“No! No!” she coughed into her hands, blood pooling under her tongue. The coppery taste cut through her like a knife. Her hands were cupped around the bloody remains of her gemstone, the shards opening new slits in her pale skin with every breath. Her knees hurt from falling to the stage, but not nearly as bad as the overwhelming blaze burning at the base of her throat. One hand slid to the spot the stone had once sat, touching the thin stream of red running down the front of her dress, tracing the line to the source, “Please...I can't...” She vaguely heard the whimpers of her 'sisters' off to either side, but paid them almost no attention at all. Millenia, she had lived. Only once had she ever hurt so much, back when she was just a pony. Back when that old Unicorn had found her, in his words, 'Worthy' of the privilege of hosting what was at the time the greatest Evil in all of Equestria. When he had tied her to a table and forced a razor sharp crimson stone into her throat.
Now, the stone was out, and had it been that thousand years ago, she would have been happy, ecstatic to be free of the curse. Now, she remembered every detail, every nightmare. She remembered that the stone converted darkness in the heart, into nutrients, the only kind she could consume. Her body had been irreparably altered by the Unicorn's magic, and even if it hadn't, she had eaten no real, physical food in so long that her body would be unable to handle it. Before her sisters had been created, she had been alone, starving and unable to eat. The Unicorn had explained exactly what would happen if she didn't protect the stone. Exactly how she would slowly die of starvation if she failed to sow anger.
Organ failure, unpreventable, and necessary, as her insides changed to accept the dark energy more readily. But without a source of that energy, whatever was left of her original guts would struggle to process Jello. The crystal shards slicing her skin and muscle like warm butter was just the icing on the cake. Her next cry splattered blood across the stage, a choked, macabre pattern that reminded her, reinforced the image of that Unicorn. She tried to swallow, to clear her mouth so she could curse him, but her stomach wasn't there. She couldn't swallow. Instead, she glared at the splattered blood.
Another flare of pain lanced through her throat and she dropped the remaining shards of crystal to the surface between her knees as both hands climbed to block the bleeding cavity. Something deep inside her made her push one finger carefully into the hole, causing her to curl onto the puddle of blood and saliva on the stage, a new level of pain making itself known. Still, the flow of blood from her mouth seemed to have lessened. She couldn't sing, she couldn't even cry out anymore.
From her new angle on the ground, she could see that those seven...those creatures, the Rainbooms she remembered, were coming towards her. Coming to help. With every step closer, she saw the glint of power from the shards flash out under the blood. She couldn't find a reason for them to help. She knew what they were of course. They were the reason she had been made a monster. The reason that Unicorn had enslaved her, cursed her with immortality. The yellow one with the pink hair, she was the one that was formerly the Unicorn. So, too, were Bacon-hair and Glasses. She attempted to flee.
Four stumbled attempts at standing, and she only managed to gain a few meager feet. The pain radiated down into her belly, ripping through what used to be her stomach, tearing her apart inside. She knew she was bleeding from there too. She could feel it welling up around her skirt as her body ate itself from the inside. Glasses reached for her, trying to pull her hands away from her throat. One hand, barely under her control, lashed out and left a bloody handprint on the other girl's lovely purple skin, “Get back. You...” 'Can't save me.' That was what she wanted to say. That was how she wanted to put it. She wanted to ask for help, but she couldn't.
Still, Glasses moved in closer. The Jock darted behind her and grabbed her arms. The Furry dipped in and pressed a white cloth to her bleeding throat, whispering something she couldn't quite make out. She tried to shake her head, to tell them to leave, but her throat was filling with blood again. Tears started to leak down her face, crimson as the blood leaking from her mouth and nose. Glasses was saying something again, but she didn't hear it. The pain was gone. Or at least, she couldn't hurt anymore. She was frozen in time, the warm blood leaking down the sides of her neck from her ears freezing just above her shoulders.
Her mouth managed to form the shape, but she didn't know if any sound came out, “Why?”
This time it was Bacon-hair who spoke noiselessly to her. Or at least moved her mouth. Bacon-hair's hands were bloody, and she knew it was her own, and there was a lot of it. How much blood did the average human have in them? Five gallons, she remembered. But an Equestrian had more. Now without pain, she was free to ponder that. Did she have human blood, Equestrian blood, or something else? She tried to free herself from the Jock, succeeding in getting a foot to lash out. The sharp heel of her boot struck the Furry in the side, sending her tumbling away, splashing in the blood.
All at once, the pain came back, and she curled into a ball, sobbing through a mouthful of blood as everything started to fade out. Or fade in. Brilliantly painful light burned at her red eyes, lancing through her brain. Erasing, repairing, tearing. She screamed into her own knee, only absently aware that the Jock had backed away, and pulled the others with her. Good. They had accepted her fate, as she had over a thousand years ago. She closed her eyes, failing to block out the light, and let it take her, “Goodbye, Sisters.”
– “Adagio, are you alright?” Her eyes opened, blinking off a red crust. Her mouth tasted like blood, coppery and disgusting. And Glasses was standing there, crisp, clean, and devoid of the blood she had just been kneeling in.
“I...” she coughed, launching a ball of red and black onto the clean stage, “I don't know...”
“Why did you save me? What did I do?” She was certain she hadn't done anything to deserve surviving. Not in her three thousand year life. She was a monster through and through as far as she knew. But here, sitting in front of her at Sugarcube Corner, that stupid purple girl was smiling at her. Bacon-hair was right next to her, that same grin splitting her face.
It was the pink one verging on a diabetic coma that answered her though, “Oh, we didn't. The magic did it.” If she wasn't sure the walking party-favor hadn't been entirely normal, now she was positive, because she could have sworn the girl, an employee at the restaurant, was helping a customer across the floor at the same time. And when she turned to look, there was an empty space and Sonata, hair looking like it had shot through a tornado. Now, she was more confused than after she had asked the question, and just stared at Glasses and Bacon-hair with a look hat used to be able to melt steel.
“How does Equestrian Light...Fucking Light magic of all things…cure creatures that survive on negative feelings?”
Glasses set a notebook on the table, open to show a bunch of what most creatures would assume to be scribbles. It was only through extensive training, and the way her brain was wired up, that she could even interpret it. It was a complex spell matrix. And it was moving in the way she knew only true spells could. But more than that, she recognized it. It was definitely her father's work, at least, the bottom three layers, inked in a dull gray and black. But the top two layers of the matrix were a combination of red and violet ink. Recognizable only because she had seen the two Unicorns using their magic.
“Starswirl's Soul Bond spell. The one he used to imprison the first Siren in his own daughter,” she almost spat on the table, “Right there, second layer is where he layered the feeding mechanism for the,” this time she did spit, both saliva and the word hitting the table with equal vigor, “Siren.”
“I figured. That part wasn't the tricky part. See, after the Elements brought you back from the edge of death, we still had to save you. Sunset figured that maybe you...Er, the Siren, sorry, was feeding off your body itself, not the energy you were taking in. The energy was being converted...”
“First tier, Energy-to-Mass patterning throughout the bonding script. Father was always going on about those sorts of things. How it made food creation spells easier,” she scowled at the notebook. In this matrix, it also made it nearly impossible for the afflicted host to consume actual food. She didn't want to cry.
Then Glasses said something that pulled her back out of her self-loathing. “Father? You mean...No...That can't be...”
She nodded, “I am...well, I was Twin Spirals...Uh...” her hand brushed against the matrix, “I...was also the Siren, Dazzling Strike.” At Bacon-hair's curious look, she added, “You both have researched this spell...My father's greatest work. I assume you know what it does?”
Glasses blinked, “It...uh, the notes say it was used to imprison monsters inside a pony, the host, but something went wrong with the early tests, replacing the host's soul with that of the monster...But you...”
“Yes, Father was always fond of wording it so it didn't sound so bad. Imagine,” she looked at the Marble-skinned girl beside Bacon-hair, “You getting bonded to Her,” she glanced at Party-favor, “the result would have both of you in there. Except neither of you is a monster, so it would mostly be mutual.”
Marble blinked behind her purple curls, “What do you mean, mostly, darling?”
“I mean,” she picked up a spoonful of red ice-cream and another of white ice-cream, “If you were to eat both of these at the same time, they would taste, well reasonably good together, neither overpowering the other. In our case,” she replaced the red ice-cream with a spoonful of ketchup, “The Siren, or ketchup for this example, will overpower the ice-cream and make it taste rather awful.”
“Whyever did Starswirl believe that would be a good idea?” Glasses asked, “It seems like that is an excellent way to create a psychopath.”
She nodded and pointed to the third layer, “This pattern is supposed to imprison the subject in the host's subconscious mind, where it cannot escape. Like a Tantabus.”
“It was flawed. It failed to imprison the Sirens,” she glanced to either side of her, at the stupefied looks on her sister's faces, “He revised it after the first...” That one word. She knew what she was to him. To the stallion she had once called her father. That was before he trapped her in the mind of a monster. And he never went back to fix it. Just banished her to another dimension, another body. One even more unfamiliar. “Starswirl the Bearded FAILED. And then he did what anypony would have done with a spell that went wrong. He disposed of the results!” She was starting to get louder, rising to her feet.
Glasses tapped the red ink on the matrix, “Adagio...Twin? Or would it be Dazzling?” the purple girl seemed confused, “Uh...Sunset figured out how to extract the Siren. That's what this part is. She derived it from…?”
Bacon-hair opened a second notebook, one that contained a much thicker matrix of crimson ink, “I had to extract the Negative Energy absorption portion, but after that, using Draigo Scaletongue's Energy Converter...Uh, not the original. That only turned light into heat and vice-versa...I had to modify it, that's where these extra layers came from, to make it convert positive energy into negative energy.” Bacon-hair passed the notebook over to her, and poked at it.
Glasses nodded, and flipped to another page in her notebook, which glowed with purple ink, overlaid with ink the color of the night sky, “I had to get Princess Luna's help with this part.”
She leaned forward, orange hair brushing the table as she peered at it, “That's the Dreamwalker spell, isn't it? The princess showed me it once...A long time ago. How does that help?”
“We were able to trap the Siren in the dreamscape until the spell gathers enough ambient energy to destroy it. The parts I put in,” a delicate finger traced over the purple lines, “will allow your body to regenerate the damage the Siren caused, unfortunately, that portion requires that you be awake. And sleep will...Uh...”
The Wallflower leaned in, “When you sleep, the Siren will be in control...You...Um...All three of you will need contained...”
“Oh, Celestia...How long?” Aria was never the most patient of the three. She was also the youngest, and least broken. A lock of orange hair found itself curled around an almost frail tan finger, “Years. Maybe even decades. Longer than it took to settle in.” Her eyes scanned the spell layers, all three sets, but she was so out of practice that she couldn't have helped clarify it for her sisters, “Full enclosure?” Would they have to be locked in cages to protect the others, or just chains?
Glasses shook her head, “Muzzles, possibly gags, depending on how much of the Siren's power is left after the Battle of the Bands. Realistically, Applejack can easily overpower any of the three of you.” Glasses seemed to be thinking, but it was Marble that spoke up next.
“Apple Bloom can probably overpower most of you, to be honest.” The blonde Apple farmer seemed about to object, but shrugged and agreed.
“That means you three will be staying at the Apple farm for the duration of the spell.”
She nodded, and looked at the Farmer, “Applejack, was it? I thank you for your hospitality, and for undertaking the risk under your wings.”
The Farmer just nodded, blankly, as Sonata opened her mouth to add something else, “It'll be just like a big sleepover! For a decade…? Adagio, what's a decade?” For a moment, the eldest Siren almost answered, but the Sonata's face split in a grin to match Party-favor, “Kidding. This is gonna be so fun!”
