(Past Chapter 1): The Unique Properties of Desperation

My first and most hated memory of this place is cold.

"Huh? Wh-" I say, my crusted eyes winking blearily before a violent shiver wracks my body. 'Step one of the operation, regain vision.' I think to myself with a tiny bit of humor in my lips. I blink several more times, before groaning as a minor migraine pierces me at the sight of all the blinding white. Having never been one for bright days, this one is especially awful.

"Christ, who turned on the lights? Who turned on the fan?" I continue, trying to get up to my hands and knees as my tiger-themed blanket slips off my back. The soft and squeaky crunch of snow is my first warning that something is terribly wrong.

The second sign leaves my guts wrenching with fear, and it comes from my vision finally clearing to the sight of a seemingly endless plane of unbroken snow, coated in a whipping, violent white wind. In the distance, spires of what look like ice are coated in a malignant aura, and some part of me shudders independently of the cold as a second, new, and unnamed fear awakens in my heart.

The third sign, for anyone else, might have finally pushed them from fear to terror, though in my case, I only feel a short moment of shock as my eyes discover some facts to ascribe to the current feeling of numbness that leaves my fingers and toes totally insensate. Looking down, I scramble back just far enough to sit, waist-deep in the snow, as I lift my limbs up to find them finger-free.

Recognition flashes in my eyes at the sight of white, fuzzy hooves and I look behind me, craning my neck to check for the best possible result for me right now.

"No wings," I say, my concern growing, before, with some dread and clumsiness, I slowly reach up, and-

"And a horn," I finish, the fear from before turning into dread.

Most in my situation would probably be overjoyed if they equated "Horn" to "Magic", but those same people would receive a scathing retort if they tried to convince me of that right now. Sure, anywhere on... I'm assuming Equis? Anywhere on Equis that isn't this place right now, and they might be right about that, but where a set of wings might keep me warm, and, with luck, give me a way off the freezing ground-

I try to stand up, mindful of the fact that every second of me sitting down in the snow will just make me cold faster, I immediately doubt my previous assumption as the wind chill feels so much worse.

-and I'm certain an Earth Pony's natural hardiness might have given me the greatest advantage against the elements overall, this useless lump of unknown arcane biomass is currently a liability to me. With nothing but a blanket, my wits, and magic with no convenient passive benefits, my only routes to surviving the hours to nightfall, much less reaching civilization, in one fell swoop have all fallen directly into the coin slot of random chance.

If that spire in the distance is the Crystal Empire, then it's currently lacking the Heart, as I immediately feel something awful and cloying just looking in its direction. A feeling that I would be a fool to ignore when it comes from nowhere in my own mind that I can recognize. And if it's missing the heart, then that means Sombra's in the picture.

(If it's not the empire, then it's a total unknown, and going there could just as easily be as bad or worse than walking into that smug caricature's grasp.)

Of course, the alternative is staying out here and most-likely dying in a few hours from frostbite, or wandering off to try and find civilization elsewhere, and absolutely certainly dying in a few hours of frostbite.

I look up to my horn, a frown on my face. "And then there's the other gamble," I say, feeling dumb and colder for having stood up in the icy wind like this for the past few minutes while trying to decide on a course of action.

Feeling cold, dread, and its fizzier cousin, fear, I'm now sitting in a larger hole in the snow, and they will erect monuments to my craftsponyship, I'm certain. Despite my best efforts, no combination of faces, hooves, and failed magic attempts made the attempt at an Igloo any easier, and it's only by crouching down and laying on my blanket near whichever side of my pit is against the wind do I feel even the slightest relief.

Another shiver wracks through my body, and I'm certain that I'm dying. The fear in my gut converts itself entirely into painful dread, feeding the sensation of my gut crushing itself that much more. Even though my body isn't shutting down yet, per se, I am certain that I'm dying. The sun slowly meanders across the sky, and in what I'm roughly measuring as an hour, I've only been getting colder.

If there's one thing worth saying about my life before this, it's that I've always had the morbid desire to die screaming. The idea of dying in my sleep, or drowning, or, as is relevant here, freezing, is terrifying. Far more terrifying than pain of any sort I've felt or can imagine. To that end, I've always felt that I'd much rather die burning or fighting, so that, up until that last moment, I'm awake and aware.

An almost childish desire to not have death creep up behind me, when I least expect it, but instead face me directly. Of course, all of those intelligent, mindful thoughts characteristic of calm pondering in one's own home fall away like a broken car window when I'm facing it myself as far away from home as I can possibly be. I don't want to die.

It's around this time that the petty part of my higher brain function decides that I'm better off angry than moping over my demise as I look at a lump of packed snow in the corner of my hole, a collapsed attempt at a roof. Of all the times, and all the places, and all the races, I've been consigned to the one combination of those three that, as far as my knowledge tells me, has the lowest chance of survival.

I didn't even die in my own world to get here, and now I get a measly day in this one before it comes to an end from exposure? The impending doom that my stomach is trying to remind me of quickly turns into heat in my ears as I grow frustrated with what I feel is effectively grand-theft-remainder-of-my-life as perpetrated by fate, and stomp the edge of my blanket until my front leg aches.

"Piss!" I shout, and then I shout it a few more times, just to be certain that I've shouted it enough.

I glare at the frozen lump, completely free of any shame on my own incapability to make a proper shelter against the snow, in my own mind blaming it on the circumstances. While silently resigning myself to spend my last hours spitting curses to any gods or almost-gods that can hear, the hot, feverish feeling of annoyance and hate in my ears leaves me practically blushing with anger.

It's only moments later that with an almighty shout of yet another curse word, I feel something that douses me in ice water, both metaphorically, and very literally as the back of my hovel melts into my mane and blanket. The vitriol of the last minute fades at the same time as the almost purple aura I see in my vision's periphery. The hot black flame at my horn's tip, however, lasts long enough for adrenaline to flood my veins, and for me to try to use it some way, any way, before it's gone! In that brief moment, my desire to use the fire is matched by a sudden surge of seething rage to match that need.

The resulting boom rattles my ears and ruins my hole, leaving the walls a smooth, only slightly larger crater. In the center, where the frozen lumpy target of my hatred once lay, I stare directly at the pitch-black bonfire that is now roaring, eating away at the ice and water itself. My eyes widen, and I shiver even worse as exhaustion from the strain hits me. With caution, I slowly step over to the flame that sucks away at the migraine-inducing brightness of the blinding, almost reflective snow around me.

As soon as I'm within a body's length of it, I immediately feel it. A warmth seeping into my bones from the flame's mundane component, and a strong hatred, my hatred, for the ice that I failed to tame for protection. I'm immediately reminded of a quote I once read somewhere or other.

"Your anger keeps you warm now, but will leave you cold in your grave," I can't help but mutter word-for-word, before shaking my head. I'll concern myself with the cold of the grave when I'm put there. I immediately feel a greedy ambition as I look into the swirling, warm depths that my magic turned the ice into, one I am absolutely certain is my own.

I start to chuckle, and then, I start to laugh, "Grave?!" I chortle, "Why, it seems my anger may very well keep me out of it!" I laugh hysterically against the wind's howl, before dimming back into chuckles disguising relief as my mouth is occupied dragging my blanket over me to guard against the aforementioned wind. I huddle near my fire and try to ignore how nippy my rear is by focusing instead on the sensation of pure heat from the warmth in front of me.

As I curl up and keep myself occupied thinking, I spot the simplistic black silhouette of a fire branded proudly on my hips now, its color the same shade as my own hair. A concerning development, all things considered, but thinking to myself, if there's one thing I've always been talented at, it's justifying a bad attitude.

As the sun is slowly cranked down over the horizon, and the wind is relieved of its duty by the cruel chill of night, my little bonfire has begun to smoulder down into nothing, leaving strange ashes and coals behind. I clamp down on my curiosity and end my pondering. It's almost time. In the time it took the sun to wander, I bitterly considered my options.

Three months. If I remember right, that's how long it takes a human to succumb to starvation. I'd rather not find out that I'm wrong to think that a pony lasts that long by any means other than a book, which means I'm once again given a choice that isn't really one. Go into the city, or go deeper into the frozen wasteland. To that end, me and myselves reach an accord. I'll let greed and ambition take the lead when night falls, and follow my mostly baseless assumption that it will be simpler to sneak in at night.

"Said the spider to the fly," I grimace, feeling that unnamed fear take hold again.

Less than an hour later, the sun had set completely, and it was around that same time that I began to realize that I'm an idiot. I hadn't considered that I should start walking to the city before sunset so that I would reach it by nightfall. I suppose I can blame that on the mesmerizing sight of my own magic hours before, which had turned those hours into minutes as I stared, transfixed in quiet awe at the ice-drinking, light-eating fire. During that time, my mind had been practically flooded with ideas for how I could use it in the future, assuming I survived that long.

I didn't dare try to summon up the black flames again, concerned about impairing myself mentally with what my memory of the TV show told me was undeniably dark magic. In the situation I'm in, keeping my head on straight will be one of many things staving off a terrifying death.

Having shaken my grim thoughts aside, I fumbled for the better part of ten minutes, stumbling, gnashing, pawing the ground, and generally making a fool of myself as I tied my blanket around my neck as firmly as I dared to with only hooves and teeth to do the job. The dyed portrait of a tiger in cotton sits on my back by the end of it.

"Not much of a cape, but it's mine," I say, sucking down what comfort I can from what I now realize is the last piece of home I'll probably ever see or feel.

Drinking as much as I can of the water that's melted near the remains of my bonfire, I take a sharp, strong breath and turn to the looming Crystal Empire in the distance. Less than a minute later, I'm flat on my stomach with a smacked, bloody nose as the giant icy bowl I've made resists my efforts to climb out of it the first time, sending me slipping back down at high speed.

The second time, I come to the conclusion that I'm forced to use force to crack the ice and pound the thin layer until it breaks apart. I then scrabble my way up the cracks of it like a clumsy dog. With that comparison in my mind, I shake off the remaining ice that's tried to cling to me as fast as is reasonable and begin the slow, methodical walk to what I desperately hope isn't my inevitable and painful doom.

After violently and angrily patting out the last embers of black fire that I made the poor choice of igniting in my mane, thinking that the rule of cool might keep me warm and unburnt in transit to the city, I commit my first crime.

"Crystal berries, crystal bread, crystal cheese..?" I mutter to myself, rooting through the pantries of a house, one of many in the outermost edges of the Crystal Empire.

"I get the other two, I guess, but where are they getting the milk for that?" I continue, before deciding not to think about it too hard as a realization nearly hits me. I take the thought, and viciously shove it back down into the cage named "Why would you even think of that", and the rest of the budding idea is sealed within its close cousin, "God, I feel sorry for any mind-readers that make it in here".

Dumping my pilfered food in the middle of my blanket, along with a healthy helping of stolen linens, I begin fumbling around, trying to tie the whole thing off. A great deal about the situation immediately confuses me. The fact that I can metaphorically taste the malice and fear in the air leaves no doubts in my mind that this place is currently not the Love-and-hope capital of the world, but if that's the case, then why would Sombra let them keep this much food for themselves?

I'm obviously not going to be checking, but it implies that these ponies are still living in their homes and not some kind of crystal-mine slave camp. The only thing that absolutely makes sense is that there are a number of broken windows, one of which had been cleared out and low enough for me to slowly pull myself in without outing my innards.

As I figure out how I'm going to tie a blanket into some kind of sack, a small voice startles me. "Why are you taking our food mister?" the squeaker squeaks as I wheel about.

'Shit, I'm being Cindy Lou Who'd' I think hysterically at the small, faceted crystal pony child who walked in on my burglary. One who looks very nearly as frightened as I am.

'Well, when in Whoville...' I take a bracing breath and wrack my brain for a lie.

"Well, you see, all this food is... Smudged. I've been sent to take it to my workshop. I'll polish it until it's glittering again, and bring it back just in time for breakfast!" I force a smile.

"That's a load of ponyfeathers mister," the little rat glares at me.

I find myself filled with a characteristic annoyance "Ok, you come up with an excuse then if you're so God Damn smart," I retort.

They tilt their head like small confused quadrupedal creatures are want to do. "What's a god dam?"

I pause for a beat. "Don't worry about it. Now is this the part where you start screaming your head off, or can we skip to where I try to convince you not to do that?"

After a moment in clear thought, the foal decides to answer my question with another question, and responds "I thought King Sombra got rid of all the homeless ponies?"

I find myself disturbed by the implications, but decide not to question that further right now. "I'm not homeless. I'm just not from around here."

My comment causes the foal to perk up.

"That's not possible. Nopony's been able to get in or out!" she shouts, before I rapidly shush her.

She continues more quietly "The guards show up whenever anypony tries, like they knew about it already."

This prompts me to think. Ultimately, I am forced to face the fact that I have no idea why I didn't just get tackled at the border, then. Maybe I just got lucky? As I look at the kid's sad little face, I'm stricken with what is absolutely a malicious intent to lie and get the hell out of here, and not at all an urge to pull some noble Robin Hood nonsense.

"Tell you what. You let me walk out of here with this food, and I'll figure out how I gave those guards the slip, and you'll be the first to know."

"Sound like a plan, Stan?" I finish, holding up a hoof.

"My name's not Stan, it's Glitter Miss Priss," she says, unsure and looking at my outstretched leg as though it's a viper someone's trying to convince her to pet.

"I will forever call you Stan unless you go along with this," I ultimatum her.

If looks could kill, I'd be deader than chivalry I suspect, as she looks ready to start screaming just to spite me.

Her resolve to introduce herself to the fine art of pissing me off finally cracks like a pre-omelet and she bumps my hoof. "Fine."

"Good call Priss," I say, strapping the crude sack of food and cloth to my back as best as I can.

Before I start to heft myself out of the window and run like makeup, she decides that she simply MUST ask the most awkward question possible. "Where will you be going?"

"Oh, I've got a magnificent palace of the highest possible quality waiting for me just outside," I trail off sarcastically as she glares softly at me.

"You don't have anywhere to go, do you," her verbal arrow strikes, annoying me.

I glare right back. "And? I can't exactly stay in Sombra's glass bear-trap," I gesture awkwardly around me.

"You could hide here though, the guards obviously don't know you're here," She points out logically, like some sort of irrational sadist.

"And your parents?" I raise an eyebrow, secretly hoping she has an answer that means I don't have to go back out in that damnable cold yet.

She matches my raise, putting her own eyebrow in the pot with a respectable poker face. "They don't know you're here either."

'Well, she's got me there.' I think as she leads me to a closet under the stairs that looks big enough to fit almost two adults if they stood on top of one another. Harry Potter, eat your heart out. I crunch my way through some of the pilfered crystal berries and grimace at my picky taste buds rebelling against the sour-sweet flavor. I never notice the obsidian eye that had rolled into the kitchen before my conversation with Priss as it follows me. I also fail to notice it's soft purple light from under the closet door as it softly pings out a signal as I sleep.

I wake up to loud pounding, not from inside my head for once in my life, but from the vile and bright outside world. After a respectable moment spent realizing that this is real, and last night wasn't just an extremely long, complex, and realistic dream, I slowly pop the door open. I peek out into the adjoined hall to see a trio of ponies talking to a trio of guards. Looks like Priss and her parents are being questioned.

The mustached amber-colored stallion seems to be explaining in no uncertain terms that the guards can search the whole house, and that they won't resist. Of course, at the same time, I realize what this means and calmly panic as the three guards make their way in, having gotten all they need out of Priss's parents and prepared to get all that they need out of their house, namely, me.

I slowly, calmly, and above all else, quietly step on something that crunches loudly. Thankfully, the crash from me slipping on it is more than loud enough to catch their attention, if the thing I just stepped on hadn't been loud enough on its own. As I tumble to the floor and smash my nose for the second time in as many days, I hear stomping that easily reminds me of what I'm facing, heavily armored, well-fed looking guards who do not necessarily understand what "Police Brutality" means. With these thoughts in my mind, I mentally shove the panic off my neck, swallow my currently absent pride, and bolt!

It's around this point that I'm made aware of a pretty simple fact, trained, healthy and motivated crystal pony guards will run faster than a hungry, effectively day-old unicorn. The thing that makes me the most aware of this is that within two seconds, my lungs are expelling my precious air, and my spine is pressed down along with the rest of me by what feels like a metric ton of crystalline armored stallion.

My limbs are painfully bent behind me, and I summon up black fire for some desperate attack. Before I get the chance to waste my remaining energy on an attack that has almost no chance of helping me escape, I feel their grip on me slacken and I take advantage of this to scramble free, kicking and yelling before slipping free of the dead weight.

I turn around, ready for a fight now that running has failed and my blood is boiling with annoyed anger, I'm confused to see the guards just stand there, slackjawed and blank-faced. I take a few steps back, but they just sit there like they can't see me for what feels like minutes to me, but is more likely mere moments. Looking up at the black fire on the tip of my horn, and back to their glazed, far-off expressions, I decide not to look this gift horse in the mouth, and stumble away, wanting nothing more than to beat them into a pulp, but cognizant of my opportunity to escape while they're off in la-la land.

I feel more pain than almost any other I've felt before as I stumble over to the window, throw myself out of it slowly, and try to limp my way out of town while holding the black fire spell on my horn like a lifeline, feeling nothing but anger and distrust for the idiotic rubes who are staring at me fearfully from their windows in the early hours of the morning. It seems to take forever, but after slow, meandering and stumbling step after step, I walk out of the Crystal Empire and into the blistering cold beyond with nothing but stained cotton and mashed food to show for it.

Angrily flicking my head at the hated snow to start a new bonfire burning it, I feel like splattering that damned brat across the frozen wastes when I realize her and her traitorous parents had followed me right out of the city. This thought in my mind, I black out from exhaustion as the last drop of magic finally completes its task in summoning up the ice-burning fire.

(Noir Report) A Clear-Headed Report on Unclear Findings [Black Flame]

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Foreword

With a mind currently unclouded by unnatural emotion do I begin this short journal. Thank god for crystal ink and black paper. I've always enjoyed white writing on a black medium. Some small pleasure to help me cope with this foreign land. And an easy sight to soothe my poor eyes in this bright country.

In memory of my homeland's delightful stories, I believe I'll title this book Grimoire Noir. A name I'm sure none in Equestrian or beyond will find reference to.

Entry #1, Day 3

Until such time that I learn the pony who rightfully discovered this spell first, I will take the liberty of speaking of it in my own ignorant terms, such that a fresh perspective can be had on what seems to be the simplest dark magic. One so simple in fact, that it is the first of any magic that I have learned to summon in my life. The moment I cast that spell was also the moment I had discovered my special talent, when my fear turned to frustration, and then anger, my horn had erupted with a toxic purple aura, and at its tip, a black fire began burning, drinking in the light. I thus name the spell Black Flame.

When I cast it at a chunk of packed snow that had been frustrating my attempts to shape it into shelter, the flame crashed into it with the force of a charging bull and exploded in a wash of heat that turned the snow around it into smooth ice. In the center, the black fire had grown, and had begun to devour the ice, burning it away into what I believe is nothing at all. The heat from this fire saved my life from the bitter cold, and made me realize my talent.

One thing worth noting, however, is that, though its use requires relatively little skill, it's downsides are many. First and foremost among them being an increase in the user's aggression and a strange, mental pollution that dampens other, interfering emotions. Like a chain reaction, the emotion required to evoke this fire is also created by it. Even being near the flame created evokes a feeling of malice towards whatever it is burning for those who are warmed by it.

The first time I cast it was also the first time I learned of the exhaustion inherent to casting spells. It is now that I look back to that time that where the evocation of emotion drained magic from me, the sensation of emotion restored this lost vital essence. As I grew frustrated during a long journey afterward, and then, amused at the idea of a mane of the black flames, I felt my vitality return faster and faster at the amusing thought, and the imagined scenario of others seeing me with it. This culminated in the foolish decision to attempt it, one which my poor tattered mane attests to even as I write this. Let this be the moral of that anecdotal experimentation, then, that the Black Flame should only be cast on something one wishes burnt.

Experimentation taken after that point in the safety of a new shelter raised worrying questions to which I have few answers. As I began to test the black flame more and more, I found myself forced to overcome a grudge against the mundane objects I cast the spell on once I had concluded my tests. Thankfully, as they are obliterated for my continued warmth, overcoming this strange, petty desire for vengeance against ice, snowballs, and a piece of cheese was not too painful a process. I am unsure whether the grudge was born from using the magic itself, which may mean an unavoidable loss of sanity with each casting, or if those grudges were the result of the emotions evoked by the magic conditioning me rapidly with a petty dislike by association.

That is to say, it may very well be my own personality that causes me to take offense against something merely because I had felt strongly about it at one time. Though I am cautious and will strive to be respectful of this spell, I have not changed my former feelings towards it. If I master and harness this magic, I could perform operations on my own that I thought lost to me in this land, such as milling, forging, and smelting. Heat is heat, and the flame consumes what I deem its fuel. If I could narrow my frustration, and better manage my anger, will the flame become more controlled as well? It's worth testing, and I plan to do exactly that. Maybe I could attempt cutting with it next?

I am unsure if this is a property of the Black Flame, or a property of the mind control spell I pit it against, but, when faced with those whose minds had been put under another's thrall, my noxious fire seemed to mesmerize them, leaving them frozen and unwilling to take action against me. I'm unable to test this further at this time, and to be frank, any sort of serious, long term testing feels a bit unethical to me. I'll simply have to keep my eyes open. If the future goes as I expect it to, there will be no shortage of those whose minds are impaired by other Dark Magic users, and no shortage of situations in which I am forced to evoke that all-consuming fire of hate.

One minor quirk of the Black Flame that I did not feel worth noting at the time, when I had turned it against snow, despite snow being made of ice and water, the flame left behind coals, ashes, and glittering fragments. It might be a worthless byproduct, but never in my life have I ascribed to the notion that worthless byproducts exist. Instead, I will refer to it as I believe it to be, a potential reagent. I'll call this new substance Cold Ash. Perhaps next, I should seek to mix it with iron, eh? Cold Iron? ...No?

(Present Chapter 1): The Return of Light: Part 1

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The tawny griffon looks shocked at the blue pegasus calling her out in front of the other nearby ponies, whose confusion up until this point had been steadily increasing at her behavior.

"Y-you, you are such ab- au- a-" She stutters, before finding her words "A flip-flop! Cool one minute, and lame the next!"

Walking towards the door, she turns back with a scowl and continues. "When you decide not to be lame anymore, gimme a call." she snarls, slamming the door shut behind her as she leaves with a loud rattle and a shaking window pane as her final punctuation.

"...Not cool." The poly-chromatic maned pegasus says with a frown to the closed door.

The short, stout dragon next to her pipes up at this point, splaying his arms akimbo and turning to face her with a befuddled blink.

"Wow, what a party-pooper!" he says, prompting the other ponies at the party to begin questioningly mumbling among themselves about what had just happened.

"I'm sorry everypony, for bringing Gilda here. I didn't realize how rude she was." Rainbow Dash says, her eyes downcast.

In an old ruined section of park often frequented by apathetic-looking griffons, an older and worn-looking statue stands impassively over the loud racket happening under its hooves. The marble statue depicts a pony standing at attention, their muzzle pointed upwards ever so slightly with a covetous and satisfied expression as they gaze into an ancient copper oil lamp clutched protectively in draconic claws. The statue further depicts the pony as having six scaled limbs attached to it, socketed around the pony's own shoulders and neck. Five of the limbs are folded behind its back, while the sixth reaches out and holds the lamp firmly, clamping the lamp's copper wick cover closed as if to admire it.

A worn, gold plaque at the bottom once read "The Adversary", and it might still have said that to this day if it hadn't been stolen days after the statue was delivered there.

The statue itself, however, resolutely ignores the borderline ranting occurring at its feet.

"Stupid ponies. Stupid Ponyville!" Gilda hisses, stomping back and forth in front of the statue with her tail whipping violently side to side.

"I hate them, I hate them all, and I hate Rainbow Dash too!" she shouts, trying her hardest to hold back bitter tears. Ones she failed to hold back the day before.

The moon shining overhead almost seems to acquire a colder tint to its shine for Gilda alone as she glares at the statue, hating the fact that not even Griffonstone is 100% pony free.

Her glare rapidly fades as something tickles the sides of her head near her ears, and a chill runs up and down her spine.

"Hate is such a strong word, dear." she hears whispered right next to her, the chill from before intensifying as she scrambles away from the statue backwards.

"What the flock, who said that?!" The griffon shouts, head darting from side to side as her pupils dilate to spot the hidden offender.

"Why, Gilda, just your biggest fan." The voice whispers smugly.

"How do you know my name, freak-o!" she squawks. "Show yourself!"

"Oh I have an approximate knowledge of many things. For example, I know you don't really hate Rainbow Dash." The voice says, ignoring her second demand.

Gilda, by this point becomes incensed as her anger overrides her fear.

"Uh, yeah, I'm pretty sure I do, creep! You don't know anything!"

The voice puts on airs and simply responds condescendingly. "If you hated her dear, then why does the way she treated you hurt so badly?"

Gilda bristles at this even more, but doesn't have an answer.

"I'm not going to beat around the bush, Gilda. I'm here to help you." The voice continues hesitantly, after a moment.

"I can teach you tricks so awesome, Dash will be all over you. I know her nearly as well as I know you, in fact. You help me to help you, and..."

The voice chuckles "Well, her true nature won't let her abandon you again after that." The voice croons sweetly.

Gilda is frozen with indecision, the emotional roller-coaster she has been stumbling off of for the past day leaving her unsure. "Y-yeah?"

"Yeah." The voice confirms. "Just imagine it, it would be like your first day of Junior Speedsters again. My payment is thus. Become my apprentice until I feel you've learned my lessons, and I'll put you right back in Dashie's good graces."

Despite the eerie feeling Gilda had felt up until this point, she can't help but remember the good times she had with her best friend, and her resolve becomes galvanized.

"It's a deal!"

The voice chuckles again, much more darkly this time. Smoke begins wafting down from the almost completely sealed wick-cover of the lamp.

"Good, good! Now you just have to do one simple thing."

"And what's that?" Gilda snarks.

For a moment, Gilda nearly mistakes her surroundings for some sort of icy blizzard as the voice says in a soft, terrifyingly dark tone, emitted from the statue's lamp. "Free Me."

"This can't be that complicated, it's just a hunk of rock, right?" The voice says with a nonexistent raised eyebrow and exasperated tone.

"Look man, I don't know what to tell you, It's coming off when I get it off, now shut up for a second, I think I've got it this time." Gilda retorts, making her fifth attempt in as many minutes to pull the lamp out of the statue's grip.

"Grrr-whoooOof!" Gilda shouts, flopping to the ground when her violent tug fails to pull it free from the marble pony.

"Just use a crowbar or something. It'll be faster, Christ-" The voice attempts, before Gilda interrupts.

"Faster? I'll show you faster, and I don't need no stinkin' crowbar to do it!"

With an Eagle-like screech, Gilda leaps into the air, and crashes into the statue claws-first after building up speed high in the air above it. The impact immediately cracks the stone arm off, sending it tumbling to the ground with a rousing "Crack!".

Gilda brushes herself off with a beaky grin, before yanking up the stone arm and hefting it over her head in both talons.

"And my name's not Christ." she finishes, slamming it down and crushing the carefully carved claws around the lamp into the statue's base.

The lamp tumbles free, clanking several times with a series of "Ow"s, before halting in midair and righting itself.

Twisted, delighted laughter fills the air as the lamp rattles, unleashing a torrent of black smoke that swirls around it, matched only by the blazing pillar of flame that erupts from it's center.

The smoke is blown away to reveal the very pony that the statue had been clearly modeled after, one whose size is average, whose coat is white, and whose mane is a maelstrom of black fire. A pristine, ivory horn juts from their head, and their purple eyes bore into Gilda as his draconic arms fold behind him onto his back. The limbs, bent as they are, transition from dragon to pony with some sort of glittering grey metal between them.

Spotting the lamp he had been trapped in, he lazily picks it up in his magical aura, examining it before his eyes light up with amusement. "One thousand years..!"

"Will give you such a pain in the neck!" he smiles to himself, looking to see Gilda's reaction.

"I thought you were like, a genie or something." Gilda says skeptically, crushing the stallion's expression into mock disappointment.

"So you're saying you don't recognize the Illustrious Sage of Darkness, Weiss Noir!?" The pony preens, puffing up his chest and pouting.

"The master of The Shadow Realm, the creator of over one hundred black magic spells? No spooky campfire stories or claims that I come after bad little griffons?"

Gilda's expression becomes no less sour. "And why would I know some dumb old pony from like, a thousand years ago?"

Weiss's expression turns curious, and his eyes obtain a hard, unknown glint. "You're serious, aren't you?"

After a moment, his expression softens, and he closes his eyes with a shrug. "Well, far be it from me to hold it against you."

"Let's hash out business elsewhere. I'm not certain that I'll remain unrecognized if enough griffons see me." And with that, Weiss begins walking off in a random direction.

"And uhh, where exactly do you think you're going, gramps?" Gilda retorts, prompting him to stop.

"I was going to go somewhere and summon up a quick castle, why do you ask?" He responds with a raised eyebrow.

"I'm pretty sure plenty of griffons will see you if you do that, dweeb. We'll do this thing at my place." She says, jerking her thumb back towards where her hut is.

Weiss looks surprised, before nodding. "Right, right... I'm used to a bit more isolation, I'm afraid." He explains sheepishly.

"Silver wolf's fame, no. Joke'd Luna's mane, no." Weiss mumbles, tossing summoned bottles of mercurial metal and cotton-candy colored stardust behind him as he draws purple circles in the air with his horn to summon up more.

"So you're some kind of pony wizard, gramps?" Gilda says, munching on a scone while reclining near her crackling firepit, watching his frustration mount with no shortage of amusement on her part.

"Expired aspira, aspired ex-pyre, no..." He grumbles, before jolting. "Er, yes, basically. My special talent is dark magic, which everyone else is either too crazy or too dumb to study properly." He says ironically.

"God Damn it, where is the-!" He stutters, before a bottle clocks him in the head from a portal above. He snatches it out of the air with a claw before it can hit the ground.

"Ah! Ok, good, This is what I need." He holds up a bottle filled with a red fluid. The fluid inside thrashes around, occasionally, liquid fangs leap from it's surface to snap at nothing. A label on the bottle simply reads "Haterade".

He waits for Gilda to ask "What's that?", but when she just smirks at him and doesn't, he finally cracks with a grimace.

"Fine. It's a special potion that I've used in the past, to train my guards to harness dark magic spells and keep them hydrated." He says with a tone like a kicked puppy.

"Made from a unique, and highly coveted blend of rage poison, brine, and recently, windego ectoplasm, this version of Haterade is the most potent that my alchemist had learned to produce, and is guaranteed to enhance one's magical potential to staggering new heights while renewing their arcane strength."

"Uhh, I don't know if you hit your head coming out of that lamp, but griffons don't cast spells." She says, staring at it dubiously.

Gilda decides to continue speaking when a glob of it leaps onto the glass and snarls at her before sliding back down into the remainder of it. "I'm not drinking that."

"Good, my potions are too strong for you traveler. I was planning to water it down to almost nothing anyway... As I do for the rabble." he snarks with a smirk.

Gilda frowns angrily. "I am not rabble, and if drinking that junk is how I gotta prove it, then hand it over." She jerks her claw out demanding.

"You can't handle my potions... They're too strong for you!" He recites.

The griffon stands up and stomps over to Weiss until he's shoved into the wall.

"I wasn't asking." She whispers, grabbing it.

"Erm, wait. Jokes aside, you absolutely do not need to drink that in here." Weiss says, a hint of caution entering his previously jovial tone.

She smirks, shaking up the bottle a bit to agitate whatever's inside "And why not?"

"Because it is going to make your temper so short that it would be barred from carnival rides, and I enjoy my head not only having teeth in it, but also lacking fists where they once were." He answers honestly, before realizing that won't dissuade the already short-tempered griffon, and continuing with something more substantial.

"And once you learn what I have to teach you with it, you'll have to pick your friend's jaw off the floor when she sees what you're capable of." He goads Gilda, confident she'll take the bait.

After several long moments, and a suspicious glance between Weiss and his potion, she relents. "Fine, but this stuff better somehow make me Wonderbolt material, gramps. I don't think-"

'Anything less will convince Dash after yesterday.' goes through her mind, but not out of her mouth. She changes topics.

"How do you know so much anyway? Are you a spy?" Gilda interrogates, setting the bottle on a squat table next to her.

"I have the gift of prophesy. Much better than that hack, Tealeaf Pie." Weiss says with a confidence borne of having said it a lot before.

"Then how did you get caught?" she points out, looking at the lamp Weiss had been inhabiting up until an hour ago.

Weiss just smiles sadly. "Everyone makes mistakes, Gilda."

He looks out the window, spotting the moon in transit. "Let's get some rest, hmm? You've got a very busy day tomorrow."

"Whatever gramps. You just hold up your end of the bargain." Gilda rolls her eyes, before plodding off to her room.

Weiss simply trots up to the firepit and stares into it, glitter in his eyes and exhaustion that imprisonment didn't cure in his body. Mindful of the smouldering coals, he collapses into an obsidian smoke and settles among the ashes, having exhausted himself pretending at corporeality. The lamp nearby flickers with black fire at it's wick.

"So me getting mad is going to somehow make me better at flying?" Gilda says skeptically, looking at the sports-drink bottle of Haterade in her hand, which Weiss had painstakingly wheedled her into allowing him to water down.

"No, it's going to make you better at magic." Weiss corrects, stepping over a bush as they make their way into the brush for training.

"The first thing you need to learn is that a horn doesn't make magic possible. It doesn't even make the magic stronger. It just makes it easy."

"How do you think you were able to breathe fire when you ate that spicy candy at Pinkie Pie's party?" He says.

Gilda, ignoring how he knew about that, shrugs and takes a swig of the tainted water. "It was really hot, so I guess it caught fire? I don't know, cut me some slack, gramps, I'm not some dumb egghead."

Weiss just shakes his head with a hum "It just tasted really hot. But it made you feel like your mouth was on fire, and it made you want to get it out of your mouth."

"That's the only secret to magic. What you want, and how that makes you feel. Everything else is just, as you might say, egghead hogwash that helps you get there." Weiss says, prompting Gilda to think.

"So I want to fly fast, and that's supposed to make me... mad?" She asks rhetorically as they make it into a small clearing with a burbling river running through it, a rabbit scrambling away at the sight of intruders.

He nods. "A horn makes for easier magic, but that doesn't matter when dark magic is the easiest. If you can get it started, and know what you want to happen, the magic itself will make your emotions strong enough, and of the correct type to do what you need done. Any other kind of magic, and it wouldn't work correctly, or even at all, unless you had the strong, correct emotions in the first place, and the correct mindset to capitalize on it."

He gestures to the bottle, which Gilda had taken the past few minutes to slowly drain down.

"The potion just helps you get that spark. With training, you won't even need that. You'll know what you need to feel and focus on, and the advantage of experience besides."

"But enough theory. It is now time for your first lesson. I want you to punch that tree as hard as you can." Weiss says, summoning a bottle of blue medical liquid and several rolls of bandages.

"Uhh, I'm supposed to be learning to fly better, remember gramps? You going senile on me-ACK!" Gilda quacks when her side gets whipped by a bandage held in a purple glow.

"What the flock was that for?!" Gilda shouts, claws grinding into the dirt as she clenches them.

"You're here to learn to get mad and know what you want out of it." Weiss states.

"Now pretend that that tree is standing between you and not getting another ironic round of 'Gilda gets whipped by a bandage instead of tended to by one'." Weiss says with a faint smirk, already backing up when Gilda shrieks and rushes him.

His attempts to slyly dodge her attack as part of the lesson fail when her rapid movement wins out against his inferior senses, and she pummels his side hard enough to send him to the ground, the scales on his arms scuffed up by the grass, and a nasty purple blooming where the strike landed.

Gilda clenches her teeth as she places her right talons on the disoriented unicorn's head and leans down. "I know what you're doing, and I'm not doing any of this sneaky sensei crap, you teach me right or we're done." she snarls.

Weiss simply laughs, prompting her to shove his head away and back up for his answer.

"Fine, you're obviously too smart for it anyway." He says, standing to his feet and undoing his bruise with a slow, drawn out flash of white magic.

"You're mad at me, so we'll be using that to train you. You're mad at yourself, so we'll use that too." He states simply.

Brushing himself off with his arms, he continues, pointing to the tree he pointed out before. "I'd like you to punch that tree until you can break it. That's the point when I know you can get mad enough to draw power from it, and you'll never get that mad the first time with flying alone. Is that right enough for you?"

"Yeah, it's right enough gramps." She sneers happily, before walking over to begin disturbing the flora.

While the griffon is distracted, Weiss's illusion fails, and the bruise on his side returns to visibility, prompting him to casually cover it with a few of his draconic arms.

'It takes so long to clean grass stains off' he groans internally, resolving to begin constructing new cleaning artifacts as soon as is feasible.

'Thankfully, it shouldn't take nearly as long to make Gilda more dangerous than she thinks she is'

"So what's with these freaky eyes, gramps?" Gilda says with a shallow frown aimed at the river, where her reflection is emitting a hazy green from the corners of it's eyes when she blinks.

"Well, it means you're performing the magic correctly. Don't ask me why, my best theory is that it has something to do with eye boogers. And that can't be right." Weiss jokes, prompting Gilda to chuckle.

Her chuckle turns into a glare after Weiss suddenly clapping briskly startles her from her self-examination "Right! You're ready, then. You've already started using dark magic to enhance most probably every muscle in your body, all you need to do now is acclimate to flying like that." He says in order to dim her violent stare.

"Now we're talking. I already feel great, I can't wait to see what my babies do now that I'm juiced up like this!" she says, hopping from side to side.

Weiss simply smiles fondly, and hands over another sports-drink container in his magical grip.

"Hydration is important." He says.

"Yeah, that's probably the only thing about flying you know, gramps, but thanks anyway." she says, snatching it out of the air before guzzling it down.

As she finishes, she tears the bottle in half, lets out a roar, and leaps into the air, which Weiss ignores in favor of the row of trees Gilda had started to fell one after the other.

"I wonder if I should warn her about the dangers of magical exhaustion?" Weiss wonders out loud.

'Eh. She'll learn my lessons better on her own terms.' He ultimately thinks to himself, looking at the aerial fright train that's currently pounding the local cloud population into extinction.

"Ok, the eyes are one thing, but this is kinda ticking me off gramps. I kinda want to know this stuff before it happens, got it?" Gilda says angrily, looking at her wings, which had begun to leave a purple contrail mid-flight after a few days of practice.

Weiss simply shrugs at the now glow-capable appendages. "It means your training is nearing it's completion. You can now consistently cast... Well, by all practical definitions, a spell, albeit not one you can brag about in polite company, dark magic and all."

"I've seen it happen to pegasi, but I've never taught a griffon before. It's perfectly normal, and simply means that you've begun to draw out the anger you need to get what you want, without having to think about it." he says proudly, arms folded behind his back.

"...I mean, I guess it looks pretty cool." She says, looking unequipped to handle the praise.

"But that's not the point, am I going to end up puking pink next or something? I'm going to be very angry if I keep getting new colors and start glowing in weird places." She says, taking a threatening step towards him.

"Look, unless you start casting regular spells, which shouldn't be possible without some work you aren't doing, you've reached the limits of griffon incandescence. Dark magic is pretty universally purple in color, and it's users emit green from their eyes. That's standard, and there's not really any more unexpected side effects from just self-enhancement magic." Weiss says as he backs up, realizing that a female with an unwittingly altered appearance and a magically intensified temper are two things that need not be combined with anything but careful wording and quick speaking.

Gilda levels a stare at him and freezes it there until she feels he's been sufficiently intimidated. His place now having had him put in it to her satisfaction, she grins and ends the tense mood with a simple question.

"What's next?"

"I think I'm ready." Gilda says, flexing her claws with a grin as she lifts a tree with flight alone, having suffered magical exhaustion several times to raise her endurance to this point with the help of watered down tonics and plenty of her "famous" scones.

"You may very well be, Gilda." Weiss frowns, nibbling around the twigs in his own scone.

"Yeah, I've gotten pretty awesomer." she nods, swinging the log slowly back and forth before letting it crash down to the ground, sending birds flying from the trees at the sudden shaking.

Flapping down to the new wooden bottle that Weiss had had to manufacture, she looks down into it with an uncomprehending eye.

"Aww dang, it's empty. Mind giving me a refill?" she complains, shaking the cup from side to side.

"If you're ready, you shouldn't need any." Weiss says with a hidden smile.

Gilda thinks about this for a moment, before scoffing. "Whatever, I might need a little pick-me-up between reps if I'm going to impress Dash. Come on, don't leave me hanging here gramps." She complains with a pout.

Weiss pauses, and looks to the side in contemplation, before floating the mostly-full bottle of concentrated Haterade over to her.

"I'm trusting you to dilute this yourself, Gilda. Just a sip's worth is enough for a whole cup of water." he applies a serious look to his face, and then points it at her.

"What, you're not coming with? And here I thought the Illustrious Weiss Noir, Sage of Dorkness, would want to show off how he just got finished training Equestria's new best flier without so much as a feather of his own?" Gilda poses to Weiss, taking the bottle in claw.

"Well I have no intention of babysitting you, I do have things that need to be done." he says, leading the conversation to the point where he can accept her offer.

Gilda just gives him a blank look, glancing around the clearing. "Yeah, I can see that." she deadpans.

Returning her look with interest, Weiss relents. "Fine, I'll go with you to Ponyville, but no babysitting. I'm there to observe whether you've learned all my lessons yet, and ensure that our debts are squared."

"Sure thing gramps. You'll be singing a different tune when Rainbow Dash is eating my dust." she smirks.

Weiss shrugs with a faint smile "Gilda, our little Dashie isn't going to know what hit her."

(Weiss Report) Chug [Estus and Bonfires]

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Foreword

As it turns out, the ponies of this world write in horsey wing-dings instead of plain English. I'll be sure to have my old Noir Journal translated after I learn to write in their language. This one, however, I'm going to leave locked firmly behind a language barrier. It wouldn't do me much good if ponies started thinking I'm some kind of freaky otherworldy alien instead of just an ordinary crazed cultist corrupt with fell magics. That besides, I'm going to be putting my human sciency stuff in here too, and I'm not one-hundred percent sure that won't do some bad shit if it gets out.

In the event someone does find a way to read this, I'll repeat myself, and name this one Grimoire Weiss. Good luck figuring out that reference, you fuzzy code-breaking dorks.

Entry One, Day Seven

So I figured out what that Cold Ash stuff was, turns out it's like, not-ice. Apparently, when I use hatefire on stuff, it can only burn the stuff I actually hate, up to a certain point. So all that ash and coals and little glassy bits, that stuff was actually like, all the parts of water that are fundamentally not ice? I mean, that's the running theory. I say that because even though it's all solid, you can't actually melt it or anything. And it's also crazy flammable, like, with regular fire. But it doesn't make a hot fire, it makes this kind of orange glowy fire that feels like you're just sticking your hoof in water. It's pretty cool, not going to lie. And I mean, I'm not lying, because the fire is literally cool, well, lukewarm really, but that's cool for a fire.

The reason I decided to make this report here, on this fancy white book instead of my ordinary culty tome is because I'm totally going to use this to steal stuff from dark souls, and absolutely nopony is going to understand what the hell I'm talking about if I write it in the Noir book. Basically, I'm going to try and figure out how to use this stuff to make like, estus flasks. If I can put like, healing potions in with it, it'd be like making a spray bottle but with medicine, yeah? Yeah, this is going to be sick. To that end, I've ground up the Cold Ash, mixed it with whatever healing crystals my dudes can whip up for me, and relabeled it in a new bottle while I work out the details. I'll call this new craft mat Aspired Ex-pyre, because I'm very clever and my wordplay is to be envied by all.

Entry Two, Day Twenty-Eight

So the new stuff doesn't work yet.

I figured it wouldn't be that simple, but come on, it was worth a shot, right? Waterfire, healing crystals, toss em together and you get bonfires and estus flasks. Turns out, the aqua fire from that doesn't actually like, MOVE the crystals or the healing energy in them anywhere. So I'm left with burnt out powder and untapped healing dust. I'll need to figure out something to make the crystals get all flamey too. I would say, "just use hatefire", but to be frank, that sounds like a terrible idea. I mean, it would probably work great if I could make a Black Flame, but without the whole "Malicious corruptive hatred and ability to burn through nearly anything" aspect. Maybe there's like, a normal magic equivalent? Oh right, there's that thing dragons can do. Maybe I can figure out how to get me some of that, I mean, the noble Ponyvilleian equine bookhorn never seemed to complain about getting singed in the show, if I remember right.

Until then, I've got a whole bunch of bottles of this shit that I also don't have a use for. Probably shouldn't have made so much. I'll work out something to do with it, given some time.

I've made a terrible, hilarious mistake. I figured I would just see what would happen, anyone would. I toss a bottle of Aspired Ex-pyre into a small Black Flame and, well.

Nobody got hurt, but I'm pretty sure I'll be waking up to ponies dumping snow on me in the morning for a few weeks.

How the heck was I supposed to know that hatefire and healing crystals and water powder all put together made harmless, but entirely effective regular fire?

It didn't help that I just kept laughing after the bystanders returned, sans-hair. I seriously didn't think a bald pony would look that hilarious.

Apparently, they didn't think so either.

Far away from any bystanders, and against their express wishes, I went ahead and tried it again under more controlled circumstances, and received a similar result with far fewer dust-explosions. It's actually very interesting how the fire is able to burn nearly anything but living flesh. I get a strange feeling looking at it, one I can't put my finger on. I mean, I don't have a finger to put on it, but I can't put my hoof on it either. The point is, looking at it evokes some weird, not-hate emotion, and it's able to burn anything that isn't people. Could be useful. I doubt anyone would like my suggestion for a cheap barber though, so I'll have to put some actual, serious thought into how it could be used. Bleh, my least favorite kind of thought.

Maybe I could use it to like, free ponies from ice or chains or something. I mean, that's a bit of a niche use, but whatever.

Well, this is Weiss Noir, signing off.

Entry Three, Day Twenty-Nine

Wait, shit, I'm so stupid, I literally just made hatefire without the "people burning" part. I'll just use this new Friendly Fire on some Aspired Ex-Pyre and...!

Well it's not my precious sunny-d, but I think I'll accept this blue raspberry estus knockoff as though it were my own. By applying the Friendly Fire to the Aspired Ex-pyre after doing some magic stuff that's hard to explain to make it not eat the bottle, I've basically got a back-draft in a bottle. Pop the cork, the fire suddenly has a ton of... I guess air is feeding it. It doesn't really act like fire. I'm getting off topic. Friendly Fire and Aspired Ex-Pyre go into a bottle, and raspberry blue explosions come out, leaving not a minty fresh scent, but rather, a huge flaming wave of "no more ouchies". I feel like a goddamn genius, even though the bottle form is basically only good for minor scrapes.

The actual firepit I made with the stuff is like the world's best spa treatment though. As if a hot-tub and a shower came with pop-rocks and sweet delicious medical care.

Shame it's so expensive, though. My dudes can only make so many healing crystals as it stands. I'll send them a few bottles and tanks for emergencies, and then stop wasting their supplies for my dumb indulgences.

Actually, that's not a bad name for it, to be honest.

I'll start calling stuff like this "Indulgences". It's not like anyone but me is going to appreciate the references anyway even if I tried to explain them to these ponies.

PS. Ok, it's just going to hurt me later if when I go over this if I don't TRY to explain, but I basically had to figure out that weird emotion and figure it out so I could mess with the Friendly Fire's targeting system. I guess the best way to describe the feeling is that feeling of "I need to get rid of some garbage I have lying around, and I know I'll feel better when it's done".

It's not really completely accurate, but those fiddly positive emotions rarely are.

(Past Chapter 2): Hopeful Ultimatum

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My second, and fondest memory of this place is warmth.

"Mmm." I murmur, when something pokes me in the side, a short while after this, the dull ache saturating my mortal shell starts to groggily wake up as well, giving me its own, all-encompassing greeting.

"Hey mommy, I think he's waking up!" I hear from what my ears tell me is a nearby dog-toy squeaking, but my memory of last night informs me is actually Priss.

She pokes me again, eliciting an "Mmmph" of abject pain from me. As I open my eyes slowly to avoid the sun's bitter morning assault, I notice that my white brick surroundings are actually comfortably and dimly lit from small windows.

"Glitter, leave the poor colt alone." Someone says, prompting me to drag my sight-lines around the modest room. I spot benches made of ice, squat cubic chairs made of snow, and even what looks like an empty doorway into more rooms on my eye's journey over to who spoke.

"Da-ugh" tumbles from my lips as I wrench myself further into the waking world and attempt language once more.

"Where are we?" I question, not recognizing my surroundings by the time I arrive to an orange pony with some sort of pink bun for a mane, and a hammer, chisel, and crystal for a cutie mark. The mare had been sitting nearby, a table next to her covered in chunks of ice in bowls.

Before the mare can speak up, Priss takes the liberty of going berserk "We're outside the empire!" she cheers, hopping around the room as though she had drank The Flash's coffee.

"Yes, we are." The larger mare nods, before answering my actual question. "We're still where you collapsed, Glitter Bomb, my husband, said that we shouldn't move you while you're unconscious, so we built a shelter around your fire."

My jaw loosens as I glance around the room again. It's around this point I realize that the walls themselves are made of some sort of polished ice brick.

"H-how long was I out?" I say, disbelieving how they somehow built an entire house while I was asleep.

"Oh, just a few hours." She answers, baffling me.

Before I can properly consider how fast they would have had to work to do that, she continues with a firmer tone of voice and begins to ask some questions of her own. "May I ask your name? Mine is Whittle. Whittle Miss Priss."

Well, at least the naming convention is consistent. Unfortunately for her, I have absolutely zero intention of giving anyone in Equestria my real name.

In the process of thinking up a suitable pseudonym to give her, I spot my distinctly white horn out of the upper corner of my vision, poking out of my distinguishing black mane.

"Weiss." I lie. "Weiss Noir."

She gives me a funny look and mangles it. "Ice No-Are?"

"No. Weiss, Weiss Noir.

"Wise Now-R?"

"Weiss..." A pause "Noir..." I slowly finish.

"It's uhh." My mind goes blank for a minute. The griffons all had German names, right?

"It's a griffon name." I explain, which seems to satisfy her.

"Well, Weiss, I have to admit, I'm... Concerned. Curious and grateful, but concerned nonetheless." She says, leaving the bowls of ice ignored to walk closer.

"A young unicorn stallion with a griffon name, living just outside the Crystal Empire. He breaks into our home and steals our food, only to escape the guards with some sort of dark spell. If Glitter hadn't run off and followed you, I'm not certain we would have-" She pauses, as if to pick the correct wording. "-taken a risk like we did."

She looks diplomatic as she continues with a graceful tone, like velvet-lined stone. "I hope you can satisfactorily explain this, young pony. It... It could be very important."

Her glittering ruby laser stare, coupled with my injuries, leaves me feeling cornered and trapped. I'm unable to come up with anything compelling to say, before she sighs lightly, and shakes her head, the bun atop it rustling lightly as a ruby clip sparkles buried inside it.

"Don't feel pressured if you don't have your story in order, deary. It's simply that there are still a lot of ponies in the Crystal Empire." She continues piteously.

"I didn't want to stalk after you into the snow, you know? You struck an intimidating figure when you lit up with that terrifying fire and green smoke like Sombra. But... Glitter Bomb made me understand that we had take that risk."

"Sombra's mine expands by the day, and he brings ponies under his thrall to work in it as he needs them. We couldn't choose that." She continually stares at Priss as she speaks, who by this point had calmed down and took a somber look at the floor.

I feel a sinking pit in my gut by the end of her short lament, a bitter thing that won't let me ignore her words.

She walks back to the table in the corner of the room and turns her attention to the bowls of ice chunks, prompting me to speak up.

"What are you doing?" I question as she dumps them onto the table and begins crushing them.

She just smiles. "Making crystals. Our food's not going to last forever, so growing more will be important. I'll plant these outside when they're ready." She finishes crushing them into small chunks, and walks out of the room.

I fail to comprehend what she means by "When they're ready", but the odd, blatantly magical glow around them is what leaves my incomprehension complete as they slowly turn into faceted frozen jewels.

Whittle Miss Priss walks into the sitting room, where her husband Glitter Bomb is shoveling snow into the umbral fireball trapped in the room's centerpiece, an icy carved pit surrounded by dug up dirt.

"So the colt woke up?" he says, and then continues. "Did he tell you what we need to know?"

As he kicks the last chunk of snow into the fire, it flares up hotter for reasons the family didn't understand, but whose properties they discovered while erecting shelter.

Whittle walks up to him and puts a hoof on his shoulder, rubbing it. Her hubby could be so tense sometimes.

"Not yet dear, he's understandably scared. I'm sure the lad will open up if we just give him some time."

Glitter Bomb frowns. "Whittle, you didn't see what I saw, then. After he lit up his horn, he started looking at those guards like a dragon looks at a pony. Hungry and unhappy. And his eyes started spewing that green smoke when he saw us following him. He could be as bad as Sombra, and you've got our daughter in there trying to make friends with him."

"We've just got to know what's going on in his head, whether he helped us or not."

Whittle just giggles, patting her husband on the back a few times before disengaging.

"Well if that's all you need to know, then we've got no problems." She says, lifting a hoof and shaking it as if to count on nonexistent fingers. "He's somepony who's scared, hungry, lost, alone, need I go on?"

Glitter looks a bit more bashful at that. "...Do you think he'll help sneak more ponies out?"

Whittle doesn't say anything as she hears her daughter giggling from the other room, and faint singing from Weiss, slowly rising up in volume.

♫"Love is the power
Love is the glory
Love is the beauty
And the joy of spring"♫

"I believe he'll be receptive to the idea, dear." She smiles.

♫"A smile, a laugh, and you in my heart, As well as my baseball bat."♫ Priss finishes.

I shake my head slightly to rid my thoughts of the impressed confusion that Priss applied to them when she followed up my rendition of Mother's Eight Melodies with Earthbound's, despite there being no way she could have known the lyrics.

At least there's no doubt in my mind now that this world does funky things to music.

"There, satisfied? Have you got your daily ration of entertainment at my expense?" I snark to the little annoying crotchspawn who demanded I "Do something interesting".

I hope she isn't expecting an encore, considering that I don't think I actually know any other child-friendly songs.

"Wow, way to make singing sound like a chore Mister Noir." Priss retorts, matches my tone.

"If it's really as tiresome as you make it out to be, then it clearly wasn't entertaining enough for me." she snoots, thrusting her nose into the air with faux dismissiveness.

I level a leer at the child. "Oh, I meant to say 'Singing is my favorite thing in the world, above all else'. Is that sufficient for you to spare me a most unfitting punishment, Stan?"

Priss immediately has an expression one might expect to find on a shuddering volcano instead of a filly, but that rapidly turns into a smile that leaves me believing a trip out into the snow will leave me warmer than having to endure it much longer.

"Oh your punishment won't be unfitting." She says, trotting out of the room happily.

I can't help but feel I've made a mistake as I work my way out of bed and over to those ice crystals that Whittle had... done something to. Looking at them carefully, I'm unable to learn a thing. They're glowing, they look like gemstones instead of frozen water, and apparently, they're going to solve our food problem. It's no wonder to me now how the Crystal Empire was so prosperous, if they can just turn ice into food. Perhaps this is what all the crystal foods are made of? I guess if dragons can subsist on gems, ponies can subsist on ice.

Deciding that I've got nothing left to learn observing those, I exit the room, looking around at the one after it, some sort of living-room, with a pit in the middle and a yellow pony with a rust-red mane, mustache and what looks like a Prince Rupert's Drop for a cutie mark. He tends to the bed of dark embers within. This must be the Glitter Bomb I was told about. I'm careful to not walk quietly, so he knows I'm approaching.

"You sure you want to be near that stuff?" I warn.

He just looks confused. "If it was going to do something, it would have done it by now, I figure."

"You can't feel the, uhh..." 'The smouldering resentment that the bed of coals and snow are practically singing out to me?' I don't finish.

"The heat? I'm a big pony, Weiss Noir. To be frank, we could do with a little more right now." He looks between me and the pit.

My head involuntarily tilts at that, but I ultimately submit to his request, and muster up an immense dislike for whatever's in that pit. My horn ignites, and I both intentionally, usefully, and successfully use my magic for the first time. As the black fire roars anew, I feel nothing but bitterness towards whatever had been left in it, before the feeling fades as my magic slips back into inactivity.

"What's with the scowl?" Glitter Bomb says, surprising me.

"I was scowling?" I respond, noticing my facial expression. I'll have to watch that.

He looks at me like I'm crazy, and I'm forced to come up with something to say to convince him I'm not.

"I really don't like the cold." I explain. This seems to satisfy him as he returns to staring at it instead of me.

I watch him visibly work up the nerve to say something, before he starts. "How do you feel about a repeat performance of last night?" He ventures vaguely.

I already know what he's getting at, but I need to know more. "Which part, exactly?"

Glitter Bomb responds without looking away from the firepit. "The part where Crystal Ponies walked out of the empire for the first time in years."

I feel that nasty pit in my gut again, and try to reason with him, words tumbling out rapidly. "I don't know enough. I might not be able to hold my spell as long, and the black fire on its own might not distract the guards if we tried torches. Even if I could hold it, there might be a radius of effect, so ponies might get caught out of it. It wouldn't be worth risking trying to evacuate the whole city in one night."

"Then we'll learn. If you're willing." He responds simply, before elaborating further. "Whittle has some friends from a club she used to go to. The Crystal Carving Cabaret. They'll trust us if we tell them there's a way out, and we can find out what you need to know while we're there."

The pit in my stomach from before turns into a lead weight, but I have nothing left to deny him with. Being scared isn't a good enough reason not to help these people.

"Alright deary, you've got your saddlebags, your trail food, water. Is there anything else?" Whittle questions, looking between me and Glitter.

"Wouldn't hurt if I had some rupture drops, but there's no fixing that right now." he complains, shouldering the heavier set of bags between the two of us.

"Ready boy?" he asks me, which I just nod in response to, my dry mouth denying me a more complex answer.

Priss prances up sleepily. "You're going to do great daddy! Mr. Noir, you better not mess this up, or you're really going to get it!" she shouts, stamping her hooves into the snow with a squeaky crunch.

"I'll do my best." I respond, which prompts her to give me a funny look. Shit, I should have said something snarky, shouldn't I?

Putting a hoof to my chest and my head in the air, I quickly continue "Maybe not, after all, my best would be overkill, with how amazing I am."

This seems to put her at ease, and returns her expression to that familiar state of amusement and visible hamster-wheel-turning as she devises a retort. She ultimately decides not to, and simply nods happily. A sad wave between all parties is our last contact with the pair as we walk into the setting sun, in the direction of the Crystal Empire.

"So, what does one normally do to pass time on a long walk like this?" I question, growing a bit restless at the slow plodding pace towards the distant empire.

Glitter Bomb just shrugs. "Small talk?" he says redundantly, judging from what we're doing right now.

I try to come up with something interesting to ask about. "So Whittle said something about planting ice. Is that what you guys do for food?"

He nods "It's really not that good though. Real crystal tastes better when it's prepared right."

I guess that explains rock soup. Maybe I could use my black fire for mining to get them some. If it can burn ice into nothing, surely it can do the same to rock.

"I'll keep that in mind." respond.

He gives me a sideways glance, taking that as impetus to continue.

"Of course, it also tastes better fresh. You can keep growing new crystals from old ones, but ones that first come out of the ground are best." he says conversationally.

The awkward air from before starts to fade, and I pose a theory to him. "You seem to know a lot about it." To which he huffs with a smile.

"I'm a Crystal Pony, from the Crystal Empire, with a Crystal Cutie Mark." He explains, prompting a small embarrassed flush from me.

"That makes sense." I respond, scraping up what little remains of my pride.

A few hours of aimless conversation later, and the sun gives way to night on the Crystal Empire, and Glitter Bomb stops me.

"This is close enough. Perform your magic, and warn me when you believe you've reached half of your limit."

'I really hope that magical stamina doesn't correlate to physical stamina.' I think to myself, summoning up a general, unfocused foul mood, which, to my surprise, doesn't grow unnaturally when I summon the pilot-dark that is as weak as I can make it. Maybe it only influences my emotions as needed?

I feel some relief at that thought, which turns into shock when my spell suddenly fails at the same time.

"What's wrong?" Glitter says uncomfortably at my misfire.

"Nothing." I say sharply, summoning up another bad attitude and focusing on keeping it.

Glitter looks uneasy, but shakes his head. "Tell me before you grow tired. We can't afford to get caught." He says, annoying me.

"You said that already, foal. Let's do this thing and get the hell out of here." I say, stalking forward.

He trots up and ahead of me, leading the way at a brisk pace, our first stop is at a large building covered in glittering statues of ponies, go figure. A sign at the front is covered in script I don't bother reading. He opens the door slowly, and walks inside, at which point I follow. As we go deeper into the building, my vision is impaired by my spell running, while his night vision seems to be more than sufficient to piece out where he's going. I take the time to look around as best as I can while he searches for whatever it is he's looking for. The foyer itself seems to be something like a club, or bar. Judging from the bottles at the back behind the bar, and the stage to the side, I have no reason to doubt this assumption. It's at this point that I spot it.

A small, insignificant pebble made of some black glassy material, carved to look like an eyeball, rolling around aimlessly. No, not aimlessly, I realize. On a patrol. I walk closer to Glitter Bomb and poke him. "Do you see that thing?" I question, turning his vision to look where I point.

"See what?" He questions back, confused. I feel an odd glimmer of a feeling coming off of him, one whose source becomes apparent when I look back to the eye and learn the source of it. Something about the eye seems to be making his focus slide off of it, like some kind of notice-me-not spell.

"Nevermind, just stay close to me for a second." I command, walking closer to it. My hate for Sombra sockets into place as a worthy replacement for my previous feelings, and my black flame flares up when I sense it. I'm immediately reminded of Lord of the Rings when I sense what emotions are radiating off of the sentry-eye, and, therefore, what must have gone into creating it.

"And into this ring, he poured his cruelty, his malice, and his will to dominate all life." I whisper, shaking slightly.

Glitter quickly walks up next to me with worry in his expression. "Weiss, what are you talking about?" he implores.

I snarl, and rear up, stomping the glass eye into pieces with both hooves, before taking a step back. "Do you see it now?!" I shout. "These are how he was doing it. How he was preempting the escape attempts!" I say, unable to control my volume.

Glitter grabs my head and pulls me to look at him instead of the scum on the floor beneath me. "Calm down." He commands, and I release a shuddering breath, noticing my black flame recede from the base of my horn back to the tip. The lights in the room all turn on at once, and we wheel about to see a large mare with a head-full of curlers staring us down with a blank expression.

"This place is closed, boys." She says, cracking her neck.

Glitter rapidly takes point and starts the process of convincing the hulking mare to not make pretzels of us. "Drop Kick, it's me, we need your help tracking down Whittle's friends."

The mare immediately begins beaming when she recognizes him, galloping over and pulling him into a hydraulic-press hug. "Glitterface! You old workhorse, how the hay are you!?" she squeals.

"I'm not sure he can respond like that, M'am." I say as evenly as I can, still boiling inside from what I had learned not moments ago.

"Well whaddya mean he... Oh." She drops him with a blush, patting the coughing stallion on the back as he tries to recover from a powdered spine.

"Drop Kick, we've found a way to get past the guards. Him." Glitter points at me, after regaining his senses.

"What, this scruffy little candelabra?" she says skeptically, getting closer than makes me feel comfortable as I take a step back, out of her hugging range.

"The guards can't see him when he's lit up like that. They can't see anypony following him either. We're going to get as many ponies as we can, supplies, and walk right out of here. We've got a camp they can hole up at." He explains, to her growing delight.

"Oh finally! I should stay here though, keep up morale. Ponies have been needing the Cabaret a lot more lately, yaknow?"

I shake my head. "Not an option." They both look confused at this, so I explain further. "Unless you can guarantee that Sombra can't read minds, you already know too much. None of this will make even a bit of difference if he figures out our plans or our methods."

She looks heartbroken at that, but after a long moment, relents. "Fine. But you better work quick getting everypony out. Ponies will notice that I'm gone, and it's going to hurt when they don't know where. Sombra didn't come after me because he figured once the booze is gone, ponies will get mad enough to fight, even if they can't win."

"We'll only be doing this as slowly as we absolutely have to." I say carefully.

She doesn't look happy with my answer. "Let's just go. I know where Vittle's place is, she's got the most foals, so she'll take priority."

A bright blue stallion with a ponytail for a hairdo and a gem-encrusted fountain pen for a cutie mark shakes and shivers. This pony's name is "Writes Well", and he doesn't have a good answer for his master.

"Two." A sonorous and smooth tone states conversationally.

"Two seeing-eyes in as many days, broken entirely. On those same days, my precious future-slaves begin to disappear. None of my guards say anypony suspicious had been there, and none of my wards informed me of somepony breaking in. I want you to explain it to me, Writes Well. I'm asking you very politely, and calmly, to tell me where my slaves are." He says, walking forward and sitting next to the pony, as though they were old friends.

"I-I'm so sorry, m-master, nopony will t-t-tell me anything, I swear it, they haven't responded to the bribes, the threats, nothing!" He says, trying to keep from breaking down entirely.

"Tsk tsk tsk... You know, I don't blame you, Writes Well. I know my gift to you wasn't good enough. Just letting you keep your mind, in return for your loyalty. Letting you stay out of the mines in return for your service." He explains.

"Why, if somepony offered that to me, I'd be offended! Outraged, even. You don't have to worry about me not understanding that. I really do get it."

Writes shivers even harder at this "Pl-" He tries, before being interrupted.

"Shhhhhh... It's alright. You don't have to worry about betraying your fellow pony anymore. I shouldn't have put that burden on you."

They stand, and walk around to look Writes in the eyes. "That's why I'm going to be giving you a new job. It's simpler, it's not in the mine, and best of all, you'll get to work alongside ponies who understand what it's like to be in your shoes. It'll be wonderful for you, I'm certain, to get back to working alongside your peers, instead of against them."

Writes is confused, confused enough to stop his shaking.

"All you need to do is be afraid for me."

"Like those ponies in the ritual room."

Writes at this point is inconsolable as he realizes what's about to happen, backing up with tears in his eyes. "Please King Sombra, P-p-"

Sombra, who had been following him as he backed up, simply smiles, and with a touch of his horn, Writes Well's entire world became terror.

Looking at the thrashing, screaming pony on the ground with apathy, Sombra simply lifts them up in his telekinetic aura, and slides him into a hole in the floor where, directly below his throne room, circles upon circles of black crystal and white chalk draw the fear from similarly flailing ponies held safely in the air by magic, and funnel it directly into himself.

"Good night, Writes Well." Sombra says, the hole sealing off with crystals wrought from his cruelty, malice, and will to dominate life.

(Noir Report) A Refutation on the Common Usage of Dark Crystal [Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation]

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Entry #2, Day 4

Where the Black Flame is infuriating, the black crystal is intoxicating. I find it difficult to cast at times, between my holding back as much as possible, and my own fear shattering the careful magical forces at play. I've learned that a strong enough "incorrect" emotion can interrupt me casting a spell, after enough instances of it happening in this exact situation. I don't want to use this spell anymore. Despite that, I must. Any advantage that I don't take may spell doom in the trying times that this book was written in. I refuse to believe that this magic can only be used by a tyrant, I have to refuse it. To that end, I shall name this spell Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation, to remind me of what I risk becoming during this study, and of who I must surpass to achieve mastery of it.

Domination. The hunger for obedience, for deference. The type of itch that can only be scratched when another pony grovels before you. This emotion forms the core of SC3, as I'll be calling the spell for short. When this emotion is paired with the mental urge, or command to manipulate crystal, the spell begins, starting by intensifying the emotion until it it's strength matches that of the spell, and then performing the task that one set out to do. Crystal begins to grow, change, and distort in a way professional crystal-shaping crystal ponies call "Disturbing". A firm focus is required to shape the crystal with any degree of accuracy, and unmaking it is far more difficult than even the act of creating it without some sort of seed crystal. Despite that, it is entirely possible to use this spell to destroy crystal, as well as create it without a seed to grow it from. Perhaps I'm wrong, and the seed crystal that the spell locked onto during those experiments was merely too microscopic for me to see. I have no way to test this at the present moment, so for all intents and purposes, I will consider the spell to be capable of generating it ex-nihilo.

Having no desire to spy, and no confidence in it's ability to be concealed from dark magic users, my first experiments in creating dark crystal were of it's physical properties. Having summoned up various primitives, I tested them destructively and in other, more practical ways. One unfortunate thing to consider, nearly every adult crystal pony who participated in testing was able to break the crystals that I created, while I myself was unable to damage the larger ones, beyond scuffing them, or breaking off fragments. Ordinary crystal tools and weapons were able to break through any Dark Crystal counterparts with trivial ease, making it unsuitable for combat against superior crystals, made by superior crystal creators. In all physical respects, SC3 pales in comparison to old fashioned Crystal Pony Ingenuity. Something that fills my heart with pride and relief, and informs me for the seventh time that incorrect emotions can shatter weak, lesser spells.

My next experiments lay in it's magical properties. As the only unicorn on hand, I pray those who read this forgive my small sample size. Even more unfortunately, there may be a bias involved. My attempts to burn it with Black Flame succeeded with ease, the fire obliterating the blackened crystal I summoned, but in the very same experiment, if I created a crystal and attempted to contain a black flame using it, the flame was helpless to resist as I encased it and snuffed it out. Ultimately, these experiments lead me to believe one simple fact. I am not a suitable test subject to compare my own magic against, as I pollute my own results with the intentions of my magic. Something which I will try to remedy in the future via either proxy or assistant. Though I must wonder if there do exist others who could match me in dark magic and yet retain that in their heart by which I may call them "friend". Perhaps I'll have to produce such individuals one day, if I myself prove capable of retaining that quality at my mastery's epoch.

My final experiment lay in it's true essence, the undiluted desire for control. I absolutely refuse to attempt even the most minor perversions of the mind using this spell on another pony, but there exist targets that do not fall under that stipulation. Myself, and that which does not live. Attempts to use the crystal to influence my own mind with simple commands or hypnosis fail. My desire for control fundamentally cannot be used to take that control away from me, something I should have expected. Perhaps, then, It might be suitable for retaining my self-control, something I am unable to test at the present moment. As for the second among my victims, a term used in my homeland, a "Golem", is a creature born from rock and slaved to it's creator. Though my attempts at present fail, I feel it is a failure of lacks, rather than truths. I can tell from the crystal's primordial equivalent of confusion that it fails to control inanimate objects not through a lack of ability, but a lack of capabilities. Rocks do not have muscles, nor do they have joints or eyes. If I give these things to my golem, will it rise and serve me? If I give to it, will it obey in turn?

When compared with it's peers, dark crystal is clearly the runt of the litter, however, it's still a hard, glassy substance that can be produced from nothing at a point of my choosing. Any from my homeland would immediately see what I see, an incredibly potent tool with unimaginable destructive capacity. As they would most any extant or nonexistent object, I imagine. The first, most obvious question is "What type of crystal is it?", to which, dear aspiring magi, I have an answer here at the end of my entry. "It depends." An unfortunate, but true fact of this spell is that, if you do not know what you are growing the crystal from, it's properties default to those of glass, and if you do know the substance, then the crystal that results is a variant of it. I learned of a new substance by this method, when a dark ice crystal I created had come to melt into an equally dark water. In future reference, this substance's name shall be Black Water, my most intelligent and complex name yet, one worthy of poetic praise from all who hear of it. If I spray it at things, would that make it Black Water Mist?

(Present Chapter 2): The Return of Light: Part 2

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"Dear Celestia, she whose burning winds punish the land and sear the world, and Dearest Luna, whose frigid gale pierces our homes,

it is my greatest pleasure to inform you both that from my slumber I have awoken once more to blight your world with my presence, and that from my imprisonment I am now freed to do so.

The time has come once again for the forces of Good and Evil to engage in their ancient battle. Your Champions beckon for me.

And no pony can say who shall emerge victorious...

Your dear friend and eternal adversary, Weiss Noir."

Weiss bites his tongue and releases a puff of purple dragonfire with a snap of his claws, sending the black scroll's smoke flying into the distance.

"So who were you writing, anyway?" Gilda asks, walking alongside him.

Weiss chuckles. "The welcoming party."

"Remember what I said about secret sensei bullcrap? The same thing applies to weird answers that don't answer my bucking questions." Gilda says with a scowl.

Weiss, rapidly rephrasing his former statement, elaborates. "I was taunting the princesses about how I'm going to go to Ponyville, so they'll send over the fun stuff to deal with me, get off my back Gilda, jeeze."

Gilda almost laughs before holding herself back, thinking that it probably isn't a good idea to be laughing at Princess Celestia's misfortune.

The pair, at this point, begin to approach the train tracks, which Weiss tests with a hoof.

"So are you just going to wait for the train or something? Why did we go this way?" Gilda complains sourly for the detour.

Weiss shrugs "You wanted me to come, some of us can't break the sound barrier without a little help." He says, hopping carefully onto the tracks and summoning up magical energies.

"A technique from the Thievious Racoonus adapted for unicorn usage should be enough to let me keep pace with our lovely flying prodigy." He says, hopping up and down on the tracks until he's satisfied with whatever goal he has surrounding his hooves in a maroon glow.

"Give me a push?" He wiggles with a smirk.

Gilda's smirk wipes the smirk off his face, however, as she lazily takes flight, loops around and, at an appreciable fraction of the speed of sound, shoves him right-

"To my faithful student, Twilight Sparkle,

I fear you may be in danger, I implore you to return to where you once found the Elements of Harmony as soon as is reasonable for you. Bring with you your most trusted friend among the ones you have made thus far. My request is that you retrieve the Weapons of Light that I and my sister once wielded in ages past. I have the utmost faith in you, my student, and believe you will surpass my expectations once again.

Yours truly, Princess Celestia."

Spike finishes reading, as Twilight's mane fights to get free of her head before she catches fire from stress. It fails this escape attempt, however, instead merely turning itself into a frayed rats nest in her slowly increasing neurosis.

"Spike, do you know what this means?!" Twilight shouts, pacing around the room rapidly, stuffing a saddlebag full of nearly everything in the room that isn't nailed down or a book.

"Uhh, that you should wait until a reasonable time to go running off?" Spike says.

"No, that I need to go get the rest of the girls immediately!" She shouts, twitching.

As she begins to levitate Spike over to the saddlebag, he speaks up rapidly. "I don't know if I should be in this one Twilight!" he says to avoid the fate of being packed with the peanut butter sandwiches.

The instant he says that, Twilight stands up ramrod straight and drops him. "You're right! Celestia said to ONLY bring my most TRUSTED friend!"

"Uhh, I don't think she said you couldn't bring the rest of them..?" Spike responds, scratching his head while standing back up.

Twilight stands tall and retorts obviously. "It's subtext Spike, she obviously expects a great deal from me, to choose my most trusted friend to help obtain the Weapons of Light! The most trustworthy Element of Honesty, Applejack!"

As Twilight gallops out of the door at a dead sprint, Spike is left behind, confused and slightly annoyed that he'll have to put everything back up that Twilight shoved in her saddlebags and left behind.

Thankfully, her magical aura drags the over-fattened saddlebags out after her at extreme speed, sparing him the effort.

Meanwhile and elsewhere, Rainbow Dash enjoys a well-earned nap high in the clouds, although technically, one might have argued that she's just sleeping as her current choice of napping spot is the bed inside her cloud home. Ignoring for now whatever ontological nature her rest has, the question quickly becomes moot as her nap is ended by a pounding on her door.

"I'm up, I'm up!" she shouts, rolling over onto the ground and shaking herself into full awareness. 'Who the heck is knocking at this hour?' Dash internally complains, walking over and opening it.

"Yeah, what's up... Gil..." She pulls her jaw back up with a small click, and schools her expression into something more neutral. "...da?"

Gilda beams at Dash like the cat that caught the canary "Last time I was here, I didn't exactly make a good impression." she says, the content of her words at odds with her behavior as she practically hops from side to side with excitement.

Dash, confused and with a strange, bad feeling, responds. "Yeah, you really didn't, Gilda. You made a lot of ponies really upset!" she raises her voice a bit, wondering if this is the part where Gilda apologizes.

The griffon in question dashes those hopes entirely as she nods rapidly. "Yup, my flying sucked and I didn't keep my cool, but that's all changed, I went through some brutal training last week, and I'm here to remind you that Gilda's the coolest griffon you know. Just you wait." She says, already imagining Dash's apologetic and awed tone when she sees what Gilda can do now.

"Gilda, I'm really not sure some flying tricks are going to be enough to make up for what you did!" She says exasperatedly, confused at why Gilda doesn't seem to see that.

Gilda shakes her head. "Come on, give me a shot, you have no clue how tough that training was, you'll see what I mean when you see what I can do."

The way she acts at this leaves Dash surprisingly concerned. 'What's got her so happy, did she just forget what happened before?'

'She's acting super weird.' Dash thinks to herself.

To satisfy Gilda's stated goal, Dash decides to accept her offer. "Look... Alright Gilda, I'll watch your tricks, but you really need to apologize afterwards, Ok?" she pleads.

"Yeah yeah, it's on my to-do list." The Griffon waves her off with a claw. "So, where's some clouds that need clearing weatherchamp, I want to start this flight show off strong!" Gilda questions, turning around and scanning the skies.

'Has she been sleeping?' Dash involuntarily questions internally before answering. "Uhh, there's a cloud front over by Sweet Apple Acres that I'm supposed to get rid of by tomorrow, I guess we can use that?" Dash ventures.

Gilda hops off the cloud home's porch and into the air below. "Lead the way, and get your counting feathers ready, because this one's going to be fast." she cheers.

After Dash takes her over there, she lands at the edge of the farm where the clouds await. A few lazily drifting puffs of watery cotton.

"So what's the trick?" Dash questions nervously, landing next to Gilda, who just smirks.

"Just get to counting Dash, you won't believe it otherwise." And with that bold statement, Gilda gets ready, set, and then goes, blasting through the clouds like a rocket, seeming to almost bounce off of them one to another like a pinball as she makes hairpin turns on the drop of a dime.

In what feels like an instant later, Gilda lands with a skidding crash and announces her own count beneath a clear sky. "Ten seconds flat. And yours?"

Dash is so distracted by Gilda's unnaturally green eyes that she stutters. "U-uh, took you nine seconds... Actually."

The only thing as strange as Gilda's eyes and her incredible jump up in speed is her expression, almost like her being wrong about her counting made her more upset than the real time being shorter pleased her. Her briefly angry expression turns much happier after a quick moment, though. "Guess my counting isn't as good as my flying!" she shrugs.

"Heh. Yeah." Dash says. "So about that apology?"

"Well I'm not done yet, Dashie, You think I'm some kind of one-trick-griffon?" She pulls out a bottle of water and rapidly chugs it down.

"What's that you've got there, Gilda?" Dash questions curiously.

"Just some sporty stuff my trainer has me drinking." Gilda shrugs. "Now come on, Let's have us a proper race, right here, right now!" She shouts cheerily, already assuming a liftoff pose.

Dash mimics her uncomfortably. "Ok, but after this, we really need to talk, Gilda."

Gilda laughs, but also looks vaguely annoyed. "Yeah yeah, just let me finish my routine and we can talk till the cows come home. As long as you don't mind talking about how badly I whipped you in this race!"

The cows waving in the distance at Gilda's comment fail to comfort Dash, as she just can't quash the weird feeling about Gilda's behavior.

"Ok, disguise in place, alibi prepared, let's do this thing." Weiss says, covering up his extra limbs with a set of saddlebags, and his energetic flaming hair with sunglasses and a tourist sun-hat.

The exact moment he enters Ponyville's borders, he receives an entirely expected but still shocking shock as someone pops up behind him with a cheerful sappy shout.

"Hi! My name is Pinkie Pie and my tummy got rumbly and my mane got extra frizzy and my left hoof shook out a really big number in binary, so that's how I know there's a new pony in town and they're really grumpy and tired and they woke up on the wrong side of the bed and they don't want ponies to know that they're just sleepy and need a good friend by acting like they're secretly a big mean grumpy grump pants and they haven't had-"

'So this is what it feels like.' Weiss thinks to himself, waiting for her to peter out.

"Gaaaaasp!" she inhales, before continuing.

"Sarsaparilla in a really really really really really really really really really-"

When the pink maned mare belts out enough "Really"'s to prompt her to gasp for another breath again, Weiss shoves a hoof in her mouth.

"I think you've delivered the spirit of your message, dear." Weiss says, prompting her to mumble through the hoof in her mouth until he retracts it with a small amount of disgust.

"If you say so, anyway, like I said, my name's Pinkie Pie, what's your name, huh? Huh? Huh?" she says no less rapidly.

"Well you see, I'd like it a whole lot if you called me Black Snooty while I'm in town. There's some ponies who don't much care for me, and they'll get really spooky when they know I'm here." Weiss says.

"Well that's weird, why the hay would you want me to call you that, your snooty isn't even black!" She says, face scrunching up in confusion.

Weiss responds obviously "Because Queen Meany doesn't really fit me right now."

"That makes sense!" she shouts, preparing to evaporate into the wind to prepare a surprise party, before being grabbed by Weiss one last time.

"Wait, Pinkie, I'm not actually new to Ponyville, I've been here before. No need to stress yourself making a party right this minute." He says, prompting Pinkie to shake her head rapidly.

"No, nonono no. That was before Ponyville was founded, so it doesn't count, a-doy! Even if it did, that just means I'm super duper late with your welcome-to-ponyville party, like, Ultra super duper late!"

Weiss calculates the optimal route to delaying Pinkie while carefully ignoring how she knew about that. "Alright, alright. But you have to wait until I get a better disguise, or the party will be super frowny, and I'll be sad and embarrassed and the spooky ponies might notice me and that will make me... Ultra super frowny...?" He ventures, prompting Pinkie to gasp as if he were admitting to having a terminal illness.

"Well don't worry your snow-white behind Snoots, your new aunt Pinkie will be more than happy to help you with your super secret disguise, but even more importantly than that-!" She thrusts a hoof in the air dramatically.

"Your new aunt Pinkie will be absolutely super omega duper wooper overjoyed to get you your much-needed sarsaparilla!" she finishes, grabbing him and dragging him along next to her.

"I'm a millennia older than you." Weiss mumbles to himself, too allured by the promise of the first taste of sodie-pop since arriving in Equestria to muster up more than passive resistance and quiet mutterances as she drags him along.

'Looks like distracting Pinkie is going to be easier than I thought.' He considers as he's led into Ponyville proper, where he spots Twilight only barely restraining herself from running into the Everfree at a dead sprint as she instead power-walks with a disgruntled Applejack in tow.

'And there goes the one pony in town who might recognize and have an easy cure for rage poison.'

Dash lands at the end of Sweet Apple Acres, panting slightly. Gilda, equally tired, gives Dash a lazy smile, before reaching for her bottle of water. When she discovers it's empty, she dashes it at the ground and stomps it into pieces with displeasure.

"Whoa Gilda, what the heck?" Dash wheezes.

"Ugh, I'm out of water!" Gilda says, grinding the wooden chunks of bottle into the ground for good measure.

"I don't want to mix up more of that junk, it'll take for-flocking ever." She growls, before pulling out a new bottle, filled with some sort of red potion that sets Rainbow Dash's hair standing on end.

'Just a sip is enough, he said.' Gilda thinks, before uncorking it and taking a short swig of the sour potion.

"Ugh, this stuff sucks." Gilda complains.

"Gilda, is that the stuff your trainer has been making you drink?" Dash questions, glancing sideways at the thrashing brew.

"Yeah? Why, you want some?" Gilda queries.

The Pegasus rolls words over in her mouth. "I... I don't think you should drink any more of that stuff Gilda. Let's just do some more flying, Ok? You kinda did my work today, so I've got some more free time." She says.

For a brief moment, Gilda's posture turns tense at Dash's words, until she visibly forces herself to relax.

"Yeah, I guess it is an unfair advantage." Gilda forces out.

"Gramps said I didn't need it anymore anyway now that my training's done. It's all yours. Just don't overdo it if you're going to try some." She says through clenched teeth. With that said, Gilda tosses the bottle carelessly onto the grass next to her.

As Gilda stalks off to the clearing they designated as their liftoff point, Dash picks up the bottle and carefully pours it out.

Though she'd never admit it, seeing Gilda's body flash purple for a moment was the most frightening thing she had seen in over a week.

"Hey Dash, I want to show you a brand new trick. You've never seen this one before, I guarantee it!" Gilda shouts back, looking over to one of the apple trees and gliding over to it.

"Life is pain!" Weiss complains from the floor of Sugarcube Corner, rubbing his aching stomach.

"Nope, just your tummy. You drank a lot of soda. I don't know why you got into the unsweetened soda-water. That stuff's not exactly tasty on its own." Pinkie rambles, polishing a countertop while Weiss groans and moans.

"Because soda is life." Weiss answers, slowly raising himself back to his feet with magic.

"I was lost but now I am found." He says reverently, throwing another few bits onto the counter for more soda, but Pinkie just shakes her head.

"I'm cutting you off Snoots, you've had enough for one day." She says, trying to push his bits back.

"Hey, I'm not over the legal limit yet barkeep. I'm still good to drive." Weiss complains with a thump of his hoof.

"I hope you're joking Snoots, that would be awful if there was a legal limit on soda! Driving a cart or no, you drink any more fizzy drinks and you're going to pop like... Pop!" She giggles.

Groaning from a combination of stomachache and being denied his divine nectar, he takes his bits back in a disgruntled manner and exits the shop.

"I'm going to go check on something I had cooking. I'll let you know when I need ya'." Weiss says as he scans the town until he senses what he's looking for.

"See ya then Snoots!" Pinkie waves him off.

As he walks out of sight, his sunhat, sunglasses, and saddlebag evaporate into smoke.

'Distraction complete. Now for phase three of my master plan.' he chuckles to himself, walking towards Sweet Apple Acres.

"So what'r these things supposed to look like, anyhow?" Applejack questions as they enter the chamber that once held the Elements of Harmony, the empty pedestals coated with long-untouched dust.

"Well, according to Ancient Armories of Antiquity, the Weapons of Light are a pair of tools created a long time ago by some sort of Sage, Wise Knower, using materials gathered near a sacred tree in the Everfree forest itself. There's two of them, a whip and a sword, and they can only be wielded by ponies with a good heart, because of how they repel evil." Twilight exposits, trotting up to the nearest pedestal.

"I don't know where they actually are though." She continues helpfully.

Applejack trots up to the same pedestal, and, taking a deep breath, blows the dust off of it.

"Well, we best get to lookin' then, iffin some "Bad thing that's absolutely going to happen and is worse than Nightmare Moon" is as true as you said it was."

Twilight blushes slightly, remembering how she chose to word the matter when requesting Applejack's assistance. She is then shocked when after Applejack's puff of air, the six pedestals that once held the elements begin to descend into the floor, a stony grinding marking the transition of the six pillars into slightly hazardous steps into some sort of lower room. The pair look between one another with unspoken dialogue going between them, and they hop their way down into the unknown depths below. As they hop down the final pillar, they spot it, a pair of pedestals lit by crystals high above. The floor and walls around the pedestals are coated from wall to wall in sun and moon motifs, a trapezoidal white pedestal holds a gleaming white sword with a bold purple handle, while a bright red orb sits snugly in a rounded obsidian dias.

"That's them, the Weapons of Light!" Twilight says, galloping over to them before a strange wind repels her, sending her tumbling head over flank back to Applejack, who stood further back and was merely scooted on her hooves a few feet away.

"Wh-" Twilight begins, stumbling to her feet.

"But that doesn't make any sense, the weapons are only supposed to repel ponies with evil hearts trying to get them! We're not bad ponies..!?" Twilight says, working herself into a panic.

"We have to get those weapons Applejack, Equestria might depend on it!" Twilight moans piteously, before a hoof on her shoulder startles her out of it.

"We're gonna get em, Twi, and we'll do it together." Applejack says with confidence.

"Do you trust me?" She questions redundantly, which Twilight immediately nods in responds to.

With no more words needed, the pair ground their hooves, grit their teeth, and slowly push against the magical wind testing their resolve, inching closer and closer to the sacred relics.

"Ok, so, my trainer had me pulling up trees with my wings, but not by like, grabbing them, but actually flying them up out of the ground, it's so cool that it'll put all this to rest once and for all!" Gilda says, approaching the apple tree to attempt uprooting it, but Dash gets between her and the tree with a burst of speed, flapping between the two.

"Don't, Gilda, these are Applejack's trees, and I really don't think she'd like you tearing one of em up."

Gilda's face twists with anger. "I'll put. It back. After." She hisses.

Dash shakes her head. "Let's just go over to the woods, Ok? It's just a few minutes flight."

Gilda at this point is apoplectic, shuddering with pure rage. "I don't want to wait a few minutes. Just let me do my trick on this one stupid tree."

"Gilda, don't touch Applejack's trees, you won't impress me breaking other ponies' stuff." Rainbow Dash says, trying to flap a little closer to Gilda.

"Impress you?! It's not going to impress you?! Then what is?! Huh?! What's going to impress you, what!? wh-" Gilda drops Dash, who she had been holding by the neck and squeezing with one talon while Dash scrabbled for air.

"W-what-" Gilda backs up, suddenly overwhelmed with shame and fear of herself.

"P-" She shakes. "O-ok Dash, please don't be angry, I... I don't k-know why I did that, I just." She backs up further, rump bumping against a tree, she looks back, only to see her wings awash with purple light.

Dash, who had been afraid for herself moments before, is now very afraid for Gilda, whose confused and fearful expression are at odds with her earlier behavior.

"I- Don't be mad, I didn't mean it, Celestia-" Gilda cringes with pain, before leaning over and voiding her stomach onto the ground, a pink froth of potion and water spilling onto the grass.

"O-oh Celestia help me Dash." she whimpers, before vomiting again.

Dash rushes over as fast as she's able, holding up Gilda with a foreleg and gripping her head gently to keep her feathers out of the way.

"Don't worry Gilda, I'm going to get you to help, Twilight's probably got some idea how to fix this, Ok? Just hold on."

Gilda periodically retches as the pair make their way to Ponyville, and by extension, the Golden Oaks Library. By the time they pass Ponyville's border, however, Gilda's illness has mostly passed.

"I think I can walk now D-Dash." she whispers, desperately wanting to not be close enough to Dash to do what she had just done if she lost control again.

Rainbow Dash, meanwhile, simply shakes her head and continues to support the griffon.

As the duo walk down main street towards help, they finally encounter Weiss, who smiles at the pair.

"Oh good to see you two, just the pony and griffon I've been looking for." He says conversationally.

"Who the hay is this guy Gilda?" Dash says as she is gently pushed away from Gilda.

The griffon looks angry, but tired as she shouts "W-why the flock was I just puking my guts out gramps?! I almost..."

"I almost-" she tries again, but is interrupted.

"You almost did something you would regret, and then you regretted it anyway. The influx of fear and regret caused your body to purge the emotionally charged potion." Weiss explains simply.

"Considering that, I'd say our lessons aren't done. But your little trip here certainly is. Assaulting an Element of Harmony isn't going to win you any friends, dear, and even if it would, you know too much. You'll just tap that dark power again as soon as you're angry enough, potion or not, now that you know how it's done. You're unstable." he continues with a cold sneer.

Gilda shouts back. "I don't want anything to do with you, freak!" But as soon as her anger reaches a fever pitch, she breaks out in a cold sweat and backs up at the familiar sensation of power shooting through her.

"We had a deal, Gilda. I go free, you learn my lessons and I help you regain Dash's friendship. You're coming with me."

Dash, who had been listening to this exchange, has some anger as well, and decides to make up for Gilda's inability to express her own. "So you're the pony who gave Gilda that freaky juice? I'm not going to let you do anything to her." She says with cold steel in her voice, stepping in front of the griffon.

It's around this point that the surrounding ponies look on in caution and fear at the altercation brewing in the middle of town.

It's also around this point that Twilight and Applejack run up to the situation, Fluttershy, Pinkie Pie, and Rarity in tow.

Weiss pays no mind to the newcomers, and steps towards the increasingly afraid griffon. "Our debts aren't squared, Gilda. I refuse to let that stand."

"Leave that poor griffon alone, you brute!" Rarity says, having heard enough of the conversation to recognize the aggressor as she trots up next to Rainbow Dash.

"You ain't takin' nopony nowhere." Applejack continues, standing next to Gilda.

"Hi Snoots!" Pinkie says, bouncing over with the rest, while Fluttershy takes up the rear and Twilight takes point against him, forming almost a huddle around Gilda.

Weiss snarls. "Don't call me 'Snoots', you foal." He says hastily, trying to salvage his pseudonym before Pinkie unintentionally ruins it.

"It seems my true name has been wiped away from this saccharine era."

Twilight at this point pipes up with a frown. "Oh I know exactly who you are." She says, taking a step forward.

With a dramatic point, she exclaims for the world to hear. "You're the Pluck-Night Pony, Know-Our Vice!"

Weiss freezes, literally hearing the mangling of his name's spelling and meaning.

"No... I'm actually not." He deadpans, confusing Twilight.

"But that's what it said in Predictions and Prophesies, A moon minus days after the blackest night of the brightest day, events would conspire to send hate with hate, and Know-Our Vice would arise to inflame all Equestria!"

Weiss facehoofs "Yes, Bookhorn Maroon, but my name isn't Know-Our Vice, It's Weiss Noir!"

Twilight's head involuntarily tilts while the rest of the gang looks confused at this non-sequitur.

"Vice Know-Our?" She repeats, prompting Weiss to growl.

"No! Weiss Noir, not Vice Know-Our!"

Twilight at this point responds in monotone. "You just said the exact same thing twice." To which Pinkie chides.

"Twilight, don't be rude, a pony's name is something you should respect, even if they are acting like a big meany-pants right now. He just spells it differently."

Twilight's mane frays slightly "But they sound exactly the same!"

"Yeah, but the readers know you're messing it up!" Pinkie says sagely.

Weiss decides to distinctly ignore all of this, and go back to his original line of conversation. "Look, Rainbow Dash, you can't possibly tell me you're going to defend her." He says smoothly.

"She didn't treat Pinkie invading your hangout time the way she should have." He explains.

"She ruined what should have been a party to cheer her up and make her feel better, with actions that were completely unwarranted." He steps forward as Rainbow Dash cringes as his words.

"She embarrassed you in front of the entire town." He takes another step forward.

"She didn't even try to make things right when your one day together ended on such a sour note." He continues, looking at her smugly as her friends get more and more angry.

"How could you possibly forgive her after she did something that awful, that disloyal?" Weiss finally finishes, standing nose to nose with Dash.

"Because I did the same thing to her!" Dash shouts back with pure suffering in her tone, forcing Weiss back with her words.

"I should have told Pinkie off when I knew Gilda just wanted to hang out with me for the day and Pinkie kept butting in, I shouldn't have done all those stupid pranks when I knew she was getting upset."

"I should have tried to talk to her, instead of just talking at her. Even if I had to chase her all the way to Griffonstone to do it." Dash hangs her head, before turning to face Gilda.

"I didn't realize how rude I was. Can you forgive me for being such a jerk, Gilda?" Dash pleads, seeing Gilda's tear-stained and shocked face.

Mere moment later, the pair are hugging the stuffing out of one another, laughing and crying in equal, emotionally releasing measure. Even the rest of the girls at this point are smiling at the heartwarming reconciliation.

Weiss puts a scowl on his face and points it at them after they conclude their moment. "Forgiveness or no, you can't stop me from squaring our debts. I'm not leaving without Gilda."

It's at this point that they all turn and glare at Weiss, who simply smirks. With a flourish of his head and an ignited horn, he unleashes wave after wave of raw killing-intent, attempting to cow the group into submission with his magically enhanced predatory presence. The air flickers with powerful dark magic.

The two unaffected ponies among them stand tall however, and at their defiance, he quickly acts shocked and ends his spell with some theatrical sparking. "What? This isn't possible, The ponies that can ignore killing intent that strong can be counted on one hoof!"

Applejack steps forward with a smirk, prompting Weiss to back up. "We can. We can beat yer' fancy magic, and we can make you get the hay out of Ponyville."

Twilight steps forward as well. "And Gilda won't be going anywhere she doesn't want to."

Weiss chortles. "Oh, you're going to make me leave? With what, the Elements? Didn't the Princess tell you that those alone aren't enough to keep me down?"

Twilight smiles, and pulls out a blade in her telekinesis, while Applejack holds a red whip in her teeth. "Actually, we were going to make you leave with these. The Weapons of Light!"

"The Blade of Evil's Bane, the Master Sword!" she hefts the blade aloft, light shining off its mirrored surface.

"And the Whip of Alchemy, the Vampire Killer!" she continues, prompting Applejack to crack the crimson, chain-woven whip in a puff of fire.

Weiss carefully draws his face into a mask of pure rage. "You dare?!" he shouts.

He then shouts again when the group of ponies don't answer, his mane erupting like a volcano in black fire. "You dare?!"

Pinkie pipes up "Yeah, we dare!"

Weiss's expression instantly turns neutral. "Understandable, have a nice day." He turns and begins to trot off, making nearly everypony, including the ones who had been watching from their houses, faceplant.

Gilda, who had been watching this with an arm still around Dash, can't help but comment. "What the flock?"

She's startled however, when her comment prompts Weiss to turn around.

"By the way, Gilda." He says, conversationally.

"I still haven't squared my debts with you. Here, in return for the pain and grief I still owe you for causing, and as payment for releasing me. Consider this my thanks. And my apology." He tosses her a sack of bits, which she catches angrily.

By the time she looks back from the flying bits to Weiss, he's already dissipated.

"That stupid idiot gave me a couple of lousy bits for all that? Ugh! This won't even pay for a night at the inn!" she huffs, before Twilight's eyes widen at the sight of the flat, off-colored coins.

"Gilda, let me see those bits!" she says, making the curious griffon open her talons to reveal the aged golden coins, a picture of a diamond on one side, and what looks like an eagle on the other.

"Oh my stars!" Twilight shouts, eyes widening even further.

"Those aren't bits, Gilda, those are gepee, they must be at least a thousand years old!"

"So what, they're old?" Gilda questions uncomprehending.

"Not just old, but valuable! You could sell those for... I don't even know how much, you're rich!"

Gilda looks surprised at that, but ignores Twilight's impromptu history lesson on ancient forms of pony currency to instead focus on Dash, who looks like she has something to say.

"Hey Gilda. I shouldn't have just let you go like that when you yelled at everypony." She says with some shame.

"I should have chased you down and kicked your flank!" Dash finishes, laughing as Gilda smiles too, albeit a smile as shyly held as the one she had back during her first day of Junior Speedsters.

"That's what friends are for, right?" Dash goes on to say, making Twilight frown.

"I think all our friendships can absolutely be had and improved upon without the looming threat of violence, right?" The purple unicorn questions, making Gilda visibly ponder that for a moment.

Gilda's pondering ends when she wrestles Dash and then gives her a noogie. "Nah!"

"Dearest Princess Twilight,

Today I learned that sometimes, it can be hard to accept when somepony you like acts in a way that's not so nice. Though it's impossible to control how your friends act, it's possible to control your own behavior. Just continue to be a loyal friend, even when it's hard, and in the end, you'll have the best chance possible of helping a true friend's better nature come to light.

Your faithful student,
W e i s s N o i r."

Weiss writes mockingly, before sending it off in a puff of dragonfire.

As he trots a short distance into the Everfree, he can't help but laugh and laugh at just how perfectly his plans had gone, and just how delicious their reactions had been.

(Weiss Report) Bribes [Master Sword and Vampire Killer]

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Entry Whatever, Day Whatever

I'm so pissed. The royal sisters just blasted their way into my throne room for the third time. Turns out, after they defeated Discord, they did some snooping around, and accused me of colluding with the bastard. You try to make one measly set of Chaos Emeralds by legally designating a room for ponies to raise a cacophony in whenever they feel like it, and they think you're trying to beef up the one person in Equestria whose attention I absolutely do not want. It took some quick talking, and I basically had to promise them backup Elements of Harmony, but they left without just beating me into a pulp.

After the second time, I started literally leaving the skylight of my throne room open for them twenty-four-seven, and they decided to go through a wall instead when they saw that. I'm so god damn angry. I'll get over it though. I might be pissed at them for a lot of reasons, but it's a petty anger, and the best cure for that is indulging in the delights of using magic to make things ones consigned to fiction. Not that I even know how to make relics as good as The Elements, anyway. Good thing I have dudes for that. Good work dudes.

What those posh bitches don't know is that I know where the tree is too, bet they weren't expecting that. My quest to make them some spare world-saving goodies will start there.

Still too annoyed to mark the entries proper, use your imagination, codebreaking dorks.

My first problem emerged when I entered the forest. That place has a feeling of safety that I bet really doesn't make ponies happy when there's actual predators lurking around. Long story short, I found the tree. My second problem emerged when the tree basically asked me with like, sappy magic feeling waves if I wanted it to just MAKE more elements with some of it's remaining energy, that tree is too generous for it's own good. I managed to convince it not to because of the plunder vine seeds, and instead hunkered down, broke out the portable lab, and got to work enlightening myself.

That didn't fucking work, but it did give the tree enough time to lowkey read my mind, and it helped me figure out something kinda huge. The Everfree Forest is the harmony capital of the world. Everything works on it's own because ponies are supposed to work alongside it instead of having to lead nature along by the nose just to make it function. It's gotten pretty shaggy though without anyone giving it that little touch of guidance, since there aren't any ponies willing to pony the fuck up and try. I think that kinda bums the tree out, but I don't exactly speak arbor. I wonder why the princesses never tried to tame the forest, I mean, they're living there, do they just think it's cursed?

It's around day five that me and the tree painstakingly come to an agreement after some embarrassing attempts at higher-order communication. It has figured out that I fucking love quid-pro-quo, and it's got a self-preservation instinct like the rest of us mortals, even if it ignores it a bit too often when it's trying to be nice. I didn't figure out that it was onto my plans, though, until a patch of ground near the roots started glowing, and the tree basically ordered me to dig up that spot.

I was amazed when I found a huge chunk of ore that practically made my teeth itch. The glittering titanium ore had spent so long in the Everfree that it had become charged with the power of Harmony. Not as good as the tree's big-boy powers, but holy shit it's a start. I had been kinda getting worried I wasn't going to get anywhere with this, and those princesses seriously freak me out. When's Celestia going to get all nice and pacifistic like in the show? I swear she wants to go all Bane on me every time we meet.

Oh yeah, I bet you wish this entry was marked correctly

With what I'll call Master Ore in hand, I made my first trip back home to drop it off with the R&D Dudes. I gave em a simpleish goal. Make me a sword blade out of the stuff that's as magically hollow as an empty bottle, because I'm planning on packing this fucker with features. The Master Sword has a few key features that I wanted to include for authenticity. The first and most important is the ability to repel evil.

Now normally, this would be the part where someone struggles to define what evil is, but I'm fucking Weiss Noir, I've got a pretty good definition. I also know that that Master Ore puts me on fucking eggshells standing near it, so it's a good start for repelling dark magic in general. I just need a way to give it the capacity to intelligently differentiate between who's evil and who isn't, and give the weapon the punch it needed to defy evil completely. I'd like to thank the modern day legal system for my solution. I simply ran some extremely well documented offers that were as ethical and took the matter as seriously as possible through the Arcana Liber. I didn't get many takers to offer their soul's up for Equestria's greater good after death, but I only needed two.

I made absolutely sure that they were willing to do this instead of going on to Elysium, but the two that ended up signing up for this thing were hardcore Crystal Pony vets from the Crystal War, who wouldn't take no for an answer when I started getting second thoughts. I've made sure that I will give them a Monument when the time comes, a really big one with their names plastered all over it in the toughest materials I can produce. I still fear that I had gone too far, and will fail to do enough to honor their decision.

With the core of my two weapons slated for use, I had my dudes begin production and assembly of the Master Sword. A blade made of Crystallized Master Ore, Harmonic and Sacred, with the strength and magical potency to repel evil. A Hilt and handle made from Timeshift Crystal, my answer to time manipulating magics, tuned and attuned to the blade to allow it to rewind away any damage dealt to it, no matter how grievous, and keep it as pristine and powerful as the day it was made. I also included a bunch of lesser charms in the space left over in the blade, such as a recall spell, first and foremost. Seriously, fuck the idea of some villain getting one up over the good guys because they made the sane choice to not keep the damn things on them twenty-four seven. Now with a simple, intentional shout, the weapon will just pop right up when you need it. I bet they could do some Kingdom Hearts Strike Raid shit with that, but then, I'm not going to be the user, so whatever.

But one weapon does not a duo of warrior princesses satisfy. I knew for a fact that it wouldn't. So I wracked my brain trying to consider what else to produce with the remaining Crystal Soul, after bringing the Master Sword to the Tree of Harmony to have it blessed. The tree seemed to have picked my brain enough to offer something substantial of it's own, and I was guided to one of the places where the plunder vine seeds had taken root. The tree fighting them off had turned a few of the corrupt, chaotic seeds to harmony, and I knew then what I had to do. I carefully dug up one of the Harmonic Plunder Vine Seeds, and took it back to the Shadow Realm in my most powerful sealing arrays. There was only one person, or rather, Zebra, I trusted with the production of the second weapon.

Entry Whatever four out of four

Malusi, my muse, my inspiration. Literally the only zebra I know, and also the best zebra of all time. When she saw the Gifted Vines, she attempted to knock me out with sleeping gas to take them for herself. After an intense discussion, she was more than happy to join me on an expedition to the Everfree to help me produce the second weapon. She refused to explain what exactly she was going to do to achieve that, but after three weeks meditating next to the Tree of Harmony, she scoured the Everfree, demanded I basically pander to her whims, and dug up plant after plant after plant, brewing them in a pit dug into the ground.

She went on to toss everything in, spat in it, and after some minor hallucinations on my part from being too close to the fumes, she had the completed whip. I asked her if she left room for the rest of the features, but she just sneered at me and said that nothing I add by this point could improve upon it. After I woke up tied to a bear the next day thanks to her amusing prank of drugging my food, I convinced her to allow me to look it over when we returned to the Shadow Realm, only to find she had my dudes perform the final enchantments on the whip already, which acted almost as though it were alive. It would change from form to form every time I looked away, being a leathery whip at one moment, and thick metal chains tipped with a heavy weight the next. As best as my R&D Dudes can tell me, it will resolve into a "true form" when it's user claims it.

I sent the princesses a letter saying that the newly christened Master Sword and Vampire Killer would be sent to them when they were complete ("When the two ponies who signed up to inhabit them kicked the bucket" was carefully not included in that letter), got drunk, and docked Malusi's pay for spiking my drinks the next day. Letting her exist in the same country as poison joke was clearly a mistake on my part.

I couldn't help myself afterwards. I went to the tree and inquired if it wanted me to help remove the plunder vines, or find some way to destroy them. It made me feel strangely bad when the tree expressed a desire for me to not make the attempt to preserve the timeline it had been working towards. I guess the tree had grown to understand my need to repay kindness with kindness, though, since it instead wished for me to spread what Malusi had learned of the Everfree forest's bounty. Probably to tempt future ponies into braving it.

Malusi agreed, but demanded that she first teach it to her own offspring, when she opted to have one. It made me feel a bit wrong to agree to her demand, considering she had been trying to develop an immortality serum for years on my payroll after her banishment, and therefore, it could be a long time before the tree's wish could be granted, but ultimately, I had no choice, since she was the only one who received the tree's wisdom, and by extension, the only one who could share it.

(Past Chapter 3): Strike the Earth!

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My first attempts at leadership sucked. For me, that is. Everyone else seemed to be on board with it by the end.

"Why not use the view-be-gone assemblage from Trotter's Tome of Reliquary?" one of the ponies argues. Tome Waiver, I think.

"Because I firmly believe we should not be trusting any magic that didn't stop Sombra the first time. He might be able to go so far as to detect it, making it a liability," I try to explain to the group of adults who had gathered to discuss keeping our group safe from being... Reacquired.

"Furthermore, while his spells may not be able to detect you all when you've got those Black Flame lamps, that just means he'll have to look for signs of our camp instead. Strange structures, smoke, anything could give us away, and it would take him a day's work to do a quick scan of the countryside if he took flight."

The ponies look uncomfortable at my statement, just sort of shuffling around a bit.

"So yeah. My solution is pretty simple. We do this old school," I say, continuing internally. 'Although, technically, I guess it would just be school...'

Shaking out of thought, I explain. "We dig deep, leave no traces on the surface, and split our camp up into cells, each cell having minimal information on the others, and connected via underground railway."

A pony from the crowd speaks up loudly "We'd be trapped like rats if Sombra found us then!"

I give him my full attention when I answer with what I believe to be the truth. "We'll be trapped like rats if he finds us at all. Whether or not there's tons of rock above our heads."

I sweep my gaze over to the others in the group, who are starting to realize the danger they're in, even now. Or maybe that's wishful thinking.

"We'll all keep each other fed, warm, and above all else, safe, but from this point forward, we live in darkness."

Another naysayer pipes up at this point. "Like the ponies Sombra has in his mines?" she sneers.

"Are they?" I question back, confusing them.

"Are they really living? Their minds are trapped. Their fates aren't their own," I state with confidence.

I take a short walk around the crowd, letting them soak in my words, before I continue.

"I'm telling you that we will live in darkness. I won't let you all merely survive there. Our home until Sombra's end will be a realm all our own, a realm of shadows of our own making. We will take back the shadows that monsters have dared to hide in."

Glitter Bomb runs into the room, interrupting my ministrations of the crowd. "Everypony, there's a monster outside. Anypony who can fight, come with me now."

I get the feeling that this may be one of only a few opportunities to sway these ponies to my side, and follow along, already full of anticipation.

I've always been a bit of a thug when it comes to violence. Fighting's my idea of a good time, when I'm ready for it.

"This aught to be fun," I say to myself as I follow along with the stouter looking ponies who opt in to defend our camp.

If I live for a thousand years, I doubt I'll ever understand it. Looking at the roaring, hairy scorpion the size of a semi, I'm more excited than I've been in years, but a couple of guards had me scared out of my mind?

I see a group of crudely armored ponies trying to drive it off with long spears, and have an idea. It's simple physics. Pressure, speed, and sharpness.

I decide to make the attempt to imitate what I had seen of Sombra's dark crystals, aiming my horn at the snow in front of me, intending to create a glassy ice spear, to drive it directly into the scorpion like a piston by growing it from the bottom-out. Physics at it's finest.

As the magic builds up, and I mentally aim the magic's direction of growth towards the scorpion, I have a curious idea. If we captured it instead, surely we could make good use of it. Having a monster at my disposal would also help keeping the ponies in line. I try to shake the feeling away when I realize what a stupid idea that is, but it persists as I'm forced to finally unleash my building magical energy, firing the spell of crystal growth at the snow.

The thin spear, already growing at high speed from the ground distorts, it's sharp point turning blunt as my desire to capture the scorpion overwhelms me, and I'm unable to bring myself to end it's life when I could instead subjugate it, kind of like Pokemon, really.

The black ice crashes into the beast, already shaping around it into a collar as it thrashes to break the spear off at the middle. Where the spear struck, however, it continues to grow, the scorpion's thrashing only serving to break the crystalline ice up and spread it further over the beast.

It looks like the scorpion is winning against my rapidly draining magical reserves, however, as it's thrashing around removes more ice than it spreads. The ice that's there, however, is more than enough to keep the monster distracted while the rest of the ponies stab it to death with their spears.

The corpse is quickly overtaken as the ice encases it fully in it's death throes, like a fly in amber.

The ponies are cheering and hollering at their victory and for my help, but despite that, I feel exhausted and ill at what I had nearly done. I offer up a fake smile to the group and complain about the spell taking a bit out of me as I walk back inside slowly, heading for my room and bed.

Is that what he feels all the time? That hunger? I failed to cast the spell even once without feeling like I would do anything to have that beast in a cage for my own uses.

The spell I attempted was taxing, yes, but the feeling it required to cast was so potent that it overwhelmed my reason, however momentarily.

Am I going to go insane if I keep doing this?

Instead of sleeping like I want to, I open a drawer, stuff a diamond pen in my mouth, and start slowly writing in my little black book.

"Entry #2, Day 4..." I write, deciding to experiment with the smallest forms of the spell that I can muster.

It's been roughly a week since I first arrived in the frozen north, and to celebrate this anniversary, I've been recruited to do backbreaking labor. I can hardly wait. The worst part is, mindlessly chewing through rock is, surprisingly, as relaxing in real life as it is in Minecraft, making it incredibly difficult to use Black Flames like I planned. I just keep getting too relaxed while I'm doing the job, and too satisfied when I check my progress.

"Sure you wouldn't rather just use a pick?" Glitter Bomb says, dragging a cart filled with red crystalline spheres behind him. Rupture Drops, he calls them.

He had been assigned to help me with step one of my plan, digging out the first cell somewhere away from our initial camp. I simply do not know enough about mining to recognize any dangers I might run into, which is something Crystal Ponies are supernaturally capable of.

"I wouldn't know where to begin. I can barely pick up a shovel, much less swing a pick," I respond. If I knew how to levitate objects, I might have been more receptive to his idea, but I've been stuck "hoofing it", so to speak, since I got here.

After I manage to get upset enough to mine another twenty meters or so, he stops me. "Hold on. There's something here."

I take a step back, quench the fires I had going, and let him do his thing, watching carefully to see if I can learn anything. He walks up and down the tract that I dug out, tapping the wall in a few places before hearing something that makes him look pleased. He turns around, rears forward, and bucks a random wall of my tunnel, cracking open what almost looks like a hidden chamber. The only thing that marks it as being a product of nature rather than labor are the massive swaths of gems growing up from the ground, and embedded in the walls, each and every one of them perfectly faceted in a variety of styles.

God I hope we end up with enough gems to like, deck everything out in them. These gemstones are downright scintillating, beautiful, even in the weak light of our crystal torches. The feeling only grows as I admire the gems, before I shake my head and let Glitter do his business. He pulls out a Rupture Drop, sets it in the middle of the small chamber, and measures out some thin, fiberglass material. Or maybe it's closer to fiber-optic cable, as it flexes slightly. Screw it, he has a length of crystal wire that he deems suitable, which he somehow fuses to the drop with his bare hooves, before rolling it out into the tunnel, back several meters, and lain on the ground.

"So, would you like to do the honors?" he asks me.

"What do I do?" I ask in response, looking at the crystal thread on the ground blankly.

He answers with a mimed step. "Just stomp on it."

Shrugging internally, I walk up and step on the tip of the filament, cracking it. The crack suddenly spreads, turning the wire to dust as it races down it's length, curls around into the cavern, and unleashes an earthshaking boom that has me in a panic.

"Fuck! What the hell?!" I say, backing up. Is he going to bring this fucking place down on us?

He just laughs at my healthy respect for not setting off high explosives inside a stone tomb waiting to be made, and trots over, calling to me. "Come on, we should probably bring these back. We need lots of good crystal for your wacky plans," He mocks.

As I take a seat in Whittle's new workshop, I can't help but question. "So uhh, your husband set off high explosives in the tunnel we were digging. Is he just crazy, or does he know something I don't?"

She just starts laughing as she shoves pieces of gems together, fusing them to one another as though she had glue on them.

"You really aren't from around here, are you?" She responds rhetorically, pulling a piece off of a gem crystal as though it were made of Lego, and attaching it elsewhere.

"Crystal Pony magic is tied to crystals, of course. But we're still earth ponies. Rupture drops reflect that. When a rupture drop explodes, it also releases a burst of raw energy that fuses like to like, and separates unlike from unlike. Any gems and ores nearby are cracked free, and the stone itself is bonded even tighter together."

"A mine made by any self-respecting Crystal Pony would never collapse. And an explosive made by any Crystal Pony would never cause a cave-in. This is just the sort of stuff foals grow up knowing in the Crystal Empire."

She finishes her work, tapping the large piece of crystal lightly with a small chisel. The entire giant diamond collapses into tiny little spheres in the bucket she had set it in.

"How are marbles supposed to help us again?" She queries, probably wondering just what the hell I'm thinking.

I shake my head. "They're ball bearings. Think of them like solid oil. You've seen ponies slip and fall on them, right? Same basic principle. Use ball bearings instead of wheels for the mine-carts, have them mounted to the rails instead of riding on them, and use gravity to push it along instead of pony-power."

"Higher speed, safer, easier to ride, and a smoother ride at that. They're not that much more difficult to maintain, either. Just dump the ball bearings out every so often, and check for jams that would indicate if there's broken ones. So easy, even those empty-headed morons who are still against my plans could do it," I explain further.

I neglect to mention that I've essentially reinvented a modified roller coaster. While fun, I doubt it would go over well to try and explain that I'm turning what is essentially a giant toy into what will be a large portion of our salvation.

The skeptical look she shoots the bucket implies that she believes them to be glorified toys, however, despite my best efforts.

That's absolutely fine, though. Her comments on Crystal Pony mines never collapsing gives me some good ideas for traps. All the best deceptions are based on preconceived notions, after all. It might not kill him, but I'd be proud to annoy Sombra if he comes into our little rat hole and experiences the joys of a massive cave-in.

"So where are you going to get the materials for miles and miles of railway? It's the furthest thing from cheap that there is, getting that much durable crystal," She criticizes.

I just bark out a short laugh. "I've got a few ideas."

I look at the bin filled with black chunks of rock with unadulterated greed.

"I hope you've got a really good reason for making us waste time to get this worthless stuff," The mining team's captain says to me, tapping his hooves impatiently. He must have spotted something mad in my eyes, because he backs up when I turn to smile at him.

"If this doesn't work, I'll gladly owe you all favors. If it does, though..." Laughter starts bubbling up from within my chest.

"Our little townstead will become the most technologically advanced place in the world, in one fell swoop."

One of them pipes up. "Uhh, how's a bunch of dirty graphite going to do that?" He's met with murmurs from the rest that generally agree.

I smile, smaller than before, and with hidden nervousness. "I'll be happy to show you." Pulling out a small chunk of the graphite rock, I toss it on the ground, and charge up Sombra's crystal growth spell, preparing to fire it at the rock. I'm flooded with those same dark urges that appear every other time I cast it, but this time, I'm ready.

"They will call us The Ancients, and marvel at our superiority," I hiss, focusing on how I need this rock to bloom into it's full, crystalline form, how I need it to be as strong as I know it can be. The best damn material on earth, the holy grail of material sciences, graphene, a hexagonal crystalline lattice of carbon found in small, microscopic sheets in every hunk of graphite. A strength over two hundred times stronger than even steel, by weight.

I focus, harder and harder, both on my desire to grace this world with something utterly beyond anything these cave-ponies have seen before, to lord my genius over them with the results of my beautiful labor, and on every detail that I can remember from old science magazines and internet articles, every minor detail I attribute to single-island graphene, I pour into my magic, before I begin to feel faint, and my horn begins to ache.

I release the beam, and it strikes the hunk of carbon in a scintillating purple, black, and green blast.

At first, nothing seems to happen, before something almost like fuzz begins to overtake the graphite piece, like the frills of a dress, or a tutu, in a dark royal purple color that I just adore.

Before I can make a fool of myself leaping for joy, a voice cuts through the little world I had myself in focusing on the stone.

"So you made rock gossamer? How's that supposed to help us any?" The mining captain sneers at the object that's about to change his dumb little world.

"You're telling me you recognize this substance, and you don't realize what I've just done?" I say, confused at how they could already know about graphene, and not be stunned into silence at something as potentially useful as this.

He retorts. "Uhh, yeah, you've made decorations? My niece can make it too, that doesn't make the stuff useful. Rock gossamer just tears like tissue paper if you try to do anything with it."

How could these ponies be this dumb? I shake my head in amused exasperation as I look to the purple frill covered rock. "Typical of ponies, You just scratch the surface, but never think..."

I grab the massive pile of dark magic enhanced graphene, and will it to grow into itself mixed with generic dark crystal, layer after layer around my hooves with some remaining scraps of my magic. "...To look deeper."

I watch their expressions slowly change into confusion, and at least a small hint of fear.

"The most versatile substance on the planet, and they used it to make confetti," I sneer quietly to myself, walking over to an enchanted spike I had Whittle make for me for the test, and firmly pressing my shoe'd hoof onto it. So far so good.

When the mining crew starts to look at me like I'm crazy, I begin to feel practically giddy with excitement as I stomp on the spearpoint and crush it.

"Of course it would tear like tissue paper, you idiots. Diamonds and steel that thin would tear like tissue paper. But when you thicken it up a bit..." I just wave my armored hoof around a bit. "So, would anyone else like to debate me on this? No? Just going to stand there like a bunch of pissants?"

One of them looks a bit upset, and responds. "You don't have to be such a jerk about it," they say firmly, while the others just looks embarrassed.

It's around this point that I realize I'm enjoying myself entirely too much, and try to tone it back. "Right, right. My apologies. I'll attempt to make it up to you all for my behavior," I claim.

Shit, why was I saying all that stuff before? It seems I can't even use the spell with an urge to dominate a substance without getting defensive in the face of defiance. I should know better than to piss these ponies off. I can't allow just wanting to be top dog and impress them to turn me into even more of an ass than I already am.

Trying my hardest to somehow burn that lesson into my mind, I dismiss the group. "Alright, my little mining dudes, could you take the rest of that cart to the growth specialists? If we can begin producing large amounts of... Rock gossamer, we'll be much better off. God I hate that name," slips from my lips unintentionally.

A few laugh, most shrug, and they drag the cart off down the tunnels of our only cell towards where the crystal growers are.

I look down to my new, sickass purple horseshoes, and I can sense my old emotional state in it. I'm shocked to find that these crystals just... Feel different than the dark ones. The hunger for control is almost entirely overshadowed by my greed, tainting and distorting that drive to dominate. Something about it just sings to me of it's unique, different nature.

A new spell? It certainly feels right. In a way Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation simply doesn't.

As hard as I try, I can't sense the flame I set to burning directly below me in the Cell's deepest point. Now I just need to put it even deeper, and I'll feel comfortable with it's distance from any pony on the surface. The reason I feel the need to perform this experiment is simple. I'm going to make what is probably this world's largest hate-filled bonfire. A Hatesink, able to produce the heat my charges will need to endure and thrive. Buried as deep as needed, at the bottom of a deep hole, with vents directing the warmth throughout the cells. A steady supply of rubble and trash, along with me tending it, and I'll have all the heat a town could need.

"It's deep enough that I can't tell where it is, Glitter Bomb. Tell the miners to measure that out for me, if you would, and make the firepit deeper by ten times that amount," I command.

"Are you sure it needs to be that deep, boy?" He responds curiously.

I shake my head. "Not at all, but we can't afford to take any risks without unreasonable redundancy. I didn't mention this when I was selling my plan to the camp leaders, but I will be commissioning every possible stealth charm, as soon as I fully understand them and am confident in them not being a liability."

He looks at me funny. "So you lied to them?"

I shake my head again. "No, Glitter. I told the truth. I don't believe we should trust in stealth charms alone to hide us. That's exactly why I'll be putting forth so much of my own effort to understanding them, and why I'll be pushing so hard for ponies to do further research and development on them. I want any spell we trust to be verified beyond any shadow of a doubt."

He seems to have accepted that. "Alright. I'll tell the miners to make it deeper. We're going to be having a little celebration tonight after work's done. Do you want in?"

"Got any crystal soda?" I question, hoping against reason that crystal ponies just have some weird crystal version of pop.

His confusion throws my heart into the depths of despair, and his words crush my every hope and dream. "What's soda?"

I harden my heart to this cruel world, and resist the urge to cry. "Don't worry about it. I don't think I'll be showing up. I've got other ways of indulging."

He laughs. "Come on, you might make a few friends. I don't know how many friends you'll make doing your weird experiments, or with your nose stuck in that book."

"Hmph. Maybe if ponies learned how much fun research and development can be, I very well could," I snark.

He just laughs again at my admittedly petulant tone. "Well, drinking or studying, you won't make friends freezing your tail off out here while you're doing it. Let's both go in and get warmed up, boy."

The two of us trot down to the hidden entrance and make our way into the warm dark depths below.

As I pass by dim crystal torches, and warmly greet the ponies walking by with their light-amplifying goggles on, I see that at some point, some ponies had mined out a large empty space for the foals to play in.

I see a lot of them playing with marbles. They must be a few of the ones Whittle has been making for my transportation network. A few of the foals are just sitting near the vents that feed hot air from the hatesink up closer to the surface, getting cozy and rambling about inane little things to one another. I spot an older couple on a bench nearby, just watching fondly from a distance.

As we walk down to the mine, I see a few of the miners on break, swapping stories, food and drink as they just sit around waiting for the boss to come pester them. I hear snippets of a mare talking about her sister, who's still in the Empire. I see a trio tossing dice, betting gems since we haven't started minting currency yet. Despite the lack of monetary risk in the gambling, they're having a blast. Maybe I'll introduce card games to these ponies. Really amp up their fun time.

In the bottom of the Hatesink, around the central bonfire, I see a bunch of ponies just sitting around the fire, talking to each other. Their bodies were somehow silhouetted against the flame as it draws light towards it, only for it to scatter off of the ponies between it and them. I can sense their hate for Sombra, as dark as the fire they were warmed by. And a few, smaller hatreds as well. It seems after I explained how the Black Flame works, ponies have just started using the Hatesink's flame as a place to vent to one another, talking about missing family members, talking about Sombra's cruelty. Even just talking about stubbed hooves and the time they accidentally drank spoiled milk. The hate passes between them like flowing water, the pressure inside them relieving slowly.

The exhaustion that had started to creep up on me, both mental and magical, from near constant use of dark spells after dark spells begins to fade as I watch ponies just... Living.

It's around that moment that I realize I'd throw away anything I have to let them keep this for a little while longer. It's a selfless thought, sure... But that's not really what they need, is it?

They need me to keep my head on straight, to keep from becoming a liability to them. They need me to keep using dark magic, the one thing Sombra's never faced before. They don't need me to discard things like my sanity and morality, but to hold onto them tightly. And as much as I hate to say it, I'll need some friends to help me do that. Shit, I hope Glitter doesn't fucking say "I told you so" if I agree to go to his stupid party and end up enjoying it. God damn it.

"Hey, Glitter. I think I will go to your little shindig. I don't really have anything better to do," I tell him as cool-ly and subtly as I can.

"Oh? Finally seeing things my way, boy?" He grins knowingly at me.

God damn it all, I grin back.

(Noir Report) The Occasional Benefits of Experimental Contamination [Royal Crystal Growth]

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Entry #3, Day 8

Near the event of this entry's provocation, I had made a mistake, one that was very fundamental, but whose results were extremely pleasing. I had attempted to force control over SC3, focusing on feelings I had at the time believed were those of Dominion, and wishes that I thought were those of dominion over substance. The feelings I had actually called on were those of Greed, and my desires were those of enrichment. I had been attempting to prove to a group of ponies the veracity of my claims in discovering a new, unique substance, and, in my desperate bid to prove to them what I believed the material was capable of, prepared and fired a beam of powerful magic that I had believed was SC3. The result was, instead of the substance I desired, or a shadowy, dark version of it, a gorgeous purple color that was the perfect shade, dark and alluring.

It's only now that I sit down and write that I suspect the color of this magic is related to which colors I find desirable. Likewise, the properties of the material born from it are, dare I say it, slightly greater than those I attribute to the substance's mundane form. In the times this book was written in, I see no need to reveal precisely what the mundane substance was, for the sake of keeping knowledge of a powerful tool from the hooves of my enemies, and will not elaborate upon it further here. Instead, I will expound on the spell's results on other forms of crystal.

Much like Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation, the spell I will label as Royal Crystal Growth is able to produce generic crystal. Unlike SC3, however, it cannot produce crystal from seemingly nothing. It requires a visible target with properties suited to the spell in question. Most notably, properties the user comprehends, and wishes to improve upon.

Unlike what I have been told of crystal enchanting done by the ponies of The Shadow Realm, this spell is incapable of producing any properties that cannot exist in it's parent crystal in some way. Furthermore, I am led to suspect that while Crystal Enchanting can produce any color of crystal, Royal Crystal Growth is limited by the user's own preferred colors. Despite my best efforts, I am only able to make Royal Crystals which are shades of purple. (and in one instance mentioned hereafter, cyan)

The most obvious uses for the spell are those of physical properties. Further differentiating it from SC3, Royal Crystals lack the correct magics to control and dominate, it's magics being purely internal and improving upon the original substance. Snowflake Obsidian becomes sharper and harder, Sapphires become flexible and optically superior, and Diamonds melt into a puddle of sludge. I was very embarrassed at the time, but it seems one possible misfiring of this spell can cause undesirable substances to be destroyed, owing to my strong disdain for diamonds.

(I have an extremely strong disdain for diamonds.)

Needless to say, this spell is extraordinarily useful, and has quickly grown to become one of my favorites. Users must be cautious however, as the creation of substances via this spell invokes a strong feeling of possessiveness and avarice towards those creations. In myself, this resulted in a violent reaction towards critique of my creations. Users should be cautious that they do not discard things which are important in the throes of passion that one experiences during the creation of beautiful objects.

Though I am unsure as to where I have heard of it, I cannot help but be reminded of a certain cursed tome (that is not this one) when I reflect on the properties of this spell.

Unfortunately, with a spell such as this, the explanation of it's uses must be accompanied with a description of it's products, and, indeed, suspecting these products to be the subject of my own personage, rather than something which may be expected for others, you will have to once again forgive me for the inaccurate portrayals you will now bear witness to, beginning with it's effects on a personal favorite substance of mine. Lonsdaleite.

When Royal Crystal Creation is cast on this extraordinarily rare gemstone, I had been able to evoke crystals of supreme durability and beauty, and whose inner magic transformed kinetic impacts back on themselves. Furthermore, though I did not intend this initially, it's harmonic properties are enviable, judging from the beautiful tone that a strike to a rod of it evoked.

Though they once again pale in comparison to equal effort from a crystal pony, I am nonetheless filled with pride at my new dark magic creation, one uniquely my own. To that end, I name this variant of lonsdaleite Royal Vibranium, after the appealing sound of it's vibrations. It, alongside Royal Cloth, have made up nearly the whole of my wardrobe since their discovery. And damn those who call it gaudy. I've never been more pleased with my aesthetic.

On it's own, Royal Vibranium is an extraordinary substance whose properties are familiar to me, sharing traits (and it's name) with a fabled substance from my homeland. A resistance to blows, and strange properties of vibration. Though I have yet to test it's use in weapons, I am certain it will excel.

Other, less noteworthy experiments I took included casting the spell on crystal sugar, resulting in an intoxicating paste, casting the spell on salt, resulting in a lustrous metallic crystal, casting it on quartz, resulting in a crystal which wails even more loudly when vibrating, and finally, casting it on various, much smaller diamonds, the only one of which to survive was the one that was initially tinted purple. The purple diamond in question grew diamonds which were a bright cyan, had metal-like properties, and refused to grow in anything but cubic chunks. What the results of this magic say about me, I do not know.

Perhaps I should refer to the mixture of Royal Cloth and Royal Vibranium as Adamantium? I'm not positive there exists a substance in this world which bears that name yet... If there is, I'll seek to obtain some for further testing.

(Present Chapter 3): Roast Busters

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"And so, having received the coins from a supposedly historic figure, one whose return has been vouched for by investigators, and whose appearance here in Ponyville is corroborated by several reputable witnesses, I believe their value as collectors items is only exceeded by the rarity of the aforementioned items. I thank you for your consideration, and expect your timely reply," Twilight finishes dictating to Spike.

"How do you spell "Corroborated"?" he asks, chewing the tip of his writing quill, to which Twilight responds with the answer.

"And... "Aforementioned"?" he asks again, a bit more sheepishly. Twilight answers again.

"... "Consideration"?" It's around this point that Twilight simply plucks the quill from his hand and jots in the words for him.

"Anyway, yeah, Gilda! I'm sure that Mister Antique Appreciator's Historic Amassment of Practically Appreciated Antiques will appreciate what is practically a mass of historical antiques like these," She says confusingly.

"Gesundheit" Spike responds, making Gilda and Dash chuckle while Twilight looks unamused.

"Alright, so she'll just leave the coins with you and you'll get her the cash?" Dash clarifies, making Twilight nod.

"Yes, It's very likely that you'll receive it in installments, instead of all at once, both to keep the market from being damaged, but also because buyers will need to be found."

Gilda feels annoyed, then cautiously frightened of that annoyance, prompting her to quash down the feeling before it can properly manifest. "Yyyeah. It's cool. I can be patient," she says for her own sake.

Twilight seems to pick up on the mood. "If you need anything else, Gilda, please don't hesitate to ask."

She then poses a question. "Have you found anywhere to stay yet while I handle this for you?"

Gilda scratches her foreleg lightly. "Dash said I could crash at her place for a while." Dash nods sagely at this.

"No friend of mine is bunking at some dirty motel while I've got room," Dash claims.

"I'm not sure I would call Woodwork's inn a "dirty motel"..." Twilight says, chastising Rainbow Dash.

"Yeah, yeah. We're going to to out. You coming Twilight?" Dash questions.

Twilight shakes her head. "No, sorry, I took so long helping the two of you that I've fallen a bit behind on my magic practice. I'll need to take a raincheck on that."

Spike pipes up, hopping up and down "Oh, oh! Can I go? I haven't done anything all day!"

Twilight hums. "You don't want to stay and help me practice spells?" At Spike's negatory headshake, she shrugs. "Alright, but stay with Dash and Gilda, and be back before too long."

"Aww yeah!" Spike shouts, hopping over and out the door with the duo.

As the trio walk out, Dash speaks up. "So, Spike have you heard about the new unicorn in town?" she trails off as they leave earshot.

Twilight looks curious at this, but shrugs it off, pulling a spellbook off one of her shelves and cracking it open.

"Come one, come all! Come and witness the amazing magic of the Great and Powerful Trixie!" A pony calling themselves "The Great and Powerful Trixie" commands, as her wagon unfolds into a stage, and she hops out onto it.

"Watch in awe as the Great and Powerful Trixie performs the most spectacular feats of magic ever witnessed by pony eyes!" She shouts, unleashing a barrage of spinning flares and fireworks. The smile on her face as she does so seems more genuine than her claims, as she readies herself to bask in the crowd's praise.

Rarity mutters from within the crowd itself. "My, my, my... What boasting!"

Spike looks ready to say something, but Gilda interrupts. "Yeah, she's got spunk!" Gilda chortles.

A black-coated unicorn mare smugly retorts within earshot. "There's nothing wrong with showing off your talents, after all."

This seems to set Applejack off, as she makes a claim of her own. "There's a difference between showin' off and showin' off like yer better than everypony else."

"Yeah, especially when you've got me around being better than everypony else," Rainbow brags, ignoring the resulting halfhearted glares from her friends as she hoofbumps a laughing Gilda, only to notice them afterwards. "Oh, uhh, I mean... Magic-shmagic. Boo!"

Trixie's cheerful smile rapidly turns bitter. "What's this, neigh-sayers in Trixie's audience?"

"Do they not realize? Do they not know they stand in the presence of the most talented and magical unicorn in all of Equestria?" She scoffs, flicking her head.

Rarity huffs. "Well, she has a very inflated opinion of herself, doesn't she?"

Rainbow Dash nods her head. "Yeah! What makes you so awesome anyway?" She asks as Gilda smirks standing next to her.

Trixie waves her head theatrically. "You mean other than the fact that Trixie alone holds the power to vanquish an ursa major?!"

Her stage unleashes a spray of magical fireworks that form their sparks into the neon outline of a star-studded beast, prompting the crowd to ooh and ahh.

"When all hope was lost, the ponies of Hoofington had no one to turn to," She says with mock despair as the magically drawn bear bobs menacingly.

"But the Great and Powerful Trixie stepped in, and with her awesome magic, vanquished the ursa major and sent it back to its cave deep within the Everfree Forest!"

The bear illusion is popped into stardust by the tiny stick figure Trixie that is sent up with wand in hand to vanquish it.

This prompts a more sizable reaction from the crowd, even prompting two unicorn colts to practically sing her praises.

"I mean it's not like you saw it, she could just be saying that!" Spike says to the duo.

Trixie ignores Spike's words, and opts to instead further hype herself up. "Yes, my little admirers, Trixie is absolutely the best in Ponyville."

The crowd fails to respond loudly enough to please her, so she continues.

"Don't believe The Great and Powerful Trixie?" She laughs faintly to herself.

"Well then, I hereby challenge you, Ponyvillians. Anything you can do, I can do better-" she is interrupted.

♫"We can do anything better than you,"♫ The black-coated unicorn snipes back suddenly, melodically, and loudly with a smug grin.

Trixie scowls, feeling a hint of something build up. "No you can't."

♫"Yes we can,"♫ The black mare hums.

"No you can't!"

♫"Yes we can!"♫

Trixie, feeling the urge to entertain the crowd and curious where this heckler is going, allows her magic to bubble up in her chest and begins to sing along. ♫"No you can't!"♫

The heckler in question just grins further, and their voice is joined by several others, who decide to join in. ♫"Yes we can, yes we ca~an!"♫

Applejack steps up to the plate first, with a lasso tied to her tail. ♫"Any trick that'cha got, we've got one better, betcha a bit that I'm better'n you."♫

♫"No you're not,"♫ Trixie responds, grinning at whatever dumb trick this hayseed is about to pull, only to be shocked when she begins performing complex rope tricks.

♫"I sure am,"♫ Applejack says, leaping inside and outside of the spinning loop of rope with ease and grace.

♫"No you're not!"♫ Trixie says louder, igniting her horn to pull out a rope to trip up the farmer, who dodges it without even paying attention as she is focused entirely on her footwork.

♫"I sure am!"♫ Applejack finishes, throwing her lasso to a nearby tree to yank an apple off of it.

♫"No you're not!"♫ Trixie shrieks with frustration, trying to wrap the rope around Applejack's legs.

♫"I sure am, I sure am!"♫ Applejack sings as she stomps the offending rope flat like a snake, catching the apple in her mouth and chomping it down in one bite.

Trixie wracks her brain quickly.

♫"Trixie flies a rocket! Look, she even docks it!"♫ She exclaims, launching an empty firework around over the crowd's heads in a complex flight before landing the hollow paper tube right on the heckler's horn with her careful telekinesis.

The mare retorts, igniting her horn and causing the paper to pop into shreds. ♫"I blow it to pieces, and that's when it ceases!"♫

Applejack pipes up proudly out of nowhere, pulling an apple out of her hat. ♫"I live on apples and bread!"♫

Trixie looks confused and questions. "And only on that?"

"Yeah!" Applejack says.

"So can a bat," Trixie dismisses, turning to the unicorns in the crowd.

She needs to get these ponies back on her side, and fast. To that end, she breaks out one of her most complicated performances as she begins her verse.

♫"Any spell you can cast Trixie casts faster, Trixie casts any spell faster than you!"♫ She claims, allowing her horn to briefly flash before summoning up several colorful balls.

♫"No she can't!"♫ The crowd jeers.

♫"Yes she can!"♫ Trixie retorts, beginning to throw the balls in the air, juggling them with only the briefest flashes of levitation.

♫"No she can't!"♫ They say, watching the balls go flying around.

♫Yes she can!♫ Trixie continues, juggling the balls even faster.

♫"No she can't!"♫ The crowd continues, not yet impressed.

♫"Yes she can!"♫ Trixie further continues, summoning up more balls even as she juggles the ones she has out already.

♫"No she can't,"♫ The crowd dims, slowly entranced by the display.

♫"Yes she can!"♫ She claims, summoning up brief flashes of light and fireworks in-between every juggle she performs.

♫"No she can't..."♫ They finish, starting to look very impressed.

♫"Ye~es she~e... Ca~an!"♫ Trixie sings, tossing the balls into the crowd, where none of the unicorns manage to grab one before they bonk them softly on the head.

She laughs privately to herself by their shocked and awed expressions, waiting for more.

Agitated by Trixie's claims of speed, Rainbow Dash takes her opportunity to join in.

♫"Any rainbow you make I could make cooler, I can make rainbows way cooler than you!"♫ She sings, flying rapidly around town and through several clouds to amass the rainwater needed to surround herself in a scintillating chromatic glow as it impacts her when she halts on a dime in the middle of Trixie's stage.

♫"No you can't!"♫ Trixie builds up her magic, launching it at the rainbow surrounding Dash.

♫"Yeah I can!"♫ Dash says with her eyes closed smugly, unaware of her rainbow starting to swirl around her.

♫"No you can't!"♫ Trixie laughs again, as Rainbow is put in the spin cycle.

At this point, Gilda takes to the stage, trying to pull Dash out of the tornado with flapping wings.

♫"Yeah she can!"♫ Gilda shouts, fighting the weather anomaly.

♫"No she can't!"♫ Trixie's pleased expression turns to a scowl as she prepares another spell, only for her to be blown back when Gilda yanks Dash out of the tornado, making it explode into an even larger, more beautiful rainbow.

♫"Yeah we can, yeah we can!"♫ The pair sing, spinning around in the middle of the awe-inspiring weather feat from the residual forces.

Trixie begins to get nervous, the crowd cheering for the pony and griffon's amazing trick.

She actually takes a step back when they're all cheering for these random upstarts who took over her stage.

She forces herself to smirk and steadies herself. ♫"Anything you're great at, Trixie is Greater, The Great and Powerful's greater than you!"♫

♫"No she's not!"♫ Spike snorts.

♫"Yes she is!"♫ Trixie gaffs.

♫"No she's not,"♫ Applejack retorts.

♫"Yes she is!"♫ Trixie laughs.

♫"No she's not!"♫ Rarity cries.

♫"Yes she is, yes she is!"♫ Trixie lies.

Trixie, already stressed out, realizes she's running out of tricks, and hides her sweating face behind her hat for a moment as she flips it around to begin her next act.

♫"Rabbits out of her hat, nobody could top that!"♫ She says desperately, whipping her cap around and pulling a stuffed animal out of it.

♫"I could sew one finer, as I'm a designer,"♫ Rarity responds, pulling the curtains from Trixie's stage and turning it into an adorable plush bunny.

♫"Trixie can learn any spell!"♫ She strains.

"From out of a book?" The black mare from before asks.

"Yeah?" Trixie says obviously, which only makes them laugh.

"Yeah, you'd have to look. Ya chump!" They joke, making Trixie's blood boil with humiliation as they turn on them.

The mare in question is more than happy to continue. ♫"Any chant you incant I can chant cleaner, I'll incant any chant cleaner than you."♫

♫"No you can't,"♫ Trixie says bitterly.

♫"Yes I 'cant,"♫ They slang back with amusement.

♫"No you... can't?"♫ Trixie says, confusion growing on her face.

♫"Yes I 'cant!"♫ They say agreeably.

♫"Wait, who can't?"♫ Pinkie pops out of a bush nearby to ask, her question going unanswered as the mare finishes.

♫"Yes I 'cant, yes I 'ca~ant!"♫ The mare cheers.

Trixie throws her hooves up. ♫"Yes you ca~an't!"♫

She decides to turn to her stage, and activates some of the hidden mechanisms to launch more neon fireworks into the air.

♫"Any yarn you can spin, I know one better! The ones that I know are all better than yours!"♫ Trixie claims, preparing the fireworks for another animated show.

♫"Ones with scares?"♫ Snails asks slowly

♫"Ones with laughs!"♫ Trixie responds affirmatively.

♫"Ones with twists?"♫ Snips questions excitedly.

♫"Every twist!"♫ Trixie nods with pride.

♫"No you can't!"♫ Spike retorts, arms crossed.

♫"Yes I can, yes I can!"♫ Trixie finishes, standing tall on her back legs as the neon fireworks turn into a menagerie of magical monsters, with little stick figure Trixie standing against them.

Rarity steps up to the stage now. ♫"All of your clothes dear, I could sew them finer, you'll find that my stitches are finer than yours!"♫

♫"No you can't!"♫ Trixie says self-consciously.

♫"Yes I can!"♫ Rarity says, converting her giant plush rabbit into raw materials swirling around her.

♫"No you can't!"♫ Trixie shouts.

♫"Yes I can!"♫ Rarity continues, her magic rapidly stitching and restitching the cloth.

♫"No you can't!"♫ Trixie practically begs.

♫"Yes I can, yes I ca~an!"♫ Rarity finishes, showing off her vastly improved duplicate of Trixie's stage outfit.

Trixie, having grown to regret this entire day rapidly, still has it in her to try one last time to impress and entertain the ponies who came to watch her perform.

♫"Trixie can juggle knives!"♫ She says, hoping she won't have to prove it as exhausted as she is.

♫"I can bake apple pies!"♫ Applejack shouts over the din.

♫"Trixie calls down thunder!"♫ Trixie tries again.

♫"Nah, you'd probably blunder!"♫ Gilda laughs.

♫"Trixie can cast any spell!"♫ She boldly claims.

"So you can cast "Fly"?" The dark-coated mare questions with genuine curiosity.

"No?" She responds, prompting them to shrug.

"Neither can I."

It's too much for the performer, her body starts to shake with pure unrestrained rage and humiliation, after that final stupid little inane comment that that heckler made finally pushes her over the edge.

"Enough!" she stops singing with a stomp, shocking the crowd into silence with her one, violently spat word.

"Show's over! I'm packing it up!" Trixie shouts, running into her wagon and causing it to fold back up, the ponies still on it jumping back and off the stage in shock.

"You want to make a fool out of the mare trying to entertain you bumpkins, then you should leave me out of it!" She screams, slamming the wagon's window slats shut.

She fails to see the ponies outside, who had honestly been having a lot of fun, and who look disappointed that the show's over.

The shadow-coated pony who had started all of this is nowhere to be found.

Weiss awakens from his meditation as the shadow clone disperses.

"Hmm. I may have gone too far, starting that music number," He says to himself as he rises from the black glassy floor of his tower.

"Well, it should still put her on track to help me with my plans, even with Gilda interfering in the timeline."

He walks over to an archway with his arms folded primly behind his back, and observes Ponyville past the distant treetops of the Everfree.

"And judging by Spike's restraint at the magic show, it's unlikely that he will provoke Snips and Snails into drawing out that damn Ursa Minor," He sneers, afraid of the consequences of trying to face a beast like that.

One thing he's firmly aware of is just how weak he is without the Arcana Nox. Something that studying the Alicorn Amulet should remedy quite nicely until he can return to the Shadow Realm and reactivate it.

Without The Arcana, his chances of defeating anything in combat are slim at best, he feels.

Judging by how Celestia and Luna haven't shown up, either his earlier bluff worked, or they believe he'll be little more than a speed bump for the Element Bearers.

A thought like that can't help but evoke laughter from the dark sage, a cruel, satisfied sort of laughter that one only gets from knowing something that one's opponents do not.

"Trixie leaves town disgraced and insecure, but not destitute and homeless, I offer her the power she craves in return for bringing the amulet to me. Ponyville's less hostile to her because she wasn't successful at embarrassing the Element Bearers. Like clockwork, the hands tick towards fun times."

He starts laughing again, in a perfectly sane manner for one who had just been monologuing to an audience of zero.

"And she was talking about how she took down an Ursa Major!" Spike relays to Twilight, who is working on removing a giant mustache from the Golden Oaks Library.

"Really? That's some claim," Twilight responds curiously, finally getting the arborious 'stache to cease existing.

"Yeah, you probably could have beaten her with one hoof tied behind your back, I mean, twenty-five magic tricks and counting! It's incredible!" he points to the tree she just finished scraping facial hair off of.

Twilight looks sheepish, and even goes so far as to blush a bit at the praise from her number-one assistant. "I don't know Spike, boasting or not, if what you told me is true, Trixie is still a very talented mare. I can't even perform levitation that fine yet."

Spike scratches his head. "Yeah, I guess it was a pretty cool show. I kinda feel bad that she thought we were making fun of her. I know Snips and Snails think she's the best thing since sliced hay."

Twilight ponders at that. "I think you might have a point Spike. Tell you what, how about tomorrow, we get the girls together, and try to make it up to her before she leaves?"

"I'll need to tell Pinkie she'll need to fast track her party plans if we're going to catch her before she goes, though," Twilight thinks to herself.

"What makes you so sure Pinkie's preparing a party for Trixie of all ponies?" Spike asks.

Twilight responds, explaining her logic. "I doubt anything less would make Pinkie Pie miss a magic performance that nearly the whole town went to see."

Spike shrugs, and the pair walk off to Sugarcube Corner to tell Pinkie about what they've learned.

"We're back with your smoothie, oh Great and Powerful one!" Snips mumbles through his teeth, holding a tray bearing a trio of milkshakes in his mouth.

"For some reason, the Hay machine's been rented out, so they gave us a few different flavors to make up for it!" He apologizes.

'Trixie's bad day can't be made any worse, she supposes', she thinks to herself, picking up the strawberry one and taking a long sip.

Seeing the two colts are still there looking at her expectantly with their own smoothies, she feels exasperation rise up in her lungs.

"Yes?" Trixie questions, wanting to get this over with.

Snails pipes up. "Could you tell us another story?"

Snips follows up on that energetically "Yeah, could you tell us the story of how the Great and Powerful Trixie vanquished the Ursa Major?"

Trixie feels a migraine threatening to pop up, any attempts at boasting turning bitter after today's farce.

She groans. "Trixie is far too exhausted from her incredible feats being met with mockery and belittlement to do such a thing. Begone with you."

The two look saddened at this, and slowly walk away.

"Maaan, Trixie sure looked sad," Snails says obviously after a few minutes.

Snips thinks to himself, and pipes up. "Yeah, there's gotta be some way we can cheer her up! I bet all we gotta do is show Ponyville that she's the real deal!"

"Are you thinking what I'm thinking?" Snips smirks at his best friend.

"Why don't penguins swim south for the summer?" Snails drawls questioningly.

"Oh piss," Weiss says, as he spots the trail of shattered trees leading to Ponyville.

Walking to the center of the room, the pony plops down and enters a meditative pose, dark magic wafting around him until it splits off into another shadow clone.

The clone frowns sharply. "That stinking animal better not crush Trixie's wagon. I don't need to wait several months while Trixie slums it in a rock farm instead of getting me my amulet."

Without another word spoken, the clone leaps out of the open window, bursting into smoke on impact with the ground, and reforming mid-gallop towards Ponyville.

Trixie is woken up by pounding on her wagon door, leading her to blearily walk over with her shouting voice ready, only to see it's those two colts from before.

The duo begin rapidly rambling, but Trixie is unable to parse it, and simply responds angrily.

"Didn't Trixie tell the two of you to begone? That doesn't mean "come here and wake Trixie up at this ungodly hour of night"."

Snips manages to form a coherent sentence to explain with. "We have a... bit of a problem."

Snails corrects his friend, responding with "Actually, it's a whole problem..."

Trixie's eyebrow raises. "And what could be so important that it needs to be dealt with in the middle of the night?"

It's around this point she spots a gigantic star-spangled bear pushing it's way through the treeline, directly towards Snips, Snails, and by extension herself.

The trio run away as fast as they can from the charging bear as it kicks Trixie's wagon aside, where it crashes into a building and becomes splinters.

Before long, they're all backed up against the wall, with the monster bearing down on them and citizens looking on in terror and fear. Twilight, who had been walking home from Sugarcube Corner, spots the commotion, and runs to stand the bear down while Spike runs for cover.

"Hey Trixie, now's your chance to vanquish it just like your story!" Snips says, nudging her forward.

"It sure wasn't easy getting that Ursa Major into town, after all!"

"What? Is this entire town made up of crazy ponies?!" Trixie shouts, trying to back up.

Snails decides to interject "Come on, you're the Great and Powerful Trixie! You've got this!"

The duo try for a reprise while Twilight is contemplating the spells she'll need.

♫"Any beast we could beat you could beat surely, now here's your chance to prove better than we!"♫

"You're both nuts!"

♫"But you can!"♫

"Call the guards!"

♫"But you can!"♫

"We need help!"

♫"But you can!"♫

♫"But you can, can, can, can!"♫ They sing together, trying to encourage her to finally prove to everyone that she's really the greatest, only for her to respond.

♫"No I can't, can't, can't, can't!.. No... I... ca~an't!"♫ Trixie crushes her eyes shut and finally admits the truth, shocking them both utterly.

"What!?" Snips and Snails shout at the same time.

Trixie shouts what she had thought to be fairly obvious. "Nobody can vanquish an Ursa Major, I just made that up as part of my character for the act!"

"Made it up?!" They respond, shocked and suddenly realizing the danger they're in from the Ursa.

At the same time, Twilight, who had been ignoring the commotion, quietly and impressively lulls the monster to sleep with music drawn from reeds using wind, milk taken from the local cows using a water tower, and gentle rocking from immense levitation magic, before lifting it up and carrying it all the way back to it's cave in her magical aura.

Trixie looks between the Unicorn who had just, if not vanquished, certainly pacified the Ursa, the townsfolk who are looking at her with an expression she doesn't comprehend, and the two little colts who caused all this trouble.

It's simply too much. Abandoning theatrics, Trixie bolts out of town as fast as she can.

Gilda, who had been watching the entire thing with a rapidly growing suspicion, takes flight after her.

'I really hope this isn't what I think it is.' Gilda thinks to herself as her suspicions are confirmed.

At Ponyville's border, Trixie is stopped by the mare from yesterday who started the ruination of her show, standing alone in the middle of the road.

"You! You're that unicorn!" Trixie says dumbly, jabbing a hoof towards them with a snarl.

The mare simply smiles. "I certainly am. Queen Meany, Professional Heckler, at your service."

"And what need does Trixie have for a heckler of any kind?" Trixie growls.

They shrug. "You really don't. But maybe you're in the market for something to increase your magical power instead."

"I heard your little lament back there. It just tears you up inside that you don't live up to your own hype, doesn't it?" They jab at Trixie's insecurities.

Not waiting for Trixie's response to that, Meany continues. "I've been looking for a... Particularly useful artifact. I'll bankroll you, provide funding to restore your lost livelihood, and in return, you keep an eye out for something called the Alicorn Amulet. Bring it to me, and I'll complete our deal by teaching you magic that will let you live up to every tall tale you've ever spoken."

Using a bolt of purple lightning, they summon a wooden chest filled with gems and golden trinkets.

Trixie looks tempted, very tempted. Her home, gone, all her possessions, smashed to pieces. All she would have to do is bring this annoying mare one measly artifact in return for all of that?

She opens her mouth.

"So you are doing this crap again," A distinctly non-Trixie voice interjects, landing in front of Trixie.

"Get the flock out of here Weiss. I'll hurt you if you don't," She says, cracking her talons.

The now-ousted Weiss frowns. "You're really fucking this up right now Gilda. Why don't you go back home and cry about how scary you are."

Gilda smirks, walking forward. "You're trying to piss me off. Right? That's what you do. You piss ponies off, make em do dumb stuff, and then swoop in to take advantage of it."

Judging by Weiss's genuine angered reaction, Gilda suspects that she's touched a nerve. She turns to Trixie.

"Don't listen to him, he's trying to use you." Gilda explains to the confused Trixie.

"He offered me the exact same thing. "I give you what you want more than anything else, and all you've got to do is learn dark magic"."

"Look, that bear broke your stuff, right? Talk to Twilight. You're owed something for that."

Weiss takes a step forward, his disguised clone's hair flickering with black flames as his anger grows. "Don't listen to her, Trixie. She's one of the ones who showed you up! They might offer you some pittance of bits, but I'm offering a king's ransom! More importantly, I'm-"

Gilda interrupts. "Twilight also got together everyone who jumped up to ruin your show, and has em ready to say sorry. They're waiting for you if you just come back into town."

She looks ashamed in a familiar way. "An apology is something we really owe you right now."

Weiss's mane explodes into flames when he senses Trixie's temporary feelings of insecurity that he had been cultivating dim and then be snuffed out by Gilda's words.

His teeth audibly grind when he realizes his musical number altered Trixie's act enough to endear her to the town instead of alienate her. "You've fucked me over, Gilda. You really have."

"Happy to hear it, chump!" Gilda snarks back, smirking.

With the knowledge in mind that he's lost this battle of wits and temptation, Weiss steps back, and announces for the world to hear. "You will regret those words. We will meet again."

"Avidus!" He throws his horn in the air, and a bolt of lightning crashes down, dragging his clone and treasures away in a flash of magical energy.

Gilda stares at the spot Weiss's clone once occupied, before turning to Trixie. "Come on, let's get you that apology! Twilight's got everypony at Sugarcube Corner."

When they arrive, Trixie is stunned at the cacophony of cheering she receives when the doors open and the lights come on. A banner reads "Thanks for the Show!". Pinkie Pie bounces up and down cheerfully, hopping over to Trixie and dragging the stunned mare over to the smoothy machine she rented out for the party, shoving a shake into Trixie's grip.

Extra hay, just the way she likes it.

"Dear Princess Celestia,

My friends and I have learned a very valuable lesson about friendship: There may come times when the way a pony behaves or boasts can come off as inappropriate, but we should try not to react inappropriately ourselves, trying to one-up a pony who chooses to brag can lead to hurt feelings all around, and worst of all, the proudest of ponies are often unwilling to admit flaws and hurt feelings alike until it's almost too late. We should instead appreciate a pony's true talents, and help them realize that their real achievements are often worth more than the ones they make up."

(Weiss Report) Believe It! [Shadow Clone]

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Entry Number Twenty-Four, Day Four-Hundred-Fifty-Nine

I'm the fucking hokage, go home Naruto. For a while, I thought I was wasting my time trying to clone myself with dark magic, I had this huge chamber ready and everything to blast apart whatever horrible doppelganger comes out of my horn, but instead, It goes off without a fucking problem. I'm so excited. One of the grand-daddy busted powers is now in my grasp, and all I had to do was tap into the all-encompassing self-loathing every human has.

Sure as shit not writing this one in the Grimoire Noir. The last thing I want is for anyone to use this puppy against me, or even worse, find out that I can even do it. I'll have to make a point of pretending like my shadow clones are real. Something that isn't that difficult, considering I can only make one of them, and I black out while I'm controlling it. This is also my first attempt at cobbling together a new spell from just theories and guesswork, too. I've been stumbling onto plenty of magic spells when I want something and feel strongly about it, but this is the first time I've managed to actually take the time to plan it out, decide what emotions I need, throw them in the blender and hit frappe.

You take your average everyday hate, turn it in on yourself, mix it with a healthy dose of arrogant self-assurance, a hint of fear, two quarts of raw directed adrenaline and there you go. It took me a while to work out the exact ratios to cast the spell for the first time. That careful balance between self-loathing and egotism is absolutely necessary to both create something that isn't you and become it, but also make it become like you and remain in your control, and without fear, you can't escape your body to inhabit it temporarily.

That fear is the key component, turning the spell from a clone that might share your thoughts, or might deviate and become a problem, into a spell whose purpose is that of a true proxy, a "you" which can perform tasks without endangering the real you. I wonder if the mirror pool works anything like this? Questions for later. I really don't feel comfortable going anywhere near that thing, whether it requires magic words or not.

A side effect of controlling a body made entirely of magic is it's mutability and regeneration. As long as I don't fuck up the spell, even massive injuries just turn the clone to smoke, and if I can ignore how painful that is, I can simply pull the clone back together afterwards. I can even pull the smoke together into other shapes, though they all come out the same color as the smoke if I do that. Really, the only flaw with this spell is the sheer magical drain it imparts to cast it. Right now, even just making one leaves me almost completely drained.

This is thankfully mitigated by the fact that the magic I spend still exists in the clone. It takes even more concentration, but so long as I can maintain the shadow clone spell at the same time, I'm still able to cast other spells from the clone itself using some weird empathetic multitasking that I'm positive a human brain wouldn't be capable of. Normally, I might be worried by the fact that, by all means, I don't even have a human mind anymore, and can now feel multiple chunks of emotions at once, but to be frank, this spell is just too much fun for me to worry about that right now.

I guess that's how Muave Magician Twirlight Sparkler is able to cast like six different spells at the same time, even if it boggles my mind the sort of impossible, insurmountable talent that must require.

Yet another reason to never let this spell become known to the public. If there exists a pony with even half her power, I'm pretty sure they could just take over the planet with this spell. Probably. I'm not exactly an expert on what you'd need to take over the planet, get off my ass.

The uses of this spell are both obvious and varied. The ability to no longer risk my personage during experimentation, to send proxies to hostile foes for negotiations, It's ability to change shape when reforming from it's shadow state, all of these come together to form one glaringly useful power. Already, I've managed to perform experiments that previously were locked off to me, including rudimentary experiments with Migratory Iron, a substance so dangerous that my R&D dudes have violently refused having anything to do with it thus far.

Tests on it's ability to change shape aren't quite as pleasing as I had hoped. Destructive testing indicates that the transformed states are only as strong as my own magical power and pain tolerance, spikes bend like nails, and metal is no stronger than my own skin. Even so, some of the more practical transformations are still usable, such as simplistic vehicles, tools not reliant on their durability, and of course, transformations which integrate other physical objects.

I've begun filling my shadow clones with Rupture Drops accordingly, forming a nasty surprise for those that manage to slay one. For my allies, I've simply told them that I have discovered a spell which can remove me from danger when a lethal blow is detected. Of course, even though this is vaguely untrue, I certainly plan on developing such an enchantment as soon as is reasonable. As far as I can tell, it's bringing my little ponies some comfort to know I'm not just going to drop dead in combat.

And of course, the taunting and pranking potential are legendary. I've already gotten three people with the old "Rat leaps out of a picnic basket" trick in the Cacophony Zone.

The looks on their faces when they realized it was a prank... Ahh, it gives me life.

(Past Chapter 4): Greed is Good

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The first dragon I met was awesome and terrific. It inspired awe and terror in equal measure.

"So my Millennium Golem is destroyed by your Dark Magician, since it has more attack points, and I take the difference between those two numbers in damage to my own life points," I explain, gesturing to the wafer thin sapphire cards that are spread out on the table, a small illusion floating above them of crude still-images of the monsters, powered by the special table I had commissioned for it.

The various fillies, colts and adults who were interested had already seen all of the fun parts of the game, and I went ahead and distributed the cards and rulebooks I made for the game and let them leave so I can dig into the more boring components of my plan.

Fair Cut, the pony I recruited for this, soaks in my words with careful thought. He had been skeptical at first when I was sent to him seeking math-performing enchanted crystals, and told him it was for a children's game instead of mercantile business, but when I began to explain my plans, his eyes slowly began to light up more and more. A game of math, rules, and citing obscure documentation? He was hooked. I had a feeling he would be when I saw that his cutie mark was a diamond cut into a number symbol.

Of course, and this was more of a secondary goal really, I was really probing his skill and the quality of his products. Apparently, the most common method of performing math automatically is with an enchanted tool called an "Amber Abacus". Naturally, I did my best to put the kibosh on that, and inquired if it were possible to make calculating enchantments which did not require moving parts to function, and perhaps could be integrated with other enchantments.

"I could, but that would mean a pony couldn't read it or put forward commands to it," Fair Cut says, explaining something that's obvious to him, but obviously a sign of untapped potential to me.

Scratching my chin as if I didn't already have a basic knowledge of user interfaces, I offered him a thought. "What if you used buttons instead?"

I wave my hoof through the glowing outline of a wizard jutting from the magically charged card to make it fizzle and pop. "Illusions of numbers and symbols that when touched, give commands. And those commands inform the crystal to display an illusion of its answer."

Fair Cut shakes their head like they've considered it before. "The "buttons"... Might work. But Illusion magic has its limits, each illusion has to be chosen beforehand, and can only appear and disappear. You would need over fifty crystals for every single symbol that the primary calculating crystal would display, each one enchanted with an illusion."

I smile. "What if the enchantment only had to display a single dot? Could it be made to display that dot in a particular place as commanded by the enchantment?"

He looks confused at this. "It should be possible, but what good would a dot do?"

I pull out a small book I had obtained to doodle in, and open it up to the first page, where I had been practicing my Equestrian writing, each symbol made by just poking the paper until the little ink blots shaped into the character. I begin to explain it to him, even as his eyes widen with realization at the sight of it. "A technique from my homeland. Pointillism, the act of using individual dots of pigment, which, when taken together, form an image." Thank you Bugs Bunny: Back in Action.

After he just stares at it with his mouth agape for an awkwardly long time, I decide it would be best to give my commands and take my leave. "I'll expect a working prototype for my Duel Monsters Calculator within the month. Feel free to inform me, your coworkers or your peers of this project if you require any help."

I had also made sure to write down an abridged rule-set for the game, and a few warnings about the dangers of an eternal format and not occasionally making rule changes for various cards. Though, I can't help but think Fair Cut might be a bit busy absorbing the fact that his work has just been revolutionized to worry about that for a while.

As I walk out of the room, Priss's pink tuft of mane sticks out of the crowd as she ceases mingling among her peers to accost me. "Where'd you even get the idea for a nerdy game like that?"

"A story from my homeland," I smile, and get my narrating voice ready for the group who looks interested at the answer as well, preparing to begin an abridged and ponyified version of a story I know by heart.

"Legends say that long ago, when the pyramids were still young, ancient princesses played a game of great and terrible power. But these Shadow Games erupted into a war that threatened to destroy all of Equestria. Until a brave and powerful pharaoh locked the magic away, imprisoning it within the mystical Millennium Items..."

Whittle stops me in the hall a few hours later as I walk out to the mine to see if any new materials have been discovered.

"You know, Weiss, when a pony tells me "You'll be making relics of untold power for me", I usually suspect them of wanting larger crystals, instead of smaller ones," She points out, walking alongside me.

I chuckle, stopping to turn an annoyingly large rock in the middle of the tunnel into smooth glass with a puff of black flame, so nobody trips over it later. "If anyone tells you that bigger is better, you'll know that they're a liar."

She raises an eyebrow. "Oh? Is that why your room is practically a padded crate with some shelves? You know ponies wouldn't mind if you asked for better accommodations."

I raise my own eyebrow at that. "Why the hell would I want a bigger room? We've got a perfectly good swimming area, so a personal bath wouldn't do me any good. Dark Magic makes my bed perfectly clean every night, so walking on it doesn't bother me, and anything that doesn't fit on my shelves belongs in storage or secure storage anyway, so someone else is organizing it."

I try to pick out why she's pointing that out, and test my theory. "If it's about appearances, I have a solid sapphire office for that."

An office which I absolutely adore. Though the solid sapphire chair isn't as comfortable as I thought it would be.

She shrugs. "As long as it's what you prefer. Some of us have some rather ordinary ideas about size equating with status, and yet our caped, jewel-armored "Leader" is eating rations and sleeping in a horseshoebox."

I wonder where she's going with this.

"If I can eat cheap tasty food and fit a comfy bed in a shoebox, I will. It's a sign of the highest quality to be able cut costs without sacrificing necessary qualities. We just have different ideas about what's good."

Her smile grows at that, confusing me. "Well, I happen to like your ideas so far. You know... I couldn't get a straight word out of Fair Cut earlier, he was so excited. I'm a bit envious, to be frank."

I'm still chewing on her words when we reach the mine, but I feel the need to give some sort of assurance. "I may have some ideas. But they won't work until Fair Cut is done with my calculator."

Her confusion is gratifying. "How is a calculator going to help me with carving crystal?"

"Simple. I'll teach it how." I grin, trotting off and leaving her no more enlightened than she was before.

As I barrel down the minecart tracks to the second cell of our collective home about a mile away trapped inside a pitch black box, I find that I can't stop screaming.

Oh Christ I'm going to die.

As the covered minecart slows down far too slowly for my tastes, I regret my decision to have the architects design it to move as fast as is possible while remaining safe.

I finally stumble out of the cart, smashing my nose into the floor while a pair of strong looking ponies drag the cart around and up the ramp to bring it high enough for gravity to take it back to the first cell again. At the same time, I try desperately not to think too hard about the fact that that entire tunnel is rigged to collapse if a cell is exposed. It isn't until I reach our primary gem mine that my legs stop shaking and I regain some semblance of coherent, not-prey-animal thought. I brush myself off, sear my armor clean, and walk in like I own the place.

The first thing I notice is how there are several massive veins of crystal that are completely untouched. In fact, it's one particular kind of crystal I don't recognize on sight, a vague, grey-blue crystal that both glows, and is paired alongside other, less scintillating crystals of other shades and tints. Every once in a while, I spot one of the crystals change color.

I hail one of the miners who had been heading out and question them. "Hey, you, mind if I ask what these are? Looks like the miners are ignoring them."

The gangly mare gives me a goofy grin. "Aww, those'r just Againtes, boss says don't mine em up 'er take em outta the mine 'er it can make things go funny."

That... didn't help as much as I had hoped. But it is sufficient to quell my curiosity for now. I dismiss the mare. "Thank you for the help. Have a nice day."

She broadly nods with a toothy smile and walks off to do whatever it is Crystal Ponies do after their shift.

I continue further into the mine, where Captain Iron Diamond is there for some reason, talking to Foreman Fair Shake.

I let them conclude their business about more diamonds being needed for spearheads, before I talk to Fair Shake myself.

"Greetings, Shakes. What's new?" I ask him, cutting straight to the point.

He scratches his chin "You know, asking for weird magic gems doesn't really give me a lot to work off of. But we did find a vein of orichalcum, if that helps."

I'm a bit stunned at hearing that that exists here, but shrug it off. "Is it a durable, magical metal of extreme rarity?" I question.

He looks confused at that. "It's not that durable or rare, but it is pretty magical. It holds enchantments like nobody's business."

If joy were heat, my smile could probably melt that metal right now. "Good work. Pass it on to any ponies that can refine it, and keep me up to date on any further developments like that."

The rest of our discussion details the amount and quality of the metal, and the other assorted gems they had been digging up.

"So what's with the drawing?" Priss says, startling me from my writing as I snap the Grimoire Weiss shut.

I respond hastily. "You don't need to be looking too deeply into that tome, Priss. It's a good thing you can't read it, the knowledge entombed there is not for pony eyes."

Her eyebrows ascend at the revelation I just imparted on her puny, uninitiated mind. "So what was with the crab drawing?"

I bristle at that. "It's not a crab, they are blueprints I've been working on for the Heavy Lobster, when it's done, it'll be a giant monster of metal and magic!"

She doesn't look suitably impressed. "So it's your dumb idea book?"

I nod at that. "Exactly. It's called the Dumb Idea Book because Dumb ponies could never think of Ideas like the ones in here."

She deadpans. "So it takes a genius to think of metal crabs?"

I huff indignantly "Well if you're just here to critique ideas that, yes, require a genius like me to think of, then the door is over there." I point to the empty doorway, throwing my nose in the air with an aristocratic snort.

Priss giggles. "Sure thing Genius Noir, I'm just here to tell you my friends want more of those nerdy math cards."

I nod in response. "I'll work on it. And it's "Mr. Genius Noir", thank you very much."

Sombra grins down from his throne at the beast he had just finished capturing. Mind control wouldn't work of course, with its mind so filled with powerful emotion.

But bribery... Well, it's a novel concept, but he's willing to try anything once.

He talks as though he were speaking to an associate instead of a violent monster. "I need you to do me a small favor. There's been some... Rats. Scurrying about my kingdom. I want you to sniff out their surely jewel-encrusted nest, and... Do what comes naturally to your kind."

"They are somehow hiding from my sight somewhere in the frozen wastelands around my empire. Something I wish remedied."

"I'll free you, of course, and then, if you bring me their leader, I'll pay you generously myself. And of course, I'll overlook this whole..." He waves his hoof dismissively.

"Nasty business you attempted," He finishes, smiling affably.

The monster shifts under the black chains, smoke snorting from its nostrils. Its steel grin voices its agreement well enough.

As I drag over a cart of garbage to dump in the hate fire pit and infuse it with more of my magic, I see that ponies have formed another venting circle to rant at one another about their woes, like they have been every other day that I come over to renew it.

As I dump the garbage into the fire and prepare to ignite my horn, I can't help but notice that, for some reason, the fire hasn't dimmed as much as I thought it would. Which is to say, it's been burning just as strongly as it was when I left.

I feel like questioning this incredibly bizarre occurrence, but before I can, I immediately feel a white-hot burst of violently angry avarice. The telltale sign that one of my Royal Crystals has been damaged or broken. This can only mean one of two things. Either someone's in for the reprimanding of their life...

Or the A-class emergency alarm has been triggered.

I gallop towards the Railway for news as fast as I can, arriving just as a cart is sliding in at the emergency speed from Cell Two, confirming my fears.

Captain Iron Diamond steps out and turns to me with urgency in his tone. "Dragon Attack at the entrance, I'm gathering soldiers. Hurry."

With his message delivered, he stomps off with intent to fend off this attack.

I get in the cart, inform the rail manager to activate emergency speed for all carts going out, and grow my thin and pleasant-looking ceremonial armor into a thicker, fully covering form as I burn my cape away to nothing and silently tolerate the mind-numbing speed.

"Hey come on little ponies, let me in, I won't hurt you too bad! I just want your dumb leader, and all your gems!" The dragon roars as he worms his green, scaly arm around inside the entrance, trying to fish out ponies while widening the entrance hole.

As I see the offending limb swat away one of my guards, I'm filled with fury.

"Everypony, stand back. Guards, prepare the killcapture room and remove any ponies between here and there," My voice is altered by the face-covering mask of my helmet as I speak.

When the guards are all back as far away as possible behind me, I ignite my horn and shoot a small, but violently hateful fireball at the dragon's arm, where it crashes into its claw, singeing it slightly before the dragon snuffs it out by balling their fist.

"Oh that's cute, little ponies think they know fire. Let old Redhot show you how it's done," They grumble, before a loud inhale leaves me and the others no time to evacuate the tunnel.

With a rapid burst of magic, I summon up as many layers of Royal Cloth as I can, and blow a hole in the ceiling between me and the entrance, attempting to redirect the fire, and, if that fails, insulate my guards from the worst of it with a foam of graphene and air.

I barely remember the next few moments after that, as I apparently blacked out for a brief few seconds.

I just remember seeing the dragonfire, and sensing the endless tide of overwhelming greed that filled it as it blasted me back and erased huge chunks of my armor.

I snapped out of it when I heard the dragon's laughter. "Did I enlighten any of you down there? I hope I didn't get you too badly now."

My anger returns with contemptuous ease, and I prepare to use my Royal Crystal Growth to attempt what Sombra's crystals could not.

Greed, as an emotion, is perfectly capable of causing harm to one's enemies.

The paste-smeared spear of purple crystal that erupts from my helmet is more than sufficient to pierce the dragon's nose when it pokes it into the hole while trying to worm its way in, and its screams of anger are all-too gratifying as I break the crystal off of my helmet so I can move freely again.

"Oh you're going to get it now, you little ponies," They roar again, slightly more nasally, gripping the hole with both claws and beginning to rip their way through it to get inside.

Thank goodness. I was worried it would just keep harassing the entrance.

I shout out to the dragon. "Well come on, Rednose, and bring your new piercing with you, I'll give you a few matching ones!"

Oh yeah, that definitely pissed him off.

Me and my guards are forced to constantly duck into divots in the wall as the dragon periodically erupts into ranting and dragonfire, and Corporal Fair Cop is forced to grab my hoof when I found myself reaching towards the greed-dense fire like some sort of curious child.

Before long, we've all managed to taunt and bait the dragon into a massive chamber, and I ignite all the bright torches to discourage the dragon trying to make its own light.

"Welcome, Tomatoface, to my Boss Room," I smile inside my mask as the dragon looks confused.

Around the room is one stone path in or out of the room, and a grid of large stone tiles are embedded in the ceiling, with hollow holes at their corners. The circular center platform of the room is surrounded by wide pools of freezing cold water, with the clear glow of crystals embedded into the walls of the pool lighting it up, and crystal torches embedded in the walls giving the room a large amount of bright light. Water pours into the pools from fountains up above, from holes carved to look like flattened, ape-like skulls.

One, less significant detail is the abundance of slits in the walls, though their exact purpose isn't immediately apparent.

"Wait, you're just going to fight me dragon-to-pony?" Redhot says incredulously when they notice the utter lack of guards and escape route in the room, before laughing loudly.

"I would almost respect that if it weren't so stupid!"

I just shrug in my armor. "Then step forward, and I'll teach you respect."

This more than manages to piss them off, and when they step fully onto the central platform, the walkway that connected it to the entrance drops into the floor as the archway leading in slams shut with a giant crystal skull door. As the walkway sinks into the water, a curious layer of frost gathers on it, spikes of crystalline ice growing a small distance out before stopping as it nears the glow of the magic gems embedded in the moat's walls.

The dragon just smirks at this, and looks down at me. "I hope you don't think a fancy room is going to scare me off or something. I'm going to toast you, and then I'll take you to that dumb spooky pony, and then I'll get so many gems!" They salivate.

The mention of a "Dumb Spooky Pony" offering them anything for me gives me pause, before I shake my head internally and remember the plan.

I take a step back, and look up to make sure I'm directly under one of the blue stone tiles in the ceiling, as opposed to the grey ones that checkerboard the roof around them.

"Then come on, show me you've got what it takes to defeat the Shadow Realm's Final Boss," I say, the name slipping out unintentionally as I try to come up with something intimidating to say.

The dragon takes a confident step forward, unafraid of my threats. This prompts me to quickly and loudly shout "C-B Twenty-One!"

The dragon's confusion turns to pain when a grey stone pillar drops down from the ceiling, pinning its claw to the floor with over a ton of reinforced stone.

As it thrashes to free itself, I take a step forward, ready to dodge if it attempts to use fire on me.

"You can still surrender, Redhot. You won't be harmed further if you do."

"Oh I'm sure as chip not doing that," They growl, yanking their claw free as the pillar snaps the rest of the way to the ground with a groaning crash.

I step back into the safe zone and shout again. "Drop em all!"

Redhot's eyes widen as, of the checkerboard of tiles embedded in the ceiling, every single grey one begins to drop down one after the other, forcing them to dodge, smash, and in one case, even melt a pillar before it can bury them in the stone traps.

Their confidence returns when they see me avoiding certain spots on the ground and constantly looking up at the roof, and makes the connection between Blue Tiles on the ceiling and safe zones from the pillars.

They continue to dodge, even as they gaze over to where, over the blue pools of water and past them, there are nothing but blue tiles.

"I've figured out your little game, dumb pony, I just have to go over there and your dumb trick stops working!" They point to the water.

I school my emotions and shout confidently. "You could, but I know for a fact that dragons shouldn't be able to swim!" I technically tell the truth.

The dragon's smile proves to me without a shadow of a doubt that they've taken my bait. "Watch me!" they claim, leaping into the water and doggy paddling over to the flooring on the other side.

"Careful!" I warn.

"The water's a bit nippy!"

It's at exactly this moment that Redhot realizes what I'm implying, as icy crystals begin to form around its limbs, the buoyant frost crawling up their body until they're completely immobilized, an iceberg with half a dragon poking out bobbing gently on the water as they thrash and struggle.

"What the frack, what is this!?" They roar, trying to use dragonfire to melt the ice, but failing as their neck is locked in place by purple crystals thrust up from the ice by me as I trot over the frozen water to them. It really doesn't help when I also make sure to muzzle them with my next set of crystals, clamping their jaws shut.

"Just a tiny bit of science, and a whole lot of magic," I state, standing next to them on the frozen floor.

"Those magic gems down there suppress crystal growth. This whole pond is already cold enough to freeze, but until someone falls in, it just... Can't quite manage it."

"To be honest, I didn't have too many more ideas to stop you after this one. I had some holes in the ceiling rigged to spray freezing water everywhere, a few vents in the floor rigged with noxious gas. And if all else failed, I had some ponies watching the fight in the other room, who would try to use Rupture Drops to fuse some rubble together around you if the fight drew on for too long," I state simply.

"I shouldn't be surprised that the hatefire didn't manage to take properly on you, and your mass meant that I didn't put nearly enough intoxicants in your body when I fired that spear at your nose. It did slow you down a lot though, I noticed."

I shrug.

"Anyway, you're going to go to sleep now. And when you wake up, we'll have a little talk about what happens to dragons that know too much about The Shadow Realm."

The dragon's increased panic allows it to, very impressively, I might add, crack several of the crystals holding it as I draw out a hoofful of sugar and royal crystal.

With what little remains of my magical energy, I grow them together into a thick purple spike that I jab into the dragon's side, underneath the hardened scales.

"The Shadow Realm, really?" Priss snarks as I limp to the medical chambers.

I have the privilege of hiding my embarrassment behind my armor. "Shush, I was doing a bit. Please tell me none of the others in the viewing loft heard that."

She giggles. "Oh it's much worse than that. Everypony's running with it. Pinprick told me his dad said the guards are thinking about calling themselves the Shadow Guard now."

My mortification, I can only hope, is hidden extremely well by what remains of my armor. Priss's continued giggling fails to assure me of that notion.

(Noir Report) An Aside on Dragonfire

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Entry #4, Day 23

While I hold disdain for the only dragon I have met thus far, their behavior has inspired a true respect and fondness for their race. The idea that any creature, living or dead, could experience such depths to their greed is phenomenal. If there existed any pony who could create dragonfire through magic, I would fear them. The amount of greed required to summon up the flames that a dragon wields trivially, I am certain would leave a pony a drooling vegetable on the ground from it's intensity. Despite this, I know there exist dragons that can converse, that can reason, even as from their mind's deepest depths to it's shallowest shores, greed can well up and saturate them.

While I'm uncertain that it is possible to harness dragonfire myself, studying it has given me new insights into the nature of dark magic, and indeed, these revelations may be key in improving other aspects of my magic.

The first and most important thing I have learned from my studies, is the fact that when magic performs, emotion amplifies. Even one's dying gasp could be turned into a veritable storm of magic, if sufficient emotion were present to amplify it. Dark Magic is able to manufacture emotions sufficient to begin casting a spell, but until now, I was unaware of the distinction between a spell's true power, and merely the power it achieves from magical expenditure. This excess emotion amplifying the power of a spell is something that Dark Magic cannot achieve on it's own, and even the blackest of spells can be thrown to greater heights by invoking true, pure emotions from it's caster.

This helps properly explain the problems I once experienced during the casting of spells in strenuous circumstances, my hatred for Sombra, when pulled forth, had made my magic briefly flare out of control once upon a time, turning the small black candle-light I had held into a roaring fire. At the time, I assumed it was due to my feelings impacting my focus, and a lack of control making me spill more energy than I had intended. I know now, however, that the true cause was my magic itself being amplified. Learning to harness and control this will be crucial if I am to gain mastery of magic.

One thing worth mentioning as I conclude my study into dragonfire, is that battling the dragon offered me the opportunity to prove a theory I had held earlier. I now know without a doubt that Royal Crystal Growth is capable of enacting harm on living things. Something which SC3 is extraordinarily difficult to wrench into doing. The power of avariciousness isn't dissuaded so easily from attacking a foe with potentially lethal attacks.

With that said, I now have much more to explore from the Royal Crystal Growth spell. Much, much more.

First and foremost, by using it alongside Black Flames, one can rapidly cause damage to physical structures, igniting them with the flames, and attacking the now weakened object with a nightmarish porcupine of crystal needles which can break through the object and compromise it's structure. By growing crystals from their base instead of their tip, and with a focus on durability and small size rather than sharpness and mass, one can drive spears of the material through many lesser forms of armor, including thinner portions of dragon skin. I'm not sure dragon skin is especially durable, but considering it resisted Black Flames, I deem Royal Crystal Growth a perfectly serviceable combat spell even if only for it's use in rapidly unleashing an attack at medium to close range.

Slower, but no less useful applications of the spell begin to shine through when it is used in a very particular way on existing crystals. By growing Royal Crystal inside of a normal crystal, instead of on it, the tension inside the gem can be increased until it is shattered. Furthermore, by combining Black Flames, Royal Crystals and the patience and assistance of professionals, blades can be crafted whose edges are of a terrifying sharpness.

And of course, among all things dangerous, there is none more dear to my heart than the classic and beloved tactic of simply dropping a weighty object onto a foe. Something which Royal Crystals are able to fulfill. I admit, there's no small irony in the fact that if I attempted to use SC3 around falling rubble, it would likely drive me to save my foe instead of finish them off. Perhaps that thought should be explored to deeper depths. One cannot wrench control over others without living, healthy individuals. Shouldn't that therefore indicate that SC3 could be turned into a spell of healing and defense? Something which protects one's subordinates.

But that will be testing consigned to another entry, for now.

One thing worth mentioning, there are other, even deadlier uses for this spell, ones which I dare not record here. If whomsoever reads this tome were to discover those uses on their own, I pray that you never allow them to come to light. Horde that knowledge jealously, and let it perish with it's owner.

I have also discovered flaws to this spell, ones which may leave it's user indisposed. Most important of which is the fondness one invariably develops for the things they create with it. I've found myself unable to bring myself to use superior products for my own armor if I can instead produce acceptable armor myself. The pride and enjoyment I've found in creating things from nothing but my mind and my magic is one that I am familiar with, but I feel may be unduly amplified by the sensations of intense greed and arrogance I experience during the casting of the spell.

There is a satisfaction that emerges in a pony which blends so well with the greed that Royal Crystal Growth invokes, and where Greed, Pride and Enjoyment intersect, one cannot help but adore the works that their own selves have wrought, even if objectively, they have not produced the most superior examples of a given thing.

(Present Chapter 4): Painful Reminders

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Weiss trots up to the small Priss, who had been standing in the town square next to the Kingdom Heart, ruffling her pink colored mane with one of his draconic claws as he stared into the glittering black pyroclasm, feeling warmth from it.

'The Crystal Heart must be crying it's eyes out knowing it will never be as warm as this.' Weiss thinks to himself.

"Hey, come on Mister Noir, I just got finished combing that!" She complains, trying to squirm away from his mussing up her mane.

He laughs, and ruffles it a bit more. "And now you have the privilege of doing so again. You really should be thanking me."

She pouts, standing eye to eye with Weiss. "You're just jealous because under that burning wig you call a mane, you've been reduced to a chrome dome Weiss."

Weiss glares. "It's still hair, it's just all flamey. Your hair is flamey too, you know."

And indeed, Priss's mane is a mass of cherry-red fire as well, only a few shades richer than her coat.

"And it's the finest flame in the Shadow Realm, thank you very much, Lord Weiss. Way better than Eclipse Flash's," She says with a stomp of her armored hoof.

Weiss just laughs some more. His laughter continues, even as Luna finishes walking up behind him.

Eventually, Weiss's laughter ends, leaving his tired face fighting a rictus that threatens to overtake his small, hollow smirk.

"What a cruel dream," He states.

Luna doesn't respond as the silhouettes of ponies walking around fade away, and the black conflagration in the town square dims into nothing, leaving the area barren and aged into unrecognizability.

Weiss speaks up again, conversationally, as he walks over to the stone benches surrounding the long-dead fire and takes a seat. "You know Luna, I once had a dream just like this."

"In that dream, I saw a land of ice and snow, and then, that land was filled with ponies. Friends, families, an entire kingdom!"

"But verily, it be the nature of dreams to end," he quotes.

"And when I awoke, only the memory of that dream remained."

Luna continues her taciturn staring, before walking over to sit next to him.

She speaks up. "I've come to ask why you're acting this way. I've heard word from Ponyville. You've been... Provoking ponies. Threatening them," She says, pausing before she finishes. "Frightening them."

Weiss's posture doesn't change, but by this point, they look dead, put plainly and simply.

"I took on a lot of responsibilities back then, you know. There were a lot of ponies I had to become. I didn't really enjoy them at first, but they all felt right in the end."

He waves at the barren caverns.

"Hence nothing remains, except for our regrets."

He pauses for a few moments, recollecting his emotions into their little box, before continuing as though talking about the weather.

"A long time ago, your sister asked me how the two of you could let an evil like me continue to rule over ponies, no matter how well I cared for their needs."

"Playing off your fears for the future, I told you that I could be your rival. The practice villain that keeps your skills sharp and your armories full for the real deal."

"Weiss Noir, the Symbol of Evil," Weiss says dramatically.

He holds his arms out wide, looking sideways at the princess. "Well... I am here."

"I'll put your heroes to the test. I'll dangle prizes in front of them, and I'll roar in anger when they slyly snatch them from my jaws."

"I'll make a nuisance of myself potent enough that ponies throw aside their petty differences to stand against me."

"I'll find the ponies that are teetering on the edge, and I'll scare them so badly they leap the other way."

"But more importantly, I'm going to make preparations for Sombra's return."

"And then I'm going to murder him."

Luna looks torn at the brutally frank statement. "You don't have to do this to yourself Weiss. Let us help you."

She tries again. "Please let me help you."

Weiss laughs. An empty noise, vacant of emotion. "Oh imagine the newspapers. "Luna and Weiss join forces, return of The Nightmare?"."

His face returns to it's stony stillness. "No. I'm afraid this isn't a job I require help doing. It's a penance for the one pony who did the crime."

Luna is incensed by this. "Weiss, thou are not responsible for what Sombra claimed he had done. There is no way thou could have known, and there was nothing thou could have done!"

Weiss just shakes his head. "Luna, from the moment I met Sombra, the blame for his every action rested squarely on my shoulders."

"We cannot allow thee to continue tormenting our ponies," Luna states firmly.

At this, Weiss begins to laugh, louder and louder, as his watery eyes obtain a mad glow. "Then stop me!"

His insane laughter only turns mournful by the very slightest amount as the dream ends.

"So, yeah, uhh..." Gilda scratches her neck.

"I kinda suck at this, but I guess what I'm trying to say is, I'm really sorry I yelled at you last time I was in Ponyville."

Fluttershy doesn't make eye contact, and just scuffs the ground awkwardly.

Gilda is confused at this. "Uhh, so anything to say to that?"

Fluttershy murmurs something unintelligibly quiet.

"I didn't hear that, could you speak up a bit?" Gilda asks as nicely as she can, trying to remember how politeness works.

Fluttershy mumbles something that almost sounds like a couple of words strung together, if one squinted their ears really hard.

Gilda tries her hardest to not get even the slightest bit annoyed with this. "So do you accept my apology or don't you?"

Fluttershy looks up, and finally speaks loud enough to hear. "I-"

"Um, there's smoke..!" She points up behind Gilda.

Gilda, looking around, spots the huge cloud of smog as well. "Holy shed!" Gilda curses.

Apologies and their acceptance or lack thereof ignored for now, the pair make their way to town to warn the ponies of the danger.

When they arrive, Fluttershy tries to warn everyone about the smoke, but her demure manner of speaking, and Rainbow Dash loudly bouncing a ball around muffle her warnings too much. Gilda, seeing this, takes a deep breath and decides to give it the old Junior Speedsters try.

"Hey! Punks! There's a bunch of flocking smoke everywhere up there, you aught to act like it!" Gilda bellows, before cringing when she sees Fluttershy paralyzed with fear.

'Oh way to go Gilda.' She thinks to herself, vowing to avoid shouting near the buttery pegasus.

Twilight gallops up with Spike in tow after Gilda's shout, looking over the shocked ponies who are now looking up to the sooty clouds.

"She's right everypony! But don't worry, I've received a letter from the princess, and it isn't coming from a fire."

"It's coming from a dragon."

The ponies all gasp, shocked and afraid.

Fluttershy is snapped out of her own frozen state by Twilight's words, shouting quietly. "A Dragon..?!"

When Twilight gathers the rest of her friends to the Treebrairy and explains the situation, Applejack is the first to break her silence in the name of putting forth hard-hitting and seriously worded questions.

"So what in the name of all things chocolate dipped is a full-grown dragon doin' in Equestria?" Applejack asks.

Twilight answers Applejack's question with a question-inducing answer of her own. "Sleeping."

This evokes questioning noises from everyone there, forcing Twilight to elaborate further.

"According to Princess Celestia's letter, the dragon's snoring is the cause of all this smoke."

Gilda smirks when she throws her own two bits in. "And here I thought Rainbow picked bad spots to nap in."

Pinkie scrunches up her face. "He should probably see a doctor about that smoke, I don't think that's healthy."

"Well, at least they aren't snoring fire," Rarity responds to Pinkie's non-sequitur.

"So what's the plan, then?" Rainbow Dash finally pipes up.

"Are we going to have to give him the boot? Like that! And that!" Dash shouts, kicking and punching in the air before having to be caught before she hits a bookshelf head-on by mistake.

Twilight says with some exasperation. "We need to encourage him to take his nap somewhere else. Celestia has given us our mission, and if we fail, Equestria will be drowned in smoke for the next hundred years!"

As everyone nods and Twilight belts out orders for everyone to prepare for the coming trip, Gilda is the only one who notices Fluttershy trying to say something.

"You got something to say?" Gilda questions, trying to avoid accidentally spooking the pegasus. Naturally, this makes Fluttershy clam up completely, shaking her head rapidly.

Gilda looks exceedingly disappointed at her reaction, but tries to hide it under some poise and determination. "Then I'm going to go get ready."

Unknowing of the problem occurring outside, Trixie quietly sips at her drink that she ordered from the Shakee Shoppe, pondering how things have changed so rapidly and, might she say, horribly, in her life.

'As nice as everypony has been, helping Trixie get back on her hooves, I'm still bitless and homeless. I just don't get how this town even humored my act with a unicorn like Twilight here...' she thinks to herself, flashing back to that fateful moment when Twilight demonstrated magical power beyond comprehension.

Though she didn't want to admit it at the time, Weiss's offer was almost painful in how tempting it was, especially when she received it so soon after having seen that.

Trixie tries to bury the thoughts under another slurp of smoothy, thinking about it doesn't solve anything. It especially doesn't solve anything for Trixie to think about how she'll never even come close to having magic power like that.

"Ugh, why couldn't Trixie's wagon have broken down in Baltimare instead," She groans into the table.

'Because if it broke down there, you'd be out on the street instead of in a nice inn apparently paid for by the crown, drinking smoothies that were apparently "on the house",' Her thoughts traitorously point out.

It's downright bizarre to her how generous and kind the townsfolk here have been, and it doesn't at all help her mood steadily deteriorating as it had been over the past week.

And then there's the elephant in the room. The ominous black tower that rose out of the Everfree the same day she arrived. The abode of that dark wizard.

When Trixie questioned the bookish librarian about them, she found herself nearly buried in tomes on the historic villain, which had to be culled down to one tome in particular that managed to quench her curiosity, and doused ice water on the idea of going to them for any help, or indeed, any reason at all.

"Know-Our Vice", as the book referred to the pony, was the evil ruler of an ancient citadel, famous for both his ironic punishments towards criminals, and his ironic gifts for those that displeased him. The most famous example being the Equestrian Spy that he granted the toggle-able power of invisibility when they were caught, with no strings attached. They had enjoyed themselves with the power so much after being sent home that they were eventually caught and tried for spying in Equestria itself, unable to resist the temptation to abuse their new ability.

The hallmark of the villain's rule was their twisted adherence to harmony. Tempting ponies with generous gifts, kind actions and mercy to defeated enemies that often infuriated them, speaking honestly when they knew others would not believe him, or would willfully misinterpret his words, a loyalty to his minions that bordered on pathological, and above all else, a bizarre and all-encompassing sense of humor.

Trixie assumed after reading that book that Weiss's offer was genuine, but would somehow leave her miserable if she took it.

But sweet Celestia, why was it still so tempting?

Well, that's a dumb question. It's tempting because Trixie can't stop thinking about just how she is neither Great nor Powerful compared to the humble unicorn that probably saved her life from that Ursa.

The loud snore of a dragon halts Twilight and the others.

"What the hay?" Applejack comments as the ground rumbles.

"Well, looks like that's what a dragon snoring sounds like," Twilight comments.

Fluttershy, after regaining her senses, looks up at the mountain with mounting trepidation.

"That's... Really high up," She says, prompting Rainbow Dash to snort slightly.

"Yeah, mountains tend to be like that," Dash responds.

She then continues. "I'm going to fly up there and check it out!"

Before Dash can live up to her namesake and dash off, Applejack points out something important.

"Hold on, now. I think we should all go up together. Safety in numbers and all that."

Her words drag Rainbow back down to the rest of the group with a grumble.

Rarity speaks up with a point of small talk to make. "I hear the only thing more alluring than the luster of a dragon's scales are the beauty of the gems they use in their nests. If I play my cards right, perhaps I could even convince him to part with a few..."

Gilda's eyebrow raises, prompting her to interject. "That sounds like a really bad idea. I've never heard of a dragon reacting well to someone messing with it's loot. I know I wouldn't react well to it."

Pinkie follows up on that with a faux roar. "Rawr! Want a diamond Rarity? Well too bad, they're mine!" She roars.

All the girls in the group laugh at this except for Twilight.

"Girls, this is no laughing matter! Fluttershy, you're the expert on wild creatures. How do you think the dragon will behave?" Twilight asks the distinctly Fluttershy-lacking space behind her, before seeing Fluttershy still at the bottom of the mountain.

Rainbow reacts to the sight predictably. "Hey, what's the holdup Fluttershy?"

Pinkie takes this opportunity to have a baklava and a fake pistol that they fire off into the air. "Did somepony say holdup?"

Fluttershy scuffs the ground shyly. "It's... really steep."

Rainbow retorts readily. "Yeah, mountains tend to be like that too. You could just fly up here, you know?"

Fluttershy works up her nerves and nods, but when the dragon's snoring startles her, her wings snap shut and she falls back to the ground.

When Applejack starts climbing back down, Twilight takes the opportunity to interject. "We don't have time for this, what are you doing, Applejack?"

"I'll take her around the mountain another way," The farmer says plainly.

At this, Gilda is flooded with impatience. 'Come on Gilda, keep it together.' She grits her teeth at the delay.

"Wait, wait. I could just carry her up, it would be faster," Gilda slowly forces out as she calms herself.

Twilight nods happily as Gilda softly grabs the pegasus and hefts her up into the air with powerful flaps. "That's a great idea Gilda, we'll be right back on track if you do that."

Fluttershy is too overwhelmed with fear to complain as they make their way further up the mountain.

Weiss awakens from his slumber, rising up from the black pit in the room's center to reform his body and steel his mind for the day.

"Six heroes, and only two Weapons of Light. Well... That just won't do. Not at all."

He hums to himself.

"Until I can find a rube willing to scour every pawn shop in Equestria for the Alicorn Amulet, that particular line of research is lost to me. But maybe... Maybe I should simply source my goods more... locally."

With a malicious chuckle, he descends the stairs of his tower, into the castle ruins he grew it from.

"Oh what was it called again? Visionation Augmentation? No, it wasn't that."

His self-aimed mumbles follow him as he slowly scours the castle of the pony sisters from top to bottom for a very particular book.

Before too long, the girls manage to all make it up a good portion of the mountain, coming face to face with a gap in the path, a long fall between two nearby cliffs.

Where the others are all able to leap across trivially, Fluttershy is left behind, unable to work up the courage to make the leap.

Twilight gently points this out. "Alright Fluttershy, it's your turn now."

Fluttershy shudders, pupils dilating at the sight of the chasm. "But it's really... wide."

"You could just leap on over," Applejack claims.

"I don't know..." Fluttershy responds, before another snore from the dragon makes her jolt into the air briefly.

"I really don't know." She says again, shaking as she looks down.

At this point, Pinkie hops back over to Fluttershy's side. "Oh come on Fluttershy, it's just a hop skip and a jump!"

Gilda, preternaturally sensing Pinkie preparing to burst into song, interjects. "I could just carry her across like I did before."

Fluttershy, upon hearing her words, rapidly rambles quietly. "Oh, no there's no need for that, no need at all really, I'll just um-"

Fluttershy closes her eyes, and, driven by the idea of the alternative being another ride on the griffon express, leaps across the surprisingly small distance between the cliffs on her own.

Though Gilda manages to hide it much better this time, Fluttershy's fearful reaction at the idea of Gilda helping her sends a bitter pang through the griffon.

"Well, as long as you've got it handled." Gilda says, restraining herself with every iron band of willpower she can to keep from acting upset.

Meanwhile, and arguably parawhile, the flow of time itself briefly becomes convoluted, as out of the chronal fabric above Sweet Apple Acres, a large, bulbous machine slowly fades into existence. The machine is painted mostly yellow, with accents of green and blue. For whatever reason, the word "Hope!" is painted on the side in a way that seems almost ironic. It slowly lands in a clearing of the apple tree forest, and it's bulbous, slightly conical cockpit hisses open.

The heavily cloaked mare that stumbles out of it spots some of the apples, and, with nothing short of desperate and reckless abandon, runs over and uses some of their precious little energy to yank an apple free of it, stuffing it in their mouth with a sob as they eat as quickly as is safe for them. Feeling the agonizing hunger of their subjectively past week slowly abate, they pull down more apples and eat those at a slightly more sedate pace.

The unicorn's gaze slowly sweeps to the mountain in the distance, and the jewel of Equestria, the city of Canterlot affixed to it's side.

"Got to get to Celestia. Got to get to Canterlot," They rasp, throat soothed slightly by the juicy, ambrosial apples.

Time Machine ignored completely in their desperation, the yellow-coated mare pulls down her hood, stuffs it full of apples, and forces herself to begin walking the long route to the nearest train station.

Twilight slowly treads across a long stretch of trail, whispering to the others.

"According to the map, this entire area is an avalanche risk-zone, so be as quiet as you can manage, alright?"

Everyone but Fluttershy nods. The excluded mare looks terrified, and opens her mouth, before a panicked look from everyone makes her pause, and making eye contact with Gilda causes her to snap her mouth shut as fast as possible. Strangely (and frighteningly), this reaction doesn't make Gilda look any happier.

They slowly tread past the area, and finally make it to the dragon's lair.

What goes unaware to them is the dragon in question detecting their scent. Six ponies don't warrant the slightest concern, but as they near, his nostrils detect the stench of griffon feathers.

And a griffon with greed in mind is a great concern indeed.

Twilight nods as they stand in front of the cavern's mouth. "Ok, everypony, here's the plan, Gilda and Rainbow, you two will clear the smoke clouds," She says, making the duo nod.

"Pinkie Pie and Rarity, you'll create a distraction to divert the dragon if things get dangerous in there," She continues, making the second duo nod as well, Pinkie Pie blowing a party horn at the same time.

"Applejack, you're ready with the apples in case he decides to attack, but it shouldn't come to that," Applejack nods as well, throwing an apple and catching it with determination.

"Fluttershy, your job is to wake him up safely so we can open a dialogue... Fluttershy?" The pegasus being questioned shakes her head, her legs locked in place.

Fluttershy starts. "I-"

"I can't go in the cave."

Rainbow Dash raises an eyebrow. "So what's the problem? I think we've got some torches if it's the dark that's bothering you."

Fluttershy shakes her head. "I'm not scared of the dark... I'm scared of..." she trails off into an inaudible mumble, before being startled by the dragon snoring fitfully.

After some prompting from the others, she finally spits it out. "I'm scared of dragons."

A small shifting occurs inside the cave.

Twilight interrogates. "But Fluttershy, you've always been talented dealing with wild animals, what's the issue here?"

"That's because those animals aren't dragons," She shakes her head.

The shifting increases, and the tinkling of treasure rings out in the distance.

Rainbow Dash interjects, a bit shocked. "You dealt with that manticore like it was nothing, though?"

"That's because that manticore wasn't a dragon," Fluttershy nods.

Small thumps begin to approach, but go unnoticed by the others.

Pinkie Pie offers her own take on the matter. "Spike's a dragon, and you aren't scared of him!"

"Yes, because he's not a massive titanic horrific sharp-toothed fire-breathing smoke-snoring scale-armored long-horned could-eat-a-pony-in-a-single-bite scarier-than-Gilda all-grown-up dragon!" Fluttershy shouts aloud.

"And just what's so wrong with that?" The dragon growls, arms crossed as they stand up behind Fluttershy, who was turned away talking to the group.

The group all look on with horrified expressions as the dragon takes another stomping step forward, while Fluttershy stumbles back away from it, whimpering, whispering and generally failing to say anything coherent.

"I- uh- w-" Fluttershy is completely paralyzed as the dragon snarls at her.

"Well?" They growl again.

Gilda, who had been watching with restraint and fear previously, slowly grows more and more incensed, but remains too worried about frightening Fluttershy even more to do anything about it.

When the dragon smirks at Fluttershy in a way that's painfully familiar to Gilda, her resolve snaps.

'Oh screw trying not to scare Fluttershy. This is way more important.' She thinks to herself, wings already flaring.

"Hey! You need to back off, bub!" Gilda roars, getting up in the dragon's face.

The dragon looks confused at this, it's just one griffon, purple glowing wings or not, so why are all their instincts screaming "Danger!"?

Mustering up some resistance, the dragon retorts. "But she said mean things about me."

"Yeah, when you scare ponies they're not going to act nice. It sucks, and you're just going to have to suck it up! Because you don't get to try and scare ponies just because you're mad. Even if they don't like you," Gilda snarls, magically enhanced killing-intent wafting off the incensed griffon.

The dragon takes a step back at this, teeth chattering, before Fluttershy flaps up between the two and interrupts the exchange with newfound bravery after watching Gilda's stand with wide eyes.

"I'm sorry for what I said, Mr. Dragon. I was just intimidated. I shouldn't have judged you before I got the chance to meet you, no matter how scared I was," Fluttershy says, patting the dragon on the nose.

"We're also sorry for interrupting your rest, but the reason we're here is because your nap is making a lot of smoke, and it's not good for the ponies that live here. Could you please pack your things, and maybe find somewhere else to finish your nap?" Fluttershy pleads.

The dragon looks sheepish at this.

"Ok..." They look down, before plodding off inside.

Fluttershy then turns to Gilda, pinning the now terrified griffon to the metaphorical wall like a metaphorical butterfly with her eyes.

"You shouldn't yell like that," Fluttershy says with a small, world-devouring glare, before her face softens.

"But thanks for sticking up for me."

Fluttershy looks shy in a surprisingly uncharacteristic manner for once. "I should have taken the time to get to know the real you before deciding if I was scared or not when you apologized, Gilda. It's obvious now that you've got my best interests in mind. Even if you are a little loud."

Gilda scratches her head and awkwardly chuckles. "I probably should have kept my head on straight the first time we met. So... We even?" Gilda holds out a balled up talon.

Fluttershy hoofbumps Gilda's outstretched fist. "We're even."

"Dear Princess Celestia,

I'm happy to report that the dragon has peacefully left our fair country, and it was all thanks to my two dear friends, Fluttershy and Gilda. The adventure taught me that you should never lose faith in your friends, and, more importantly, that being afraid can make you push away the ones that would be willing to help. During these times, overcoming your greatest fears is a task that can be truly surmounted with the help of someone willing to stand up for you."

Twilight finishes, as Spike happily writes it all down, grateful for the break from dealing with Fluttershy's animal friends.

"Man, Twilight, they're acting totally different now!" Spike says, looking out at the window, where Fluttershy is discussing various birds of prey with a curious, but mostly laughing Gilda.

"Well, I suppose that's just what happens when somepony stares down an angry dragon for you."

Spike shudders. "Remind me not to get angry at Gilda, then."

Twilight just laughs at that.

Weiss dumps everything in a treasure chest for aesthetic purposes.

"Ok, I've got the book, I've got the Heart's Desire resin, I've got the Stardust, I've got one of the branches The Tree dropped."

"Now I just need an alchemist to help put everything together." He finishes, staring down at the magical reagents with unabashed excitement.

(Weiss Report) Time Travel Sucks [Time Machine]

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Entry One-Hundred-Sixty-Five, Year Fifteen.

Let me go on record by saying I fucking hate time travel. It's super fucking spooky, and I'm so fucking positive that If I fuck with it too much, it's going to fuck back. And I really don't want to get fucked by time travel. That having been said, I've created a time machine. Now I know what you're thinking, but I'm not really a fan of prune juice, especially in a swimming pool. Jokes aside, I do have a good reason for this. Several in fact. Reason number one? I can. Reason number two, I wanted to. Reason number three...

Well, for a while, I was desperate enough to consider using one.

Now that it's finished, though, it remains firmly on the shelf. If there's one thing I've learned watching cartoons, it's this. "Time Travel is for Immortals and Fools." is an axiom I hold near and dear to my heart, and one I have no plans of putting to the test any time soon. But one thing I suppose is important is the fact that, now that I have a time machine, I can, at the very least, combat other time travelers. Like, say, ones who threaten to destroy time by using ancient time-warping spells to alter the past.

Yeah, see, I'm not a big fan of getting reset either. Ergo, instead of dismantling this time machine, I'm going to hold onto it, store it somewhere safe, and hope I never have to break the puppy out. Especially considering one simple fact. It's not really a very good time machine. My first attempts at using it for strictly testing purposes were... Less than stellar.

Test number one, which was unmanned, worked well enough, I would only send it forward, and then back, observing the results accordingly. This experiment showed that the machine's accuracy left a bit to be desired. Further tests only compounded that, culminating in me determining that every pound of weight in the time machine makes it more inaccurate with it's destination.

I was able to fix this problem with some carefully re-tuned Timeshift Crystals, but even then, the time traveler would have to make a judgement call, and choose to risk one of three things. Missing their intended location by a random portion, missing their intended time by a random portion... Or missing their intended timeline by a random portion. Yeah, see, that kind of answer would freak me out too.

After I got a report back indicating that my Time Machine, however briefly, had entered a parallel universe created through a DIFFERENT type of time travel, and that my own time machine was incapable of generating new timelines, I jerked my metaphorical hand back as though it were burned. So fucking spooky. I was tempted to destroy my time machine right there and then, but at the same time, realized that it was too late to shove the genie back in the bottle.

If there existed other versions of myself in parallel timelines, it would only take one of the time machines they made falling into the wrong hands to screw me over, even if I myself destroyed this one. Furthermore, the other me's would presumably also realize this, increasing the amount of total time machines. It would be a fucking Cell Situation all over again if I just assumed getting rid of my time machine would get rid of all of my time machines, and I'd be the Trunks who was dumb enough to assume so. So I'm back to Plan A. Shelve it until I need it.

That being said, I plan to consult a fortune teller next week, by asking her very specific questions about the future, I can determine a great many things about this timeline, and where it's headed. Namely, if it's a doomed timeline. Regardless of the results, I plan to use a mind-wipe on myself to remove the answers the fortune teller gives me from my memories, and use a timer to ensure that I spend exactly one hour asking her questions.

By combining these two things, and the Tree of Harmony subtly manipulating time on it's own, I should be able to "Synchronize" any alternate versions of myself, preventing the various timelines from deviating due to the answers I receive from the fortune teller. I also have a relic designed to cure the mind-wiping if certain conditions are met, which would allow me to immediately know which timeline I'm in, and make plans accordingly to preserve the prime timeline.

I really screwed the pooch on this one, but It's better than just being helpless if a threat comes using time as a medium of assault.

Entry One-Hundred-Sixty-Six, Year Fifteen.

One thing worth mentioning, the commissioning of this machine has also taught me a great deal about the potential of Timeshift Crystals. Possibly even more than the creation of the Master Sword afforded me. They really are quite the miraculous substance. Apparently nobody thought to tie time-manipulating magic to raw, grown crystals before. Their loss, I guess.

Like seriously, even though on their own, they can't actually generate new timelines, they ARE capable of... basically fulfilling all of one's time-related needs, including the preservation of certain types of paradox object, stabilizing the fabric of time within an area, and of course, the wide, wide range of methods that it can be put towards for manipulating time on a smaller, more manageable scale.

To that end, I've managed to create twenty five Timeshift Pendants, ten of which I stuffed in the time machine, just in case. Though again, hopefully it won't come to that, since even with a Timeshift Pendant, if a Paradox Object wants to cease existing, there's not a whole lot I can do. The existence of a paradox object that time wants gone will actually drain the energy from a Timeshift Pendant in an imperceptible way, which also means I've got no way of telling if something's going to poof until it suddenly does, and my crystal shatters.

It's actually super annoying. I really do hope someone figures out a better way to preserve paradox objects in the future, because this really isn't a workable method for doing the job.

If they did, I wouldn't have to worry nearly as much about this dumb time travel bullshit.

(Past Chapter 5): Genre Savvy

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My first apprentice hates my guts. And to be frank, that also makes them my best one.

"Fuck!" I hiss as Doctor A.R Homeopathy pokes me with another crystal needle.

He frowns condescendingly. "Don't be such a baby. You weren't complaining when you walked in here covered in dragonfire burns, you really should be unconscious right now, after that."

I grit my teeth. "That's adrenaline for you. I didn't even realize I was hurt."

They shake their head. "Flaws of the pony adrenal system. Always making fools act like heroes. You are quite lucky that a guard had been here to cut that ridiculous armor off you."

I blush, and then hiss again when another needle pokes me. "I swear I designed that armor to come off."

Dr. Real just shakes their head again, before jabbing yet another needle into my aching side. "Then perhaps next time, you should design it to come off more easily. Or even better, not challenge a dragon in some meat-headed direct confrontation."

"Now hold still. If those crystals come out, we'll have to do this all over again. Injuries like yours are not something a pony easily recovers from."

I force myself to smirk. "Will I be able to play the piano anymore?"

"Yes? Your injuries will not inhibit the movement of your limbs, or your magic," The doctor responds with confusion.

"Well that's strange, because I couldn't before!" I joke.

"Oh yes, very funny. Keep your humor up, then. You'll need it to aid in your recovery," The doctor says, exiting the room.

After a long time just laying there, boredom easily more painful than the admittedly aching patches of recovering skin, I'm freed of my boring torment by the sound of a door opening. Oh god, it's Drop Kick. Hopefully she isn't as... Boisterous... With hospitalized ponies like myself. I continue to wait patiently while she drags in a giant glass keg of some sort of sloshing liquid.

"I'm here with the good stuff hero," The burgundy coated, curly-haired giant of a mare drawls, taking the mugs and a pair of straws off the top of the barrel.

"Erm, I'm not much of a drinker, M'am," I respond nervously as she pours out a mug of the glittering liquid.

She gives me a stink-eye that tells me as much as her words do, as she sips at the mug herself. "So what would you call last week, then? I'd love to find out what kind of pony you consider a drinker, having seen that."

I groan at the memory of the celebration Glitter Bomb talked me into going to, and the copious alcohol consumption that followed. "I'd call it peer pressure and say that my behavior spoke for itself."

She laughs at this, stomping the floor uproariously. "Alright colt, I wouldn't pass up some pain-relief looking like you do, but if you want to act tough, I won't stop you."

I try not to pout at that.

As soon as doc says I'm good to walk around, I beeline my way to the dungeon that I had carved out to house our new resident, and begin a long winded explanation of just why we can't trade our secrecy for this dragon's freedom, ending with something a bit like;

"So, in short, my green, scaly friend, I quite literally cannot let you go free, since you'll just lead Sombra back here, one way or another. With that said, I have no intentions of mistreating you during your time here. I'll just need to know your dietary requirements and anything which might contribute to your health, and we can begin increasing the comfort of your accommodations," I explain to the extremely displeased dragon currently chained up in Cell Two's Dungeon.

"Frack that, I'm not about to be a prisoner for a bunch of dumb ponies who can't even fight fair," Redhot retorts, trying yet again to spray fire intense enough to let them break out.

The yawning fifty-meter void dug out in front of their face, however, prevents the flames from actually touching anything before they dissipate, while the royal cloth padded manacle around their neck prevents them turning it around to aim their fire breath elsewhere.

I decide that some stick is worth applying in this situation, before the carrot will take, and attempt to make the application accordingly. "If we fought you fairly, you'd be dead instead of waiting to be pampered. I'm certain that's not the alternative you were hoping for, though."

I then offer the aforementioned carrot in a manner of my choosing. "I'm more than happy to wait a while to start giving you a healthy chunk of our gems to eat, though, if you want to get miserable and hungry before your silly pride stops holding you back from accepting basic amenities."

Redhot snarls at this, but that doesn't dissuade me from continuing to speak. "So, diamonds or smoky quartz? We have an abundance of both, and not much use for them."

Their bitter face twitches at the mention of diamonds.

I keep talking aimlessly. "Also, do you prefer cushions or just a bed of gemstones? I'm... Fairly certain that crystal cloth is up to the task of dragon bedding. It's stronger than my armor, at least, and I only got lightly roasted by you wearing that stuff."

The dragon grins at this. "Then why weren't you wearing that instead, dumb pony? Not that I'm unhappy to hear that I got you."

This is my turn to be unhappy and defensive over my vestments. How dare he shit on my beloved and perfect designs. "Because I like my armor better. I made it myself and it's my favorite color."

Redhot doesn't respond for several seconds.

"I don't like cushions. My scales rip through them."

I hum at that. "Have you ever heard of a beanbag chair?"

At the dragon's negative response, I go on to explain. "You just stuff a tough sack, the "bag", full of materials, the "beans". I'm sure I can get some prototypes to you to test soon enough."

I stand awkwardly, and still vaguely in pain. "At any rate, I'll have some quartz and diamonds sent over shortly. Avoid harming my dudes, and you will receive privileges."

"Endanger their lives, and you die where you lay," I finish plainly, with no particularly strong emotions in my tone, after which, I limp out of the room and towards my office to handle the matters that my people have started putting together for me to attend to.

A young crystal filly with a mane comprised of red and yellow stripes and a dark grey coat sits on a cushion in her room, schoolwork on the table in front of her ignored as her thoughts roll around in her head like a cat nearly as angry as she herself is.

'Why won't anybody listen to me when I tell them that he's evil?' Her internal monologue questions as she looks to the shelves of books she managed to bring with her when her family moved here.

'Every legend, every story explains it perfectly! Ponies have a problem, and then some sly villainous figure tempts them with an easy solution, and then...' She dares not mentally voice the endings to those stories, so as to not imagine what Weiss Noir has planned. She just knows she has to find some way to stop him before it's too late.

She looks to a different section of her tiny, filly-sized personal library. 'I don't get it, he's using dark magic, and the magic tomes on that subject indicate he should be acting crazy and selfish, and yet he's somehow tricked everypony into making him their leader. If he were using mind control, there would be signs, indicators.'

She groans and thumps her head onto the table, before the hint of an idea appears in her mind.

"Wait... Wait!" She scrambles to her bookshelf, scanning through books to try and find a specific one.

"He's been forcing everypony to wear light amplifying goggles to see down here, instead of just using crystal torches, and his explanation that somepony could detect the torches is a bunch of nonsense..."

"It's got to be the goggles. Where is it... There!" She yanks out a yellow, gem studded tome labeled "Arcanogram Slim's Lens of Untruth: User Manual and Troubleshooting."

Flipping through the pages, she keeps speaking aloud. "Momma said that Weiss Noir seemed "Especially weak for a unicorn", but that can't be right, he just got finished trouncing a dragon! But if she only ever saw him through a carefully designed Lens of Untruth, instead of a violent, powerful dark magic using jerk-"

She flips to a page illustrating a pony looking through a spyglass, which displays a smiling red pony as being a frowning blue one instead through its perception-altering screen.

"She'd see a well-mannered, but weak-looking good-samaritan!" Her eyes light up at the revelation she had undergone.

Slowly, her excitement is tempered by the facts, however.

"Now I just need proof of my theory, and the only one here who hasn't potentially been influenced by a Lens of Untruth is..."

She feels her hair stand on end at the thought of interrogating a dragon, but clamps down on the feeling.

She's got a plan now. She'll expose Weiss Noir, or her name isn't Eclipse Flash!

As I listen to the well-dressed, official looking fellow explain in extremely verbose detail the exact nature of his request, on behalf of several ponies. I'm a bit shocked that they're even bothering to ask my permission for this sort of thing, but I'm not going to complain.

"So in short, sir, we're requesting that with the construction of Cell Three nearing completion, the various cells be given actual names," The individual in my office says, leafing through stacks of papers.

I mentally groan at this. "You do remember that the reason things are divided into cells is because we may need to abandon and evacuate one at any time, right?"

"Naming them might encourage attachment that would make an evacuation especially bitter."

He hums at this, looking through his notes. "Then an alternate proposal. Give the cells distinct names, and increase the amount of evacuation drills. The two will counterbalance one another, and-" He is interrupted as I stop him with a raised hoof.

"Alright," I say, admitting defeat when I realize his proposal must be a fairly popular one if he's grasping at straws just to convince me to implement it.

"I'll get to work on some names. There's no need to stress everyone with more drills just for that. Instead, I'd like you to relay my intent to push for more general and practical education for youths, and institute mandatory education for adults who fail a simple test on re-homing protocols. I'll leave the details of how this is handled to the teachers," I say.

"If they're going to grow more attached to their place of residence, they'll simply need that much more knowledge on how to smoothen the transition to a new one in the event of a cell exposure," I finish.

The stallion processes my words, before nodding and taking his leave after restacking his papers.

'This is a really bad way of handling things.' I think to myself.

I need a better way of figuring out what these ponies want, and then giving them the things that are reasonable. Right now, I'm basically just giving commands and then having to manually go from cell to cell to check whether ponies are satisfied with their implementation. It seems this is also similar to how they're used to handling governance, but I possess neither immortality, nor the time to play Sim-City micromanaging them 24-7.

Maybe some kind of voting and survey system? I mean, just because it sucks back home doesn't mean I can't take a few cues from it. As long as I just use votes to guide my decisions instead of making them for me.

A mare enters shortly after the previous stallion left. One with a larger pile of papers.

I think I preferred fighting the dragon.

Hours later, I'm finally done with today's proposals and requests, and can get to my real job. Trying to make my magic use so potent and terrifying that I can deal with threats. That is to say, I'm fruitlessly trying to figure out how to use levitation, supposedly one of the most basic unicorn spells period. I have no idea what I'm doing.

I've tried focusing really hard, imagining invisible hands, and even meditation, but nothing seems to crack it, eventually, my frustration reaches a boiling point, and the small rock I was using for practice is flung into a wall by a shaky kick as I hiss in anger. This is so dumb. I've been just randomly stumbling into dark magic spells for over a month now, and I can't manage to pick up a rock?

Frustrated and defeated, I decide to make my rounds and check on the Black Flame firepit, to make sure it's still somehow burning. When I reach it, I see the usual gathering, with one major exception. One pony has taken charge of the venting circle, and is ranting to the crowd about how Sombra will one day pay for his crimes. I tune out the speech when it makes me realize something far more interesting, and finally makes me understand why the Black Flame hadn't needed me to refuel it this entire time.

It was somehow being fueled by the ponies themselves. I could feel it, something in the nature of the fire had changed since I had created it, if my black flames were a jug of apple juice, then what I now saw had slowly, over the course of the last few weeks, been turned into fruit punch, that is to say, there was now more of other ponies hatred in it than my own, feeding it without garbage or magic expenditure on my part.

Realizing how the flame had changed made me feel...

Huh. That's not a human emotion.

As I realized in this moment that yes, it would be logical to assume that I indeed have a physically different brain now, one whose similarities to human neurochemestry are probably coincidental at best, the unnatural emotion became stronger.

I received a few funny looks as I walked back to my room, but at the time, I didn't care much, and for a few hours, I just laid down and tried not to think too hard about how I assumed that my inhuman transformation didn't also affect my mind. Even if I hadn't cast a single spell, the chunk of me that I considered "Me" would still have been running on the wrong wetware.

Eventually, I managed to untangle and unpack most of the mental strain that my little moment of enlightenment had cost me, and I decided in a similar manner to the fox who couldn't get the grapes that I was better off not having to deal with the cavalcade of evolutionary fuckups that went into the human brain anyway, and that's the story I'm sticking with.

Having gotten my mental alibi for not having a psychotic break in place, I move onto trying to explore this mysterious new feeling.

None of the books I've managed to read so far refer to it at all, but I have my suspicions as to what it could be, when in a book about magic unique to crystal ponies, I find constant references to a "natural" sensation, and the way the book explains it describes it as a feeling that a crystal pony has when they're observing something in nature that is acting the way they predicted it would. This feeling is described as an integral part of nearly all of the higher order spells for growing food.

So, evidence in mind, I decide to create and test my hypothesis. Crystal Ponies have an emotion which emerges from observing the natural world, and is required to cast their unique magics.

And the emotion that I felt came when I realized that my Black Flame had changed, and that emotion became stronger when I realized that I had changed.

So I focus on the things that have changed, both to me, and around me, aim my horn at the training rock and...

My horn flickers a little bit in a white aura, and the rock wiggles with a few sparkles, before a hint of excitement ruins the entire thing, dropping it to the ground.

"Oh fuck me," I say, frustration boiling up in my mind at this, the latest of my failures, and the rock is flung out of the room in a flash of purple energy as the frustration mixes with the awareness of change I had already been feeling.

Normally, I would be excited to discover a new dark magic, but instead, I'm even more frustrated.

"Oh come on! This makes like four dark spells I've somehow stumbled on in the past month, and I still can't manage the one normal spell that babies figure out?!"

I sigh with disappointment. "Whatever, this is horseshit."

Considering my already frustrated mood, I decide to spend the rest of my free time channeling it constructively to practice this new spell.

I'll work on figuring out levitation when my mood improves.

Eclipse Flash decides that she's done enough preparing, strapped up with pots and pans for protection, and her book and quill ready to take notes, she slowly sneaks down the tunnel to the dungeon.

When she spots the two guards preventing ponies from entering the massive double-doors, she thinks for a moment that there might not be a way in. Luckily for her, though, she spots it. Two large carts, one filled with jewels and one filled with... Sacks?

'Now's my chance!' The filly thinks to herself when she sees the carts stop in front of the doors. Running as fast and quietly as she can, she scrabbles up the cart and under one of the sacks before anyone can notice.

She holds her breath and waits, before, after some chatter between the guards and the ponies towing the carts, the doors groan open, and she feels herself being moved inside. When the cart stops, Eclipse waits a few more minutes, just in case. Her waiting is interrupted when she feels the sack she was hiding under get pulled up and out of the cart suddenly, startling her.

She turns quickly to see who uncovered her hiding spot, before her face pales and her pupils shrink.

"Oh... Um, hi!" She says to the large, toothy, and absolutely massive green dragon.

The dragon's eyes narrow. "You know they said I could eat anything in these carts, right?" Redhot lies, making Eclipse's pots-and-pans armor rattle as she shudders.

"Please don't! I'm just here to... Ask you a few questions?" She hastily pulls out her book and quill.

The dragon does something that, in his mind is probably a non-threatening smile, as he puts his hand under his chin. "Well go on then."

Eclipse shakes her head to rid it of lingering fears. "Right! I need you to tell me how powerful and cruel Weiss Noir is! The safety of the Crystal Empire may depend on it!"

The dragon's forehead scrunches up in confusion. "That scrawny whelp? He's a coward and a weakling, trying to buy me off or something. Not exactly strong or cruel."

Eclipse's own face turns confused at that, before she realizes he must be under threat to keep Weiss's secret!

"That's a lie, I need the truth!" She demands.

The dragon smirks at this. "And just what would you be willing to get the truth, then?"

"Maybe... Get me out of these chains?" Redhot suggests, rattling the thick glittering cables holding him down.

The filly looks nervous at this. "You... Won't hurt anypony?" She ventures.

The dragon's smile widens. "I just want out of this dump. I've got a horde back home waiting for me, and this whole thing has been a bust. I'll tell you the truth if you help me get out of here."

"Mmm," She whines.

"Unless you don't want to know how "powerful and cruel" that whelp really is..?" They bait in response to that.

Eclipse Flash pulls out a pair of gem-clippers that she brought along just in case. "Ok, but only because you probably hate Weiss too."

It takes an extremely long period of time for one small filly to clip through dragon-sized cables, enchanted clippers or no, but she eventually snips the last part free, releasing their right claw so he can go on to rip off the rest of the shiny restraints.

Redhot rubs their neck to get the kinks out of it. "That's better."

He then turns his gaze down to the excited filly waiting for his answer. "So you want to know how mean and strong he is, right?"

She nods rapidly, making him nod as well.

"Well, it's really very simple."

"He's not nearly as mean and strong... As an angry dragon," Redhot says, grabbing the filly in one giant claw, prompting her to shriek and thrash.

At the sound of that, the doors open up wide enough for a troupe of guards to peek in, preparing to attack the monster.

Redhot holds out the screaming filly, "I've got one of your little pony whelps in here! Open the door and let me through, or I'll find out if crystal ponies crunch like their namesake."

His bluff works out marvelously for him, as the door opens up the rest of the way, and the guards back up with hateful glares.

"Yeah, that's more like it."

As Redhot slowly thumps through the tunnels, he slowly grows incensed at how his hostage has devolved into crying.

A few minutes later, when he finally reaches the exit, his mood is far from improved by the sight of that bastard, Weiss, standing in front of him like he can do anything about this.

"Well, if it isn't Weiss Noir. That's what this one called you, right?" He gently wiggles the sobbing filly around like a bobble head.

Weiss says nothing for a few moments, before chuckling.

"I'm going to make you an offer you can't refuse," Weiss says.

Redhot just raises a scaled eyebrow.

"Let her go, and I'll tell you how to safely rob Sombra, and then let you go on your merry way," He continues.

The dragon responds. "And if I don't?"

Weiss shrugs. "I can't spare the ponies for an expedition or risk exposure to chase you down and rescue her, and fighting you head on will just prompt you to kill her to free up your claw for combat. So if you don't let her go, I'm going to kill all three of us by detonating the explosives in this tunnel."

Redhot, against all the reason he can muster up, almost sweats at that. "You're not that dumb. You even said it would kill you too, and the pony!" He retorts.

Weiss shakes his head. "You don't get it. If you walk out of this tunnel with that pony, then she's not coming back. By all definitions worth mentioning, she's dead."

"If I fight you and she dies, then that's that. And I might not even win. It's an unacceptable risk, since you might defeat me, and go on to expose the Shadow Realm, and I'll be unable to protect it, since I'll be dead or captured by you. Even if I won, I'd be ruined. Not a single pony in this place would trust me ever again, and I would no longer meet my own standards for leadership, I'll have effectively gambled away my soul for the chance of coming out on top."

"But if I kill all three of us right here and now, then you can't expose the Shadow Realm, and I can't be captured and forced to reveal any key information via torture or magic."

"The Shadow Realm might survive the third option, and the second option risks total defeat."

"So go ahead and pick. Do you choose to live, or do you choose to die?" Weiss says simply.

The two stare at each other for what feels like hours, slitted reptilian eyes into blank, purple crystal.

Redhot can practically feel the exact moment his resolve cracks.

With a snarl, he holds his claw out to the side, and drops the pony held within, who scrambles into the dark tunnels behind them crying.

Weiss smiles underneath his helmet, and ignores the sweat matting his face as he stands aside to let Redhot through. "You chose wisely."

As the dragon slowly stalks past him, glaring back at the unicorn, Weiss continues. "Sombra's arrays can't detect dark magic. He probably had to see you with his own two eyes to catch you. As long as you're using some form of dark magic, you're invisible in the Crystal empire."

That said, Weiss pulls a black crystal out of a pocket on his side with the faint glow of levitation, tossing it to the dragon who catches it.

"That gem will unleash about three hours of dark flames if cracked or scratched."

"Have a nice day, Redhot the dragon. I hope we can do business on more amicable terms in the future," Weiss finishes as the dragon gives him an indecipherable look before flapping their wings and taking off into the distance.

After the dragon is completely gone, I pull my helmet off and through force of will, hold myself back from vomiting all over the floor as I wipe the sweat off my face and return my breathing back to normal.

'Note to self, rig the entrances with actual explosives instead of just lying about it,' I think to myself.

After a while getting everything prepared and everypony together, the Shadow Realm experiences its first evacuation. The ponies look miserable to be abandoning their homes to return to Cell One, and eventually move to the newly completed Cell Three, but Cell Two is a writeoff, now that the only dragon who knows about it is free to expose it.

Of course, telling the dragon that he risked exposing the entire Shadow Realm was a necessary part of my bluff. He probably wouldn't have bought it if he knew I could just collapse the entire section he discovered and move all the ponies elsewhere within a few hours if needed.

I collapse the railway tunnel between the Cells myself, flipping the switch that activates rupture drops in the ceiling, dropping massive stone after stone into the tunnel, in such a way that any invaders inside would be crushed if they were in it.

A few hours after that, the filly responsible for this mess is in my office, along with her parents, who look suitably ashamed of their daughter.

After hearing the whole story, I purse my lips and look the filly in the eye.

Her fucking name follows the exact same convention as every plot-relevant magic user in the show. Twilight Sparkle, Sunset Shimmer, Starlight Glimmer.

And now here's a filly named Eclipse Flash, who just snuck past my guards, released a dragon, and nearly got herself killed because she thinks I'm some cackling dark lord.

Well, I mean, by some definitions, she's right, but she also seems to think that's a strictly bad thing.

"So, then. Eclipse Flash. I'd like for you to speak honestly. Your honesty right now will decide your fate," I say dramatically to set the mood.

Her parents look suitably afraid, but I give them a sly wink that they pick up on immediately.

"You think I'm a villain, that I'm evil, right?" I question her, my glare piercing into her wide eyes.

She looks terrified, before she musters up all the bravery she can.

"Yes. I do. You're just hiding it from everypony until you can turn on us!"

I nod at that. "And nothing I say or do will convince you otherwise?" I ask, just to be sure, before moving forward with my plan.

"Nothing at all, I wont let you trick me like you did everypony else," She demands firmly, making her parents extremely embarrassed at her behavior.

I nod again. "Then I'm afraid you won't like what I'm going to do in response to that."

She looks a bit more afraid.

"I'm going to make you my apprentice. With your parents' permission," The parents in question look shocked at this, but nod in agreement when I turn to look at them.

They don't look nearly as shocked as Eclipse does, however. "No way! I'm not joining you, I just said I know that you're evil!" She shouts at me.

"Exactly. If I'm evil, you need to know every trick I have so you can beat me. And, more importantly, so when you do expose me as the devilish monster I really am, you'll be ready to protect your fellow ponies from anything that comes after me." I explain.

"So I'm prescribing to you this. Once a week, I'll call you to my office, and I'll personally tutor you on the functionality of every component of the Shadow Realm. And between those weeks, I'd like you to periodically write me reports on anything you learn from observing ponies who are enemies, bullies, friendly rivals or even just downright mean to one another. It is my belief that by studying the magic of... foeship..." I grin to myself.

"By studying the magic of foeship, you'll be able to easily dethrone me as the dark lord of this foul realm, without putting anypony in danger, like you did today when you tried to pit one of my enemies against me."

Her parents are trying not to laugh at this, while Eclipse herself finds her wide eyes igniting with inner fire.

"Fine," She belts out, crossing her forelegs.

"But when I grow up and figure out how to beat all your dumb tricks, I'll show everypony exactly who you really are," She glares.

I just smile at this. "I wouldn't have it any other way, my traitorous student."

(Noir Report) Observations of Unicorn Utility in Moments of Frustration [Prestidigitonium]

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Entry #5, Day 35

My latest discovery in the arts of dark magic is a frustrating one. By this, I do not mean that it is difficult, or vexing, but that it is quite literally a spell that by nature requires frustration, and induces it. My independent research also leads me to believe that, sadly, this spell may not be possible for some, who lack an emotion which is evoked by the awareness of change. By combining this "Arcane" emotion with frustration, a spell can be cast which unleashes a sharp burst of force, one able to perform a variety of simple tasks.

It would not be unfair to call it the dark cousin of unicorn levitation. Where levitation is smooth and can be performed with grace, this spell makes itself known in only sharp jerks and even bursts of mundane flame as force becomes friction. The simplistic nature of this spell makes it useful for a variety of mundane tasks. To that end, I have decided to name this spell Prestidigitonium, after the delightful tales of famed magicians from my homeland.

Having learned it during a frustrating instance of practicing my levitation which I have always had, my first thoughts were those of how well it could compare with it's cousin, and I attempted to lift and float various objects using it. These tests failed on most levels, as sustaining this spell is almost impossible, and even if it could be sustained for more than a sharp burst, it's violent wrenching of objects at high speed makes it unsuitable for extended use, unless you enjoy objects being flung at unreasonable speeds.

It is extremely useful to those with quick reflexes, however, as by using flashes of it, one can toss objects about and to where they desire them to be. It takes practice, however, or you'll simply be throwing things at high speed to places you don't want them to be. My bruised face attests to the fate of those who lack an understanding of momentum, the function of mass and velocity, and how it can be preserved between prestidigitations.

One thing to keep in mind however, is that apparently, the recoil from the prestidigitonium spell is applied to the user, and while it can be divided up and placed on any part of the user's body, it's still a concern worth mentioning, as the sudden application of recoil to the body when casting this spell on larger objects can induce injury. Managing the distribution and location of where the stress forces of moving an object are applied is an important component to mastering this spell.

As I'm sure my readers are considering even now, I feel the need to dash their hopes before they decide to experiment. This spell, as far as I understand it, cannot grant a pony the ability to fly. Even with careful management of recoil applied to the hooves, it would take more than four hooves to keep stable and safely manage the repeated heavy impacts. Even if they could, they would need impressive footwork just to sustain the flight, as they would need to kick in tandem with the spellcasting to gain height, and have the stamina to continue doing so for long periods.

Next is it's ability to create fire, as mentioned before. With only a minor alteration to the user's intentions, this spell can crudely influence the temperature of an object, heating or even igniting it, though employing too much power in the spell will simply cause the object to explode instead. This, while desirable in some circumstances, is not an intended part of igniting an object via prestidigitation.

Being a spell whose primary function is to emit various types of force, prestidigitonium is also capable of, with greater focus and power, tempering those bursts of force into the more familiar forms of physical impact, such as cutting an object, piercing it, or even spinning it. Though even my own record for achieving these effects consistently is spotty. I recommend to anyone who attempts it to first learn to prestidigitate an object with force from multiple angles, such as throwing an object with a spin, or crushing an object by applying two halves of force from two angles. By mastering this first, the caster will have less trouble with the precision needed to use prestidigitation to damage objects, without also flinging them about.

In theory, a true master of this spell could instantly perform tasks of phenomenally impressive transformation, as it's only limits are the power and skill of their user. Thoughts that I have had while testing it in various ways include the potential for carving objects, heating metal, changing the color of certain substances, creating puffs of wind or showers of sparks, or lighting and snuffing a room of candles at once.

The spell's flaws are many, from it's invocation of frustration, a thoroughly unenjoyable emotion, to it's requirement that the user know all that they wish done at once, as the spell functions so rapidly. But I assure you, it's potential uses are well worth the risk. Indeed, I hesitate to classify this as dark magic in more than the most academic sense, as the emotion it evokes is one that we all experience often, and one which rarely invokes foul deeds or thoughts in those who are mature and have dealt with frustration often enough. Furthermore, the spell only evokes frustration if your own natural frustration is not up to the task, as all the other spells I have discovered do. Ergo, one who is already frustrated with a task could then use prestidigitonium to aid them in that task, with no negative effects which I can discern.

Perhaps it would be reasonable to name a transmutation spell "Bibbity Bobbity Boo" to complete the set, should I discover one. Then again, that is a bit of a long name, so perhaps not.

I am certain that I'll come up with something suitable, if should I discover such a spell in the future.

(Present Chapter 5): Time-Release Formula

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Deep within the Everfree Forest, a cauldron bubbles within a hollowed out tree. Surrounding the cauldron are all manner of masks, ritual items, and most abundantly, bottles and bottles of potions and large urns of herbs. But the most curious feature of this strange abode is its sole resident, a Zebra, wearing golden rings around her neck and hoof, and with an expression of contentment that few individuals would hold naturally within the Everfree.

Her quiet singing is accompanied by the symphony of rustling brush and the chirping of insects as she slowly meanders around her home with ease and comfort borne of one living there a long time, easily maneuvering around the various floorbound pots to retrieve incomplete unguents and apothecarial goods to place in the cauldron, to create a mixture whose purpose is unknown, but presumably one that the zebra has in mind, making it.

Her careful brewing is interrupted briefly by a knocking at her door. A forceful, but not altogether impatient knock.

"Who is knocking at my door? ~ State your business, I implore," She asks, walking over to her home's entrance and preparing to open it for the visitor.

Said visitor pauses for an oddly long moment, mumbling to themselves, before speaking up. "I seek Zecora. ~ The master of alchemy. ~ I mean you no harm."

Is that Hayku? Zecora opens the door, unsure what to expect. What few expectations she musters up are dashed when she sees a figure that until today, had only been described to her in old, old stories.

The ominous presence is somewhat broken up by the sight of the pony visibly counting out syllables to themselves before speaking.

"Just the mare I seek. ~ Did I interrupt something? ~ Sorry if I did," Weiss says.

Zecora stares for a moment, before waving them in cautiously, choosing her words carefully to not disrespect the powerful unicorn.

"What I brew is fine so far. ~ It can wait for Weiss Noir," She claims, walking inside and closing the door firmly when he enters her home.

Zecora drags out a straw mat for herself and the guest, nervously eyeing them constantly as they wait with an amiable expression. "I beg you, pardon the mess. ~ I haven't cleaned yet, I confess."

As she sits down, and, thankfully, he does too, he starts to state his business. "You can't help but think; ~ What reason I would come here ~ ...But you've heard of me."

"Your homeland has none. ~ No tales about Weiss Noir. ~ We must share a friend?" Weiss probes conversationally.

Zecora shakes her head. "I know the one called Malusi. ~ My mother spoke of you, you see."

"Exiled for theft and treachery, ~ you trusted her, and set her free."

"Though she fought and robbed and bit, ~ you laughed and made a game of it."

Weiss's eyes widen at this, and he quickly musters his words. "She still walks the earth? ~ She made her fountain of youth? ~ Where does she live now?"

Zecora shakes her head sadly. "She spoke of her dearest friend. ~ Fondness held until the end."

"Of vital youth, she was not bereft..."

Zecora remembers the moment sadly. "A potion blew up, no trace was left."

Weiss's formerly hopeful face is forced back into neutrality.

"So she's dead, then," He states the most obvious interpretation of Zecora's words, dropping the act. "A shame."

He shakes his head. "No matter. I have need of a master alchemist. I trust your mother taught you what she knew?"

The zebra nods. "Potions, brews, and alchemy. ~ She left her every skill with me."

"Good," He nods, before his expression becomes unhappy.

"But first, I need to know what day you planned on going to Ponyville this week. There are fates I won't allow the offspring of Malusi to suffer."

Zecora looks confused at this, before looking to her urn of hay. It has been getting fairly low.

Celestia sits on her throne, bored out her mind, and anxious as to the events of the past few weeks.

"-Therefore, I believe the tariffs on gelatin imported from Hissrael shouldn't be decreased, but instead, increased further, we have no need for their goods when-"

It's enough to make her thankful for her mastery of Viceroy Visor's Viewtiful Visage spell, without which it would be much more obvious that she isn't actually paying attention to the latest scheme from her little nobles.

After she had accidentally rolled her eyes at Ambassador Fern two-hundred years ago, she had decided it wasn't feasible to keep a serene expression for all eternity without a touch of magical assistance, thousands of years of practice on poker nights or not.

'Ugh. I liked it better when it was called As-Nags. Saddle Arabians really knew how to hold-em.' Celestia thinks to herself as the pony in front of her rabbles on.

"-after all, even measly farmers can manage something as simple as increasing production of plants that are suitable substitutes for their highly unethical-"

Oh dear. She better take care of this before continuing the rest of her internal monologue.

"Chancellor Bitter Pill, I do hope you are not disparaging the practices of our dear friends, the Great Snakes of Hissrael," Celestia chides lightly.

"It would be unfair to call their methods unethical, when they are the foremost experts in medicine and lacusurgy in the world. Even a princess needs a touch-up now and again, as my visit to their facilities last year can attest to."

"Their work in the, and I use this word with the greatest of confidence, ethical treatment of their donors and patients has revolutionized the field of carnivorous products and thaumaturgically aided catch-and-release hunting across the globe."

"That is to imply, Chancellor, that I am afraid I will have to reject your proposal on numerous grounds. The increase of tariffs on byproducts from Hissrael would cause great strain on the medical and confectionery industries, which would of course make difficult the continuation of the basal remedium cost act as the price of producing most medicines is made far greater."

The Chancellor is, against every bit of reason, logic, and over one-thousand years of Celestia's historic skill at picking apart these scams on record, stunned at her swift and brief dismantling of his proposal.

When he just stands there like a rube instead of getting the hay out of her court, Celestia's serene face doesn't express her displeasure sufficiently, forcing her to use polite words to finish the job.

"You have my permission to leave, Chancellor, and I hope your day finds you well," She finishes gracefully, the flushed pony performing an act that "commoners" might call "running" as he vacates the room.

Finally, the last pony enters as the former one leaves. Celestia may have found it odd that this pony explicitly requested she be seen last, but supposed that it was not too unreasonable a demand at the time.

The cloaked figure slowly walks up to her throne, and when she speaks, Celestia's breath freezes in her throat.

"Hello, Princess Celestia," They nod, pulling down their hood.

"S-"

"Sunset? Is it really you?" Celestia says, with a soft tone seemingly intended to not make the phantasm before her disappear.

The unicorn shakes her head. "No. Well, not exactly."

The unicorn pauses, trying to gather her words appropriately for the ruler of Equestria. "I am Sunset Shimmer, but not the one you know," She explains.

"I come from a time several years in the future, where Equestria, and indeed, this entire world, has been destroyed, left a barren wasteland with no life."

Celestia is shocked at this, searching them for any deception, but finding none. "But how can this be so? How could this have come to pass?"

Sunset looks nervous at this, and pulls out a scroll, one stamped in purple wax with a symbol that makes Celestia's annoyance rise. An emblem shaped like a horseshoe, with two small devil horns attached to the top, as though it were a headband.

"I was given this list of things that I can't tell anyone, and, well, that's on the list. All I can do is ask you, have you taken on a new student, and has she become the bearer of the Element of Magic, alongside her five friends who now bear the other Elements in a town called Ponyville?"

Celestia balks at this, but nods in response to her question, making Sunset sigh in relief.

"Then the horrific future I come from cannot come to pass in this timeline."

Celestia finds herself so very, deeply confused and wanting to understand just what is going on.

"Is there anything you can tell me Sunset?"

She nods. "I can tell you what happened to bring me here."

She didn't understand. How could this have happened in such a short time? The minute she came through the portal, she felt a horrible, yawning emptiness from the world around her.

The castle she entered into was nothing but ruined crystal, with no traces to indicate that any ponies lived here.

It took her a day before she finally accepted that, for some reason, the portal back to the other world was not functioning at all, and that it had become inert the moment she left it. The magic in the land was too atrophied and broken to sustain its enchantments. It took her two days to realize that there was nothing left alive in this world, everything boiled and baked by the sun, which had been sitting in the sky unmoving since she came here.

It took her a week before she could no longer find food in this wasteland.

It took two weeks for her body to weaken to the point where she could not endure traveling any further.

And on the third week, she had been found by Weiss Noir, an individual who had survived this horrible world's fate by virtue of being sealed away the entire time it had been happening.

He explained to the starving Sunset that he had only two real options for her. He could give her a swift end, or, (and he explained that he really wasn't a fan of the second idea) do something extraordinarily dumb that may save her life.

She chose the latter.

When she did, he looked vaguely annoyed, but had soon dragged her into the melted slush of the frozen north, to a flooded cavern that he had dried with gouts of black fire.

Inside the cavern, in a secret room hidden away, he revealed the Time Machine to her, and explained his displeasure at using the machine for any reason, even as he wrote out a detailed list of things she both needed to know, and that she must never reveal.

By this point, she was too delirious to care or really listen to his ranting, desperate after the pain of hunger and the despair of seeing Equestria's cruel fate had crushed her former ambitions into dust.

He ordered her to make her way to Celestia, the one pony who both knew her and would be able to help her afterwards to determine where exactly it is that she ended up after using his faulty Time Machine.

He had a smug expression as he used a marker to draw the word "Hope!" on the side of the machine in English instead of Equish, something her dazed mind only vaguely noted as being unusual after years on the other side of the portal that led to the human world.

"Sunset Shimmer," He said, after manually shoving her into the cockpit of the machine and dialing it to take her to the Prime Timeline during the current era.

"There is a sizable chance that in the future, relatively speaking, events will occur that might prevent this timeline from ever existing, if time travel works that way. If that happens, you yourself may cease to be as well. I don't have a solution to preventing that here. This isn't your salvation, it's a bandaid. It could be years, or it could be tomorrow. Find Celestia, if there's a single pony on this planet who has had the time to crack the nut on paradox management, it's an immortal like her. And if she doesn't have a solution... Enjoy your time as well as you can, leave no regrets behind... And eat a ton of food."

"This thing is pretty inaccurate too. You might end up a few years behind where I'm aiming. If the world doesn't look like a shithole, crack that scroll I gave you and get to reading, because I don't want you pissing away the Prime timeline with more butterflies than absolutely necessary."

And those were his last words to Sunset Shimmer before the world beyond the cockpit of the Time Machine faded away, and transformed into an expanse of apple trees.

Celestia takes all of this in stoically, though all she wants to do is embrace her former student and not let go until it is time to lower the sun.

'I see. So Weiss awakens to find a world in which he cannot vex and taunt me with my mistakes, and settles for the next best thing.' She can't help but think cynically.

"It seems, Sunset, that even among the ponies I could have been in other times, I have still failed you in every respect," Celestia says morosely.

"I am afraid I have not spearheaded many advancements in the arcane arts of time manipulation, despite my extreme age."

Sunset dips her head at this. "Then what will become of me, Princess?"

Celestia stands up from her throne, unable to withstand the cold authority of sitting above her former student a second longer as she walks down and next to them, laying a wing over Sunset Shimmer's back.

"If there is anything that can be done, then I will have it done. Even if it means dealing with him."

"If I know Weiss Noir, he has given you a password to ensure his compliance in this era. He loves to hear his ridiculous stories cited to him too much to do otherwise," Celestia states with confidence, surprising Sunset a bit as, yes, he actually did give her a strange password that he claimed would make him trust and help her...

"If I must go there myself and demand it of him, you will receive not only my focus, and that of those under my authority, but his as well."

She continues with something to lighten the mood a bit. "And a few years from now, when we are all laughing about this together, you can help me win over the Sunset Shimmer of this era as well when she returns," She smirks at her now-embarrassed former student, who inadvertently proved with her existence that Sunset is likely to make a return in this world as well.

Celestia has a strange thought for a moment, which she can't help but voice. "Did you say he wrote in... English? You could read his writing?"

Sunset nods at that. "Yes, he had written the word "Hope" on the machine, but it was in English, I don't know how he knew that language, I've only ever seen it used on the other side of the portal."

Celestia balks at this. Perhaps Sunset could read... That white book.

The one she had found in the ruins of the Shadow Realm alongside an ornate, unreadable copy of what she believed to be the Grimoire Noir, Weiss's famous primer on black magic.

Celestia then has a second odd thought which temporarily quashes the first one. "Sunset, you said you had arrived in a Time Traveling machine, yes?"

Sunset nods at that once more.

"Where exactly did you leave it?" Celestia queries.

Sunset shrugs. "In the middle of some sort of apple tree forest. I assumed nobody would find it there in the middle of nowhere."

Celestia feels a chill run down her spine for a reason she can't quite figure out.

A week after the events of today, in Sweet Apple Acres, the crusaders peek out over the edge of the weird cart they found and hopped inside of moments ago, spotting themselves walking up to another one of the weird cart. This prompts them to come to a realization as the other versions of them explore the device, and then accidentally activate it when Scootaloo falls inside and hits a lever.

They turn to each other, and, as if reading each other's minds, shout in tandem.

"Cutie Mark Crusaders Time Travelers, Yaaay!"

Celestia shakes her head. "Well, no matter. You have gone through a terrible trial, Sunset, wherever you choose to take your path from here, know that you have my support."

"But before any more of that business can be dealt with, I require that you accompany me to the royal doctor. You should know better than to consider apples alone a cure for malnutrition of your severity."

Chiding complete, the pair exit Celestia's throne room, a reunion years in the making, gratefully achieved years earlier.

Zecora finds herself uncomprehending of what exactly it is Weiss intends to do, considering that most of his rant had been about some sort of disrespect being inflicted on her.

This was an odd thought to Zecora, who honestly hadn't noticed. Being the daughter of Zebrica's Thiefwitch Malusi hadn't afforded her the best treatment among her people, and the strange cowardly behavior of Ponyville when she had visited each month had been a step up from that.

She wonders if the ponies think her ears are for show, as she hears loud whispering coming from a building nearby, which she looks over to. She spots one of them looking right at her, but they quickly duck down.

Shrugging, she decides to check a few spots for Sleepy Shoots, the plants sent into dormancy by ponies constantly walking over them being a valuable component in some of her potions.

Digging around, she doesn't find any this time, and eventually decides to simply leave when she unfortunately isn't able to corner some stammering shopkeeper to sell her some hay. A not altogether uncommon occurrence.

Looks like she'll be eating mushroom stew this month.

Surprisingly, it seems several ponies had been following her to her home out of sight. Something that hasn't happened to her since her time living in Zebrica.

"Applebloom?" The orange one says to the small one, before shouting further as she runs directly into a patch of Poison Joke.

"Applebloom, get over here right now!" They continue, dragging the small child behind them into the flowers.

Oh dear. Zecora had better take care of this before continuing the rest of her internal monologue.

"You pony folk, you must beware! ~ Those flowers' jokes are most unfair!" She warns, making them all scowl at her, except for the child, who actually looks down to heed her warning.

The orange one shouts at her, even as she's walking away. "You keep your creepy mumbo jumbo to yourself, y'hear?!"

Zecora opts not to respond to the bait, simply walking home. And taking an alternate route there to keep those ponies from following her and ruining her house of course.

The next night, Twilight Sparkle finds herself tossing and turning in fitful sleep as the day's memories run through her unconscious mind, and she recalls how everypony spoke of the Zebra and her evil curses.

When she awakes blearily, she walks over to her mirror to begin the day, spotting her messy bedhead.

"Maybe Zecora cursed my hair," She chuckles, combing it back into place.

When she sees what really happened to her, her amusement ceases.

"Or she cursed my horn!" Twilight shouts, looking at the now sagging and softened appendage poking from her forehead, spotted with blue spots.

Minutes later, she's scrambling through her library, turning out book after book searching for a solution.

"No... No! None of these books have an answer! Ugh! There has to be a rational explanation for this, an allergic reaction, a virus?!"

Before Spike can speak up with his own potential answer, she hears a loud, angry knocking at the door.

"Ugh, who could that possibly be at a time like this?" Twilight says, walking over to the door.

"I'm sorry, but I'm very busy right now, could you..." Twilight trails off.

The Master Sword teleports in front of Twilight automatically, but with her horn in the condition that it is, she fails to levitate it into her grip and it clatters to the floor.

Weiss ignores this, stepping forward with his draconic arms at his sides and an honest sneer on his face.

"I would have words with you, Twilight," He says, as Twilight backs up fearfully.

Spike jumps in at this point. "Hey, you stay away from Twilight!"

Weiss almost smirks at that, before levitating the dragon out of his way without breaking eye contact.

Twilight glares at him after seeing him manhandle her assistant. "What do you want, Weiss?"

Weiss shakes his head. "Simple. You don't believe that you've been cursed, I don't believe you've been cursed, and since meeting Zecora, certain information that has come to light has left me disgusted with your town's behavior towards her."

He clenches and unclenches his claw, visibly resisting the urge to perform an act of intimidation he'll regret.

"So you're going to do something for me that you're already willing to do. I simply want the process streamlined. You're going to go to Zecora for a cure, you're going to stop your friends from breaking into her home and accosting her, and then you're going to personally disperse every rumor about that Zebra that you discover to be untrue."

Twilight can't help but be weirded out by the villain's behavior. Why would he care what Ponyville thinks about Zecora? Why would Zecora have a cure for this?

Taking her pause for hesitation, Weiss continues.

"And if you don't, then Spike calling you Twilight Wiggle is going to be the least of your concerns."

Spike has to hold back sniggers at this, prompting Twilight to glare back at him for a moment.

"Let me assure you one last time. This is not one of my games. There are no tricks that I have hidden among my words, no truths I have spoken in this meeting that hold hidden meanings."

"I trust that your rationality and reason will win out over prejudice and fearmongering in this situation. And no, I don't really care if you tell your friends about this discussion." Weiss finishes, before exploding into smoke that leaves Twilight and Spike coughing loudly.

"Ith ath thuth!" Pinkie Pie shouts, bursting through the door with a swollen, blue-spotted tongue, followed by the rest of Twilight's friends.

"A thirst? Ahuhuhuh, I guess that WOULD lead to dry mouth!" Spike guffaws at Pinkie, and then even moreso at the rest of them.

Twilight questions her with concern. "What happened Pinkie?"

"Thecora, the puth ath curth on ne!" Pinkie explains, sputtering with every word.

Spike, in the line of fire, complains. "Say it, don't spray it Pinkie!"

Rainbow Dash crashes into a wall, her wings poking out of her chest instead of her back making her continued ability to fly somewhat impressive, despite its clumsiness.

"Ow! What she's-" She crashes into another wall.

"Ow! -trying to say is, Zecora slapped us with a curse!" She finishes before smashing into the floor, dazed.

Rarity blows a few of her massive, lengthy dreadlocks out of her face. "I'm in agreement, I'm afraid."

Twilight and Spike look at Rarity's new do' with no small amount of shock.

A tiny Applejack stands on a fully grown, blue-spotted Applebloom's back, shouting in a squeaky tone as she hops onto a table. "When I say I told you so Twilight, boy do I mean I told you so!"

"We've been cursed!" She finishes.

Twilight looks confused as she spots the two remaining individuals in the room. "But Gilda and Fluttershy look perfectly alright?"

Rainbow nods upside down from her place wedged inside a bookshelf. "Yeah, those two look just fine!"

Twilight decides to pose a question to the other two, to make sure of their health. "Are you two alright?"

Fluttershy shakes her head, while Gilda refuses to look anyone in the eye.

"Would you care to tell us what's wrong?" Twilight presses.

Gilda growls oddly, before speaking in a svette, silk-coated knockout of a voice that would make Jessica Rabbit envious. "No, not really."

Fluttershy takes that as her cue to speak in a baritone low enough to confuse whales. "We don't wanna talk about it."

Spike can take no more of this, and falls to the ground, helpless with laughter.

"This is hilarious! I mean, look at everyone, we've got Hairity, Rainbow Crash, Appletini, Spitty Pie, Flutterguy, Girlda, Applebloomed, and Twilight Wiggle!"

"Ha ha ha," Twilight laughs sarcastically. "Spike, knock it off. We need to figure out a solution to this!" Twilight grimaces.

Rainbow groans, plastered to the ceiling. "I think we'll find a cure to this curse at Zecora's place."

Twilight growls. "It's not a curse!"

Applejack nods. "We'll go to Zecora's place and make her get rid of this hex!"

Twilight feels a migraine coming on, she just knows it. "It's not a hex either!"

While everyone else is arguing, Applebloom looks disappointed in herself. "This is all my fault. If I hadn't followed Zecora in the first place, none of this would have happened. I just gotta fix this," She says miserably, slowly plodding out of the room.

Applejack spots this, mumbling to herself. "Now where does she think she's going?" Applejack tries to jump over to catch her, but Applebloom's longer legs take her out of Applejack's reach, leaving her to plop to the floor as the age-altered filly exits the library.

At Applejack's behest when the others finally spot her, they group up and make the trek into the forest to find Applebloom and, most likely Zecora with her.

Rarity speaks up at the sight of Zecora's hut. "My, what a ghastly abode."

As they approach, Twilight looks uncomfortable at the sight of Zecora's odd decor, and of the Zebra herself singing in a foreign language to herself as she tends to the bubbling pot in the middle of the room.

"Now do you believe us, Twi?" Applejack states simply, from atop Rarity's head.

"Frightening masks, confusing incantations, a cauldron full of mysterious liquids?" Twilight asks rhetorically with a sigh. 'Not to mention whatever relationship she has with Weiss...'

"Everything does seem to indicate that Zecora is... bad. Or... what if Zecora is just making some stew?" She states hopefully.

Zecora takes this opportunity to add some words of her own, as she tests the fluid inside the cauldron with a hooftip. "I think its heat now should excel. ~ In solving the pony problem well."

Applebloom looks exhausted as she drags in a small pot of something which Zecora adds to the mix.

"Or maybe she's making something much worse..!" Twilight groans at Zecora's words, trying to figure out how that could be interpreted as something other than a threat.

"She's makin' Applebloom do her dirty work!" Applejack shouts.

"We gotta get her outta there asap!" Applejack continues, grabbing two of Rarity's dreadlocks and snapping them like reins, prompting the unicorn to jolt forward in shock, before bumping into Twilight, who blocks the way.

"No, something about this is off," Twilight says suddenly.

She thinks back to Weiss's words, and how he described almost this exact situation coming to pass.

"This isn't a curse, and there's one way to prove it. By acting rationally," She says firmly, turning around, and knocking on the door instead of letting the others bash it down.

The rest of her friends practically squeal in fear at her ruining their element of surprise, before Applebloom opens the door.

"Oh, hey girls!" She says happily.

Zecora peaks over her shoulder with a faint smile. "Ahh, it is the ones that we await. ~ Come in, your woes, I'll soon abate."

Applebloom nods happily, confusing them all. "Yeah, I helped Zecora make a cure fer our problem, It's just an herbal bubble bath!"

Twilight looks confused. "If the cure is just an herbal remedy, then what's the cause?"

Zecora takes the opportunity to explain, elaborating on the warning she had given previously. "It is as I warned you there. ~ The leaves of blue are most unfair."

"So can somepony explain it in plain talk?" Applejack asks.

Applebloom decides to fill the part. "It's those flowers we were all standin' in. They're called Poison Joke, because they play little jokes on you!"

Applejack deadpans. "Little, huh?"

They all laugh at this.

Applebloom gets their attention. "Now come on everypony. That cauldron's the biggest pot Zecora's got, so we'll have to do it one at a time. I hate to say it, but bein' old sucks! I been tired the whole time!"

The laugh even louder at that, but before long, they all take a dip in the pot, one at a time, and begin the process of curing themselves of the affliction caused by the Poison Joke.

As Twilight dries off, she turns to Zecora. "Zecora, we need to talk. I think some ponies have been getting funny ideas about you that need to be cleared up."

When Zecora comprehends what Twilight is saying, and spots the sheepish looks of her friends, she becomes quietly grateful.

When Zecora returns home after a very exciting day in Ponyville, she spots Weiss sitting on a log nearby.

He speaks after a moment in silent thought. "Your day was good, yes? ~ I did everything I could. ~ I hope it was enough."

Zecora nods at that. "I know not what you have done, ~ but among my friends, I think you're one."

Weiss nods back with relief, and stops speaking in prose long enough to talk from the heart. "If at any time you need anything, any request at all, just contact me."

"My honor demands I do nothing less for my best friend's only daughter. What whispering embers of the Shadow Realm live on through me, they are your ally."

Zecora pauses for a moment to think about that, before speaking plainly as she shakes her head with closed eyes. "There is nothing now which I require, ~ if that should change, you'll hear my desire."

When she opens them again, Weiss is gone, as though he had never been there at all.

Dear Princess Celestia,
My friends and I all learned an important lesson this week: Prejudice can drive ponies to dark places, whether they are on the receiving or delivering end. And if you give in to superstition and rumors, you'll find even genuinely bad ponies standing up to call you out on it. There are few things that hurt as badly as someone assuming the worst of you, and there is nothing worse than missing the opportunity to make a new friend because you believed tall tales about the content of their character.

Your faithful student,
Twilight WiggleSparkle

(Weiss Report..?) Color Commentary

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Entry Number Two, Day Twenty Three

To be fucking frank, I kinda wish I hadn't just figured out how to make guns. But whatever, the idea's in my head, and I'm just going to have to be careful not to let this particular genie out of it's bottle. I tested it too, it fucking works, I mean, if you give the tanks enough juice anyway. I should probably elaborate. Turns out, if you grow Royal Crystals inside a sealed vessel, the pressure rises. Pretty standard, but the energy in and energy out are way out of whack.

What exactly is a "gun?"

It's like a tiny cannon. They're a thing in the human world, tiny cannonballs fired fast enough to act like arrows.

Why would that concern him so? My own artificers have attempted such in the past, but ponies shrug them off if they lack the mass to overcome a pony's natural fields.

I don't think he knew that. Guns are pretty terrifying in the human world.

Water in nature isn't meant to reach the pressures I can put it at inside a thick graphene-lined canister, and a big boom combined with a pellet is otherwise known as a gun. Or a pipe bomb. Look, I'm not a gunsmith, I just know that I had to burn a bunch of prototypes that I was able to whip up, namely because they fucking worked.

I mean, there's a ton of other uses for this, but I'm too fucking spooked to push them to my R&D dudes because while making a freeze-ray by swapping the water for gasses would be cool, it's basically just making a gun without a bullet, so if I started using those, then someone's going to figure out the trick in a few years.

Didn't cannons exist back when this was written? Can't exactly let the genie out of the bottle when the bottle's already empty.

Indeed they were, but based on these later entries, he had been isolated from the wider world for at least a month before my sister and I found him. He may have assumed we were too primitive to have them at the time.

Really, it looks like there's only one call to make. I'm going to sit on these blueprints and work out a way to create and destroy them on demand, using nothing but my own abilities. I'll probably disguise it as a spell or some shit. If I wasn't so fucking hype about trying to make a respectable book, I might put a fake spell in the Grimoire Noir to throw people off further, but I'm not going to use my baby like that.

Honestly, this speculation is pretty pointless, considering guns aren't even useful for the one individual I want dead. Sombra's dumb smokey smoke thing would probably fuck up any of my plans to just shoot him dead. The best use for it would be to force him to assume his freaky-beaky shadow form, so I can use other stuff to fuck up his day. Or just run away as fast as possible. Probably a better plan, honestly.

He's a bit of a coward, isn't he?

He may be Equestria's biggest coward. I should tell you the story of when I first met him someday.

Entry Number Three, Day Twenty Three

Oh Christ, that's a bit fucked up. Looks like, yes, Crystal Ponies have the actual properties of crystal. I got a hair sample from one of them, and Royal Crystal Growth absolutely works on it. Not sure if it would work on a living subject, but fuck testing that. I'm not exactly eager to accidentally turn my dudes into a bunch of The Fly-esque Cronenbergs because I tried my hand at some kind of Royal Steroid.

Cronenberg?

I think it's supposed to be a reference to a human movie in which a human was turned into a disgusting monster, but the author's name in the human world I went to is Cronus Dirge, not Cronenberg.

One question answered, but several more evoked... It seems Weiss was unaware that transformative magics are as trivially reversed as they are performed.

Ugh. Speaking of potential Cronenbergs, I hope Dr. Real fucking listened to me when I told him to only clone parts of the dragon tissue samples I collected. The minute a brain gets grown, I'm suddenly dealing with ethical quandaries that I so fucking do not want to deal with right now. You inform one scientist how cloning works, and he gives you a look like Frankenstein if he found a bulk deal on right legs at a lightning bolt store.

Does every other word that comes out of his mouth have to be a curse word?

Only when he's not trying to impress someone. Oh dear. I might owe him a small apology. It might be a bit late though, all things considered.

Hmm?

Well, you smell gratuitous amounts of dragon blood on a pony and you have to make some assumptions about where it came from. Ones I unfortunately made.

It's going to be so fucking cool if it works though, This levitation magic is so bullshit. It doesn't even come with the emotion-boosting that dark magic comes with. Light magic sucks ass, and I'm hype to get some hands back. The fact that they're dragon hands is just the icing on the cake. Dragons are cool, I need hands, and dragons are seriously cool. It's the most basic math imaginable.

It seems Weiss enhanced the truth when he explained why he had attached those limbs to himself. I believe his exact words were; "Now the power of the noble dragon race is within me, and with it, their supreme greed is mine to command. I am fire, I am death!"

That's hilarious. It's also another reference. That exact line about fire and death is from The Hobbit, I think?

Indeed. It seems a lot of my former assumptions about his origins were wrong. But I have to admit, the idea of him being from the human world's future is a far fetched conclusion to reach.

I don't think he is from the human world. Or at least not the one on the other side of the portal.

Well, the important thing is, Weiss despises being outsmarted, and I feel this will be a very enjoyable thing to wave in his face when he starts getting uppity.

Are you sure we should be taunting him about this? He seemed to take keeping this book a secret rather seriously.

Trust me Sunset, he would be offended if we didn't.

(Past Chapter 6): Wrath of the Gods: Part 1

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The first time I met the royal sisters, I came closer to death than ever before.

Eclipse Flash is walking down the tunnels to her new home after today's lesson with Weiss, where he explained how that giant black fire in the newly renamed "Hidden Palace", the first Cell that had been constructed, now given an official name, her parents almost grounded her after the dragon incident, for getting them everypony kicked out of their old homes in Cell Two.

For whatever reason, though, Weiss suggested that she had been more than punished by what had happened. If he thinks pity is going to win her over, though, then he really doesn't understand how annoying it is when somepony pities you.

As she walks along, she spots a sign carved into the wall. "Duel Monsters Tournament Today Only! Tunnel 13-B Center Stadium."

Well, it's not like she had anything else to do today after her lesson with that moron. Ergo, she'll check it out.

Walking down the tunnels, she reaches a central area where she can spot the tunnel in question, and make her way to the Center Stadium from there.

The "Center Stadium", as it's so aptly named, is a big empty space dug out near the crossroads where the ponies of Hidden Palace can host small gatherings and events, Eclipse remembers from her brief study.

Looking around, it seems the normally empty center of the stadium has been filled with some huge square box with a grid etched into it, and some stairs leading up to booths on either side. A bunch of ponies of varying ages are hanging around the box thing, talking and trading cards between them on hastily assembled tables.

Two ponies that aren't trading, however, are a scruffy looking red colt, and an older looking blue colt who are arguing. Both of which have odder-than-normal hairstyles.

The red one looks especially upset as Eclipse approaches, shouting something she catches the tail end of.

"-and my bro helped me figure out this deck, so you need to stop badmouthing it, Ok?!" The red one says.

The blue one laughs at that. "Yes, a deck constructed by a Hauler and his little-kid brother. I suppose that would explain why your deck is inferior compared to one designed by actual mathematicians. I would look forward to trouncing you in the tournament, but with a deck as awful as yours, it seems to my dismay that you won't even make it past the preliminaries."

They shake their head mock-sadly, before the red colt tackles him to the ground, and they begin to scuffle physically before their friends pull them apart.

"Jerryrig, he ain't worth it! Save it for the tournament!" The colt's yellow-coated friend says, pulling him back until he calms down.

The Blue pony and Jerryrig glare at each other with a few bruises and one bloodied lip in particular, before Jerryrig breaks free of his friend's grip to speak. "Fine. You hear that Cabal?! I'll finish this on the field, and you'll see just what my deck can do!"

The thus-named Cabal retorts, wiping his face clean with a handkerchief from his saddlebags. "Yes, I'll see all the nothing it can do. I hope you've enjoyed playing Duel Monsters, because after I destroy you, you'll be too humiliated to shuffle a deck, much less show your face in the Dueling club."

Eclipse is shocked at this. They just got finished pounding each other to the ground, and they're still going to play some dumb card game together?

She's never seen two ponies who obviously hate each other's guts act like this before.

She supposes that this must be what Weiss was talking about, and pulls out a book to start her research as she walks into the stands, taking a seat near the front.

As two ponies completely unrelated to her current object of study step up into the box, and everyone else shuffles into the stands, a bizarre tan pony with a mustache pops out from somewhere, with a cutie mark of two checkered flags crossed over one another.

With a surprisingly large leap, the pony flips up onto the edge of the Field, pulling out a crystal that they shout into to amplify their voice.

"Good afternoon fillies and gentlecolts and welcome to Duel Monsters! Today's tournament has been declared a Super Expert Tournament, this means that during moments of unsure rulings and acts whose logical portent is sound but which cannot yet be reflected by the Field's automatic processing and calculations, I, will act as referee! Me! Mr. Referee!"

"The rules are simple, the first pony to have their life points reduced to zero, or who lose the ability to play, draw, and activate any card is the loser, and must submit one Duel Monsters card to the winner, for keeps!"

He looks between the two ponies in the Field Booths and nods exuberantly.

"Duelists, are you ready?! Then, it's time to duel!" Mr. Referee shouts, swiping down his hoof and leaping off the Field as it erupts with powerful illusion magic, constructing the illusion of a grassy field, and a block of numbers above both Duelists, and their names as well.

The filly with a bright cyan coat, a makeup brush for a cutie mark, and a bird's nest of a mane, Powder Keg, and the grey-coated, green-maned stallion with a black pillar for a mark, Obsidian Obelisk.

The illusion of a giant coin is thrown into the air, flipping around before it lands on the side with the rightmost pony, Powder Keg.

"Oh goodie! It's my turn first!" She says, hopping a short jig as she draws a card and squints at her hand.

Eclipse mostly decides to tune out the duel while she considered why those two ponies were acting the way they were, but she's interrupted when Jerryrig's friend, who had apparently opted to sit next to her, speaks up. "I haven't seen you around before, you a Duelist, or just interested in the game? The name's Oil Slick, by the way."

Groaning internally at the now-required social activity, Eclipse figures that she's not going to be left alone until she answers the yellow stallion.

"I didn't have anything better to do, so I thought I'd check it out. I'm more interested in those two ponies who were going at it earlier, though. What's their deal?" She says, realizing she could get valuable information out of this pony.

"Oh yeah, those two. Cabal Counter thinks just because his dad's helping make the game that it somehow makes him better at it than the rest of us. And Jerryrig's awfully fond of his brother, Heavy Hauler. His bro's super into his new job for the boss, so he hasn't had much time to hang out, but on a whim, he bought a bunch of cards, thinking it would be a good hobby for him and Jerry to share, and well, that's the story."

"Hauler's a real monster at the game though, none of my friends can beat him at it! Jerry can every once in a while, but I think Hauler just lets him win."

His piece said, the stallion returns his gaze to the game, which had started to heat up since it began.

"So, um, yeah! I'll just activate my trap card, Gunpowder Plot, destroying all monsters on the field, and that means I get to play two more rubble scavengers, since I blew up the one rubble scavenger I had on the field!" Powder Keg says, giggling as the field erupts in simulated explosives from buried barrels of gunpowder, destroying Obelisk's Stoneskin Warhorse and Awakened Gargoyle, while giggling ponies in rusty cloaks crawl out of the rubble of the field, taking their place on Powder's side.

Obsidian's stern face doesn't change, but it's clear that he's nervous.

Eclipse turns to the pony who had been talking to her before. "You guys sure take this game pretty seriously, huh?"

They shrug slightly. "It's something to do. If you can't fight, or you're too young to work, or you just aren't good at something we need, you have to find something to do with all of the extra time."

"Otherwise, we're all just waiting around for bad news."

Eclipse pales a bit at this, but nods.

After a long time quietly watching, several more games pass after the one Obsidian managed to eke out a victory in, Duelist after Duelist, even Oil Slick himself had been entered for a match, though he lost to some mare named "Heartthrob".

She pulls out her book, having studied the matches enough that she feels confident in eking out something from this grudge match between Cabal and Jerry.

Mr. Referee turns between the two glaring colts. "Duelists, are you ready?! Then, it's time to duel!"

Cabal ends up going first, which makes him smirk as though it were a much larger achievement than it actually was. "I'll place two cards facedown, and end my turn."

A few more turns of similarly mundane or unassuming moves and quiet inner monologing from both sides, and the field is stocked with cards and both players are inching towards their first major plays.

"I sacrifice Fluff Soldier and Lost Swordsmare, to summon my new monster, Swordsmare Heiress, with a whopping one-thousand five-hundred attack points!" Jerry shouts.

The holographic images of the fuzzy looking pony with giant flowers for armor and the white-robed pony with a katana disappear in a flash of light, while at the same time, a larger version of the one with the sword rises up from the floor, wearing thick golden armor and a tiara, growling with their sword held in their teeth as the upper half of their helmet flashes with light.

"I then activate the spell card Metal Lance, changing your Cruel Armor from defense to attack mode, and preventing it from being switched back!"

The Heiress suddenly obtains a giant lance, which it uses to crash into the hollow suit of armor's shield, shattering it into pieces and throwing it back with a groan.

Eclipse makes sure to jot down how, yes, the two duelists are still visibly displeased. So it's not the game being enjoyable that's making them play in spite of their animosity.

"It doesn't make any sense..." She says to herself.

Slick chimes in, answering what he thinks is her question. "Oh, that's an easy one, Jerry's Swordsmare Heiress has a special effect that prevents trap cards from going off on the same turn she's summoned, even if one of Cabal's facedown cards was a trap card, he wouldn't be able to use it. It's a smart play, considering how many of them he's been using this game."

Eclipse shakes her head. "No, not that, the fact that they're even playing a game in the first place. If they really don't like each other, I would think they wouldn't want to be sitting down to play cards at all."

Slick thinks about that for a moment, as Cabal plays a card that lets him stop Jerry's Heiress from attacking.

"How else would they settle this? I mean, Jerry might have gotten mad enough to try, but it's not like beating up Cabal would solve anything. They have to settle it in the duel. That's where one of them's going to get proven right or wrong. Jerry and his bro, or Cabal's math buddies. One of them is going to come out on top, and the other one will be humiliated," He explains, making Eclipse ponder his words.

The Duel continues, before entering the final stretch, the showdown.

"You're a fool Jerryrig! This is it, now, with Cruel Armor, Cruel Soldier, and Cruel Blade in my graveyard, I can activate my ultimate gambit, Chilling Gasp!"

The ponies in the stands gasp at this, but Eclipse instead watches Jerry's reaction, shock and despair. Maybe Slick has a point about humiliation after all, he looks way too invested in what seems to be something bad about to happen in the game.

The grassy field turns into a frozen set of ruins, spikes of ice jutting from the ground.

"By banishing those three cards in my graveyard with this spell, I can change the field type to the Hateful Ice Field, and by sacrificing my three token monsters I can summon a monster straight from your nightmares! Come forth, Elder Windego!"

The block that appears alongside the new monster displays its attack points and defense points. The number is higher than anything Eclipse has seen on the field so far, implying that this may be it for Jerry.

"So what will you do now, Jerryrig? It doesn't matter if your Swordsmare Heiress or your Silver Prince attack, my monster's special effect would still freeze them solid! I hope you're as excited as I am, because your next turn is also going to be your last! Take comfort in the fact that your malformed deck is going to be beaten here, by the best deck there is!"

Cabal laughs in a way that absolutely does not suggest sound mental health to Eclipse.

Jerryrig's expression, though, gives Eclipse some pause. The colt is just staring at his deck, and for a moment, she wonders if he's thinking about conceding.

Well, whatever he's thinking about so hard, it seems he's done thinking now.

"It's not about how good my deck is Cabal, that's what you don't get. It's about having fun, and enjoying the hobby!" Jerryrig claims firmly.

"My bro helped me make this deck, so I'm going to trust that it's got exactly what I need to turn this around!"

That said, he reaches over, and swipes the top card off of his deck, drawing it dramatically.

Jerry grins like he's opening Hearth's Warming gifts. "Your Windego might freeze any monster that attacks it, but it can't survive without its frozen den!"

"What you've underestimated is the care between my Silver Prince and Swordsmare Heiress. When both of them are on the field, that caring is proven, through this card, Magic Kingdom!"

He flips the card in his hand around, revealing it as he slams it into the table.

"When played, no facedown trap cards can prevent its activation, and the field type is changed to the Magic Kingdom field-type!"

"And without your Hateful Ice Field..!" Jerry continues.

Cabal actually double-takes as the ice on the field is blown away, revealing red carpets and golden chandeliers in their place.

"Your Windego is no more!" Jerry finishes, before thrusting a hoof out as Cabal's Elder Windego erupts into light and disperses with a mournful wail.

"Silver Prince, Swordsmare Heiress, attack Cabal's Lifepoints directly!"

The two armored ponies rush towards Cabal, swinging their blades and making the field erupt in light, as he wails about how impossible it is.

Cabal's Lifepoints rush towards that loss-incurring "zero", and then hit it with a beep of finality.

Cabal plops down onto his rear in shock as Mr. Referee jumps in. "And the winner, and champion of the Duel Monsters Tournament is... Jerryrig!"

Everyone in the stands cheers loudly as Jerry leaps up and down, laughing happily at how he eked out the victory.

Eclipse is ready to conclude her study, but then something strange happens. Jerryrig actually approaches the stunned Cabal, and instead of mocking him, he puts a hoof on the pony's shoulder, talking in a tone that implies something other than mockery.

After Jerry finishes talking, Cabal actually starts to laugh a bit, and, before long, the pair of them are laughing loudly, and looking through one another's decks.

Their laughter is only slightly dampened when their parents rush into the Center Stadium and begin chewing them out for the fight they had before, having found out about it from someone or other.

At first, Eclipse is confused at how they seem to have become fast friends, when before, they were at each other's throats, but then, realization strikes, and she leaves to write a letter, waving a friendly goodbye to Oil Slick.

To Weiss Noir,

Today I learned that colts are dumb, and don't consider fighting a very big deal. I saw a couple of them that beat the shards out of each other over some dumb trading cards, and a few hours later after they tried to win some tournament thing, they were laughing together like chums while their parents yelled at them. Their behavior was almost as dumb to watch as their spiky hair was to look at. I guess for some ponies, it's easier than you would assume to just forgive and forget.

Your traitorous student, Eclipse Flash.

I stand inside a hidden chamber of the newly constructed Cell Three, or, as I'll be calling it from hereon, the Wacky Workbench Zone. With the new influx of resources, we can afford to properly dig into research and development, and crack the code on new tricks to help us out.

But that's not what's important to me right now. What's important to me right now is the glowing green Crystal Tube, filled with gem-saturated fluid, the highest grade magical healing crystals that we can create right now, and, in the center of the fluid, suspected by tubes, a single, cloned dragon arm.

Dr. Real approaches me, clipboard in hand. "Sir, it's simply incredible, I've... I've never even considered that this was possible. It defies everything I know about healing magic..."

I shake my head softly. "Don't worry, Absolutely, it doesn't defy a thing. Cloning fails because DNA fails, typically. But if your tissue samples come from an immortal creature?"

The doctor just nods in understanding.

After a few moments just staring at it, I decide to continue with my questioning. "Doctor, how goes the studies into cloned dragon's blood and plasma, are they compatible with ponies in any way?"

He shakes his head sadly. "The hormones and chemical balance is all off, it was a long shot that your idea would work, I'm sorry to say, sir."

I grimace at that, but continue my questioning of his progress so far. "And how about the reverse? Did the cloned dragon tissues take well to pony blood?"

Again, he shakes his head. "I'm afraid not."

This is quite a bit of a setback, but I'm certain I can still work this problem out, given enough time.

"Continue your research, and keep me posted, Doctor," I say, before moving on to another locked chamber, where the two guards standing at attention wait for me to give the password.

I give the wrong password, of course. "Salmon Sniffer," I say.

The guards both stand to one side and let me in, like they're supposed to on odd-numbered days exclusively, and only if I don't give a password included in a list that they're all trained to remember.

The next room's security, however, isn't quite so trivial.

Two of the guards in this room immediately tackle me to the ground, blades pointed to my neck. They accuse me of being an infiltrator, and shout about how I'll die where I lay if I don't reveal myself immediately.

I sit and wait for the next tier of security to be cleared, and when I don't resist or struggle, they let me up and stand aside, as they are supposed to do when someone on their list of registered individuals enters the room, and doesn't attempt to defend themselves against the guards that accuse them.

The third room out of the three security checks I have placed in all the secure areas is the only one that doesn't involve a confident bluff, the only guard at the entrance requesting an actual password, which I give.

"Now hatred is by far the longest pleasure," I say, to which the guard responds;

"Ponies love in haste but they detest at leisure."

I smile at this, which concludes the final level of security for my secret lab. The guard repeating a line back to me was a test for me specifically, as I had chosen him as the most effective cold-reader on record. If one of us had been compromised, then we wouldn't give the appropriate facial expressions at the receiving of our passwords, indicating a breach.

The theater of security complete, I enter my secret lab, where I had been working on a special project for a while now.

Having finally cracked enchanting and by extension, true Golemancy, I had been ready to start preparations for the biggest evacuation we had attempted so far.

I go over to the control panel and examine the readouts for my greatest weapon yet. one-thousand out of one-thousand were describing themselves as fully operational, and their internal pressure at twenty-thousand PSI each.

I didn't explain why exactly I had set my R&D teams on figuring out radio communications, but thankfully, it wasn't that complicated for them to figure out.

Those radio communications will be key in this, my greatest plan.

I trot over to the next component of my plan. All of the scorpion meat from the monster we killed a while back, frozen and preserved. On the table next to it, a fake pony corpse has been put together using the scorpion parts, and coated in replicated crystal-pony fur. A flawless substitute, at first glance, for a mangled crystal pony.

Though my gut is clenching with nervousness, it's matched with an equal amount of eager anticipation.

I just have to stitch together a few hundred fake bodies, and then, tomorrow...

I sat inside a small, cold hole in the ground, barely big enough for the only two ponies that were in it, myself and Iron Diamond, the both of us coated in white camoflage and only enough of us free of snow to breathe and move.

While I sat near the crude radio I had managed to have built, listening for reports and repeating the "all-clear" code phrase every once in a while, Iron used a telescope to watch the Crystal Empire, and the skies around it.

We were waiting in these little watch-holes for Sombra to make another pass around the Frozen North in search of the Shadow Realm, as he had started doing after our third attempt at evacuating civilians from The Empire had succeeded. By this point, we had freed enough ponies to genuinely hinder his ability to draw in slaves from the populace to keep up with his mines, and it seems that was enough to prompt him into action, in the form of a violent, daily search for our hideouts, a mistake that will cost him tonight.

I already had started establishing these little boltholes scattered around the north for exactly this reason, to keep tabs on Sombra's whereabouts. This, however, had been the first time that I personally participated in the watch. A necessity considering my plans to exploit Sombra's increased level of alertness this time.

"I still don't understand why we aren't just using the cubes to hold Sombra off while we evacuate everypony in broad daylight, if you're so confident in them," He says, scanning the horizon.

I pause for a moment. Iron Diamond had always been a skeptic of my plans. This makes me glad, because my plans suck. That's why I have ponies like him to make them workable.

"Because I'm confident that Sombra will think they're a genuine threat, instead of a fake one. We'll be able to disguise his new alarms going off as being because of them instead of us. I'm also operating under the assumption that he will destroy anything we throw at him with contemptuous ease in the end," I say.

He retorts quickly. "They are a genuine threat. I was there when you demonstrated them to the rest of the team leaders, what makes you think Sombra can even best them?"

I shake my head. "It doesn't matter if he can or can't. It's about risk. That's why I put so many resources into a weapon that won't survive past this day. It's expensive, deadly, and powerful. That's why Sombra is going to think it's the cause of his missing captives while we quietly evacuate more ponies under his nose."

"Right now, we've evacuated close to a third of the unenslaved ponies in the Crystal Empire so far. Tonight, we'll be taking an entire, additional third in one fell swoop."

"No risk can be allowed to enter my plans, Iron, not when the reward is this great."

My radio crackles, and a scout speaks through it. "Shadow Spotted, Sector Thirty-seven, approaching Sector Forty-nine."

I turn to Iron Diamond. "It's go time."

(Noir Report) An Abridged Depiction of Enchantment [Golem Creation]

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Entry #6, Day 40

At long last, I've more thoroughly cracked the art of enchanting. Though I assume this subject has been covered by others in the past, I'll go on to cover it again briefly in this entry, so as to smoothen the transition into the topic of incorporating dark magics established thus far into enchantments and, more importantly, golems, a subject near and dear to my heart. Through my recent advancements, I have indeed managed to create autonomous agents from magic and material alone, ones who can obey commands and perform acts.

First, I had to gain an understanding of a component of magic I hadn't yet looked into, namely, how a spell can function without a constant influx of power being put into it. The answer, as I had found, was quite simple. Emotions become magical energy, and magical energy is drawn out and shaped by emotions, before being commanded by thoughts. In order for a spell to function for more than a single moment, emotion is required.

When I cast a spell such as Black Flame, in that moment, a flame is created which contains a portion of my hatred, what I had not realized until now, however, is that there are ways by which that hatred can be sustained without my intervention. A stable, emotional force left inside an object, which independently ebbs and flows of its own volition, lastingly sustaining the magic. In the moment I had achieved this, I had rapidly began to understand other aspects of magic in short order, and, paired with my other spells, I had soon created my first true golem.

Made from Royal Crystal, its limbs driven by Prestidigitonium, and all of it controlled by the Black Crystal of SC3, it was capable of obeying verbal commands of varying complexities, fluid, lifelike movement, and, curiously, a demonstration of habits that I myself have. Whenever I would command it to, for example, push a box, instead of pushing it with their snout or forehead, as I had seen other workers do it instead, more awkwardly pushed the box with its right shoulder, something I had only seen done by myself.

To prove the budding theory I had further, I had it perform several other tasks, all of which were met with my bumbling, clumsy methods, climbing stairs, striking objects and the like, all performed as though I had simply been there doing it myself. Curiously, however, the golem was utterly unable to do several things, the most important of which being that it could not learn like I learn. While it could perform dynamic tasks, remember information that it is informed of, and the like, it would never improve, and it could not improve in a task.

This leads me to believe that spells, when cast, draw their autonomous and undirected functions from their user's subconscious at the moment of casting, and not a second after that. To test this theory, I had filled several boxes with diamonds, rubies, and sapphires respectively, and had them shuffled so I would not know which box is which. When I cast Black Flames at all three boxes, two were reduced to slag and ashes, but the third box's contents were spared, owing to my love of sapphires excluding them from the flame's list of targets.

The important thing to note from this is, this means that the flame itself had made that decision, with no input from my own eyes to direct it. The flames had simply known that I did not want the sapphires destroyed, and, through some unknown method, realized that sapphires had been in one of the boxes, and, therefore, left them unharmed. Though this did not prove definitively that my magic draws cues from myself when acting intelligently, it strongly supports the theory.

When discussing golems specifically, additional testing revealed a fatal flaw, namely, the fact that they can be trivially destroyed if their emotions are disrupted. I performed a test in which a child pretended to cry in front of my Domination-empowered golem, at which point the golem visibly became unable to sustain its desire for control, and collapsed, dead. Thus, any creation born from my darker emotions must be carefully designed, such that it cannot be slain by my own personal weaknesses. A golem, unable to experience any emotions that did not go into its creation, can behave erratically when it draws cues from me when it was created which indicate emotions that it does not possess.

In short, the strength of enchanting is the ability to create relics of powerful magical potential, whose weaknesses are those of the mind, and of emotion. And the weakness of enchantment are those of its creator, at the moment of its creation. I believe it was a famous individual from my homeland who once said; "If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles." In enchanting and golemancy, this is doubly true. The weaknesses of your creations are the weaknesses you once had. comprehend those weaknesses, and your spells will never fail unexpectedly when you set it to a task.

My personal favorite uses for this new method of spellcasting are to create small, durable golems, who prestidigitate for movement, and thusly leap about at high speed. I've never been good at golf, but perhaps now would be a good time to practice. If nothing else, I'm absolutely talented enough at dodgeball to make up for it. When the rocks throw themselves, it's doubly simple to send them flying about at my command. Though, one thing I've been concerned about, currently, I have no method to command a golem from afar. This is something I believe I should strive to remedy. Maybe some sort of voice amplification? I'm certain such a spell exists.

Perhaps I could use this new magic to produce a project I've been pondering on for a while now. If I'm making a giant crab out of stone and crystal, would that make it a Rock Lobster?

(Present Chapter 6): Make a Wish

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Weiss stares at the book that he had managed to acquire days before, and, staring at it, all he can think is how much he would have loved to meet its creator. The book twists and undulates with powerful dark magic, woven together by what is clearly the hand of a master. If only their works had been recorded in more than this enchanted tome, what good could have been done with it.

"Well, no use lamenting what could have been," Weiss says, pulling out the purple sock-hat that he had made to absorb the energy of the book's curse when he activates it, to tie the power of Inspiration Manifestation to his brand new Wishing Cap instead of binding it to himself, when he chooses to activate the book.

As Weiss stares at the floppy headwear, he can't help but feel disappointed at how mundane it looks, compared to the Minish Cap from his memories.

"Hmm. Well, I suppose there wouldn't be any harm in asking for... additional help," Weiss smiles to himself.

Trotting down the stairs, he packs his prototype hat into the pockets of a vest he slaps together, opens the door, and then stands there in dumb shock at the pony looking at him apathetically on his porch.

"You're... not supposed to be here?" Weiss says dumbly, body tense.

Sunset smirks. "I'm from a different timeline."

At this, Weiss sighs. "I knew building that machine would come back to bite me in the ass. Alright, should I prepare to be Terminated then, Schwarzenegger?"

Though his horn doesn't yet start glowing, it's clear that he's prepared to start yeehawing spells like an old-timey gunslinger at the drop of a hat.

Sunset shakes her head. "You used it to save my life. Celestia sent me here to convince you to resume your studies into paradox management so I can keep it."

Weiss glares, distrustful of her impossible words. "What could possibly have convinced me to use that damned machine for any reason? Especially to save someone who could hypothetically have never existed? My plans very clearly do not account for taking that sort of risk, in any timeline."

Sunset takes a deep breath, and quotes what the alternate timeline Weiss told her to quote. "Do not hate ponies. If you cannot live with them, then at least do them no harm. For theirs is already a hard lot."

Weiss pauses for a moment. He then pauses for another moment.

Finally, he chuckles. "Paraphrased from Castlevania; Symphony of the Night. That explains it.

"So this is what it feels like to be on the receiving end of my twisted sentimentality," He claims with a short sigh.

He shakes his head, turning away from Sunset to pace ponderously in his doorway. "How did the line right before that one go? The one Dracula says?" he asks rhetorically.

"Ahh, now I remember. For what profit is it to a man, if he gains the world, and loses his own soul? Matthew 16:26, I believe."

"So your Weiss must have seen you in quite the sorry state, if you managed to tug on what frayed threads remained among his heartstrings."

Huffing, Weiss throws his arms in the air, his dramatic demeanor instantly shattering in favor of annoyance. "Whatever! This kind of messes with my plans, but whatever, who cares."

Trotting past Sunset, he shouts back. "Come on, then, I've got business in town, we'll walk and talk."

"I might have a few solutions in mind."

Sunset, confused but altogether feeling as though she was successful at convincing him, follows the dark sage down the trail to Ponyville.

"Just a little bit longer, Rainbow Dash. You're holding up very well," Rarity says, doing some last minute measurements and sewing with her floating needles.

A knock at the door leads Rarity to shout. "Come in dearies! I'm a bit occupied!" to which the door to her boutique creaks open, and two sets of hooves click their way inside.

She hears whispering, but opts to ignore it for the moment, until an unfamiliar mare's voice pops up.

"I'm not going to do that," Sunset says, prompting a second, much more familiar voice to speak up.

"Sunset, you wanted me to save your life, right? You making friends is an unfortunate part of my plan," Weiss retorts, crossing his arms in front of him.

Rarity wheels about, while Rainbow looks ready to explode out of her frou frou getup, already tensing to attack.

"You! Get out of here!" Rarity shrieks.

Weiss tilts his head. "Well jeeze, you haven't even met Sunset yet, give her a chance."

"She doesn't mean whoever the hay that is, she means you Weiss! As in, I'm going to kick your butt!" Rainbow shouts.

Weiss glares at Rainbow Dash. "Well well well. If it isn't Princess Celestia. Even you wouldn't be so gauche as to ruin Rarity's extravagant work by fighting me in it."

Dash splutters. "What? I'm not Celestia!"

Weiss glares even harder, while Sunset is slowly realizing that she'll need to hold back laughter for what comes next. "Don't you lie to me, I would recognize that rainbow colored mane anywhere," Weiss claims confidently.

Before Rainbow can argue further, Weiss holds up a hand. "You can fight me after Rarity has that dress safely packed up for tomorrow, Princess. I refuse to fight you wearing it."

Rarity, watching this exchange, is flummoxed, while Rainbow looks like she's about to explode with embarrassed fury as she stomps into the changing room to get that garbage off her.

"Could you please explain why you are here, Weiss? I am very busy preparing for Princess Celestia's visit tomorrow, and getting Rainbow worked up with your juvenile goading won't help you any more than your attempts at flattering me have," Rarity says, cutting to the point.

Weiss nods, laying a scroll and a bolt of fabric on her table. "I'm on royal business for the princess. Also I need a hat made, I have the design here, and you can keep any of the fabric you don't use. The only stipulations are the color, gem, basic shape and gold. Anything else, I leave in your capable hooves."

Rarity floats over the scroll and looks at it skeptically. "It says here that "I'm totally NOT going to use it for a badass evil relic of super overdrive darkness". I refuse to aid you in your heinous plots, Weiss, I can't believe I'm having to state this outright. It really should be implicit."

Weiss shakes his head. "Look, I'm going to make the thing one way or another, but unless you make that hat for me, I'll be making the hat myself. You're stopping me from committing a crime against fashion."

His piece said, he pulls out the purple triangular sock-hat, and the sight of the heinous, plain-looking prototype makes Rarity growl with frustration.

"I can't believe you're blackmailing me like this," She says, stomping her hoof.

Weiss wags a finger. "It's not blackmail, I'm not using information unknown to the public to force you to act on my behalf. This is coercion, where I am using a threat to convince you to do my bidding. It's very important to know the difference between acts of evil when you're as reviled as myself. It's not that important of a mistake for a layman to make, though, I admit."

Rarity glares. "Just get out of my shop. I'll have your hat done when it's done, now, if you don't mind."

'Oh yeah, she's pissed. That's my cue.' Weiss lazily salutes and walks out of the place with Sunset.

Sunset turns to him as he begins the long trek back to the Everfree. "Why exactly did you want me to talk to them? I'm just here until somepony figures out a cure for my problem. No point making friends like that."

Weiss replies smoothly. "You're just going to have to trust that making friends here and now will give you the best chance possible of a happy, long life in Equestria."

Sunset doesn't look satisfied with this answer unfortunately, but doesn't point this out.

The next day, after a regrettable infestation of Parasprites had been dealt with with varying degrees of competence, Celestia had finally arrived for her casual visit. Twilight and her friends meeting Celestia halfway as she stepped out of her chariot.

"Twilight Sparkle, my prized pupil," Princess Celestia says serenely.

"Ahh, um, hello Princess!" Twilight responds nervously as the round, locust-like parasprites bounce in an orderly line to the side following Pinkie Pie, who is decked out with a fortress of pony-portable instruments.

"So lovely to see you and your friends again," Celestia nods, not glancing over at the parasprites.

Twilight's smile is cheaply plastered on as she attempts some small talk. "So... Did you have a nice trip? I hope so..."

Before she can make the mood any more awkward, the conversation is saved by a parasprite bouncing up to Celestia, and onto her back.

"Now what's this? Oh, such adorable creatures!" She laughs.

"They're not that adorable," Rainbow Dash complains.

Thinking quickly to herself, Celestia comes up with something nice to say about what she's witnessing.

"I'm terribly honored that you and the good citizens of Ponyville have organized a parade in honor of my visit," Celestia nods with a pleased expression that hides a naughty gleam of minor deception for her student's sake, by pretending she thinks that Pinkie Pie luring the tiny monsters out of town is some sort of planned parade.

"Parade? Oh. Yes! A parade, of course!" Twilight says far too quickly to not be suspicious.

Before Celestia's freely given excuse can safely brush this matter under the rug, a puff of smoke rushes between them, forming a sealed scroll that makes Celestia's eyes roll underneath her regal mask.

Opening the scroll, Celestia reads it quietly to herself, before a crystal cleverly rolled in with the scroll falls to the ground, and begins speaking loudly, halting Celestia's plan to prevent what's to follow quite handily.

"Dear Rainbow Dash,

Full disclosure, this is me snitching on Twilight Sparkle, It's not a parade, it's an infestation of food-devouring Parasprites. Have fun explaining the part where you made them eat anything but food, and they started devouring all of Ponyville, Twilight Sparkle.

Weiss Noir, we're done here."

The crystal then cracks in half, its message sent.

Celestia internally groans, having hoped that she could simply foist off some fake but vaguely threatening excuse to leave on her student so as to not embarrass her with the sight of Ponyville, which Celestia could literally see as she had approached from the sky.

Looking down at her student, she can already see the mental breakdown swelling up in her little neurotic pony.

'Oh no, she's going to put me in the stocks for this... No! She's going to put me in the sun for this... No, no! She's going to put stocks on the sun, and then put me in the stocks on the sun!' Twilight wails in her mind, her hair sticking out in all directions as her pupils constrict.

'They'll have to put me out with rotten tomatoes thrown at escape velocity!'

Before Twilight can imagine even more horrific punishments, Celestia walks over to her, and carefully leans down.

"Twilight, I'd like you to listen, if you would."

The unicorn's horn could be mistaken for a reciprocal saw with how fast she nods.

"Do you believe you've learned a lesson in friendship about all of this?" Celestia leads very softly and carefully, so as to not spook her little student.

Twilight nods rapidly.

Celestia leans back up and smiles down at Twilight. "Then let's have a talk about it. I'll send for some snacks, if there aren't any available."

With that, Celestia waves to her guards, sternly, their orders now clarified. Obtain Snacks.

Celestia nudges her student, prompting her, her friends, and the newly returned Pinkie to take a casual walk into town.

Speaking almost as though it was an afterthought, Celestia continues with one last statement to her student. "After my visit is concluded, Twilight, I thought I might show you how I handle situations in which Weiss Noir has displeased me. I think it would be a very helpful for you to get an idea of how I once managed his mischief."

When Twilight spots the blatant grin of impending doom on Celestia's face, she can't help but match it after Weiss, in his own words, "Snitched on her".

Sunset looks around in awe at the hastily assembled laboratory, shelves and shelves of plain black crystal packed to the brim with all manner of dark and ordinary relics.

"There's enough enchanted artifacts here to occupy the AMMO for decades!" She shouts, making Zecora wince at the noise.

"The who?" Weiss responds, levitating chalk around the room, leaving floating circles of frozen chalk dust in the air, which glow with magical energy.

"Acquisition and Management of Magical Objects. Celestia had them formed a while back, to gather up any artifacts floating around that might end up in the wrong hands." Sunset explains.

Weiss's eyes widen, as he almost drops his chalk in shock. "Wait, she's actually looking for those now? Shit! I hope she doesn't find the one I'm looking for, I kind of need that."

He then realizes who he's speaking to. "Don't tell her I said that."

In response to his words, the ceiling explodes inward, scattering obsidian rubble everywhere and revealing an orb of light that fades away to reveal Princess Celestia and Twilight Sparkle.

"Don't tell me you said what?" Celestia responds with smug enlightenment.

Zecora looks like she's about to have a panic attack at the sudden wave of ritual-ruining rubble, while Sunset is simply shocked, taking a step back from the unexpected explosion. She may have had an intimate relationship with unexpected explosions, but this was a bit excessive, in her opinion.

Weiss just rubs the bridge of his nose.

"Celestia, if I've told you once, I've told you a thousand times. Stop destroying my home. Did you blast through every single floor just to get here?! This lab is in the basement!"

Celestia shrugs. "Your throne room wasn't on the top floor as they typically were. What was I to do?"

Weiss's glare intensifies when he sees that Twilight is taking honest to god notes about this exchange. It softens a bit with nostalgia, but he quickly returns it to its full intensity.

"Do you have a reason for being here, or was ruining my day sufficient?"

Celestia visibly considers his question. "Is continuing a "running gag" not reason enough?"

Weiss snarls. "Do you have any idea how long it's going to take me to regrow those floors?"

She raises her eyebrow in response.

"Boop" Weiss says, triggering the enchantments in the tower that force them to immediately regrow damaged portions of themselves. In a second, the ceiling seals up, and the white lights embedded in it flicker back on.

Celestia puts a hoof to her forehead. "So you're complaining over nothing, I see how it is. My dear foe Weiss, now looking for excuses to berate poor dear Celestia."

Twilight and Sunset, both having not seen much of this side of their mentor, try to hold back laughter at her melodrama, making eye contact, something unspoken is transmitted between the pair, and their restrained giggles redouble.

"Celestia, you could regrow your mane just as quickly, and you would be equally displeased if I decided to give you remedial lessons on dealing with a bad hair day," Weiss claims, summoning six separate scimitars into his hands, glittering crystal growing from the palms as his horn grows, until the slightly oversized weapons settle into his grip.

Celestia laughs at this, a slightly embarrassing, undignified guffaw that slips out before she can restrain herself. "Weiss, you fight me now and you won't be able to keep up your cute little bluff when I thrash you."

Weiss sneers, flourishing the purple crystal blades. "Oh Celestia, I have nothing but the greatest skill in maintaining a convincing bluff."

This standoff, slightly at odds with their previous behavior, gives the rest of the ponies and zebra in the room pause, considering if they should perhaps back up a bit before the area becomes thoroughly uninhabitable.

Celestia visibly rolls her eyes. "Oh fine. I'll leave you to your playdate. But I think you should let Twilight keep an eye on things here. I'd hate to discover that you're doing something untowards to my former student Sunset."

Weiss shakes his head childishly, playing along and allowing his swords to burn into nothing but ashes, for all intents and purposes ceasing to exist. "No way. She'll make fun of my ritual, and I worked really hard on it."

Celestia responds condescendingly, looking to the Inspiration Manifestation Tome. "Weiss, if you're unwilling to play nice, then I'm afraid I'll have to confiscate my toy back. You know that book is still the property of the crown."

"...Besides," she continues.

"Twilight even brought along a gift."

Twilight, seeing the cue, pulls an intricate, luxurious hat out of her saddlebags, a Golden Circlet covered in carved talons and swirling clouds, set with a dazzling ruby, and combined with glittering purple fabric shaped into an almost wizard-like cone.

"When I found out you were coercing Rarity into making this, I decided to investigate," Twilight explains.

Weiss's eyes squint as he tries to weasel his way out of being effectively spied on. "Where's your generosity, Twilight? Can't you just give me my hat and be on your merry way without extorting me for juicy secrets?"

Twilight nods, pretending she didn't hear him correctly. "Yes, my offer is very generous, considering what happened yesterday. Thank you for pointing it out."

She waggles the hat in front of him until he relents with a groan. "Fine."

As he snatches the hat out of her magical grip, he continues. "Maybe yesterday wouldn't have happened if somebody didn't need a lesson in Honesty."

Celestia's eyebrow raises even further than it had once before. "Weiss, you would be just as likely to teach somepony a lesson in tree-hugging as you would a lesson in honesty, if you thought it held sufficient entertainment value."

Weiss snaps back. "Hey, I don't do it just to entertain myself! Sometimes I do it because I'm bored, and have nothing better to do."

With that said, Celestia looks up at the ceiling with unabashed temptation in her eyes, but restrains herself and simply walks up the stairs to the exit of his tower.

As soon as she leaves, Weiss chuckles with a fond smile. "God I hate her."

"Weiss Noir, you know incantations are just a mneumonic, right? They don't actually hold any magical power of their own," Twilight says as Weiss bites his lip, trying to figure out the Rhyming Scheme of his planned ritual on a piece of scrap paper.

"Maybe for unicorn magic, but this is Zebra Magic. The power of a zebra's potent magic comes from their cleverness, the more clever they are, the more powerful they are."

"Even with the rituals that I've undergone in the past to have a mere spark of that magic, and the help of an actual Zebra, I'll need a very clever and satisfying poem to make the spellcraft work."

Twilight looks confused, but intrigued. "Will slant rhymes really work, then? They aren't REALLY rhymes, you know."

Weiss huffs. "I think slant rhymes are perfectly valid, flow and metaphor are much more important in a poem."

Looking over the paper one last time, Weiss nods. "Alright, I think that's good."

Twilight looks like she's about to point out something else, but Weiss interrupts.

"Alright, I think that's good," He repeats insistently.

Weiss continues. "Sunset, Twilight, you're like yinyangs, so you'll just stand on each of the sides and look pretty."

This prompts them to take their places without too much fuss.

"Twilight, if you can't keep your mouth shut during this, just cast the zippermouth transformation on yourself right now, because I will be genuinely upset if you ruin this," Weiss affirms with the utmost seriousness.

Twilight nods, clamping her mouth shut.

Zecora, who had been sitting on a bench in the corner of the room, stands up and trots over, slightly excited. "I have to say that this is new. ~ I've not done this, that much is true"

"A ritual is not something that one can do. ~ Indeed, an art like this requires at least two," She chuckles to herself giddily.

Weiss grins placidly, levitating the purple wizardly cap next to the Inspiration Manifestation Magical Tome.

"Step one, I need a proxy. Normally, this book places a useful but debilitating curse on the user. I, however, will be placing the curse on this hat instead. Wear the hat, experience the curse. Remove the hat, and the curse goes with it."

He opens the book, puts on the hat, and ignites his horn and eyes with purple light, and he begins a modified version of the incantation.

"From in the hat to out in the world, every thought to action.
Keep it on your head and through its spell, you'll start a chain reaction.
Projecting forth beauty on tap.
By wearing this, the Minish Cap!"

The hat turns from a thing of Gold and Jewels to an object of Magic and Spellcraft, indicated by its golden metal becoming pristine, its dazzling ruby becoming scintillating, and its purple cloth becoming a smooth, softer silk.

Twilight looks on with disgustingly unrestrained curiosity, while Sunset just looks impressed.

However disgusting Twilight's curiosity, it pales in comparison to Weiss's expression, which looks akin to a child on Christmas, receiving the toy they've always wanted.

"Stage one complete," He says, before throwing the book into the middle of the glowing chalk circles, and pulling the Minish Cap down more firmly on his head.

"Now, for the ritual. Zecora, if you would be so kind as to begin."

She nods, smiling widely as her eyes almost seem to glow.

"The flaw of meek and kindliness
When to be bold is what's required
Is the simple lack of strength
To make come true your heart's desires."

The book in the middle of the circle flips around, before standing on one of its corners and spinning slowly. In other parts of the circle, a crystalline branch, a bottle of pink liquid, and a bottle of bright blue powder float into the air.

Weiss's smile turns malicious as his eyes flash red with dark magic.

"My book, you're so obedient
To manifest my every thought
So I command, decay to sand
And take the form of what I sought."

He says, forcing the book to suddenly open, pages flapping rapidly as they begin to rot away into golden sand, which floats in the air, glowing with pure, unrestrained magic.

The two bottles pop open, and the liquid and dust inside them both flow into and around the golden powder that used to be the book, while the glassy branch slowly sways back and forth, as it floats into the middle of the circle.

The pink liquid, Heart's Desire Resin, and the blue powder, Alicorn Stardust, both combine into a bright red substance, which wraps around the white crystal branch, transforming it into a straight stick, with swirly bands like a candy cane. The Golden Powder, the Manifested Inspiration, swirls around the stick's tip, compressing into the shape of a Star, and attaching itself firmly to the rod.

Zecora begins her final verse, her words making glowing symbols appear on the Star Rod as the light in the room grows brighter and brighter, and her own eyes flare with yellow light.

"When "Wish" is spoken with panache
By those whose heart and wish align
Let not their hopes and dreams be dashed
But manifest by their design."

As soon as Zecora's final word is spoken, the room explodes with light and sound, throwing everyone to the ground.

Twilight is the first to recover, groaning as she gets to her hooves, and spots the floating object in the middle of the room.

A long, Star-tipped wand, with magic that sings to her like a choir of angels.

Weiss laughs manically, ruining the moment.

"Now nobody will be able to defeat my Minish Cap. That rod is worthless in its current state, the ritual I just performed locked its dark magic behind the most insidious conditions possible, only someone with incredibly potent, unrealized desires and a kind heart could activate it now! It's not even real dark magic anymore, because it can only activate when one's emotions are true in the first place! This particular Weapon of Light is truly my greatest one yet!"

His inane laughter continues as Zecora and Sunset manage to regain their senses as well.

Sunset just shrugs at the sight of the relic, walking over to the wall of other relics on shelves, and begins looking through them now that her job was done.

Zecora is the only individual in the room to have been as awed by what she helped create as Twilight was to witness the creation of such a potent artifact of magic.

"I did that?" Zecora mouths to herself, still tingling from feeling herself call forth so much more magic than potion brewing had ever required of her before.

Dear Princess Celestia,

It is as I had feared, Weiss has used the tome to create some sort of Relic of Darkness. A hat that he implies can grant wishes for the wearer. I fear what this new object makes him capable of. But, on a brighter note, I believe he has made a fatal mistake, instead of destroying the book, he used a Zebra Ritual to transform it into a Wishing Star, a Weapon of Light that he claimed could not be used against him, as it requires a kind, strong heart. He informed me that he was planning on storing it in a "Secure Dungeon Temple", but if it can be obtained, I believe I may know somepony who can use it to the benefit of ponykind, something he seems to believe is impossible.

Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.

(Weiss Report) Unlimited Blades Work [Bound Sword]

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Entry Number Fifteen, Day Two-hundred and Nine

Dear Diary, Iron Diamond is such a pill. I crack the code on growing fucking crystal swords from my hands, and he goes "giant swords aren't feasible to use in most situations". And, like, he's right, I guess, but that doesn't mean I care, exactly. He eventually talked me down from practicing with one gigantic estoc to only using eight normal sized swords. One for each hand, one in my levitation, and one in my mouth. Who needs combat viability when you can become a fucking beyblade.

I suppose I should clarify how one can become a fucking helicopter man. Old Man Sempai, are you proud of me now? I really did it. Step one, I had to figure out how the hell Crystal Ponies can be affected by Crystal Magic. At first, I thought it was because they are actually made of crystal. Turns out, I'm... sort of correct? Not really, though. It's because they look like crystal. I should have figured this out when I got my new dragon arms, but magic seems to be very gullible. That is to say, it is very easy to "trick" magic.

All I had to do was work out some spellwork to make my dragon limbs count as Royal Crystal and Royal Cloth, and all of my usual spells suddenly began to work on them, even if they didn't physically contain the substances. The easiest way to do that was to simply make them the same shade of purple as my armor, feel the correct emotions, and boom-bam-boom, I can now grow my special blend of graphene and lonsdaleite from my own draconic limbs. No more having to carry samples of it in pouches, or wear it on my body to use it in combat.

The next question, I'm sure you're all wondering, is "Weiss, I can grow crystal from my dragon arms now, if I so have them, but how do I become a true spin-to-win master?" and, dare I say it, the answer is simple, you just have to make sure that your limbs are attached to your body with Migrant Iron instead of mere flesh and bone. By moving my arms around by shifting the connection points, I can simply swivel all six of them around my neck at absurd speeds, turning me into a champion of blood and carnage.

Needless to say, this is a ton of fun. By exclusively using my new Bound Swords for melee combat, I can afford to make mistakes that would kill anyone else. You can't disarm me, you can't parry me, you can't even approach me, unless you want to feel the sting of six ordinary fighters and two extremely shitty fighters, all caught in the spin-cycle of a washing machine set to "puree".

But the best part of my new modified spell is the fact that I can make incredibly cool-looking sword designs every time I cast it, and style all over my opponents. I may also make them extra exotic, to piss off Iron Diamond. He hates it so fucking much when I make the scythe-shaped swords, it's hilarious. "Weiss, you're designing them to break every time you swing one of those nonsense pieces of garbage!" he shouts. It's so much fun coming up with new designs on the fly to raise his blood pressure.

Of course, what I haven't told him is that even my impractical designs are intentional. So long as all eight of my swords are the same mass, it doesn't actually matter what shape they are, since I'm only using them as components in what is effectively a circular saw. If my enemy were to disarm me and try to use one against me, though, they would find themselves the proud owner of an unbalanced, malformed weapon that will look really cool right before I run them through.

One thing I hadn't known about dragonfire, but now I do, is the fact that, when you destroy something with dragonfire, you can regain energy from it, if the circumstances are correct. Thus, a unique quirk I've been able to take advantage of, is including an enchantment in the blades to allow me to turn them to ashes on command, restoring the magic that I spent to create them. This only makes my fighting style that much more effective, in the long run.

There's one major flaw to this modified spell, however, and it's a crippling one. You see, if you use this spell in the way I have used it, and Iron Diamond catches you, he will kick your ass. I would know, considering that he personally threatened to beat me to a pulp himself if I didn't submit myself to mandatory, actual weapons training. boooring.

I guess if someone manages to beat my unbeatable stratagem of spinning around really fast, I can always hit them with the classic "I'm not left handed" line, and then shit all over them with actual swordsmanship. Fuck, I'm not going to lie, that actually sounds sick as shit, like, I make them think that my gimmick is just the spinning, and if they somehow figure that one out, I drop the pretense and fuck them over with a storm of the fucking gods.

For the sake of doing that though, I'll also need to learn how to make actually decent swords, so I can drop the fun, badass looking ones for boring, clinically effective ones.

Holy shit, did you know you can fucking enchant a dragon's scales when you make it act like crystal? I sure didn't. That's OP Busteeed. Well, far be it from me to not exploit the shit out of it. I'm thinking... Fire fists. No, wait! I'll do a meme with like, scales enchanted to shoot off like bullets, that'll be cool.

Note to self, scales aren't supposed to come off, and hurt very badly when they do. Didn't really feel that fucking good when I tested out the Porcupine Panic enchantment and instead embraced the sensation of having your arm waxed, if instead of hair, the wax was pulling out fingernails.

I hope these grow back, I seriously regret trying that. It's not worth vat-growing some replacement limbs just yet, but I'm seriously going to have to put the kibosh on any more scale-bullet spells. At least until I figure out a better way of handling the subsequent consequences.

An interesting entry, but... What exactly is a "Beyblade"?

It's a children's toy, like a spinning top, but they can be tuned and their parts swapped out, the tops are then set to fight one another in competitions.

How fitting. I've made the comparison to a spinning top myself, seeing him in combat. Although I'm assuming he had never completed that training he wrote about. I've never seen him use anything other than his silly spinning tactic.

(Past Chapter 7): Wrath of the Gods: Part 2

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Less than one hundred meters from the Crystal Empire's borders, a patch of snow hisses loudly, opening to reveal a hidden tunnel, containing rails and a Minecart filled with bright cyan cubes made of some sort of crystal, and filled with a glowing, purple fluid. The amount of them is staggering, though their size is as small as a single hoof. Behind that Minecart, there are twelve others. These minecarts all contain either bottles of scorpion blood, or fake corpses.

"Alright everypony in Team Alpha, you know your jobs. Scatter the corpses and blood around the city, then find the houses or streets you were assigned and inform the inhabitants of what is to come. Any who are unwilling to leave their homes at the assigned time, you may attempt to convince them, but you must leave when the operation timer goes off. Keep radio silence where possible, and be prepared for this plan to go to pot," I say, tension flooding my body as I hand out orders, which the military captains all give and repeat as well, ensuring that all my troops understand.

As they all begin their part of my plan, I turn to the second group.

"Team Beta, your job is clear. Distribute the Cubes to every street where evacuations are planned, even distribution, then join Team Alpha in preparing houses for the escape."

The final Minecart contains my backup plan. If, somehow, everything else fails, a gigantic robot crab is a good second option.

Iron Diamond approaches me as I watch everyone get into position and wait for my signal. "Sir, I strongly suggest you return to the Shadow Realm to command those things. It won't be safe to do it here."

I shake my head. "I'm hidden enough here. I'm going to see how this plays out. I refuse to be somewhere where I can't help if things go wrong."

Iron Diamond almost looks, dare I say it, possessed with an iota of respect, before he himself silently joins Team Alpha in distributing the fake bodies around the streets, and propping them up against walls and structures.

Occasionally, a pony will throw a bottle of the scorpion blood at one of the bodies or simply on the ground and buildings, making it look as though something quite horrific had occurred.

By the end of it, A good chunk of the Crystal Empire looks exactly as I envisioned it. A God Damn Warzone.

My radio crackles. "Shadow approaching Sector Forty-Five, no unusual activity detected."

"Alright, let's ride or die," I say to myself.

Iron Diamond knocks on a door, and a kindly old mare opens it, looking at him with a weary expression.

"Yes Mr. Soldier? How may I help you?" She says with resignation.

"My name is Iron Diamond, I'm here to prepare you for evacuation from the Crystal Empire. This is your chance to escape, if you would follow me inside so I may explain," He recites.

She spots the havoc outside, and her eyes widen. "Oh my word, what is all of that?"

Iron responds accordingly. "Fakes, M'am. When Sombra comes looking, he'll think that all the escapees died."

His words give the old mare pause, as she visibly rolls the idea around in her head. "He won't hunt us down?"

Iron nods. "He won't even know you're gone until it's too late."

She smiles fondly, turning around as she shakes slightly from age. "Boys! Come down to the livingroom, there's a nice stallion here to help us!"

Several small colts stumble down the stairs, bleary eyed and tired from being awoken. Between them, an even smaller filly rubs her face to get the sleep out of it.

When Iron repeats his explanation, any thoughts of sleep are instantly banished from the children's minds, and they all smile brighter than the sun.

'This has to work.' Iron thinks to himself at the sight of that, not properly putting a thought to the reasons why that is as he maintains a stoic demeanor in front of the adorable children.

"Alright, everypony. Here is how this has to work. Right now, I'm waiting on a message from my superior, we all need to stay inside until I get that message, and when I get it, you'll all follow me to the evacuation point, ignore anything you see on the way there, because we need to move quickly when that happens. Can you all do that for me?"

The children nod dutifully.

'It just has to.'

"Sombra has reached Sector Fifty," My radio sputters simply.

With that said, and our tests of his maximum speed confirmed through past instances of provoking and observing him, the window is now open.

"All Teams, maintain radio silence. Begin the evacuation. We have one hour," I state into my radio crystal.

After that, I cast a spell which turns my radio purple in color, and attunes it to my golems.

I begin speaking the activation phrase into the crystal, communicating it to all of the cubes.

"All warfare is based on deception."

Across the Crystal Empire, the glowing blue cubes tilt up onto one corner, pulsing with light.

"Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable."

At the second activation phrase, the cubes begin lazily spinning in place, pulsing faster than they did before.

"When using our forces, we must appear inactive."

The cubes begin to spin faster, picking up in velocity, until they're humming slightly, and look more like cones. An enchantment activating inside them projects an illusion, shaped like a wriggling white grub, covered in small crystal barbs. Insubstantial, but visually beyond the range of ordinary illusion magic.

"When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away."

Inside the cubes, pressure builds up as a small amount of additional fluid is grown inside of their internal chambers, bubbles begin to form as the liquid attempts to turn into steam from the added pressure.

By this point, everyone but Weiss himself has made their way into the secret tunnel just outside of the Empire, where the masses of ponies are all shuffled onto the underground train parked there. An ominous feeling approaches rapidly, as Weiss shuffles into the tunnel's entrance and waves the train away, leaving nothing but him and his machinery in the secret hideaway.

"When far away, we must make him believe we are near. Activate Project Crystal Shrimp."

With the final phrase said, one of the cubes hops in place, before a pulse of force throws the cube towards an empty building, and, using Crystal Growth Magic bound in its enchanted fields, it grows crystals inside the walls of the building to make it crack and crash apart, as though a meteor had smashed into it.

The cube bounces to the ground, unharmed, and it, alongside its other brethren, begin fulfilling their own role in utterly obliterating the empty buildings that were left behind by the evacuees. The swath of raw destruction complimenting the fake bodies and blood left on the streets.

In every sense of the word, the illusion is one of a swarm of horrific, crystalline monsters, attacking the Crystal Empire.

Sombra unleashes wave after wave of magical slashes into the landscape below him, his teeth grit so hard that it drives him into his incorporeal form once or twice at his failure to worm out anything. Thus far, he has been in the dark almost entirely, regarding who, or what is responsible for the Empire's population rapidly decreasing over the past months.

Heaving his breaths out in a cloud of black smoke and white haze in the cold as he floats in the air, Sombra decides to try casting his suite of detection spells, his horn flaring with dark magic as he goes through every single one of them.

"Where... Where!" He howls, as the last spell returns one simple fact to him, just like all the rest.

"Nothing Unusual Nearby", the spell informs him uselessly, in its own, nonverbal manner.

"I will find you, you foolish little ponies, do you hear me? You cannot hide from the inevitable forever!" The dark pony roars, shaking the land with the power of his magically enhanced voice.

Taking several deep breaths, Sombra slowly regains his composure, and chuckles.

"There's really no need for me to get all worked up like this. If I must scour every inch of this blasted wasteland, I'll dig up where my little ponies are hiding."

"And then, I will break them. Defiance like this should have already been stomped out of them. Their little vacation will be quite the setback for the breaking of their spirits."

"I'll have to come up with something very special, to make up for lost time on that front," He mutters to himself, scanning over the endless expanse of white snow, as though he'll find anything more this time than he has the last ten times he's scoured the land around the Empire.

It's been extraordinarily difficult, hiding his energy from the Royal Sisters during his outings, without the spells he has uniquely developed to thwart their own sensory magic, they could probably sniff him out in moments.

It will all be worth it, though, when he can quietly shuffle his escaped slaves right back into their prison.

Sombra's imaginings are interrupted, when he suddenly feels countless alarms going off in his mind, as though, all at once, wide swathes of the ponies still trapped in the Crystal Empire had all disappeared from their homes in rapid succession.

Sombra turns in the air and blasts towards the empire at his fullest speed. 'Oh, that's pleasant. A nice diversion to take my mind off this nasty business. I'll pop over, quell whatever insurrection this is, and then personally interrogate the fools who thought that I wouldn't notice them scurrying underhoof.'

As he arrives though, his suspicions change, as he spies fires, explosions, and the utter chaos that has splattered over the city, blood and bodies littering the streets, many of which have been pulped or crushed by the falling debris of houses.

Scattered among this destruction, Sombra spots the cause. Strange, glittering objects that leap about like gnats, smashing into things with what seems to be a speed so potent that it breaks through even the reinforced crystal walls of the buildings they crash into.

'Not a mass-escape, then, but an infestation!' Sombra thinks in shock, flying down to destroy these monsters before they can kill any more of his slaves.

He crashes into a wide clearing in the town, where a fountain used to pour out glittering water everywhere, now a crater filled with some ice and slush.

Sombra prepares his own crystal infestation spell, but before he can, one of the gnats leaps into his face, and with a vicious spinning impact to his face, forces him into his incorporeal form.

With a growl, Sombra reforms elsewhere, only for two more of the beasts to again leap towards him, this time crashing into his body with the force of arrows, and throwing him back into his cloudy form again.

Snarling with frustration, Sombra flies high into the air, and reforms once more, creating a gigantic slab of black rock beneath his hooves that he crashes into the ground with, crushing several of the beasts and causing the slab to crack as they explode underneath it with a series of deafening pops.

This time, when a swarm of them attack him from all angles, he is ready, and unleashes a wave of dark magic, which causes the diamond gnats to suddenly be overwhelmed with black crystals, growing forth from their bodies and encasing them entirely.

Sombra's smug expression shatters as quickly as the crystals do, when he detects a sour blend of hatred and greed from the little gnats, and his crystals suddenly rupture as internal forces break them apart.

Confused, and angrier than before, Sombra takes to the skies before the newly freed creatures can assault him again and drain more of his magic by forcing him to revert to smoke.

Cautious and mindful of their maximum jumping distance, Sombra snatches one in his levitation, bringing it up to his face in a firm grip. Now that he's seeing it up close, this is no flesh and blood creature, but some sort of gem beast, surrounded in a wriggling grub made of light magic. He forces his mind into the cube that makes up the beast's core, but finds himself unable to alter its mind, as it is too overwhelmed with hatred.

Confused at why the hate in a mere insect would be sufficient to keep him out, Sombra is unprepared when, with a crickle of glass, the cube suddenly hisses at him, before exploding in a haze of purple mist and glittering cyan shrapnel.

As I watch Sombra battle my little tricky golems through my binoculars, It feels like I'm looking into a mirror, or at least, like I'm looking back from one. Sombra's magical skills immediately stand out as everything I was afraid of, deadly, fast, skilled, and, unsurprisingly, packed with raw power that I just can't match.

When I spot him actually grab one of the golems to examine it, I immediately bark into my control crystal. "One-Closest-to-target, Vile Hatred, Detonate."

With that said, the golem mass communicates between themselves rapidly, deciding that the one Sombra is holding is the one that I had commanded to do that, and thus, making it immediately channel all of its remaining magical power into growing royal ice inside of itself, building the internal pressure up so vastly that it detonates in an explosion of steam, and leaving no trace that Sombra could use to reverse engineer the spellwork.

It also riddles him with a literal pressure-cooker-esque bomb's worth of diamond fragments and blistering steam.

Seeing that Sombra has started acclimating to the golem's default tactics, and is hanging around higher than their ordinary jump-ceiling, I speak into the control crystal again. "Fifty-Percent-Random, Allyoop-One-Target."

With this, roughly half of the golems, chosen randomly among the remaining active golems, pair together and launch into the air, using one another as footstools to leap twice as high as they would normally be able to, and reaching Sombra yet again.

Oh yeah, that's pissing him off alright.

I spot him charging up something big and powered by some sort of fear energy, which actually manages to push back the golems just from the raw force he's putting out.

Time to switch tactics, if he's just going to stall like that. "Eighty-Percent, Beta-Tactics. Excluded-Percent, Gamma-Distraction."

With that, eighty percent of the golems turn red, and begin using sustained Prestidigitation charms to power through his kiai wave, while the remainder begin to beeline it to the fake corpses, crashing into them before visibly decreasing the amount of magical energy they're holding back.

Sombra roars with anger as he uses the energy taken from his ritual to boost his magic to staggering heights, enough to easily push away these cretins. Breathing room obtained, Sombra has just enough time to realize with some small panic that the creatures are now moving towards the corpses, and, embedding themselves in the dead ponies, he can sense their power increasing the moment they touch the lifeless cadavers.

'They're draining energy from the bodies.' Sombra concludes from the sight.

"The only one who can draw power from my slaves is me!" He roars with madness in his eyes as he flies down towards them like a meteor, ignoring the gnats that, having changed color, are now flying towards him like cannonballs, exploding on him and turning parts of his body to smoke.

As filled with rage as he is now, however, he couldn't care less, and, smashing into the ground while maintaining his force emission spell, begins weaving a second spell on top of it.

"Submit!" The mad king screams to the heavens, his body exploding with dark energy that turns the surrounding area into a forest of black crystals, stronger and thicker than the crystals he attempted to encase the shrimp in previously.

One thing he fails to notice in his demonic fury, is that each of the diamond grubs explodes moments before his mind controlling crystals can touch them.

Panting from the exertion, he looks around at the remaining intact houses, and chuckles to himself, brushing his chest off with a hoof dismissively.

"I suppose I should deign to dig the slaves out before they suffocate. Perhaps the sight of what happens without my gracious protection will cow these disgusting slaves into proper subservience."

Spotting one of the larger chunks of diamond left over from the strange beasts, still possessing its wriggling, malformed light-body, Sombra walks over to it, and, with a cold sneer, crushes it beneath his hoof like a plastic cup.

He had won.

I have won.

With a sigh of relief, I clamp down on my hammering heart and watch Sombra stalk over to one of the buildings to pry it open, beginning the slow methodical work of cleaning up his own mess.

At this point, even if Sombra instantly realized the deception, it's too late for him to do anything about it. By now, the train carrying the escaped citizens has already reached the newly built Angel Island Zone.

Grinning to myself, I can't help but feel proud of what I've done today as I get into the Minecart with my unused Heavy Lobster Mecha, and set it to travel back to the Shadow Realm, a switch flipped beforehand making the tunnel collapse behind me as though it had never existed.

I wonder if this makes me some kind of hero?

"He's a monster!" Celestia shouts, pounding at the dark barrier that prevents them from simply savaging Sombra in an instant, a barrier they had been trying on-and-off to shatter for over a week.

As soon as Celestia and Luna had sensed the powerful dark magic boiling inside the Kingdom's borders, they had rushed over as soon as they could to investigate, only to see and sense a true nightmare.

As they stared in naked horror at the city, they saw that whoever had been responsible for this had slaughtered countless crystal ponies with their twisted monsters, leaving bodies scattered in the streets, and ruin in their wake. And, without a shadow of a doubt, Celestia and Luna knew that someone was responsible for this.

Where Sombra had grown nose-blind to dark magic in his years of practicing it, the Royal Sisters had instead honed their ability to sense evil magic to the finest point possible, and its very own perpetrator had been so close they could taste it, their only salvation in that exact instant being their proximity to the Crystal Empire's foul aura muddying their location. The unique sensation of a pony giving in to the undilute powers of darkness practically basted their twisted creations as the Sisters had been forced to watch Sombra save the Empire from them for his own twisted ends, helpless to do anything themselves from the border of the dark barrier.

Luna, ever the voice of reason for her hot-blooded sister, puts a hoof on her shoulder, attempting to calm her elder sibling.

"We will not allow this to go unavenged," She says, her own fury a vast ocean beneath the depths of her calm exterior.

Celestia snarls, her face wrinkling with the promise of violence unlike any that Equestria had witnessed before. "We should not have allowed it to go unhalted!" She growls.

Luna's eyes meet her sisters, and they both gaze to the side, where the energies of this new Dark Mage had flown away at incredible speed.

"But we will not let it go unavenged," Luna states with a resolve more rigid than lunar stone.

"Woo!" I shout, giggling as they haul in a throne. I swear I told them not to make a damn throne, it's super egotistical, but the mood is way too nice for me to tell those little pouting faces "no" when they were so insistent on it.

Food, drink, and laughter flow around the room like water, as ponies desperately cheer and embrace one another across the entire Shadow Realm.

Turns out, when you free a large enough portion of the population, it results in a lot of heartfelt reunions. Who knew?

Oh, Goodie! My little student is here too.

I trot over to her, intent on getting her take from all of this.

"I greet you Eclipse Flash. Have you opened your Heart to the Darkness yet?" I say, laughing maniacally.

She glares back defiantly, but even I can tell it's a bit halfhearted, as she had been talking to her cousin, who was one of the ponies in this batch of newcomers. "I'll never let your foul evil turn me from my just cause, Weiss," She says melodramatically.

I definitely do not giggle at that as I leave her be, and prepare to walk off.

"Wait, wait," She says, making me pause.

"I'm still going to reveal your evil plans to everypony as soon as I figure them out... But."

She looks a bit overwhelmed at all the new ponies, at least a few of which are among friends and family of hers.

"Thank you for including us in them."

Did my heart just skip a beat? Whatever, I'm not some edgy tsundere. I can take a bit of praise without shelling up and acting aloof.

"Sounds like someone just learned a Foeship Lesson. I'll expect your report within the week, my most traitorous student," I smile, walking over to the snack table.

As I grab for some crystal cheese sticks, I find myself lifted up by a mob and dragged over to my hastily assembled throne against my will. I feel there's a metaphor to be made here, but for the life of me, I can't find it.

Priss pops out of the crowd, and I can instantly sense from the expression on her face that she's about to say something hilarious or infuriating. There is no in-between with that filly.

"All hail Weiss Noir, the Darkest Lord! His Only-Vaguely-Sinisterness! The Least-Evil! Hail!" She shouts sarcastically, prompting the crowd to start shouting it unironically.

I laugh with an embarrassed flush overtaking my face, but slowly, something tickles at the edge of my mind, like some detail I'm not noticing, but that I really should be.

And then the ceiling explodes up and outwards in a haze of gold, sending ponies screaming everywhere, and running for safety in the tunnels.

Despite the danger, I can't leave now. Not because of bravery, or some sort of sense of duty.

It's fear.

I know it before I see it, in the middle of the dust that's being rapidly cleared away with magic, the two Royal Diarchs of Equestria.

"Dost thine eyes see, Celestia? We had told thou that it was beneath the earth," I hear.

"So thou didst Luna," She says, eyes scanning around the mostly empty, once-jovial room until they land on me.

Even though my every instinct from my mind down to my soul is screaming at me to run, to hide! I can't even breathe, her presence is too much. It's like looking directly into the sun.

No, that's not correct. It's like being inside of the sun, with the star's full weight crushing me where I sit. Her fire is too much.

"O-oh Christ," I force out, as she takes a step forward.

She pauses at my words, but shrugs off my exclamation, taking another step forward. "We hope thou hast obtained all thou dost desire from this life, for thou willst lead it freely no longer," She says grimly, lifting me up and tossing me almost playfully into a wall, cracking the wall, and turning my side into a mess of bruises and my face into a mess of broken teeth.

"We will find the deepest, darkest pit that exists within Equestria, and we will throw thou in it. But first..." She trails off, as her glowing, aurorial mane briefly dims before it explodes into a maelstrom of ungodly light.

"We will deepen it!" She bellows, shaking the foundations of the Shadow Realm as her mane catches ablaze.

And thou wouldst be lucky to experience such, if thou dost not force us to end thy life here and now.

I struggle against my bone-deep pain and that mind-consuming fear that won't leave my heart, I have to do something, anything at all to stop her, or stall her somehow.

It feels like she'll kill me in an instant if I so much as twitch, in spite of that, I force myself to speak. "Why?"

Her sister winces at this, as if knowing what's about to come next.

Her lips turn up in a bestial snarl.

"Why? What a foalish question. Thou darest ask us why, when we bore witness to thine carnage this day? When we smell the blood on thy hooves as surely as we smell the hatred in thy heart?"

As she grabs my neck and drags me up onto the wall with her hoof, I blankly note that apparently, that does happen outside of movies.

I choke my words out as quickly as I can. "Fakes! The bodies... fakes! Scorpion meat, fake fur."

"I swear to God they're not dead!" My voice trembles as the pressure increases on my throat.

She swings around, throwing me into a table in the middle of the room with disgust, as though the act of continuing to touch me, even to crush my windpipe, was something she could no longer condone.

"What boldfaced lies the monsters of this era weave. We believe this pitiable attempt at deception pushes thy crimes beyond what can be tolerated, even among the imprisoned."

Luna watches blankly with an indecipherable expression as Celestia's horn alights in life-ending solar armageddon.

As I stare down the barrel, the soft pitter-patter of hooves halts everyone involved.

'What are you doing, Eclipse? You need to get out of here.' I think slowly. A bit slower than I normally think.

She speaks up, looking at her with nothing short of youthful will. "Stop! You can't prove he did anything wrong!" She shouts.

Something bubbles up inside me.

Celestia glares down at the filly standing between me and her.

"Child, thou willst not intervene in the matters of royalty," Celestia says, her horn still glowing.

She shakes her head. "You don't have the right! Until you can prove that he did something wrong, prove it to the ponies, you can't hurt Lord Weiss!"

"Anything less would make you a monster," She says, as I somehow stumble to my hooves, looking down at my apparently Loyal Opposition in shock.

Celestia's face holds the barest trace of mercy and hesitation, but both me and Eclipse notice it pop in the exact same instant, like a soap bubble in the noon-day sun.

My perception leads me to believe that in that moment, time had almost slowed down.

I can't help but wonder incredulously if Celestia knows that she can snipe me without hurting Eclipse, or if she simply deemed it a worthwhile risk to attempt it anyway. As I stare at the beam of evil erasure trailing its way through the divide between us, its trajectory aimed to slip over Eclipse Flash's head, and plow directly into mine, I realize that such pondering isn't helpful right now, and summon up what bare scraps of strength remain in me, to shield Eclipse from the worst of the fallout.

Time resumes in a split second, as Eclipse's entire body ignites even faster than my horn can begin to spark, and a magical surge overtakes her. Before my eyes, I see it, not the pillar of black fire, frozen inside the invincible pillars of crystal that stand as a bulwark between us and Celestia, and had absorbed her magic attack completely, but on Eclipse's flank, where in a shower of sparks, a Cutie Mark had appeared.

A large, red and yellow diamond, partially eclipsing a black, flaming sun, with rays of rainbow colored light spraying outward from the glittering circular gemstone.

Celestia looks to be completely without words, and, to be honest, so am I.

Eclipse looks tired, but her will hasn't changed.

"You need to leave this place," Eclipse says to the royal diarchs, as Luna looks me directly in the eyes and approaches Celestia's side.

"Sister, we believe he may be telling the truth. There exists no shadow within which he could hide his true nature from our power. His soul remains unstained with death, however blackened it may be with dark magic."

Celestia gives her sister a hard glance in response, before a snort escapes her nostrils.

"Very well," she says, turning her glare to me. By this point, for reasons I don't understand, her previously overwhelming presence is now unable to affect me, and I meet her gaze evenly as she speaks.

"We will return, when we have pondered longer what fate will become thine."

And with that, the duo flap their wings, and shoot off into the night sky.

I'll have to reward my ponies for getting the hell out like the procedures clearly stated. If anyone managed to suddenly turn a room into a warzone, the plan had always been for everyone to run like hell.

Although I suppose, if Eclipse hadn't disobeyed that order, I'd be dead right now.

Speaking of which, she seems to be pretty unsteady on her feet. I walk over to her, ignoring the dull ache that covers my entire left side to help her stay upright with a bit of levitation.

"Come on kid, let's get you to a bed. We're burning perfectly good moonlight here," I say softly, and guide the drowsy, magically exhausted pony to the evacuation minecarts, where ponies are already guiding the uninitiated newcomers through the re-homing procedures, since Celestia and Luna basically announced the location of the Hidden Palace Zone to the entire world.

She falls asleep mid-trip.

A few days later, the new and improved Hidden Palace Zone is rebuilt in a new, hidden location, as it should be, and the Hatesink is moved there accordingly.

Priss told them to make the throne and throne room bigger without my say in the matter, and they actually did it, the mad-ponies. It might have pissed me off, but it's certainly a good prank.

She better not do it again.

"Lord Weiss Noir,

Today I learned that no matter how much you disagree with somepony, no matter how much you hate them, or stand against what they stand for, there are two simple facts that you can't ever forget. Injustice is still injustice, and hope is still hope. And it doesn't matter if they come from a Princess or a Scoundrel, a pony must always fight injustice, and, of course, a pony must always have Hope. Anything less will make you worse than all of your foes, whoever they may be.

Your Traitorous Student, Eclipse Flash."

(Noir Report) Indirect Data Gathering [Merciful Bulwark]

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Entry #7, Day 52

Unfortunately, today's entry shall be one that I can only describe to you secondhand, with the help of my student, who had unearthed a dark spell unusable to any who lack the potent magic of a Crystal Pony. As the discoverer of this magic, I allowed her to call it what she wished, instead of calling it the Evil Containment Wave as I had originally offered as a suggestion. She was extremely unenthused with that name, and instead demanded It be recorded here as the Merciful Bulwark.

Indeed, when observing both the spell and it's results, my senses told me without a doubt that the spell was beyond my ability as a unicorn, that it was a spell that could only be realized by a pony like those who now inhabit the Shadow Realm. It forces me to wonder what other spells may be locked off to me, and who would be a worthy assistant to drive forth a true study into dark crystal magic.

Thus, I will now relay to you what I have managed to learn of the Merciful Bulwark, a spell which forms a potent barrier against attacks. I must warn you, however, that as I personally cannot cast it, what you will now learn from this entry is vague, and not to the standards of my usual work.

When Eclipse Flash, my student, had required magic sufficient in strength and form to prevent an unjust attack from striking a pony, she had turned her outrage at the injustice, and her desire to correct that injustice into the magical strength needed to summon up pillars of crystal, within which the black flames of hatred were swirled into, like dye in resin.

Despite my best efforts, I cannot offer you more than that, in describing how the spell had been achieved, as my student currently lacks the vocabulary with which to describe her exact feelings in that moment, the memories of which have already begun to fade slightly as the days wear on, and, since that day, she has been unable to replicate it. I plan to begin her training in the dark arts immediately, and will follow up this entry when she has a grasp of magic that is firm enough to allow her to realize this magic once again, with consistency.

What components of her outrage, of her desire to see justice done, and her even stronger desire to prevent injustice being done. To what emotions do these notions truly correlate to, and how might one evoke them outside a time of great need? If Dark Magic contains spells from both Crystal and Unicorn ponies, then are there other, even more potent spells hidden within the depths of our world's other denizens? Pondering things like this, I feel, is worth doing, to progress the study of the art, and perhaps, to progress the study of magic itself.

The crystal itself is unique, combining the best parts of Crystal Pony armor with the most destructive aspects of the Black Flame. Physical blows are deflected, and magic is destroyed as it encounters the frozen fire embedded in the stone. The spell, composed of emotions other than mere hatred, cannot be fully realized within the depths of dark emotion, which is reflected in the Crystal's color, a deep golden amber unlike any dark crystal I have yet discovered.

This may have been a consequence of the circumstances, but at the moment it had been used, it was able to deflect the destructive magic of an extremely powerful foe dead in it's tracks, with no signs of damage to the crystal. The samples recovered from the site retained this ability, to a lesser degree, withstanding several potent attacks before eventually, we discovered it's limitations, on both the front of physical force and combat magic. Though, the limits we found did not match even slightly to the blow it had withstood during it's creation, something that suggests that the Merciful Bulwark is much stronger when it is fresh.

Although, at the same time, it may suggest a deeper meaning to the barrier's purpose. Perhaps, instead of it's defenses merely weakening with time, it is simply tailored to defend against an attack of a different sort. Lacking access to powerful light magic or destruction magic aside from my Black Flame, I have no way of testing this, which leaves me with the simpler assumption that it weakens with time.

Another thing worth noting, the Merciful Bulwark does not correlate to any crystals that were in the room it was made in, this suggests that the spell either transmogrifies it's source material so thoroughly as to be unrecognizable, or that it simply does not function like Royal or Dark Crystals. It could also simply be that Eclipse does not understand the composition of the flooring, but as I have been tutoring her in such things, I believe this to be an unlikely answer to that quandary.

With no further testing that can be performed at this time without the ability to replicate the spell, the substance, or the conditions in which both emerged, I end this account thusly, with the hopes that I may revisit the topic of this spell when my student has matured in their study. While there may be tests I could yet perform, they would destroy our only existing samples of the substance, and therefore, I cannot afford to perform them at this time, for fear of the unknown time it will take to obtain more.

A spell such as this one should not be consigned to obscurity merely because it refuses to appear with ease, a sentiment that, thankfully, my student has found herself possessing as well. I look forward to future experiments on the topic, and no matter the time it takes, this spell represents something I had once thought impossible, the existence of a spell whose dark portent lies within the realm of justice and good. Something as precious as a "Good Dark Magic" is worth striving towards.

(Present Chapter 7): Winter Shut-In

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"Weiss, come on. You can't just hide away in your lab for the entirety of winter!" Sunset says, stomping her hoof firmly.

Weiss turns a dial on a strange contraption made out of dream-catchers and crystals. A giant metal antennae extends out of the top of the contraption in response to Weiss's modulation.

"Inputting code phrase. Tarot Designation: "The Moon", please respond," Weiss mumbles into the microphone, nursing a bottle of cheese-chocolate-lime soda.

The machine bleeps sadly, indicating that the response was "No."

"Inputting code phrase. Primary Designation: "Arcana Nox", please respond," Weiss says more firmly.

Sunset gives Weiss a blank look when the machine bleeps out another "No."

She walks closer, and speaks again. "Weiss, are you even listening?"

At this, Weiss sighs in annoyance. "Sunset, I want to see as little snow as possible right now, can't you leave me and my sodie-pop in peace?"

Sunset fails to comprehend the strange shift in Weiss's behavior that had overtaken him recently. Before, he had been going into town almost every other day, sometimes with the most hairbrained reasons imaginable, (She had never seen somepony look so suspicious, yet so intrigued, when he asked that apple mare if she would be willing to produce and sell Zap Apple Cider Vinegar when the season rolled around). But that all stopped in an instant when winter started, the reclusive mage becoming even more reclusive, sealing the windows of his tower shut and hiding away from the world.

Normally, this wouldn't have bothered Sunset in the least. Weiss had even been working on his paradox research more with nothing better to do, so it directly helped Sunset for him to avoid going out like this. But the problem emerged when she began to see the mask crack, so to speak. Weiss had slowly grown more and more frustrated and morose, and that machine of his, which he had been fiddling with in every free moment he had, was not helping his mood at all. Whatever he was trying to use it to make contact with, it didn't seem to be doing it.

"So you're just going to stay in here for three months?" Sunset frowns.

Weiss gives her a sideways glance, before turning off his broadcast machine. "As a matter of fact, I am. I have important work to take care of, some of which is relevant to your situation, in case you forgot."

Sunset shrugs at this. "Have you found anything yet?"

He shrugs, pulling down two tomes from his shelf, labeled "Violent Sort's Teleporting Tome" and "Greedy Guts's Metabolic Metamorphosis", opening them up to bookmarked pages to refresh his memory. "I'm working on it. Give me some time to contact the correct ponies, and I'll have an amulet that should solve your problems. You'll need to bulk up for it to work, though."

Sunset's face scrunches up in confusion as she tilts her head and ears accordingly. "Bulk up?"

Weiss chuckles and whispers. "Avidus."

With a crack of lightning and a snap of his fingers, a sack of ordinary Equestrian Bits are teleported into his grip.

"Go to Sugarcube Corner, ask for something off of Pinkie's Personal Menu. You'll need a lot of calory intake for my planned solution, so Pinkie Pie is your new dietician," Weiss says, tossing her the sack, which she catches.

Sunset refuses to leave it at that, not accepting of Weiss's blatant vagueness. "I think I deserve an explanation of your plan, Weiss, considering the fact that I don't understand what it's supposed to accomplish. Kind of like everything you do, really."

Weiss looks surprised at her actually questioning one of his plans, and has to drag himself out of some old thoughts before he can reply.

"Come on Sunset, can't I keep it a surprise?" He pleads with a pout that contrasts against her deadpan stare.

She responds eloquently, with a resounding "No."

With a groan of disappointment and annoyance, Weiss reaches over to the bookshelf, before Sunset stops him.

"If you're going to be so whiny about it, I'll get my explanation later. It's not like you're going to trick me or something," Sunset lies, making Weiss's expression turn devilish.

A chortle escapes his lips. "Well of course not, dear Sunset. I've never been one to give an innocent pony falsehoods before."

As Sunset leaves, she ponders how gullible Weiss must be to have bought that at face value.

"Well, at least that put him in a better mood. I'll just get my answers from the horse's mouth, so to speak," She mumbles to herself, already having memorized the titles of the books that Weiss pulled out. She'll just write a letter to the Princess to get some copies of them to figure out his plan.

"Now, just how would combat teleportation help fix me..?" She finishes, plodding down the trail to Ponyville, deciding that trying the secret menu couldn't hurt, exactly.

Some sugary baked goods are just the thing to deal with the chill while she waits on a response, Sunset smiles.

Pinkie cringes at Sunset's request.

"Ah..."

"Are you sure?"

"Mr. and Mrs. Cake really don't like me serving that stuff to... ponies," She trails off.

Sunset can't help but ask. "What, does it taste bad or something? I heard you were a really good baker, I'm sure your personal favorites will taste fine, right? Your secret menu was recommended, actually!"

'Well, the customer is always right...' Pinkie thinks to herself, nervously, as she grabs the crayon-etched menu that helped her accidentally put three ponies in the hospital to get their stomachs pumped.

"Buttermilk Vanilla Wafer Cake? That doesn't sound too bad. Ooh! and it comes with a milkshake!" Sunset says, reading through the menu as she sits at the bar.

"I'll take one," She says, sealing her fate.

As she waits for Pinkie to finish her order, the jingling of Sugarcube Corner's doorbell heralds the entrance of a pair of ponies, Trixie and Twilight.

Oh, her little dragon friend seems to be there too.

"Don't worry, Trixie, you're overestimating how awkward it will be," Twilight says confidently, walking up to the bar with the morose magician.

"Twilight, Trixie can assure you that it will be most humiliating for her to receive tutoring for any reason. It would be best if we were all on the same page about that," Trixie says in response, plopping her rear onto one of the seats, and pulling up a menu.

Spike decides to chime in, while Twilight is ordering. "Hey, it's not going to be that bad, Twilight might be the battiest pony in Equestria when there's learning to be done, but if there's one thing she knows, it's humiliating ponies. Er! I mean, education!"

"Thanks Spike," Twilight deadpans, as Pinkie wheels out the three dishes.

"Here you are girls, one hot chocolate with extra hay, two cookies, one chocolate chip, one marble chip, and..."

Sunset feels a cold sweat erupt on the back of her neck when she sees the Milkshake, as it seems to have come in the jar of a modified blender, instead of a glass or mug.

The first thing Sunset notices is the fact that it's topped with bananas, whipped cream, hot fudge, brownies, donuts, and donut glaze. Inside the actual drink, she notices that it's an extremely thick strawberry and cherry milkshake, judging from the spoon and extra wide straw crammed into it, alongside a small pink drink umbrella.

"Well, that's... Quite a milkshake," Levitating the knife that came with her plate, she turns to the cake, a ten foot tall, off-white cylinder, surprisingly undecorated.

"Well, at least this looks a bit less extravagant, even if it is completely huge, I'll need a heck of a take-home box for this one!"

Sunset looks a bit confused at the slice she takes out of the ordinary-looking confection.

"The inside looks a bit odd, and shouldn't it be thinner, if it's a wafer cake?"

Pinkie nods. "It is a wafer cake, thirty-seven one-inch vanilla wafers, in fact, with thirty-six two-inch layers of delicious buttermilk frosting between them!"

Trixie and Twilight both look on at Sunset's plate in awe, fear, and curiosity. Surely she can't be considering actually eating that, can she?

Spike is too distracted with the bliss derived from his own cookie to notice or care.

Gulping, Sunset looks up at Pinkie's strained grin.

"I can take it back, if you don't want it. You'll need to sign a liability form before I'll give you the fork anyway," Pinkie says, offering the jagged-haired mare an out.

Gulping silently, Sunset shakes her head. "No, I've got this," She levitates the quill out of Pinkie's hooves and signs away her right to sue Sugarcube Corner for the consequences of eating this dish.

Using her newly obtained fork to spear a donut out of the milkshake, she scoops some fudge onto it, and takes her first bite, as the ponies around her silently remember the brave mare.

"Celestia save me" Sunset moans, with a distended gut and the worst stomachache.

She isn't sure how she managed to finish both the milkshake and a good chunk of the cake, but she did, and she regrets it.

"Should I call the hospital?" Pinkie says with the ease of someone who has had to do so her fair share of times in the past.

Sunset waves her off. "No, no, I'm good. Urp," She belches lightly.

Trixie and Twilight, who had been frozen in horror as she went at it, are broken free of the spell that sealed them away for what felt like an eternity.

"So..." Twilight says slowly.

"You usually don't come into town unless somepony makes you, what's the occasion, Sunset?"

Sunset nods. "Usually, Weiss is trying to convince me to try and make friends here... For some reason. I'm actually just grabbing a snack. Or at least, I thought I was, Ugh."

"And then I'm going to the post office to send a letter to Princess Celestia."

Twilight's eyes light up.

"What for? I could have Spike send it for you, if you like," She offers, making Spike perk up at the mention of his name.

Sunset ponders this for a moment.

"I guess it couldn't hurt. I actually need two books that I'm not sure are in print. "Violent Sort's Teleporting Tome" and "Greedy Guts's Metabolic Metamorphosis", have you heard of them?"

Twilight balks at that. "Heard of them? I have some copies at the library, as a matter of fact! Why do you need those, though? The spells in them are pretty restricted, and outdated to boot. One of them wasn't even written by a pony."

Sunset offers up her simple answer. "The Princess helped me convince Weiss to help me with something, and he was reading those two books in particular while he was doing it. But I have no clue why, since the problem he's supposed to be helping me with is related to time-magic."

"I was hoping that reading the books myself would give me some idea of what he's attempting."

Twilight ponders this while Trixie gulps down the last of her hot chocolate, which had been reheated by Pinkie when she was distracted.

"Tell you what, Sunset, meet me at the library, and I'll help out. I'm not as familiar with those spellbooks as some of the others, but I've taken the time to memorize them once or twice."

Sunset turns over the idea in her head, before nodding.

Pinkie pops in at this point to do her due diligence. "Do you want that to-go-box for your cake?" She asks, gesturing to the cake with only one slice taken out of it.

Sunset's stomach violently rejects even the slightest notion of accepting that offer with an angry growl.

"Uhh," She pauses. "No thanks, I'm good."

Pinkie shrugs, before devouring the entire cake in a split second, and spitting out the plate it was on into her outstretched hoof, where she takes it back into the kitchen to wash.

Everyone except for Spike is a bit shocked at the event, but shrugs it off quickly.

"Oh, Trixie, you should come along too, we can make a day of helping Sunset, and then helping you!" Twilight says cheerfully.

The blue mare shrugs. "Works for Trixie."

"It doesn't make any sense to Trixie, why would a book on dragon magic help anypony?" Trixie questions, sitting at the table, watching Twilight and Sunset in perfect sync as they chew through book after book in pursuit of studying the two tomes that Sunset saw Weiss using.

Twilight answers in part. "Well, I don't understand how, but apparently, Weiss Noir was famous for his use of dragon magic, in the ancient past. He even pioneered a few spells himself. It's very likely that he could use a dragon's metabolistic magic as well. It's honestly stunning that Rarity is even able to cast a gem-finding spell, considering it's roots in greed-based dragon magic."

Spike walks over around this time, carrying another load of books that he plops onto the table.

Awe enters his face at Twilight's declaration. "Wait, Rarity can use dragon magic? That's amazing, Celestia said it couldn't be done when you asked her about it, remember?"

This prompts Sunset to continue where Twilight left off in the explanation. "The level of greed required to harness this sort of magic is just not safe for a pony's mind to channel under normal circumstances, no matter how skilled you are at performing magic."

Spike nods. "That's exactly what she said, yeah!"

Sunset growls, snapping one of the books shut. "I don't get it, what does magic that alters a dragon's metabolic processes and regeneration have to do with spells designed to use teleportation to damage targets with harmful micro teleportation?"

Twilight puts a hoof on Sunset's shoulder, calming her. "We'll figure this out, between the three of us, we're sure to come up with something. You said he was going to make an amulet to somehow remove your paradox status, correct?"

At Sunset's nod, Twilight continues. "So what do all of these things have in common? An archaic form of Lacusurgy, Metabolistic Magic, and Paradox Cessation."

Trixie pipes up. "Isn't Lacusurgy used to pull things out of ponies without harming them? How does that relate to using teleportation to cause harm?"

Sunset answers, this time. "They're technically the same thing. Lacusurgy is when teleportation magic is used instead of surgery, to remove parts of a pony without the usual downsides of undergoing a surgical procedure."

"But if Weiss were trying to do that, why would he be cobbling together a crude form of it when it's already an established school of magic? And why would he need dragon metabolic magic along with it?"

Twilight pops in at this with a small fact. "Well, lacusurgy was only invented in the last three-hundred years, with the formation of the Great Snake country of Hissrael."

"Maybe Weiss just doesn't know that it already exists? I can't condone him taking books all the way into the Everfree, but if he's willing to come, he could always read up on it here."

Sunset shakes her head. "He hasn't left his tower in weeks. Apparently, he hates snow, or something."

Twilight and Trixie tilt their heads at this, silently urging her to continue.

"I don't get it either. Wasn't the Shadow Realm all cold and icy? He should be right at home," She wonders aloud.

Twilight has a thought. "If there's one pony who knows more about Weiss than anyone in Ponyville, it would be Zecora. I bet if we talked to her, we could figure it out, and get a greater understanding of his plans. Know thy enemy!"

"Sorry Trixie, looks like your lesson is going to have to be postponed. We've got a mystery to solve!" Twilight shouts, hoof to the sky and curiosity burning.

Trixie shrugs thoughtlessly.

"Spike, you stay here and keep an eye on the place," Twilight requests, making the little dragon salute her.

Spike picks up the discarded books that the girls left behind when they went out through the door.

"Dragon magic, huh..?" Spike says, as he opens the book up curiously.

Zecora ponders Twilight's question as they all sip at the warming soup that she had produced for the trio of ponies that came knocking at her door earlier.

"Of your question I am most unsure. ~ All I can offer is conjecture."

"While stories spoke of his famed analgia ~ They say his secret flaw was nostalgia."

"From time to time, his followers would find ~ That he was frozen, to a halt he would grind."

"When he was questioned as to the "whys" ~ He would snap free to speak, mist in his eyes."

"A sight I saw, reminded me ~ Of a place that I can no longer be."

"He'd say some words, some referenced lines. ~ From his homeland's most ancient times."

Zecora, having given context to her next words, speaks them simply, without any insistence that she might be right.

"Perhaps he fears the sight of snow ~ Will bring him back where he cannot go."

Twilight thinks about this. "What do you mean, where he cannot go?"

Zecora shrugs slightly at this, sipping at her soup and pulling her cloak a bit tighter around her body.

"His lost forgotten shadowed land ~ Crushed beneath the old clock's hand."

"Though its place may still exist, ~ Its time has been lost to the abyss."

Trixie thinks about this for a minute, before throwing her hat into the ring. "So you're saying he doesn't feel at home here, because he still misses his old one?"

Twilight's internal lightbulb can be seen activating from within her eyes as she comes to a realization. "Of course! If we make him feel at home, maybe he'll stop acting like such a jerk to everypony!"

She looks Zecora dead in the eyes. "Can you help us convince Weiss to come to Ponyville? Pinkie still hasn't thrown a welcome party for him, and a Pinkie Party didn't fail to make me feel at home in a strange place!"

Zecora gives Twilight a funny look for her logic. "Indeed, I could do so, if you wished. Though in his own words I think he'd be "pissed"."

"Maybe, but it's worth a try, isn't it?" Twilight's use of rhetoric in her question is the only bulwark against a sarcastic rebuttal from Zecora in that moment, as they begin making plans.

Trixie sweats despite the cold as she stares at the skulls which serve as literal fountains of what appears to be magma, embedded in the obsidian double doors of Weiss's Tower.

"Trixie must say, this pony has a flair for the dramatic," She says nervously as the skulls stop dripping lava when they walk closer, and turn in their sockets on the door to stare directly at the trio of ponies.

Twilight nods. "Celestia told me about this. Weiss Noir would always plan around the path ponies would take to reach something. That's why she would just smash through his ceiling instead."

Sunset looks confused. "That's odd, normally the door doesn't act like this."

Zecora gives the door a suspicious glance as it slowly swings open, and torches inside ignite with white fire, unveiling a long hallway.

"Friend or no, we should be wise ~ Stay together, sharpen your eyes," She warns, taking point into the tower.

"More arrive, foolishly seeking fortune and glory... In this domain... Of the Damned." The room bellows in a deep voice.

"Weiss, what is going on here?!" Sunset shouts, making a hiss of static erupt from around them, the group flattening their ears at the loud noise.

"Shit, Sunset? You brought friends? Hold on, just let me deactivate the wards..." Weiss's voice rings out.

Some miscellaneous noises make their way through the magical intercom, before Weiss speaks up again.

"Seriously girl, I figured it would take at least another few weeks to gather... three whole friends, according to the weight detectors? Is this one of those pranks where you come in and there's a bunch of guards with you to arrest me or something? Whatever, come in."

Shrugging to the baffled Trixie, the quadrio walk deeper into the tower, passing by a variety of discolored walls, and stepping onto bulging tiles that oddly click, all while being unaware of the danger that they're bypassing this time around when nothing activates.

When they enter Weiss's laboratory, they see that he's half buried in the innards of a giant machine, covered in sweeping smooth white armor, and embossed with glittering cyan crystals.

"That- That's pure Orichalcum! How in Equestria could you have gotten your hooves on that much of it?!" Twilight balks.

Weiss pulls himself free of the machine, slapping the panel closed and wiping glitter off his face.

"Oh that's an easy one, I've got stashes of orichalcum all over the place, in case of an orichalcum emergency. And before you ask, no, this isn't a weapon of terror. It's just a worthless prototype that you absolutely won't be able to use against me, since it would require quite possibly the best flier in Equestria to control it."

"And the real one will be so much stronger~!" Weiss very nearly giggles at Twilight's look of confusion and intrigue as he does a little jig in anticipation of the final version of his weapon.

"So what's up, my unusual assortment of acquaintances?"

Sunset takes point. "We're here to convince you to come with us to Ponyville. It's important."

Weiss's jovial demeanor shatters like fine sapphire sheets, morphing into a blank stare.

"I'm sorry to hear it. It's never fun when one faces an impossible task," He says simply, turning back to his machine.

Sunset refuses to leave it at that, grabbing his shoulder. "Weiss, you can't just trap yourself in here. If there's something about winter that bothers you, you should face it. You stared down a lot worse than some flakes of ice."

Though she can't see it as he's turned away still, Weiss's lips twitch up into a scowl briefly before he manages himself.

"You'll have to pardon the childish undertones of what I'm about to say, but you literally cannot make me," He responds, removing Sunset's hoof from his body with an extra hand.

Twilight gives Zecora a glance that she receives.

Zecora speaks up, making Weiss freeze. "She cannot, that much is true, ~ But convincing you is something I can do."

"I have my first request thus ~ I would like you to come with us."

The girls can practically feel the tension rise, as Weiss clenches his fists, still not having turned around.

In a moment, that tension breaks, as Weiss sighs and his limbs bonelessly flop to his sides.

He sighs again. "So you have wished it, so it shall be."

"Last time I hand out a blank check for requests. I offer jewels, power and knowledge, and she asks for the hard stuff," He mutters to himself, cloaking his body in warming flames as they escort him to the exit.

Sure enough, like Zecora implied, the sight of an endless expanse of snow when the door opens leaves him staring at it blankly, trapped in some old memory.

♪"Put one foot in front of the other,"♪ He sings softly.

They don't ask, and he doesn't explain.

"I can't believe you all brought me out in the god-forsaken snow for a surprise party," Weiss says, sipping at a glass of lemon-vanilla soda, waving cheerfully at the violence-promising stare of Gilda and Rainbow Dash off to the side.

Sunset chuckles. "Well, I had to do something. If you looked any sadder, I'd have to start babyproofing the tower." She jokes grimly, a holdover from browsing the human world's internet a touch too much.

"To be frank now, though I once held silent, ~ I thought your reaction would be much more violent," Zecora questions.

"What drove your hiding and diversions, ~ If not a painful memory's aversion?"

Weiss shrugs, looking out of a window wistfully at the houses of Ponyville, now coated in pristine white snow like a blanket.

"I was worried that if I saw the town like this, all covered in snow and winter cheer, I might become too comfortable with it. My plans don't account for me growing fond of Ponyville."

Rubbing his eyes with a claw, he chuckles. "I'll simply have to adjust my plans accordingly."

"Something wrong, Weiss?" Pinkie pops up, sensing an eye being rubbed nearby and preparing the emergency cupcake to be deployed accordingly.

Weiss shrugs. "Well, it's cold as shit outside, and I'm enjoying a party thrown in my honor. So I'm feeling a bit nostalgic."

Pinkie nods sagely, before wrestling the confused dark sage into a chokehold, and stuffing the emergency nostalgia cupcake into his face hole.

Gilda's cheers and whoops are gratifying to the party pony, looks like even a grumpy griffon understands the importance of cupcake therapy.

Or is it just the fact that Pinkie is pinning all six of Weiss's arms behind his back?

Probably the cupcake thing.

Looking out the window at the ominous tower in the distant Everfree Forest, Twilight is, strangely enough, reminded of the tower she practically lived in back in Canterlot.

With Spike asleep in his bed, Twilight decides to write this letter herself, pulling out the quill, inkwell, and paper accordingly.

"Dear Princess Celestia,

Today I learned a powerful lesson in friendship. Though I had friends to help me adjust to being in Ponyville, there are others who aren't as lucky when moving to a new place, and It can be extremely disorienting to be reminded of one's old home. A friendship can both be forged and strengthened more easily when a pony is made to feel welcome, even if they are quite literally evil.

Your Faithful Student, Twilight Sparkle."

(Weiss Report) Lookalike [Metal Dash]

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Dear Princess Celestia, I've sent you a translated entry that concerns me, though Weiss claimed to be building a prototype for a weapons platform yesterday, I've found an entry that suggests he already possesses a nearly complete final version of that very same weapons platform. I've included copies of both the blueprints he gave me, seemingly uncaring if I sent them to you, but also copies of the blueprints in the Grimoire Weiss.

Entry Number Four-hundred and Six, Year Two-hundred and Fifty-three

Oh yeah, this one's definitely going to be my baby, I've packed every trick in the book into this toy. There's only one problem left to solve, and unfortunately, it's a pretty irksome one. I've made a golem so potent and capable, that I don't actually have a control-crystal skilled or smart enough to actually pilot it. I guess that's just what happens when you design a golem to match and surpass the feats of the third most adorable pony to have in the future existed, Rainbow Dash.

First things first, I'll go through it's features. Four Hellfire Reactors around it's back and barrel provide the highest top speed I can currently manage for it's weight and fuel consumption, converting magic and heat directly into thrust, the reactors are also plugged into specialized Royal Vibranium Sockets, enhanced with adamantite and, of course, orichalcum. It would be one hell of a time finding some way to damage it, even if you somehow catch it.

What really makes it shine though is the specialized additives I managed to weasel out of some pegusi, real feathers, mixed into the orichalcum during smelting, and enchanted accordingly, this monster of a golem actually increases the durability of it's armor as it moves at higher speeds, much like how actual pegusi are able to. As an added side effect, the armor is so flexible now that I've been able to massively simplify armoring it's joints, as the armor around them can simply move freely. It's a good thing, too, because right now, the only thing this golem can do is crash.

If it could do other things, some of the things it would do include lightning enchantments, automatic haste crystals, and even a specialized fluid tank which emits durability-enhancing oil in response to damage. The heavy enchantments on the orichalcum chassis also make it fully capable of combating even the most potent of magics with ease, and it's pegasus magic enables it to interact with a variety of mists and smokes.

The perfect weapon to utterly destroy my enemies.

Of course, it wouldn't be an ultimate weapon without some actual weapons, which I did not neglect to include. Most of them are stashed in a special mobile chamber, where portals can be tethered between the chamber and the golem to grant access, hotswapping weapons and parts out with ease. Weapons such as wind-blasters, magic missiles, lightning launchers, repulsive armor, and of course, the Weiss Special, Black Flame flamethrowers. It was well worth figuring out how to make Black Flames come out in rainbow colors, but it's absolutely a necessity, I feel.

One thing that I had to figure out was how to get the colors right. Orichalcum and Adamantite are both stunningly durable materials, but sadly, paint is not as durable as the substance it is applied to. The solution? Illusion Magic, baked right into the golem's enchantments, to project colored dots all over the metal's surface. As a static illusion, it holds up nicely in the face of attacks, but more importantly, while the etherware is there, I might as well have put it to good use, so I did.

Project Metal Dash, therefore, is also equipped with high quality illusion projectors, I haven't thought of a good use for a mobile illusion projector, but I'm sure I'll think of a few, sooner or later. Preferably, though, I'll first figure out how to make a golem effective and skilled enough to pilot it.

Obviously, Golems cued by myself won't work. I'm not a pegasus, I'm not even that skilled at aeronautics. There's a reason I have dudes to do my R&D work for me, after all.

I tried a number of solutions, from using programs instead of golemancy, to mechanical methods of giving the golem more control over it's flight, but those have all failed without compromising key components of the machine, leaving me back at square one, I've made a machine whose skill ceiling is too high for anything I currently possess. Perhaps in the future, I can come up with some better solution, but for now, I leave this entry here.

Entry Number Four-hundred and Seven, Year Two-hundred and Fifty-three

Here's a thought, if a golem isn't sufficient to control it, then what about a pony? Of course, I'm being a bit factitious, by "pony", I mean a golem whose cues are far more potent than that of ordinary golems. The more magic is used to create a golem, the more strongly it draws cues from the pony who it's magic came from. I've been doing some research on againte, and it's ability to replicate strong magic that is near it. If it weren't for the fact that it radiates it as well, it wouldn't be nearly so potentially useful.

Using two carefully carved and treated againte gemstones, I've created what I like to call an Againte Reactor, using this, I could feasibly create a self-sustaining reaction, two stones, radiating powerful magic back and forth to one another, resulting in a theoretically unceasing magical core which draws incredibly potent cues from it's donor.

Golems have always acted in a fairly organic manner, by drawing information from a snapshot of the person who created them in the exact moment they created it, but if I can get this Againte Reactor up and running, I can't help but wonder just how lifelike the resultant golem would truly be?

It's a total wash. The theory is sound, but in practice, there's not a single pony in the Shadow Realm or beyond who can personally generate enough magical force to trigger the feedback loop and also create the Life Data necessary to activate the againte core in such a way that it derives cues from a single pony. I'm stuck, unless I want to go to Celestia and Luna, and god would that be awkward as hell. "Hey, I'd like to test if I can make a golem so strong that it acts exactly like you in every way, mind giving it a jumpstart?" They'd laugh me out of their court. Well, who needs them. I'm sure I can find some rube dumb enough and strong enough to generate the sufficient magical force. Eventually.

(Past Chapter 8) Handled Like a Dream

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I hadn't been dreaming since I got here, when I first had one here, though, it was a bit of a nightmare. That is to say, it was literally of a mare aligned with the night.

Everything's a bit hazy as I leap over buildings shrouded in mist, even though it feels like there's no gravity at all, I still slowly glide back down after each of my jumps.

I stop in front of a metal sign on the freeway for a while, staring at it.

Eventually, I end up in a room, holding a remote. Whenever I try to press buttons on the remote, my finger slips away from it at the last second, frustrating me.

"What odd dreams thou leadst. Mayhaps thou wouldst enjoy them more if you did not change between them quite so frequently," A voice says, making me ponder her words.

"Did you know you actually always dream several times a night? Dreamless sleep is simply the result of you not remembering your dreams when you wake up," I respond.

The voice looks confused at this.

"We do not know from where thou heard that, but it is untrue. Dreams are only forgotten when they are made to be forgotten, and cruel magic can indeed take those dreams away, for a time. It is curious that you had not dreamt until I sought out your unconscious mind in this realm. But it was a trifle to correct whatever illness had plagued thy mind."

I hear her, but her words don't really register with me. Until the dream becomes lucid, anyway.

"I would prefer that my dreams remain unvisited, Luna."

Vague mist becomes a material visage, as the Princess of the Night manifests in front of me, and the room solidifies.

She stares at me, cool as a cucumber. "We assure thou that this state of affairs is preferable to an interrogation in the waking world. My sister has not the patience for the subtle art of traversing the dream realm, while traversing to thine doorstep remains an act for which no patience is required."

I get the feeling that my urge to glare at her won't be hidden by me not doing it, in a place like this. "Cracking open my mind in the waking world would give her nothing but an unsavory mess. I fear you would have better luck doing so here."

She nods, taking a dainty seat on my couch. "Indeed. And so we are here."

"You may not have depopulated a city, but thou dost yet reek of sorcery most foul. We would have honest answers to divine the truth out from under the poor reputation thine trickery has given you between us."

I respond directly. "Survival, Princess. That's the only answer you should need."

She is unfazed by my declaration. "And yet we will have more. Where didst thou learn the dark spells thou used, why do you claim dominion over the citizens of the Crystal Empire among those who have escaped, what reason do we have to trust thine intentions, when thy mind is stewing even now in the magic of evil?"

Under the assumption that she can simply take the answers by force if I'm not careful, I decide to answer honestly. "I am self-taught. I can cast no spells that I did not come across while plumbing the depths of my own self."

Luna's gaze sharpens. "Ridiculous. I am no slouch on the subject of dark magic, foal. The spells we have seen used are too varied to come from a mere hobbyist, bumbling around in the dark."

"We have yet to divine thine truthful words from thy deceitful ones through the force of magic as an act of trust. Thou willt not betray that trust."

I gulp. "Princess, if you're going to extract the answers by force, then just get it over with. I won't be called a liar until I make one of myself."

"I hated the snow, and it caught on fire. I wanted to make valuable crystals, and they grew. The spells just came to me, and if you don't trust that, then you're not trusting in the truth."

Luna suddenly starts to giggle at my words, infuriating me. "My word you are bold. If you are bluffing, then your arrogance is greater than can be measured. I dare say, where was this bravado previously?" She says, giggling more and more.

"Roughly seven miles away with my broken teeth," I growl.

At this point, she's trying to keep from bursting into laughter utterly, and failing.

"Fine, fine!" She says, dragging herself back under control with only a few minor outbursts of giggles, before waving at me to continue.

"A hopeless savant of the vilest magics of our world bumbles into spells unheard of by sane ponies, and masters them in mere weeks. Convinced as I am of that, you may continue with your fanciful tale."

Taking a deep breath to rein my temper in, I do as she says, plopping down into my computer chair and swiveling around to face the jovial princess.

"I didn't claim dominion over the Crystal Ponies. They shanghai'd me into it. Sombra's dumbass wards aren't able to detect anyone using dark magic, so I had to use dark magic on the ponies' behalf. I've got tactics that he doesn't know how to fight against, so I had to plan everything on the ponies' behalf. I've got tricks that Sombra's idiotic enough to fall for, so I had to direct operations on the ponies' behalf."

"I told them not to build a damn throne, but then they just pulled out the puppy-dog-eyes until I relented. I didn't actually ask for any of this."

Glaring at Luna to see what part of my story sets her off this time, I'm stunned when she nods as though it were obvious.

She clarifies. "Ponies do tend to do that."

"Sister tends to solve that problem by disguise public works as being her own, and lamenting when ponies do something extravagant for her instead of donating time and bits to those causes. Turnabout is fair play, when the... Puppy-dog-eyes... are brought out," She explains, slowly avoiding stumbling over my terminology.

She visibly reins in her merriment, and starts speaking Shakespearian again. "But now we arrive at the most important question. What are thine motives, thy intentions? Thou hast used dark magic more extensively than many whose minds are now corrupt. The force of thy hatred even now hangs over the land as a miasma. How could such a state possibly be reconciled with thou being anything but a threat to Equestria and the Crystal Empire alike?"

"Thou hast even claimed that thou wanted nothing to do with the task that the Crystal Ponies have thrust onto you, is there anything, anything at all, with which to prove you would not bitterly do them harm when your patience reaches its end?"

I'm baffled at this. "That's a pretty grim thought, I hate plenty of things, but I'm not just going to hurt someone, that's kinda psychotic."

Luna's confused expression leads me to believe I just said something wrong, so I quickly rephrase my statement.

"That is to say, uhh... I channel my feelings constructively?"

"I hate Sombra's guts, so I'm going to act on that, I want shiny things, so I'll make shiny things, I get frustrated with problems, so I'll solve them. Even if I were willing to hurt innocent people, which I'm not, I have no reason to."

"I don't want to do it, but in this line of work, I must do many things I do not enjoy."

"Is that not how it works?"

Luna doesn't immediately respond, making me extremely nervous that that might not actually be how it works for the average pony.

Her next words relieve me somewhat. "Your approach to managing the dark arts is naive, but intriguing. I see now why I had been prepared to halt my sister's spell, had it threatened striking you."

So it was just a vastly overblown good-cop bad-cop routine that they had been trying to run on me. I had my suspicions, thinking back to that night, but decided it wasn't worth pondering further at the time.

After a long pause, Luna nods. "Very well, your words have bought you a reprieve from my scrutiny, if nothing else."

Sensing her intent to leave, I have to ask. "Wait, if you're here, then why haven't you destroyed Sombra yet? You should be more than capable of it."

Luna looks annoyed, but not with me. "There exist magics whose sole purpose is to repel an alicorn, and an alicorn alone. Every time a new form of the spell is crafted, it takes time for me and my sister to divine how to defeat it."

"What about the Elements of Harmony?" I wonder, thinking about why they didn't use them on Sombra in the show.

Luna's tilted head doesn't bode well. "The what?"

A touch of dread bubbles up in my gut. "The Elements of Harmony, you know, the relics you used to defeat Discord. Honesty, Kindness, Loyalty, Generosity, Laughter and Magic?"

"I do not know what you are talking about. I have not heard tell of any Elements, nor do I know who this "Discord" is."

My stomach drops out from under me. That's not how the show went...

She looks around the wobbling room. "You are waking up. We will discuss this further another time. Fare thee well, "Lord" Weiss." She says, fading into blue smoke along with the rest of my dream.

I wake up suddenly, and immediately make a beeline towards the Wacky Workbench Zone's fast travel rail.

"Why do you need a dreamcatcher, anyway? Is Luna not taking care of your nightmares? That would be pretty rude on her part." Priss says as I flip through a tome named "Sleepnir's Restful Rocks", my eyes very slowly reading through the foreign text.

This time, she had jammed my door open with a wad of gypsum, preventing the lock from actually engaging when I closed my door, and allowing her to slip in unopposed to harass me. I'll have to keep that trick in mind, and proof our doors against it in the future.

"No clue, I haven't been having any nightmares. What I do have, however, is a problem, considering the door to my mind doesn't even have a lock on it," I respond, sipping from a mug of crystal juice. Considering it's quite literally magically flavored water, it has no right being as delicious as it is. Now if only my R&D ponies could figure out how to make it fizz.

I had been unnaturally willing to share information while I was asleep, I feel now, and whether or not that's because I was intimidated by someone who could probably turn my grey matter into soup, or because I had been manipulated somehow while I was asleep is irrelevant, because It cannot happen again.

"The Pony of Crystal may take, of moonstone, and they will bake it in their power of a dream awoken from whose memory they wish captured in the soft morning of a summer in a meadow, and they will awake it in a wash of their power of a fearful anticipation, of a deadline to one's work in refitting the moulding of the castle's doorways, and it will become a Moon Crystal, with inside a dream will begin to occur, and a dream will not occur within the mind of a pony near it," I read, with some disgust at the formatting and phrasing.

She chews on a piece of rock gum, listening to my reading.

"Who'd want to break in, anyway? Nothing worth stealing up there, and they'd have to wipe their hooves on the way out," She snarks with a pop of gum.

"Are you kidding? There are things in my dome would make your little filly head spin," I say firmly, to which I receive a deadpan stare.

She rolls her eyes at me. "Probably just my eyes, actually."

I groan. "Don't you have something better to do with your time?"

She ponders my words for a moment. "As a matter of fact, you're right. I shouldn't be mocking your intelligence when I'm so behind on mocking the rest of you."

I put a hoof firmly to my face.

"Let's see, what's on the itinerary," She asks herself.

"Oh, yeah, how about that time at the pool?" She remembers.

I groan louder, clapping my book shut, now that I'm fully aware I won't be able to read it with her interference. "Please, let's not talk about that. I know how to swim, I just don't... I'm out of practice."

She gives me a knowing look. "Is that what the adults call it?"

At my unamused glare, she continues. "So, have I finally annoyed you enough to get you out of here and into the fray again? You've been in here since you found that dumb book at the library."

This marks my turn to roll my eyes. "Fine, I need to pick up the Moon Crystals for testing anyway."

Tipping a non-extant hat to me, Priss trots off, to do whatever it is young fillies do when they aren't viciously mocking me.

"Foul little imp," I mutter fondly, chuckling as I leave my room as well.

I find myself anxious as I look at the moon crystal on my desk, a mere paperweight until someone falls asleep near it. The work of my R&D team's best efforts to produce a crystal to my exacting specifications, with a few more enchantments here and there.

Sadly, as much as I might like to, I can't afford to fall asleep in the middle of "court", an endless parade of ponies coming into my office, asking me to approve things, and then sending in more of their kind.

I have to find a better way to handle this. Spending hours and hours a day personally tending to every little thing that the Shadow Realm needs an authority for is cutting into perfectly good testing time.

"-and that's why I believe, with the amount of ponies we have now, and our new weapons, we should take the fight to Sombra, we can take him now, and free The Empire!"

Oh dear. I better take care of this before continuing the rest of my internal monologue.

I hold up a hoof. "I absolutely agree. There's just three small things we need, just to make sure. I'd like you to work on getting me these things, and we can begin the assault immediately."

"First, I'd like you to find something invincible, and demonstrate to me that it can be destroyed. Secondly, I'd like you to bring me a corpse made out of smoke, and, this is a very important one, I'd like you to hogtie Celestia and dump her in the middle of my office."

He sputters at my insane demands. "T-those demands are impossible, what are you talking about?!"

I shrug. "You told me we are ready to fight Sombra, an invincible god who can turn to smoke. So I'd like you to demonstrate that we can defeat that which is invincible, that which is a god, and that which is made of smoke. As soon as you can, I'll begin preparing for a direct assault."

"Until then, we continue our hit-and-run tactics. I won't risk lives on bluster, Mr. Helmsplitter."

I dismiss the guard captain, and have the next pony sent in.

Oh, finally, someone I'm actually excited to see. My loyal spymaster.

"Ahh, if it isn't Iceland Spar. I trust you've got news for me?"

The dark green coated pony nods, his white cloak shuffling. "It is as you predicted, milord. Sombra has had no choice but to release some of the slaves from his mine back into their homes to grow food, with the population as low as it is."

"May I ask why we have no further raids planned, when the machine of his tyranny is even now bleeding?"

I nod. "Yes, you can."

I wait for him to realize my phrasing, before he continues. If he's annoyed with my subtle fooling around, he doesn't show it.

"Why do we not have further raids planned, milord?"

I nod again. "Because now the entire Crystal Empire is poisoned. He's releasing slaves that were once under mind control. We have no way to cure Sombra's mind control once it has been applied, and we have no way to tell whether or not the ponies have truly been freed of his control. If we take even a single pony out of the empire that Sombra could reactivate, it would expose the cell in an instant."

"We've backed him into a corner, where rats fight the hardest."

"Right now, we wait, and we rest. And then, later, we prepare, and we grow in power."

He nods at this, and takes my message to the rest of the scouting teams to assuage their concerns.

"Weiss, this is ridiculous. I'm never going to figure out my spell unless I do it the way that professionals do it," Eclipse says, frustrated.

I laugh. "Eclipse, I've been reading the works of those so-called professionals. They shouldn't be writing flipbooks, much less spellbooks."

She glares. "Well, telling me to "Figure out each individual emotion I felt" isn't helpful at all, I should be trying to figure out how to feel like I did in that exact moment, instead of pointlessly trying to pick it apart first."

"Your book is just as ridiculous. You can't just tell a pony that they need to feel hate to cast Black Flame, you need to describe the feeling, make them feel what you felt, so they can cast it as well as you can!"

I snort at this. "No, idiot, I need them to feel what they feel. Just because the methods in existing spellbooks are old doesn't mean they're good. Making the reader understand what feelings are needed is more important than using flowery outdated wording to attempt to make the reader empathize with you."

"Although clearly, my student, you are doubtful. That's good. It means you'll seek out an even better way in the future. But first, we're going to take a break, and I'm going to demonstrate why I'm right."

Eclipse catches the glass of juice I slide to her, and drain my own in seconds, after the hours of magic attempts, we had been no closer to Eclipse realizing the power of her Merciful Bulwark again.

When she finishes her own glass, I begin to explain my new plan. "I want you to think about something you hate a lot."

Groaning, she responds. "I don't want to cast your dark spells Weiss, dark magic drives ponies crazy."

"Don't worry, I just need a demonstration. You know as well as I do from the Grimoire Noir that dark magic's emotionally altering effect only applies if you lack sufficient emotion. You've got more than enough hate to cast the spell, if you'll just do as I say. And it will more than prove my methods as superior."

She groans. "It's not going to work, Weiss, it takes hours at the best of times for a pony to even begin to understand a spell, it's not as simple as just summoning up a memory and trying to cast the spell."

Despite her complaints, she glares at me, and her hooves catch on fire, the black flames of hatred puffing up on them adorably, like a cat frightened by a splash of water.

The stunned silence of her brain cranking to a halt is sweet music to my ears.

After a long, mostly entertaining day, I'm finally able to get to the real meat of what I had planned. I set the enchanted Moon Crystal next to my bed on my shelf, and activate its enchantments. Time to see if this thing really works, or if I'm just going to have to live with the fact that Luna and anyone else can waltz into my brain whenever they want with no way to protect myself.

Though my nervousness makes it difficult, I eventually doze off, and fall into the embrace of sleep.

I "awaken" inside a blue, crystalline room. Outside, I can see my room in macro. Though it seems like I'm inside the crystal itself, in reality, this is just the way my mind interprets the magic of the crystal intercepting my dreams.

Summoning up a chair, I summon up my dream-interpretation of some of the crystal's other features. Feature number one, communication.

The Gameboy floating in front of me lights up with a nostalgic "bling!", before displaying a live feed of another crystalline room, inside which Dr. A.R Homeopathy is waving excitedly.

I wave back, before the Nintendo DS that forms the dream-representation of my next test lights up with its own noise of activation. This one displays something far less impressive, a simple calculator, modified so that it doesn't use letters or numbers, but instead, a verbal response mechanism and inputs.

Voicing out "One plus one" to the DS's microphone, my grin expands when the device responds with "Two", in a pleasant female voice. What makes this impressive is, the calculator's actual control crystal is all the way in Wacky Workbench Zone, which my Moon Crystal was able to communicate with.

I turn back to Dr. Real's feed.

"Tell the dudes I said good work, Dr. Real! This is the beginning of stage two, I believe!"

He nods excitedly, already accessing other magical computers in his own Moon Crystal to perform further experiments, and communicate with the lab boys in his sleep.

My smile shrinks, and then grows a bit when I hear a loud, drum-like pounding on the walls. Looking over at the sight of Luna impatiently pounding on the wall, making ripples roll harmlessly across its surface, I trot over.

I dampen my satisfaction as I alter the walls of the crystal into an airlock to let her inside, and summon up two copies of a familiar couch. "I greet you, Princess Luna of Equestria. I hope this night has found you well."

She glares at me, taking a seat. "What is the meaning of this, Weiss? I return your dreams to you, and you lock me out of them as thanks?"

I make myself look harmlessly curious at this as I probe her for information. "Can you not enter these as freely as any other dream?"

Her glare softens. "I cannot, Weiss. It would take the effort of a night to cast you out of this thing, if you were besieged by a nightmare, there would be nothing I could do."

Thankfully, these crystals by design cannot be set to automatically allow visitors from the outside dream realm. And even if she managed to pull me out of one crystal, that just means I need to keep a backup.

"Unfortunately, these crystals by design cannot be set to automatically allow visitors from the outside dream realm, Princess. But I will be sure to allow you in, so long as you ask politely," I say with hidden firmness.

She searches my face for any signs of deception, but, unfortunately for her, I haven't deceived her in any way.

She gives me a look that makes guilt pool in my gut. "You fear me too much, Weiss. I do not mean you harm."

I shake my head genuinely. "I'm not frightened of you, Luna. I am concerned. What can be done by you can be done by others. An enemy may one day approach my dreams who means me harm. And now that day will not come without a fight."

She turns my words over in her mind. "If it quenches your fears, then I will take no offense to your transgression, just this once."

I nod affably. "It most certainly does. Any pony feels safer within a fortress, after all, but even fortresses require a guardian without. Of which there is only one that I trust," I say, gesturing to Luna.

She must not receive as much thanks for her work as she deserves, as this makes her flush with embarrassment.

"It is my duty, your thanks are appreciated, but not required."

She's going to be so pissed when she realizes I plan on distributing these things for free.

As she leaves, I look around. As lucid as I am right now, this isn't really much of a "Dream" World, I feel.

But between the computer crystals, communications between other moon crystals, and the magically enhanced radio-waves allowing all of this, I think it would make a very suitable Digital World.

Not that I plan on having any monsters in here, but it's still a fun thought.

(Noir Report) Intriguing Thoughts on the Subject of Magical Habit [Hoofcasting and Unicorn Light]

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Entry #8, Day 61

It is only very recently that I have come to consider why particular races channel magic through particular bodyparts. Through my research, though, I have come to an odd conclusion. It seems the location through which a spell manifests is surprisingly arbitrary. In my own situation, I find that only spells unique to a Unicorn require that they be cast through my horn. My student had helped me come to this realization, when she had cast the spell Black Flame through her hooves.

The sight of this evoked a curiosity in me that I decided I should properly come to test. So I had tried it myself. I discovered that, by focusing intently, and with no shortage of practice, I could evoke the black flames anywhere from my body. It makes for a very cozy coat in the cold to simply wear a thin cloak of fire. And it is more useful to grow crystals through my hooves than via a beam of light.

Indeed, I had come to wonder what exactly the purpose of a unicorn's horn is, if not to enable them to cast spells, until eventually, I had discovered a subtle magic that had actually wormed it's way into my other spells, unbeknownst to me. It seems that when a unicorn casts a spell by emitting a beam or a blast of light, they are actually casting two spells, a spell which creates what I will refer to as Unicorn Light, and the spell that they allow to ride on that light, like a passenger on a cart. This seems to occur whenever a pony wishes to cast a spell at a distance, instead of casting it via simply allowing the target to enter the radius of magic emitted from them.

Among the few books I can find on unicorn magic, there is no reference to this hidden unicorn spell, despite it's prolific, all-encompassing use. I assume I merely lack books which detail this extremely obvious phenomena, as the alternative is that no unicorn to date has realized the purpose of a unicorn's horn. To emit light upon which spells can be carried across vaster distances.

The awareness of change, an emotion unique to unicorns. In even the smallest quantities, this emotion can be used to create light. It is a feeling which emerges much more easily when casting a spell, I find, as in the moment you cast a spell, you are fully aware of the change you intend to exact on the world around you. The usage of Unicorn Light to carry other spells entwined with it's photons is incredibly useful, and realizing that it was almost a sort of metamagic changed the way that I view spellcasting.

The days when I had thought that I needed to send showers and spheres of black flames to strike at distant foes are now over. By instead using Unicorn Lasers, I can strike objects with the very literal precision of a laser, either creating explosions of hateful fire, or sustained, needle-tipped onslaughts of narrow destruction. A unicorn who masters this manner of spellcasting will find themselves in possession of what is in practice a doubled library of spells, as the usage of a spell changes more than you might expect with the simple alteration of it's shape and distance.

The most obvious use is, at long last, I am able to utilize the Black Flame for incredibly narrow applications, a strong, thin beam of it, with enough focus, can easily lance through many materials, slicing them apart. While it might be odd to say, substances which are transparent are even more susceptible to this, as the flames pass through them with ease, burning them apart. Reflective substances are a bit more of a hassle, and I do not recommend firing spells enhanced with Unicorn Light at any mirrors, as they may simply bounce off entirely.

Let it be said that there are no ponies old enough to desire a comb-over as the result of a magical mishap.

I can't help but think of the many qualities of light that could be exploited if applied to Unicorn Light as well. What happens to dark substances, which absorb the enchanted light? What happens to Black Flames, which drink in light with incredible thirst? What happens to florescent substances, which absorb, and then later, release light? Could such things be used to magnify the power of unicorn magic even further, through the simple manipulation of photons? I believe it would make for a worthwhile series of experiments, in the future.

Returning to the subject of casting spells through other parts of one's body, the uses are equally many. With focus and practice, one's entire body can become a conduit for spellcraft. Although it is interesting to note that a body part will not glow as a unicorn's horn does unless the magic being used is concentrated and intense. This is a useful benefit for one who wishes to cast spells with stealth and subtlety, especially among those whose careful gaze rests on the part of your body you have no intention of using in casting spells.

The black flames of hatred can turn a buck into a much more devastating blow, the Royal Crystal Growth spell can grow armor and weapons from anything touching your body, and Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation can be cast and controlled with nary a telling spark from your horn. Truly, this method of spellcasting is one worthy of mastery, if one is to become a master of the dark arts, both the magical ones, and the mundane dark arts of deception and subterfuge.

And, by understanding the way Unicorn Light functions, those among my readers who have that signature appendage must master it if they are to master dark magic. However ironic it may be that, in order to master the dark, you must first master the light.

One question worth asking, though I am unsure how I would test it with any ease or safety, does this mean that there are ways by which a spell could be cast simply by witnessing it cast? The spells carried by Unicorn Light are indeed carried on light. Which has that tendency to enter one's eyes.

I suppose you could say, seeing is believing.

(Present Chapter 8): Purple's Clues

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It's still cold, it's still snowing, and Spike still can't figure out that dumb book.

He had been trying for a week now to read and understand it, but between Twilight's constant interjecting, and the book's extremely archaic draconian dialect, he's had no luck.

He rests his head on the table, groaning. "Maaan! This sucks. Shouldn't this be easy? I mean, I'm a dragon, it's dragon spells."

Twilight interjects, looking up from her own book. "Well, I'm a unicorn Spike, and it still takes time for me to learn unicorn spells. It's never easy learning new magic, especially from older books."

She continues a bit more sadly. "I'm sorry that there aren't any books on dragon magic written in Newhoof's Approachable Format, It's a lot easier to learn spells when the requirements are just laid out clearly. Would you like me to get out the Draconic Prose and Symbolism primer? We could go over it again."

Spike groans even louder at that. "No thanks, I've had enough thee's and thou's to last a lifetime," He says.

Twilight thinks for a moment. "Well, if you want to learn something, you could ask Rarity. Her gem-finding spell is technically classified as dragon magic."

"Maybe it will give you the head start you need to begin understanding the rest of that book?"

Spike, chewing on Twilight's words, quickly slips into a delightful, heart-filled fantasy about the lovely Rarity teaching him some of her magic.

"I like that idea," He nods dreamily, making Twilight giggle.

"How about this, I'll go see if Trixie wants to do some more magic tutoring today while you clean the library up, and after I get her answer, we'll go to Carousel Boutique and see if Rarity doesn't mind you spending the afternoon there while the tutoring is going on.

Spike's hasty nod and grab for a featherduster makes her giggle again.

"So anyway, that's why I think you should totally have more explosions in your next act." Gilda says, her coffee ignored for now as she rants at the blue unicorn about her act.

Trixie mumbles an apathetic "Mmhmm," making the griffon fan shoot her a glance.

"What's up?" Gilda says, nudging the unicorn.

Trixie is tempted not to answer, but is also sick of bottling it up, making her answer the question. "Trixie feels useless. Ever since she agreed to Twilight's tutoring-" she spits the word out like it's poison.

"-she has felt useless. Her wagon is fixed, her goods replaced, and yet she feels listless, sipping off Twilight's discretionary budget and awaiting another dull day of exposing Trixie's self as a weakling in front of a true master of magic. She wants to go out and do a show like she used to, but can't stop thinking about what happened last time."

Gilda thinks about that. "Yeah, I get what you mean. I haven't had much to do lately either. Being rich is kinda boring, and I've been kinda afraid to really push myself at stunt flying, after... Uh." She scratches her head.

When Twilight enters Bustling Beans's Cafe, Gilda has a lightbulb moment.

"Let's kill three birds with one stone!" Gilda squawks, starting the purple unicorn in her tracks.

"Hey, Twilight, get your pocket planner out, cause we've got plans to make!" Gilda says, paralyzing Twilight with the triple threat of Gilda not using one of her dumb nicknames for the purple unicorn mare, requesting she get out her pocket planner, and promising the tantalizing pleasure of planning something.

Gilda is only slightly surprised to find that Twilight actually has a pocket planner on her person, and flips it open without hesitation.

As Twilight takes a seat, still riding the high of organization, Gilda explains to Twilight and Trixie.

"Uhh, right. So, me and Trixie are bored, you're boring, and I've got a bunch of money I don't know what to do with, so how about we all go to Las Pegasus for Hearth's Warming Eve! Trixie can set up a show, Twilight can have some fun for once in her life, and I'll pay for the whole thing!"

Trixie breaks out into a cold sweat, while Twilight looks confused.

"T-Trixie can't do a show there! Only the most talented of the talented make it big performing in Las Pegasus!"

"I don't know about this one Gilda, I'd have to find someone to take care of Spike while we're gone, if I was going to join you two on an overnight trip like that."

Gilda waves them both off. "We'll figure it out! The opportunity is just too good to pass up. I'll work out some stunts, Trixie will show off what you've taught her, and we'll all have a good time making a show out of it."

Twilight ponders, portable quill popped in her mouth as she chews it and thinks.

"Alright, if we can find someone to babysit Spike, I'd be willing to join in on this little trip."

"Trixie is not sure about this."

Gilda slams a fisted talon on the table. "Come on mare, where's that boasting? I saw your show, and it was feathertipping awesome. Between Twilight feeding you new tricks and me providing the airshow, we'll blow the roof off of Las Pegasus!"

Twilight smiles. "I've never planned an entertainment venue before, this could be fun! I normally wouldn't be so bold here Trixie, but I think it could be a good opportunity for you as well! You've got some real talent, after all."

Trixie moans piteously, but under their confident gazes, musters up her own confidence and standard manner of behaving.

She puts a hoof to her chest and her nose in the air. "You're right, Trixie is, after all, the most talented unicorn in Equestria. Excluding present company, of course. We will create a show so impressive, it will stun Equestria for years to come!"

Gilda gives Trixie a thumbs up. "That's the spirit!" The Griffon says, chugging her cold coffee in a single gulp.

The two mares have to pat her back after she chokes on it a bit by mistake.

"Weiss, this easily has to be the dumbest thing I've caught you doing." Sunset says, pulling another bottle of milk out of the fridge.

"Sthud the fug ub and get ne that miuk." Weiss mumbles through his swollen tongue, bottle of incredibly spicy liquid rainbow left ignored on the table.

When given his precious milk, he chugs it down quickly, swishing the taste out of his mouth.

"Sure enough, that's some spicy stuff." Weiss nods sagely.

"It will be perfect."

Sunset gives Weiss a look.

"I've been doing some poking around for potential ingredients for the best hot sauce of all time. Hot sauce is the true essence of flame, but I've never been able to get any that's both spicy and tasty enough for me," He explains.

"Anyway, there's a problem with the project I've been working on for you. I can't find any registered combat mages to do the enchantments."

Sunset groans. "I've been meaning to tell you that. No self respecting combat mage is going to make a charm that teleports bits out of the pony wearing it. You need a license to perform teleportation-based medicine."

Weiss looks shocked. "Wait, that's a thing? I thought I was just throwing science at the wall here. Wait, how did you know that was my plan?"

She smirks. "Because you're insane and I found copies of the books you were reading."

"But that's not important. I want to know how you think teleporting chunks out of me is going to do anything to help my situation?"

Weiss chuckles. "So you only figured out stage one. Stage two is replacing the bits I teleport out with new, better bits."

"Tell me, what would happen to a hat from this timeline that you're wearing if you were to suddenly be paradox'd away?"

She shrugs. "It would be left unharmed? It's not a part of me."

He continues. "What about a hip replacement? If you had a titanium hip-bone put in?"

"It would be left behind too? It's from-" Weiss interrupts.

"From this timeline, yes. So, what would happen if, over the course of the next year, you ate enough food for ten ponies, and were under spells to both remove tiny bits of you and then regrow them with the energy and mass from all the food you were eating?"

She's speechless, until she isn't.

"You're insane." Sunset says simply.

Weiss shakes his head. "It's sound. I developed this process before my imprisonment, to counteract a particularly nasty combat spell I developed. Remove the poison, save the patient. Even if the entire body is the poison."

"So it will work?" Sunset says insistently.

Weiss nods. "Yes, as long as you wear the amulet for a year or so, and eat like a truck."

"Why does it have to be dragon regeneration magic? Wouldn't ordinary healing magic work just fine?" Sunset presses.

He shakes his head at that. "Not fast enough. You underestimate how much replacement is going to have to occur, especially in sensitive areas of the brain. If the regeneration didn't keep up with the damage, you'd start having more pressing concerns than merely vanishing in a puff of logic."

Sunset grabs a pen and paper, beginning to scribble words onto it.

"What are you doing?" Weiss asks.

"Sending a letter to the princess. You will never convince a reputable lacusurgeon to make what you're wanting to make otherwise." Sunset mumbles.

Weiss huffs, crossing his arms, muttering under his breath. "I totally could have."

He then throws his arms in the air. "Fine, I've got letters of my own to write anyway. Have fun with your royal pen-pal."

Grabbing a sheaf of black paper and a white ink pen, Weiss trots into his inner sanctum, prepared to write a solicitation letter.

"Hmm. My dragonfire can't send mail far enough for this. I'll have to try something else," He mumbles to himself.

"Well, dearie, I can certainly entertain him for the afternoon, but on Hearth's Warming Eve? Out of the question. I'll be going on a trip with Sweetie Belle to visit our parents that day!" Rarity exclaims, as she ties ribbons around a stunning, diamond encrusted hat.

Twilight nods. "I understand. I'll ask around to see if any of our other friends have the time to spare."

Rarity nods. "Spike, could you be a dear and hold this in place? I swear, ever since I made that stupid hat, ponies have been coming in wanting their own stocking caps. I fear a trend may be starting. I've been swamped with last-minute orders for the winter season."

"And even if I weren't, I've been trying for weeks now to find more of this divine cloth that Weiss left here as payment, but none of my fashion friends have ever seen anything like it! It is the Worst Possible Thing!"

"Anything for you, Rarity!" Spike claims, hopping over to hold the hat in place while Rarity swarms it with needles and thread.

Twilight exits the Boutique, thinking to herself. "Maybe one of our other friends can accommodate Spike."

Applejack shakes her head. "Sorry, no-can-do Twilight, me, Big Mac, Granny, and Applebloom are headed over to Appleloosa to help out with the Everred Apple harvest that week, they need all hooves on deck if they're going to get em all done before Winter-Wrap-Up."

"An' we can't really take him with us, there wouldn't be nopony to supervise him outside the Appleloosa orchard, and there'll be Ice Packs roamin' around. Too dangerous fer a baby dragon to wander around with wolves like those on the prowl."

Twilight nods. "That's understandable, You should stay safe too, alright Applejack?"

Applejack nods at that, prompting Twilight to leave to check with her other friends.

"Ehhhh, I don't know Twilight. Maybe I could, but I'm already going to be babysitting that night, could get a bit... messy," Pinkie explains, frosting a strawberry cake.

Twilight nods. "Right, right."

Pinkie puts a hoof to her chin, pondering. "What about Rainbow Dash? She's usually got some free time during the winter."

Twilight's deadpan look matches her words. "Pinkie, Rainbow Dash lives in a cloud house. Spike can't stay there!"

Pinkie gasps. "You're right, he might get rained on, and it's so cold so he'll get a cold just like that!" Pinkie snaps her hooves to accentuate her point, nodding with realization.

Twilight rolls her eyes a bit as Pinkie continues to ramble. "I guess I'll check with Fluttershy."

"Okie-dokie, make sure Spike doesn't get a cold, or it might rain! And that would be gross!" Pinkie warns.

Twilight reads the sign on Fluttershy's door and groans loudly.

"Dear, uhh, whoever is at my door.

I'm not here right now, Mr. Pelican and his family slept through migration by mistake, so I have to help them fly south a bit later than normal. I'll be back in time for Winter-Wrap-Up. Um... Sorry."

"So Rarity wasn't able to teach you anything, Spike?" Twilight asks, looking as miserable as he does.

He taps his claw on the table. "Yeah... She's just too busy keeping up with her new orders this month. I don't think she'll have enough time to help for a while."

Twilight nods. "And I haven't been able to find anyone to babysit you either. I might not be able to go on the trip with Gilda and Trixie at this rate!"

"It's a shame there aren't any ponies who just... Don't have any plans for Hearth's Warming Eve."

Spike thinks to himself, before an idea pops up in his head.

"What about that Weiss guy? He's a huge Scrooge! I bet he doesn't have any plans for Hearth's Warming."

Twilight shakes her head. "Absolutely not! He might try to involve you in one of his near-weekly evil schemes!"

Spike waves her off. "No way, you heard what Sunset said, He's too busy making that giant robot to do something like that."

Spike's words are matched near instantly by shouting and pounding on the library door. "Twilight! Let me in, I need to involve Spike in one of my near-weekly evil schemes!"

Spike giggles sheepishly at Twilight's glare silently telling him "I told you so."

"Ugh. For the fifth time, Weiss, this is a public library, just come in already!" Twilight shouts, throwing the door open.

"What do you want this time, Weiss?"

He holds up a scroll. "I need Spike to send a letter for me."

"To the princess?" Twilight questions.

"Nope. To a pony out of my service area. Spike is the strongest dragon within walking distance, so I thought I'd make use of him," Weiss explains, making himself at home and propping his head up on his hands at the table.

Twilight really works her deadpanning facial muscles out, when she retorts. "Spike is the only dragon within walking distance."

"That does technically make me the strongest one, Twilight." Spike responds, making Weiss nod sagely.

"But I can only send letters to Princess Celestia, I don't know how to send them to anypony else."

Weiss chuckles. "Twilight, what have you been teaching this boy?" He says, making the gears in Spike's brain start to turn.

"Whatever, the letter's enchanted, it just needs a strong flame to get the job done."

Twilight is about to say something, but Spike interrupts. "I'd be happy to, but you have to do something in return!"

Weiss's grin turns challenging. "I'm listening."

Twilight interjects. "Spike, you can't be serious about this, you don't actually want to hang out in the Everfree all weekend, do you?"

Spike shakes his head. "You're right. I don't want to hang out there all weekend. I want to go there for a whole week! Weiss, teach me your dragon magic!"

Twilight is brought short by this. She can't help but think that she shouldn't have told Spike about the dark pony's mastery of the art.

"Spike..." Twilight says warningly, but slowly, she begins to see his logic.

Weiss, however, looks offended. "You're kidding me, boy. I've kept the secrets of Dragon Lightning to myself for a whole millennia, and you want me to crack the cask on that now of all times?"

"Dragon Lightning?" Twilight and Spike question, making Weiss sweatdrop.

"Shit, you were talking about regular dragon spells, weren't you." He says, making them both nod.

"What do you mean by-" Twilight attempts, before Weiss interrupts her.

"A-ba-ba-bu. No thanks. I've got secrets left to keep, Twinkle Starkle."

"Are you sure I can't just bribe you with a gigantic purple diamond?" Weiss questions Spike, who drools for a moment before snapping himself back to reality.

"No way, I want to better myself, and I can't do it any other way!" He exaggerates.

"I'm going to be real with you, kid, I... Don't actually know which spells in my repertoire are common spells, and which ones are balls-to-the-wall insane. What's to say I don't accidentally teach you something that sends a bunch of angry dragons to my doorstep trying to steal my secret spells someday?"

Spike retorts with what is obviously an ironclad defense. "I can keep it a secret! I don't even know any other dragons."

Weiss gives him a look. "Twilight, I'm going to need you to be a boring pill and shut him down, here. There's no way I'm going to-"

"I'll tell Gilda and Rainbow Dash where the back door to your tower is if you don't." Twilight retorts, seeing an opportunity to annoy Weiss in the making.

Weiss's eyes narrow. "You wouldn't dare."

Twilight trots over to the door. "That's an interesting hypothesis. Care to test it?"

Weiss growls, the flaming black mass on his head writhing angrily. "Damn it Twilight, I don't want them in my house unless they are the ones being pranked."

Twilight's aura pops up around the doorknob, and continues her demands. "And you'll stop pounding on my door in the middle of the day when this is a public library."

"Twilight, you do not want to be on my shitlist," Weiss warns.

Shrugging, Twilight opens the door a crack, prepared to go out in the snow and trot to the pegasus's house right now.

Weiss's frown turns into a grin. "Fine. But I promise you, you're going to look back to this exact moment as the point where everything went horribly wrong."

Twilight giggles. "Pack your things Spike, if you're going to insist on spending the week there, you'll need more than your overnight bag."

Spike's excitement isn't at all dampened by Weiss's glare promising something hilarious and nasty in Twilight's future.

Spike feels like he may have made a mistake as he walks into the obsidian hallway of Weiss's tower, especially when he can see pools of... something red streaming down the ceilings, and over the crystal skull lights embedded in the walls. Floating in the middle of the hallway, an array of glittering spheres, disks, and rings of solid crystal float in the air, unaided.

"What's with the gems up there?" Spike asks.

Weiss looks up at the glassy artifacts in the air. "Just an array of optical crystals to amplify and harness unicorn magic more effectively during my training sessions. We won't need those right now."

He sends them into the walls in a storm of crystalline blocks as they separate and unplug from one another to float off and into their designated holes.

"Welcome to my training hall, kid." Weiss says, standing behind the baby dragon.

"It's uhh, cozy?" Spike offers politely.

Weiss laughs before a thought enters his mind, something to assuage the little drake's concerns. "Say, do you want to see something cool?"

Spike, curious and slightly afraid, just nods his head in response.

Weiss unfolds one of his arms from behind his back, and, stepping in front of spike, snaps his claws, making violent violet arcs leap between them before growing into a humming sphere of plasma.

"This is Dragon Lightning. Elder dragons call it by another name, however. 'The Flame of Pain'. They call it that because of how intense the sensation of an electric shock can be. Of course, I just call it Dragon Lightning, since it looks so different from how they use it, and I don't want anyone making the association between my perfected spell and theirs."

"When I learned of it, and eventually took it for myself, I quickly realized that while in it's raw form, a beam of destructive energy, it might be considered the single most powerful form of dragonfire that exists... There is... So much more to it than that."

"Avidus!" Weiss shouts, thrusting his arm out and unleashing a bolt of lightning. Where it strikes, a pile of gold and jewels appear.

"The power of a dragon allows them to carry magic inside their flames. It grows within them, it is unleashed from them. It steals away riches and returns the treasures to their lairs, where all riches rightfully belong." Weiss continues, spying Spike's awestruck look. His... covetous look.

With another flash of lightning, the pile of treasure is whisked away at Weiss's command.

"And with that, I'm tapped out kid. I've only got two of those in me at best on a good day."

Spike is jolted out of his thoughts by that. "What? Maaan, that's lame, you can only do that twice?"

Weiss chuckles. "Well I'm not a dragon, am I? Since I can't figure out what spells I shouldn't teach you, I'll just teach you them all. Twilight's stunned confusion when she sees how skilled you've become will be the sweetest nectar."

"I thought you didn't want to teach me to do that lightning stuff?" Spike says, confused.

Weiss simply waves his hand, making a trio of metal statues crash to the ground, shaped like fat, armored versions of Princess Celestia. Spike giggles slightly at the comical sight.

"I don't want to teach you a single thing, kid, but if Twilight is going to force me to do so, then I won't accept anything less than my best effort. My honor won't allow anything less."

"So, first thing's first, I'd like you to use your dragonfire on these combat dummies. I'll need to see your skill in harnessing ordinary dragonfire before I attempt to teach you to weave spellcraft into it."

"Oh, and don't worry about accidentally sending them to Celestia," Weiss says, choosing his words with extreme care.

Spike nods at Weiss's command, excited to learn magic after his announcement and demonstration.

Celestia comes close to screaming when the first statue smashes into the middle of her throne room, easily crushing through the marble tiles and sending her court into a panic.

"What is the meaning of this?!" one of the nobles shouts, backing away from the... plump polished steel object.

When Celestia sees the pudgy face of the second statue appear above the fountain nearby and crush it into pieces as it falls down, she notices that it is clearly supposed to be an alicorn with a certain, sun-shaped cutie mark. Her shock turns into terrifying fury.

When the third statue appears, she catches it in her magic and flings it out of the window directly into the badlands, some several thousand miles away.

Her eye twitches as she looks back at the other two statues still being stared at by her court in befuddlement and shocked confusion.

"My dear, beloved ponies, I am afraid that, for now, I will have to adjourn court for the day. I apologize for the inconvenience," Celestia says with glass-fragile smoothness, picking up the two statues in her psionic grip and dragging them through the air behind her as she walks out on her court with vengeance in her heart.

"Where are they going?" Spike says, watching the last statue he blasted turn into smoke and float out of Weiss's window.

Weiss shrugs.

"I said don't worry about it."

"To Whom it May Concern,

Having read over your credentials and history, Fizzlepop Berrytwist, we believe you do in fact qualify to undergo our most recent medical trials on the subject of unicorn injuries, though test subjects are few, the tests performed so far have shown great and rapid effectiveness in allowing a unicorn's horn to be repaired, and even restored. We await your arrival, and thank you for your patience in awaiting our response, as we understand you have been waiting quite a while for an opportunity like this. When you are able, please visit Ponyville's Golden Oaks Library, and request to see Weiss Noir.

Do not concern yourself with the necessity of a timely appointment, knowing of your current employer's stormy work schedule, we are more than patient enough to await your response and arrival. Payment for services rendered are... negotiable.

From the desk of Weiss Noir, on behalf of Princess Celestia."

As Tempest Shadow reads over the letter, she is many, many things.

Confused, suspicious, and more than anything else, violently, violently angry.

But if someone was able to send a letter to her like this, despite her ship's wards, they could have just as easily sent something far nastier.

How did they know all of that information? How did they know her real name? Her affiliations?

"If this is supposed to be a joke..."

"Then I'm not laughing," Tempest hisses violently.

The door to her quarters creaks open, and a little gremlin-like creature pops in.

"Something wrong? I heard you monologuing." they say.

Tempest shakes her head, throwing the letter to the ground carelessly and stomping on it with her forehoof. "Change of plans. Set a course for... Ponyville."

(Weiss Report) Fanservice [Divine Words]

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Princess Celestia, I believe I've found something interesting, I've never heard of spells or artifacts that enhance magic like this before.

If we could reproduce it, it could enrich the lives of unicorns across Equestria, discounting the benefits it could have for the Royal Guard.

Entry Number Four, Day Sixty-Five

Oh yeah, this one's not getting out any time soon. The last thing I want right now is an amplifier like this getting into the wrong hands. Maybe I'll release it to the public after I've defeated all my enemies or something.

I've figured out a way to make my magic hit harder. And it's honestly a pretty simple method. It's all about optics. Light alteration. I can cast all of my spells tethered to Unicorn Lights, which means that anything that can affect light can thus affect my spells. I first realized the potential when one of my spells bounced off a mirror and made me just a little bit balder than normal.

Unicorns can naturally make their horns emit lasers, but what they can't do is narrow those lasers without intense focus and practice, something that just isn't combat viable. Until now, anyway. Why do it yourself when you can do it with golems? Thus, I've created what are basically magic circles. Masses of enchanted levitating powder, made of the highest quality clear-sapphire crystal I can have produced, and enchanted with regeneration and clarity charms. I shout a code word, and the flakes of gem arrange themselves into whatever magic altering construct I need, combining with one another to form floating lenses, prisms and mirrors to harness a spell I fire off and transform it's light into far more destructive and refined forms.

I believe I'll call this type of enchanted, reshaping powder... a "Noble Phantasm"

I'll have to get into the habit of matching spells to "Divine Words", since the enchanted dust responds to verbal commands.

The first and most important codeword, of course, being "Ultima". Named after Final Fantasy's famous spell, I've set this codeword to make the enchanted powder form a circular screen which converts light passing through it into stuttered pulses. Why is this so important? Namely, because lasers have a major flaw. when striking an object, the debris and plume of gasses created by a laser striking it can actually obscure the object, stealing from the laser's efficiency. By stuttering the laser, I can make a spell like Black Flame chew through an object nearly twice as fast as it had been able to before.

Indeed, any spell that emits dust, a plume of plasma, or which relies on intense heat to destroy a target would benefit by being passed through the Ultima Magic Circle first.

The second codeword, "Backlash Wave", arranges the golems into a specialized combat mode, in which they intercept any unicorn light being emitted anywhere near me, reflecting and refracting it into a beam pointed in the same direction as my head. This mode ensures that I can turn spells that my enemies cast back against them, combining their power with mine and resulting in potentially devastating attacks. In theory, at least. I don't have any unicorns on hand to test it.

Codeword number three, "Death Beam". This codeword is one of the simplest, as it simply forms magic circles in front of me which act as lenses, turning my magic attacks into much thinner magic attacks. A thinner, more potent laser of magic can boost the effectiveness of my spells where they impact at very little cost to myself, especially when I'm performing some sort of sweeping effect, instead of focusing on a single target.

And, finally, among my general use codewords, a codeword near and dear to my heart, "Z-Target". This codeword is special, as the enchanted powder will begin to reshape itself in such a way that if I cast a spell, it will be split up among several targets that I focus on with my eyes beforehand, allowing me to make a spell weaker, in return for allowing it to instantaneously strike multiple targets at once.

The current flaw of Divine Words is the powder itself. It is too small to hold the more intelligent systems I've invented recently, and I hesitate to make be controlled by a true, solid golem core, for fear that it might be destroyed in the middle of a fight, leaving my combat capabilities crippled. As it stands, I cannot combine codewords, and to add new codewords, I have to make an entirely new batch of enchanted powder. For now, however, this will certainly give me an edge that I desperately need. I'm not sure if it can hold up in combat, but Divine Words, along with some other research I've been performing, will give me a major advantage, one that will let me survive if I encounter powerful foes in the future.

Ultimately, the nature of my Noble Phantasm is one of utility. It gives my magic a much needed boost in accuracy and refinement, a set of training wheels that can prop up my lack of skill with artificial skill. By improving this indulgence, and increasing my own personal power in tandem with the efficiency given by this creation, I'll finally have a foothold to gain enough raw combat potential to defend myself in this world. But a creation like this can't be proven useful in test chambers, it can't be proven lethal against training dummies. I'll have to forge this weapon on the battlefield, sooner or later. Only by pushing the limits of this magical technology and myself, only by using every trick, every cheat and exploit that I can find, will I be able to match the terrifying monsters that seek me out.

I don't ever want to feel like I did that day again.

Is is indeed interesting, Sunset, but unfortunately, without Crystal Ponies, I fear reproducing this particular invention of Weiss's may prove... Difficult.

Nonetheless, I find myself curious, and will have my artificers see if they can reproduce it. I always have wondered why he used those magic circles . Now I know.

(Past Chapter 9): Next Level

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The first time I truly accessed the internet, it was just as I remember it. Just a bit more... anime?

"Weiss, what is the meaning of this madness?!" Luna shouts, pounding on my dream-door.

"Luna, dear, I'm a bit occupied," I say, looking over status reports and screens, trying to save my projects before I let her in.

Her screams grow even louder. "Weiss I will turn your Nightmares into Night TERRORS if you do not open this dream Now!"

I obey the violently angry demigod, manifesting the airlock and allowing her to step in.

She takes several deep breaths, before speaking simply as she stares me down. "Would you care to explain why you've spread your sickening mockery of my realm to others? Why you have locked me off from their dreams as well?"

I hold up my hooves disarmingly. "I did no such thing. The only thing that rests on my head is that I didn't restrict them. The Moon Crystals I've been producing were for the use of me and select scientists. Any other ponies using them did so of their own volition."

Luna still looks tense and pissed, but my words have calmed her ire with the promise of me not just infringing on her domain willingly.

She questions with some irritation. "What could possibly drive a pony to cast aside their dreams in favor of this... thing."

Summoning up The Couch, I take a seat and summon up a mirror, displaying a few projects I've been working on in my sleep. "Sometimes there just aren't enough hours in the day, Luna. We're still dreaming, aren't we? And our dreams are still a way of revisiting the days we lead, aren't they? I've merely taken some things with me into my dreams to help that along."

Luna gives the mirror, and then me, a very hard look. "You will include limitations in the gems, such that ponies may choose true, unaltered sleep when they will. There are parts of the mind that are left unrested in this place you've created. Ones that can only be denied for so long."

"This is not a request, and I would ensure you have it done. Your creations would make it challenging for me to do my duty. I have seen the connections between them as well, You are unwittingly constructing a defense whose failure would harm all who rely on them."

I consider her words, before nodding. "I'll announce a recall, Princess. Equip them with on-off switches, and send em back out. Is that good enough for you?"

She considers my offer. "It will do, for now."

"Fare thee well, Weiss," She says, fading into stardust.

With Luna gone, I feel like a break would be a good idea. Banishing my various plans and projects, I open up a port to Whittle's Moon Crystal to see what she's been up to since commissioning a bunch of equipment from R&D.

As I walk into Whittle's dream, I see that she's been busy. The entire dream room has been restructured into floating platforms of gracefully and flowingly carved crystals, depicting all sorts of odd things, from ponies to flowers, surrounded by a landscape of clouds and giant snowflakes, with Whittle herself working from a gigantic and opulent cushioned chair.

"Christ Whittle, are you sure you're Ok? That's..." I stare at the screens, where Whittle Miss Priss has been using her Moon Crystal to remote control the golem-powered milling machines I had my teams produce for her.

When I offered her tools to improve her trade, I had never expected anything like what I'm seeing here. Over one-hundred finished commissions of carved crystal, in a single night.

Whittle laughs at that. "Weiss, I'm better than I've been in years. My cutie mark practically feels like it's on fire, I've never been able to carve this much, this well before. It's a dream come true... Literally!"

As she deftly commands the mechanical crystal arms to finish carving yet another ornate quartz door, I'm speechless at how one pony and some modern-ish equipment could do... this.

"And you don't feel like taking a break?" I say, with some concern.

She shakes her head. "Nope. It's not like running these mills takes much work even if I wasn't asleep. And I'm having more fun with my job by the minute."

Turning away from her work to put her full attention on our discussion, she prompts me to answer. "Just here to visit, or do you need some more work commissioned?"

I shake my head. "Just took a break. Thought I'd check in. How is Glitter Bomb doing?"

She chuckles. "He's been alright. Too many chuckleheads in the mines, though. He's had to unstick twelve ponies so far, after they started mining into Frozen Stones."

I tilt my head curiously at that. I'll have to look into that.

"Listen, I got some word back that you probably shouldn't be using your Moon Crystal every night. Be sure to set aside a few nights a week to sleep normally, Ok?" I say with some concern.

She shrugs. "Alright. I'll be sure to do that."

Nodding affirmatively, I exit the dream, and decide to check up on a few other ponies who requested Moon Crystals.

The next night, Eclipse, having read the crude manual that Weiss had his ponies write to describe the functionality and structure of the dream crystals, felt prepared to make an attempt to get in on whatever Weiss's current plans are.

'While you can't use the crystals to read somepony's mind, you absolutely can read the history of any dreams that happened inside of them, and any information that the user chose to store inside deliberately.' Eclipse thinks to herself, opening a port to Weiss's backup storage Moon Crystal while he's not using it.

Stepping into the digitally enhanced dream-room, Eclipse looks around, seeing an oddly arranged livingroom, with a bookshelf, couches, and a strange black mirror dominating the southern wall, strange, out-of-place boxes stacked underneath it. There isn't even a fireplace in here.

"Now to figure out where he's keeping his plans so I can steal them."

At the word "steal", the black mirror lights up, startling her slightly.

looking at what appears to be some sort of magic mirror curiously, she watches hazy symbols and emblems appear on it, accompanied by the sound of smacks and crashes, before eventually fading out to the scene of some sort of racoon, leaping across stone buildings until it lands on top of a metal spire, and begins scanning the area cautiously.

At the top left of the mirror, some writing she can't read is overlapping a blue emblem.

"Sup," A voice behind her says, startling her even more.

Turning around, she immediately recognizes the pink mane'd filly who snuck up on her.

"You! You're one of Weiss's minions, Glitter Miss Priss!"

The filly sneers at that. "Is that what Weiss calls me behind my back? I'll have to make sure to stuff extra snow in his bed tomorrow."

Before Eclipse can properly comprehend what Priss's non-sequitur means, the filly continues.

"What exactly are you doing here?" Priss says with a glare.

Eclipse immediately retorts. "I'm Weiss Noir's prized student, what are you doing here?"

At this, Priss attempts and fails to hold back her laughter. "You poor thing, actually having to learn from that dork."

"Weiss told me to come over and test a thing he was working on. He hasn't shown up though, so I'm just waiting."

Eclipse is confused, but also a bit excited. Could this unknown thing he's got his stooge here to test be part of his dastardly plan?

Eclipse doubts it could be that bad, if he's involving children in testing it, but she still needs to figure out what he's up to.

And it absolutely isn't at all because she's curious what amazing thing he's going to do with this old dream-catcher magical technology, it's because he's got an evil plan, and she will not allow it to come to fruition.

"Hey, what's that thing hooked up to Weiss's games. Did you put that there?" Priss points out, a hoof pointed towards the big red button hooked to the box underneath the magic mirror.

Eclipse shrugs, looking at it curiously. "I didn't put it there. I just came to figure out Weiss's plans," She pops a hoof over her mouth at that slip-of-the-tongue.

Priss giggles. "Is that so? Well, that sounds like it would annoy Weiss. And that's always a good time. What say we do some snooping, minion?"

Priss trots over to the button, picking it up and turning it over in her hooves. "I have no clue what this is," She says with the utmost confidence.

"Well, give it here, I bet I could figure it out," Eclipse says, jutting out her own hoof, accidentally knocking it to the ground.

The two give each other a look, as the button clicks, and the Magic Mirror expands until it fills the entire room.

The two look around, Priss in confusion, and Eclipse in panic, as their surroundings turn to the balmy night of Paris France's scenic rooftops.

"Sly! Can you read me?!" A voice shouts from somewhere they can't hear. The voice is responded to by another, smoother tone.

"Yes Bentley, loud and... Very loud," The smoother tone says.

The nasal voice from before continues. "Sorry, I'm just a little nervous. Breaking into Police Headquarters will do that to you."

While Priss is beginning to realize what's going on, Eclipse's confusion only grows. Her confusion causes the voices to change, now mimicking Eclipse and Priss instead of the Nasally tone and the smooth one.

"Get over it Priss, you're safe with me." The source-less imitation of Eclipse says, cutting off mid-sentence as though it had been about to say something else, but edited itself for continuity.

"I'm the thief here! I've got to steal that file from Inspector Weiss Noir" The voice exclaims, glitching out slightly as it replaces whatever name it was going to say with Weiss's.

At this point, the real Eclipse speaks up. "What is going on here? What's with these voices?!" She shouts hysterically.

Priss just laughs, looking at Eclipse's new outfit, a beret, domino mask, and baggy dark clothing. "Well 'Sly', it sounds like the voices are to set the stage. I recognize this. It's one of Weiss's dumb games. He must have somehow made it so the dream crystal itself can play the game with us in it."

Eclipse looks around at her surroundings properly, the same surroundings that were displayed on the magic mirror before. "This is some kind of game? Wait, Weiss was creating dream-twisting technology to... enhance make-believe games? That's so stupid, it can't be right!"

"...What's with the turtle shell?" Eclipse says, noticing Priss's new, blocky glasses and the large shell on her back.

Priss just shrugs. "Heck if I know. I guess unless you want to get caught by Weiss snooping around, we should try to find a way out of here."

"Only one way to go," She finishes, seeing only one path across the rooftops suitable for pony travel, covered in boards and floating coins.

Suddenly, they hear Priss's voice pipe up again now that they've finished speaking, as a building at the other end is focused on somehow.

"To get inside, we're going to have to go through that air vent," Priss's voice explains factually.

Eclipse's disembodied voice responds. "Alright, we're going in."

A third, hammy voice pipes up, its voice occasionally lilting differently at certain lines.. "And don't forget, you've got me at the wheel, you two, all you've got to do is grab the file, and get back to the cart. I'll do the rest."

"Just keep that engine running Murray, we'll be down there in no time," Actor-Eclipse finishes.

The actual Priss shrugs. "I guess that's our cue."

With that, Eclipse reluctantly follows behind the other filly, who, instead of trying to simply leap over the buildings, instead climbs a nearby water tower.

"Why are we going this way?" Eclipse questions.

"And what's with the glowing ledge?" She questions further.

Priss just shrugs. "This is the way we're supposed to go. You just sort of sidle up against the wall and..."

In a feat of acrobatics the filly could never have performed in the waking world, she leans up against the ridges of the water tower and slides around it, making her way to a series of platforms that offer a more advantageous route to the vent.

Eclipse is confused at this feat, but, upon touching the glowing blue lights, discovers that she can do it too.

"This is incredible, like we're some kind of ninjas!" Eclipse says as they leap from rickety antennae to antennae to reach the vent.

"It's still a dream, minion. I'm pretty sure we can do anything we put our minds to here," Priss says blithely, rearing back to buck the vent cover, and trotting inside when that one kick shatters it into nothingness.

Eclipse frowns. "Stop calling me that, please. I'm trying very hard to not end up one of Weiss's minions like you."

Priss shrugs, as Eclipse follows her into the air-vents. "You're closer to a minion than I am, I just hang out with him and keep him on his toes. You're actually like, one of his underlings."

"Only so I can figure out his plans and thwart them from the inside!" Eclipse protests, as they exit the vent, seeing a web of lasers and platforms below them, with a strange red bulbous metal contraption at the bottom of the drop.

"Ok, so you're a stereotypical minion," Priss snorts a bit with laughter.

"Watch out for those lasers. I don't know if they'll hurt, but they're supposed to."

Eclipse nods, and they both carefully jump down, weaving between the yellow beams by jumping from outcropping to outcropping in the tall metal room until they land on the bottom of it.

Priss walks up to the red metal alarm and smashes it, forcing the barred door to open.

Eclipse tries to get her words together as the filly leads the way deeper into this strange, metal and wood building. She had only ever seen crystal and rock buildings before.

She finally comes up with something as they walk down the halls, looking for whichever room contains the files. "I'm not stereotypical, I'm subverting that by trying to use his training to come up with ways to stop his evil plans."

Priss giggles at this. "Have you actually figured out any of his evil plans, yet?"

"Found the door," She says, pointing to the red door that they had spotted, and the open window balcony next to it.

Giving it a sharp kick, Priss thinks for a second when it doesn't open. "We'll have to go around."

The duo climb out of the window, sidling along the stone ridges of the building's exterior, eventually reaching another balcony from which they can enter the locked room.

Eclipse, by that point, had been slowly getting more and more annoyed at Priss's constant poking holes in her own plans. "No, but I'm going to, that's the whole point."

Priss shrugs, as she walks up to the safe in the middle of the room. Before she can speak, her actor starts speaking up for her.

"Way to go, Eclipse, this is where Inspector Weiss Noir stashes all his important files. I hacked into the police security mainframe and discovered this vault's combo. Try dialing in 'Four, Two, Zero'," her Actor says, giving the password to the safe.

Eclipse walks up to the vault and finds that she can't actually read the numbers on the vault door, as they just look like a hazy, unrecognizable mass. Nonetheless, she instinctively flips the dials into what "feels like" the correct combination, and the safe swings open, allowing her to safely snatch the goods, a manila folder filled with black papers.

The actor named "Murray" speaks up as she grabs the folder to a suite of triumphant music.

"Nice job! - You got it! If you come down through the fire escape, and head through the parking lot, I'll be waiting in the getaway cart!" "Murray" says.

Priss and Eclipse, for once, manage to give each other a look that isn't vaguely bitter, after successfully snatching the files. As they walk out onto the balcony again, a familiar voice rings out, constructed from their memories and expectations.

"Criminal!" Weiss's voice rings out accurately, though on some level, they subconsciously realize that this Weiss is a fake.

The dream-Weiss leaps up onto the building across from the one they're on, holding a lightning charged crossbow in his magical grip. "You foolish ponies, I've caught you red handed!"

Eclipse's actor speaks up. "Ahh, Weiss, I haven't seen you since I gave you the slip in Tom-Bay."

"That reminds me, you need to return the Fire Stone of Spindia to its rightful owners," Actor-Weiss says scornfully.

"Aw, and here I was going to give it to you as a gift, Oh, that ballista you've got, very nice. It suits you." Eclipse's actor retorts.

Actor-Weiss replies with some sarcasm. "You think? This crossbow packs a paralyzing punch, you aught to try it. Might snap you out of your crime spree."

"This dialogue is so cheesy," Priss giggles behind her hoof, while Eclipse shushes her, trying to get invested in the story this "game" is weaving.

She only manages to catch the last lines from her own actor after Priss's interruption.

"Love to stay and chat, but I just came here to pick up the files on your next dastardly scheme. I think you've had them long enough," Actor-Eclipse finishes.

Eclipse 'oohs' at that. "I'll have to remember that one!"

Priss's face pales when Actor-Weiss actually starts using that crossbow, firing electrically charged bolts at the Fire Escape they've climbed down onto. "I don't think we've got time for pondering witty one liner's here, minion!" She says, dodging a particularly nearby bolt that breaks one of the planks serving as a ramp.

Needing no further prompting, the duo scramble to get down from the building, dodging electricity and blunted crossbow bolts alike as they attempt to reach the parking lot and escape the crossbow-toting Inspector.

One of the bolts successfully strikes Priss as she leaps over one of the carts flooding the parking lot, making her light up like a Hearth's Warming Candle with electricity as she yelps.

Not one to leave a pony behind, Eclipse rushes back and grabs her, dragging her towards the open cart that promises escape at the end of the parking lot. "Are you alright Priss?"

The other filly shrugs her off. "I'm fine, it didn't actually hurt, it just sort of made me act like it did for a second. I think it's part of the game."

They both jump into the cart, which squeals off as the Actor-Weiss yells after them. "You can't escape me, racoon!"

As the cart sped off, the pair found the world around them fading into black, and before long, they were back in the dream-room they were in before, the magic mirror displaying cartoonish artful scenes of the cart speeding away, and the narrator explaining how they had found the files and successfully stolen them, sarcastically explaining how the inspector took it surprisingly well, while showing a picture of their snarling face.

Priss is the first to notice that Eclipse is still holding the folder she took from the "Game", a label on the front filled with unreadable text that they both somehow know says "Project Arcana Nox"

"Huh. Looks like you actually got something out of this," The filly says, as Eclipse quickly sends the file to her own crystal to read over later.

"Yes, it seems you did," A voice says from behind the two fillies, making them yelp.

Eclipse grins sheepishly at the unamused Lord Weiss. "I don't suppose you saw that, did you?"

Weiss gives a smile that is absolutely at odds with his next words. "Oh I didn't see anything too important. Just a security hole I'll have to patch up with running videogames inside a Moon Crystal. I do hope you'll at least have the courtesy to send me a copy of those files. I sort of need them to help the Shadow Realm."

Eclipse withers under being discovered, nodding nervously.

Weiss smiles more genuinely. "I'm very proud, even if you didn't intentionally figure out a crack in my systems, you still did it, and you were still trying to do it."

"If you were anyone else, your little... playthrough... would have crippled and exposed a plan I would strongly prefer not be in enemy hands. Now I can patch that vulnerability, and you can mark this down as a win for yourself. Good work, Eclipse Flash."

"Now, if you both would, I need to look over the footage and see why exactly you were able to access secure files from inside the Sly Cooper virtual zone I was working on."

"I expect your Foeship Report within the week, Eclipse Flash."

The two of them nod, opening ports to their own dream-realm crystals and walking with intent to exit to them.

"See you around, minion," Priss says with a smirk, making Eclipse give a glare and a smirk back.

"I still got his evil plans, lesser-minion," Eclipse taunts, as she hops through the port, and returns home.

A few minutes after I send the two fillies out, I summon up the extra copy of the files for the Arcana Nox I kept off-site. I may not have known that my Moon Crystals could have their security breached like that, but I wasn't so dumb as to only have one copy of my plans on hand. Ever since I discovered Frozen Stone, and its reaction to the Black Flame, I knew what I could do with it, I felt it in my goddamn bones. A feeling like that warrants a few copies of any files I make on it.

Holding a digital dream replication of a Frozen Stone in my hoof, I chuckled to myself.

"Upon this rock, I will build my church," I quoted.

Screw controlling golems in my sleep. While being able to cast spells by controlling golems enchanted with those spells had a niche use, its uses in combat turned out to be a bust, for a number of reasons.

And screw the Divine Words, where a few floating lenses and crystals might have doubled my abilities in combat... This next discovery, this next plan...

It would make me a god if it worked.

Who would have thought that such a humble, ordinary rock that my miners had been avoiding could have been so useful? How terrifying a substance it was, despite ponies barely registering it as more than a nuisance. Even if I did embarrass myself a bit when I first encountered it.

I stared at the frozen pony in front of me in confusion. He wasn't frozen in the sense that he was encased in ice, but rather, frozen in place like a video on pause.

I turn to Glitter Bomb, who had become the leader of this mine's sector.

"So this rock, it just freezes things that touch it? Is that pony alright?" I ask carefully.

Glitter just chuckles. "No, sadly, he's a bit dumb. But he's unharmed, if that's what you mean."

Walking over to the frozen pony, Glitter Bomb turns and bucks them off of the rock, unfreezing them and making the rock turn from bright blue to a dull grey.

"So why are you so interested in this stuff, anyway? If you're thinking it could be useful in a fight, it's not really. The rock runs out of power fast if it's got anything alive touching it."

I shake my head. "I'm just curious. I'd like some-"

I freeze, my hoof placed on the grey rock, having thought it was inert.

"-mined up and sent to my lab for testing," I finish, having been pulled off of it, with a bunch of ponies now chuckling at me.

"It can still freeze things when it's grey, can't it?" I question with some woe.

Glitter Bomb nods, still laughing a bit. "Don't touch it, boy. I'd hate to hear you losing a few hours in your lab because you went and poked the stuff. We usually just avoid it or wall it up. I don't know what you think you'll get out of it. It's hard to move around and do stuff with it in the first place, it likes to hang in the air when you try putting it in carts."

I shrug. "I'm sure I'll find a use for it."

It's only hours later that I obtain my first bottle of Stoppered Time, after burning away the Frozen Stone with hatefire creates a puddle of empty, liquid, frozen time.

While this liquid seems incapable of freezing solid objects on contact any more, I refuse to leave it at that.

There's something more important that I could do with this liquid, I sense. It's certainly worth testing.

I grab some sheets of black paper, and start writing, with a bold, English title at the top.

"Project Arcana Nox"

Lord Weiss Noir,

Today I learned that even ponies whose personalities and positions conflict can be brought together by the mutual desire to humiliate a third party. I am unsure what to call this exact form of relationship, but for now, I will simply say that I now have a Cooperative Rivalry with Glitter Miss Priss, your annoying minion who is entirely too comfortable with letting your plans go unopposed, even when she is presumably in on them herself. If nothing else, she seems to be good at testing my various qualities, chief among which is my patience.

Your treacherous student, Eclipse Flash.

(Noir Report) Revisiting Basics [Black Flame Alchemy]

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Entry #9, Day 65

Upon discovering yet another useful substance through the use of the Black Flames of Hatred, I have come to the realization that I should neglect this use of the spell no longer. Who knows what could emerge from extended experimentation on it, as, in a very real way, if the flame only burns that which I despise, then it only stands to reason that everything left untouched by it should have desirable properties.

It is with this in mind that my first experiment had been to sift through the ashes of a substance I consider particularly vile. Diamond. I've always considered diamonds to be massively overrated, compared to far more worthy jewels, and it's physical and optical properties are consistently defeated by other, more impressive gemstones. That aside, I was curious to see if there existed any part of myself which would have mercy towards any part of a diamond. Is there some hidden quality of a diamond that I actually find desirable?

The answer, unsurprisingly, is "No, not at all". I had been unable to leave behind even a single trace of the diamonds I struck with Black Flames. I moved on to the next substance to test, stone. I suppose it says something about myself that I was able to extract remnants from ordinary stone, but not a diamond. I had obtained a thin, glossy oil that could serve as a sort of polish by burning stones in a Black Flame. Further experiments revealed that the oil was also able to soak in heat and improve the sound quality of what it is applied to.

Other assorted tests included berries, water, and one regrettable attempt to cast black flame on itself. The results were a sugary sour salt, a glittering cyan glass, and a massive explosion.

I discovered that when Cold Ash and Water Gems touch one another, they actually transform into ice, in a surprisingly large volume. Something that will be useful in constructing useful weapons and tools, I feel.

I had also discovered that the explosion caused by turning Black Flame in on itself is replicable. Thus, I feel it warrants naming, for future experimentation, I'll simply refer to it as Deleterious Bomb.

Having satisfied myself testing what could be extracted from mundane substances, I moved on to a different route of experimentation. To see if I could use the Black Flame to forge metal. Taking ores that would otherwise go unused, due to my ponies' preference to use crystal for all of their tools, I attempted to refine the ore using my black fire, hoping that I could extract the desirable metals from within it. And I could, but more than two-thirds of the metal was lost in the flame's eradicating glare, leaving behind small amounts of unnatural metal, far from the mundane.

Hematite, the ore of Iron, became a blackened, charred iron, that glowed from within even after being taken from the heat.

Native Gold became a bright yellow mess, like what a child might imagine gold as looking like.

Copper was left mostly pure and unaltered. I suppose I owe this to my fondness for the orange metal. It really should be considered a precious metal, all things considered.

Nonetheless, this line of experiments had left my appetite whetted for more, and so I continued the experiment by studying their properties.

The conclusions I was left with is that Copper is the ideal material for experiments in containing and harnessing my flame magic, due to my inability to harm it mistakenly, the Black Iron would serve well for decor and weaponry, and the Bright Gold would serve well for minting currency.

One thing I discovered during the course of pushing the limits of Black Flame was how with subtle changes to your emotional state and intentions, you can alter the flames in drastic ways. The most useful among which being a method I discovered to make it burn air, creating a vacuum that sucks in even more air. This can obviously be exploited for a number of purposes, from ventilation to purification.

I've also discovered that there exist ways primarily unconscious in nature to transform a Black Flame into new, more complex forms, though in truth, I lack the words to describe the exact process by which I achieve this, and instead urge the reader to pursue shaping the flame themselves. Attempt to contemplate objects and creatures that you find embody your feelings, and the flame will obey with sufficient force of will.

I myself found that the shape of a dragon served as a potent, demanding, and truthfully inspiring shape for me to draw upon when casting the modified Black Flame Summoning. I also urge that the reader consider names for these modified flames, to properly cement them in your mind as distinct paradigms to draw upon. I myself have chosen to call my favorite Black Flame Summoning "Dragon of the Darkness Flame", after a mythological entity from my homeland's stories.

The easiest form to shape it into, however, was that of a simple small dagger. This makes sense, as a dagger serves one purpose, and one alone. To End.

Truthfully, considering the nature of the Black Flame, shaping it into anything other than raw fire serves only one purpose. It serves to resonate with the caster, to symbolize something for them, and thus, enhance the emotions they experience accordingly. Though it may be conjecture, by indulging in symbolism and flair, I have found my spells growing stronger over time, as I am able to summon up stronger, truer emotions, which amplify my magic bit by bit.

Discovering what methods serve to enhance the user's own feelings is one key to mastering magic, I suspect. Whether it be one's means or one's ends, justifying them is a crucial component to a power which can only come from one being in this entire world. Oneself.

I must say, does my Dragon of the Darkness Flame technique technically count as "Dragon" Fire? It is shaped like one, after all.

(Present Chapter 9): Three's a Crowd

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"Alright, I've got my copy of 'Everything you need to know about Las Pegasus', my backup copy of 'Everything you need to know about Las Pegasus', and my copy of 'Everything you don't need to know about Las Pegasus'. I think I'm ready," Twilight says to Spike, who had made a brief return to help her pack.

Spike just nods, knowing he won't be able to talk Twilight out of anything but the most erroneous inclusions to her travel kit.

"Don't forget your toothbrush," Spike points out blithely, making Twilight nod, as she levitates things out of her bathroom and into the already bulging suitcase.

Twilight nods. "Ok, I think that's everything!" She shouts, clicking the suitcase shut firmly. The suitcase lasts a whole twelve seconds before exploding everywhere, much to Twilight's shock and Spike's resignation.

"Maybe you should cut down your list a little bit, Twilight," Spike requests, making her blush slightly.

Twilight nods at that. "Right..."

She turns to Weiss, who had been sitting down reading the unabridged 'Spells for Ponies who wish to be immediately arrested upon casting them'. A book she is fairly certain Weiss either brought over from his own library, or wrote himself just to annoy her.

"I wish you would tell me why you're insisting on hanging around my Library while I'm gone, but let me assure you, if you cause so much as a creased page while I'm gone, I will personally make you more mindful of your actions," Twilight says insistently.

Weiss shrugs. "How was I supposed to know you were going on a trip? There's supposed to be an honored guest coming, and I thought you'd be here to greet them when they arrive in Ponyville. So now I have to do it myself, like some kind of peasant."

"Oh, also, enjoy your peasant trip, I'm sure it will give you a greater appreciation for peasantry," He adds as an afterthought.

Twilight doesn't dignify that with a response, turning to Spike instead. "Spike, I'm trusting you to keep the library managed while I'm gone, if there's any real trouble, send a letter to Celestia. Weiss, Spike knows what the rules are, so listen to what he says."

Weiss just shrugs, setting down his previous book in favor of the collective works of 'Twilight, you dumb Nincompoop, you absolute Ninny', which he pulls out of a portal he manifests with a snap of his fingers.

Ok, now he's just bucking with her.

With a dismayed groan, she's tempted for a brief instant to call the whole thing off and kick Weiss the Tartarus out of her Librabode.

No, Gilda and Trixie need her help, and by golly, as a friend she's going to do just that.

"Have fun, Ultraviolet Sprinkle," Weiss says, waving her off casually.

As the door slams shut with a muffled groan from the other side, Weiss sets down his book, turning to the young Dragon, who he had been training for the last few days on-and-off. "Say, Spike, it's getting close to Hearth's Warming. You ponies still trade gifts during that, right?"

Spike, who had been dusting, shrugs. "Yeah, sometimes. Why?"

Weiss grins as he got an idea. An awful idea. Weiss had gotten a wonderful... Awful idea.

"Well, then maybe you'd be interested in hearing the story of... The Grinch that stole Hearth's Warming," He ad-libs.

After reducing those statues to atoms last week, and personally tracking down the one she had flung into the badlands, retrieving it from some kind of damaged nest of bug-ponies, Celestia had spent her every free moment envisioning what sweet relief she would get by paying Weiss back for it.

Oh she knows exactly what's she's going to do to that spineless joker. She's going to find the tiniest lamp she can find, stuff him in it with brute force instead of magic, then stuff that lamp inside a tinier lamp, and then mail the whole thing to the sun, and then, construct an even tinier lamp, and shove the former lamp inside of this new one while he's on the sun.

No, no, that would cost too much postage. Exactly 462.8 Million Bits, in fact, at the current rate.

Oh, an even better idea! She'll trot right up to him, and buck him right in his smug face.

No, no. Not in fashion this season. And far be it from a Princess to not at least pay passing attention to fickle art of fashion.

Slowly, her gaze turns to the desk filled with neat stacks of the letters she had been receiving from Twilight and Sunset alike, on the subject of Friendship and Weiss's secrets, respectively. Two piles of papers she read and re-read night after night, drawing strength and hope from them like she had never felt before.

And while Friendship may a bit of a stretch, no offense meant to Friendship of course, she can absolutely see a way to pay Weiss back using the latter.

She flips through the notes and translations Sunset had been periodically sending over, before she spots the perfect one.

"Yes... I believe this should have him chomping at the bit," she curses to herself.

Sunset sits in the black tower's library alone, quietly reading to herself. This whole place is a treasure trove of magic both dark and old alike. But the book in front of her is quite interesting as well. She had decided to get in some more translating of the Grimoire Weiss, when she reached an entry that gave her pause.

"The tree seemed to have picked my brain enough to offer something substantial of its own, and I was guided to one of the places where the plunder vine seeds had taken root. The tree fighting them off had turned a few of the corrupt, chaotic seeds to harmony, and I knew then what I had to do. I carefully dug up one of the Harmonic Plunder Vine Seeds, and took it back to the Shadow Realm in my most powerful sealing arrays," Sunset mumbles to herself.

Her eyes widen with curiosity. The Tree of Harmony? Is that what he was referring to? And on the pages preceding that, an encoded map of the Everfree Forest.

What exactly are Plunder Vines? Celestia never mentioned those when she was teaching Sunset about Harmony, and the Elements.

Closing the book softly, and placing a bookmark in that page, she decides it might be worth investigating herself.

"It's not too far from here, either, according to that map. I'll make a short trip there and back, I've never seen the Tree of Harmony before, after all. It'll be fun," She says cheerfully to herself, packing up a few things and trotting out the door with a curiosity to sate.

Less than an hour later, she is slowly trying to make her way to Ponyville in horror. She has to... She has to tell Celestia.

Tempest stares out from the ship's bow. Seeing the small, humble town that she's seeking, a mere speck on the distance for anyone but her.

Grubber, the short and squat hedgehog, hobbles over to Tempest, with a fluffy pastry in hand, some sort of pink frosting abomination with a cherry on top.

"So why are we going out here in the middle of nowhere anyway, Commander?"

Tempest's stormy expression fails to change at Grubber pestering her yet again for information she thought she had very clearly denied them in no uncertain terms.

"I told you, I'm here to correct a mistake. And that's it. You know, if I were a less merciful individual, I might hear suspicion in your words."

Grubber shrugs. "What, did you find another quack offering horn ointment or something? You know we can't just take a detour every time someone thinks you're dumb enough to fall for that."

Tempest snorts. She had heard that joke often enough that it had stopped hurting and started being, perish the thought, a bit funny. She supposes it's true what they say, the difference between comedy and tragedy is timing.

"This isn't for catharsis. This one knows too much for their own good, and I'll have them tell us why, even if I have to get creative."

Grubber cringes at that, scarfing down the last of his snack. "Jeeze, when you get 'creative', things get messy. Should I get the tarps to put over the deck?"

Tempest chuckles. "It shouldn't be necessary. If I don't like this pony's answers, I won't leave a mess."

Trixie takes a deep breath. "Trixie is really here, in the showbiz capital of Equestria! This has... Always been a secret dream of Trixie's" She says, staring out over the floating city of Las Pegasus, and its numerous attractions.

Twilight nods. "Now we just need to get to our hotel rooms. I've already talked to the manager, and we should be able to have your show at the Buckxor tomorrow."

Gilda nods. "After we get everything set up, what say we enjoy a bit of what Las Pegasus has to offer? I'm sure there's some fun we can get into around here."

Twilight nods. "I don't have a list ready, but... I think we can squeeze it in."

The trio wander their way through the bright lights and bustling of Las Pegasus, eventually finding the Buckxor Hotel, a gigantic rainbow-colored pyramid-shaped building.

As they reach the entrance, Trixie is suddenly frozen with dread at the... pony... she sees.

Twilight is the first to notice. "What's wrong?"

Trixie continues staring, leading Twilight and Gilda to trail their own eyes over to where a group of three identical twins with orange hair and a tan coat are talking to the manager of the Buckxor.

They're so identical in fact, that they all have the same cutie mark of a green horseshoe with four leaf clovers woven into it.

"Who're they?" Gilda questions, making Trixie gulp.

"Trixie's old rival, Full House. Don't be fooled, that's just one pony. But there's enough of her to form her own dance troupe," Trixie explains.

Twilight has a brainwave. "I've heard of that! Spontaneous Division Syndrome, right? It's a birth defect that afflicts unicorns and makes their bodies duplicate when they hiccup."

Gilda quirks an eyebrow. "So all those ponies are just one pony?"

Twilight nods. "Normally, ponies take medicine to re-merge, I've never heard of a pony willingly staying split up like that before."

Trixie shrugs as one of the "Full Houses" trips, and her assistant has to help pick them up, as the rest of them are too synchronized to do it themselves.

"She always said it was an advantage in showbiz. Clearly she was right if she's also got a show at the Buckxor tonight." Trixie gestures to the gigantic poster in the lobby of the hotel as they enter.

"See the amazing Merry Mares of Full House! Tonight Only!" the poster reads, showing off ponies dancing in unison on it.

"We aught to check it out. See where the bar's set, yeah?" Gilda says, uncowed by the idea of watching a by-proxy rival's show.

Trixie looks nervous, but nods. "It would be prudent to test the waters, Trixie supposes."

Twilight giggles as she returns with their hotel keys. "But first, I believe we have a date with a luxury room, if we could?"

The girls both nod with a happier smile, and they go up the elevator to their rooms to check them out.

Gilda scoffs. "Well, it's no cloud bed, but it'll do," She says, bouncing up and down on the fluffy mattress.

Twilight, meanwhile, looks at the coffeemaker in the room with hunger in her eyes.

Trixie, however, just looks nervous as she sits on a plush chair, staring out the window.

Gilda rolls her eyes, and walks over. "What's eating you, Trix?"

Trixie shudders slightly. "Trixie doesn't think she can do this."

Gilda shakes her head. "You just need some boldness, some courage! We know you've got this."

Twilight nods as well, as she fights with the Coffee Maker to create the elixir of life that she desires.

Finally, Trixie's mood improves again. "If that hack Full House can entertain these ponies, then Trixie can wow them utterly."

Gilda's grin widens. "You got it in one Trix."

Twilight receives a letter from the manager's go-fer, tearing it open and reading it promptly.

"Good news, girls, we got the spot! Tomorrow at nine-pm, The Great and Powerful Trixie, her lovely assistant, the High-Flying Gilda, and their Magical Flight show."

Gilda pumps her fist. "Yeah! See that, things are looking up already."

Trixie nods, emboldened.

Gilda continues, arm around the two mares and shoving them out the door with her. "Now, let's kill some time before 'That Hack's' show, yeah? We've got a whole city to tear through, so I say we do it!"

"And what happened then? Well in Whoville they say, the Grinch's small heart... Grew three sizes that day," Weiss explains, nearing the tail end of his little story.

A door opening interrupts the ending, however, as Weiss quickly grabs some sacks of dye from various portals and dumps them into his dissolving smoky form.

The newly disguised and recoalesced Weiss, now disguised as a certain bookish unicorn, trots over to the Library's entrance, intent on getting some good pranking in, much to Spike's consternation and slight amusement.

"Oh, Sunset, what brings you here?" Weiss says in a rough approximation of Twilight's voice.

"Aren't you supposed to be in Las Pegasus? Well, nevermind, I need to send a letter to Celestia, it's about Weiss and it's urgent."

"Urgent?" Tweisslight questions.

Sunset nods. "Urgent."

"Emergency?" Tweiss grins.

At this point, Weiss's attempts to lead into a Foreigner song are interrupted by Celestia's chariot arriving.

For whatever reason, Celestia's chariot is filled with bolts of bright yellow cloth, and she herself is wearing a large yellow sun-hat over her crown.

"Greetings, Weiss," She says cordially filling Sunset with confusion, and making Weiss emit a disappointed groan at his plan being ruined as he discards his magical disguise.

"Hello, Celestia. Might I ask why you're here? Oh god, please don't tell me you smashed up my tower," He says, putting a hand to his face while Sunset's expression turns violent.

Sunset, having more important things to do than chew out Weiss right this minute, turns to the princess with no small amount of desperation. "Celestia, thank goodness you're here, there's an emergency. I don't know what to do, can we discuss this somewhere privately?"

Weiss mostly ignores them as he spots an airship rapidly approaching, and shifts back into his disguise. "Gasp! She's here! Both of you, fuck off!"

Celestia shrugs. "Fine, then I'll just take this cloth to Twilight's friend as I planned, and we can discuss your problem there. What do you think, Sunset, is it Royal enough?"

Weiss's ear perks up at Celestia's words, and he takes a more careful look at the load of cloth Celestia is packing with her. Surely she didn't somehow..?

"I don't have time for this. If you plan on taunting me, you'll have to get in line at the tower, Princess," Weiss says, his tone slowly turning dangerous as he begins piecing together puzzle pieces in his head.

Slapping a cheerful expression on his face, he trots over to meet the parking airship, where a small spike-haired, uniform wearing creature walks out of the opening ramp, a plum-colored unicorn slowly pacing out next to them.

"Hello! Welcome to Ponyville!" Tweisslight belts out cheerily, unable to hold back his enthusiasm at what is to follow.

Tempest, confused at the overly happy greeting, slowly drawls out the most obvious question. "Are you Weiss Noir?"

Weiss in Disguise slaps a confused, dumb expression on his face. "You're looking for the amazing, incredible, magically talented, never-failing, and extremely handsome Weiss Noir? He lives in that tower over there," He says, pointing to the black spire poking its way out of the Everfree.

As Tempest stares over at it with an inscrutable expression, lightning can be seen thundering around the tower, as if to dramatically accentuate the point.

"Right," She says dryly, ignoring this bumbling village idiot in favor of shouting back to her troops still on the ship.

"All of you. Into the forest. We'll deal with this quickly and then we can get out of here."

At her words, several large, ape-like creatures slowly make their way out, their full armor covering their faces and true species rather well.

As she makes a beeline for the Black Tower, Weiss giggles to himself, allowing the disguise to fade.

With a softly spoken "Avidus", a bolt of lightning strikes him, and whisks him away to the tower.

He fails to see Celestia and Sunset Shimmer flying at high speed in the same general direction in Celestia's chariot, just slightly askew of flying directly towards it.

As Celestia and Sunset walk into the hidden cave, Sunset's eyes begin to water up, for reasons she can't exactly explain.

The feeling in the air is almost too much to bear for the unicorn mare, and Celestia understands why as they enter the chamber of the Tree of Harmony, and see what has happened to it in the eons she has left it unobserved since Discord's defeat.

"It's dying, Princess Celestia, what are we going to do?" Sunset chokes out, her magical talent letting her know exactly what's going on with the tree, as black vines slowly creep around the chamber and the tree itself, Plunder Vines that had been growing for over a thousand years without intervention.

Celestia, unaffected by the sight by any means other than by what her own eyes and active detection and analysis spells tell her, gently drapes a wing over her could-have-been student.

"My sensory magic tells me that we have more than a year before the vines threaten the Tree's integrity, Sunset. We have time. Time to figure this out, and time to fix it."

"You said that you discovered this from his book. So we will get our answers from him."

This has to be the dumbest thing Tempest Shadow has ever seen in her life, she can't help but think as she looks at the honest-to-Celestia throne of clearly fake skulls before her, on top of which is sitting her latest annoyance.

"Welcome... To my lair!" Weiss says dramatically, his lack of extra arms and his ordinary black hair a shock to anyone who might know him, as he had unplugged the arms and enchanted his hair to suppress its flaming effect for this meeting, leaving him nothing but a seemingly ordinary unicorn with six conspicuously smooth metal pads attached to his body.

Tempest Shadow deadpans, as her guards take point. "I'm impressed. Not with your ridiculous little chair, of course. I'm impressed how you can sit there so confidently, after taunting the Storm King's top Lieutenant with the fact that you know too much about her."

Weiss nods. "You're a busy mare. I knew that unless I sent something substantial, I'd never get you here to hear my offer."

Tempest laughs, a dark, satisfied thing. "'Offer'. That's a good one. I was thinking more... Enhanced Interrogation. Anything you can offer me, you can do from inside the prison aboard my ship after I extract every last secret you have."

Celestia, walking in and realizing that Weiss's throne room doors are already open, slams them shut behind her and Sunset, so she can then throw them open hard enough to crack the crystalline walls for dramatic effect.

"I'm afraid I've got dibs, madam. You'll have to scrape up what's left after I'm through with him." Celestia says politely, stepping in front of the stunned commander.

'Princess Celestia, here?!' Tempest thinks in shock. This could get ugly.

Sunset, meanwhile, takes a step even further in front of Celestia. "Why?! Why didn't you just tell us that the Tree of Harmony was suffering!?" She shouts at Weiss, whose expression goes from smug to shocked.

"How do you know that? What makes you think that I know anything about that?" He says insistently, hopping down from his throne with a tense expression.

Sunset pulls the white, ornate book with its smooth marble binding out, and throws it to the ground in front of him in disgust. "Because you wrote about it a thousand years ago and didn't tell anypony!"

Tempest slowly backs up to the entrance. She can deal with some haughty unicorn who thinks their magic makes them so special, but she's not ready for Alicorn yet. Not with only one of those prototypes in her possession.

Celestia's sidelong glance freezes Tempest and her soldiers in place. "I thought you wanted a crack at that blustering fool? I was very serious about my offer, after all. I'll gladly let you take a swing at him."

At this, Tempest's confusion grows, in the past two years, Celestia had been sending an endless cavalcade of spies and outright assaults into the Storm King's ranks, there was no way she didn't know who Tempest Shadow was, and yet she's angry enough at this pony to ignore that?

She looks at the growingly incensed Weiss Noir, deciding that the Princess's offer was worth taking, if only to figure out how one pony could tick off a princess that much.

"How. How did you translate it? That should be impossible, even if you did have it! There's no frame of reference!" Weiss shouts in confusion.

Sunset barks out a laugh. "I spent years in the human world, Weiss, did you just assume I didn't learn English? Also, impossible? That's kind of idiotic for you to assume, considering there's also an English copy of the Grimoire Noir in Celestia's possession. Have you ever heard of the Rosetta Stone? Because you left one, idiot!" She shouts, trying to upset Weiss more.

Weiss's face twists in rage, and for a moment, Tempest expects this to turn to violence, before his body's tension flops out of him bonelessly.

"Sunset, that book is dangerous. It contains knowledge not meant for pony eyes," Weiss explains.

"If you had read it, instead of merely scanning it over, you would know that. Did you ask the tree what it wanted? Because I did. Let me guess, you read halfway through the entry, and then rushed over without finishing it."

He picks up the book, dusts it off, and opens it to the bookmarked page, calmly looking through before passing it back into Sunset's grip firmly, forcing her to look.

Sunset's expression changes to a blush when she reaches the point of the entry where Weiss explains that the Tree itself requested he not interfere.

Weiss walks up to Tempest, who had been watching this exchange, and trying to piece out the situation from it. "Now, you're making me neglect my guest. Celestia, whatever you're planning, it needs to wait. This lovely mare has business to attend to with me," Weiss says, smiling disarmingly.

Celestia internally shrugs. She's got all the time in the world to pay back Weiss's humiliation.

Tempest glares, making his smile widen.

"Tell you what, Tempest. Ponies like you and me, we have a unique way of talking. So let's talk."

"If I defeat you, you hear my offer. If you defeat me, then you can interrogate me in as enhanced a manner as you like," He grins smugly.

Tempest considers his words carefully. Either he's a fool, or he has a plan. In both cases, breaking him with her own two hooves sounds like a good time. "Fine, though... I have a few conditions."

Weiss shrugs. "Lay them out."

"We fight on neutral ground," Weiss's smile doesn't change as Tempest states her first demand.

"No targeted unicorn magic. Armor, Blast and Beam Spells, and Artifacts only," She's surprised when Weiss nods at this as though it's something obvious.

Tempest tries to think of something to bring him up short, before spotting the Princess, who looks particularly serene. "...And Princess Celestia will judge."

Oh that annoyed him.

Weiss's small frown eventually returns to an apathetic smile. "I accept."

Celestia, meanwhile, to Sunset's trained eyes, looks like she's trying to hold back laughter.

Sunset leans over to whisper her question to the Princess. "What's so funny, didn't you say Weiss was a harmless coward?"

Celestia giggles demurely, and whispers back. "He was a harmless coward because I didn't give him the time to plan. This poor mare's given him an entire week to plan every moment of what's to come, making him a very very dangerous coward."

Celestia straightens to her full height. "Your fight will be had at the Ponyville Sporting Field. I would have you all there immediately, as I don't have all day."

The Ponyville Sporting field looks odder than it usually does, its stands filled with Storm Creature Soldiers, Grubber with a #1 Foam Finger, and Spike, who didn't have anything better to do and is thus snacking on some popcorn while watching the show.

Weiss, slightly larger than he usually is and wearing a simple armored vest, smiles at the glaring Tempest, while Celestia, hoping that Weiss will at least get a bloody lip or something, stands impassively over them both in the judge's booth, Sunset taking a seat next to the princess.

Tempest finds herself confused when the pony summons two arms from seemingly nowhere, plugging them into the metal pads on his back, and ignites his mane and tail with some kind of magic black fire.

No matter, any fancy tricks he thinks he has will fall before her superior strength and speed.

Before the fight starts, Weiss speaks plainly, holding his arms out like an invitation. "Just think of this like... A trip to the dentist."

Celestia huffs slightly with amusement, and waves her wing to signal the fight's start.

Tempest immediately runs forward, slipping into Weiss's open guard and shoving him back with her front hooves as she rapidly rears up and slams forward.

Weiss, who had his extra two arms open mockingly, hasn't changed his pose, inviting her to try again after he's done skidding back.

This leaves Tempest a bit angrier, as she runs forward again, mindful of those extra arms, and, turning in place, bucks him in the chest, sending him skidding back again.

Again, Weiss doesn't even look harmed, still wearing that stupid look on his face.

Again and again, Tempest smashes away at that darn unicorn, his face, chest, sides, and even his horn at one point, before leaping into the air, and bucking him right in the head with enough force to emit an audible crack.

"Woo, go Tempest, Kick his butt!" Grubber shouts, before swapping some candy with Spike in return for some Popcorn.

Spike, shrugging, goes along with the hedgehog's cheers. "You got this Tempest!"

Finally, Weiss does something, moving a hand to his face, and wiping at his lip, he shows her the blood on his thumb.

"All that for a drop of blood," He quotes casually, as hints of graphene are revealed by the small amount of damage, mixed into the shadow clone's body for durability.

With this, Tempest's fury reaches new heights, and she unleashes a spray of explosive magic from her horn, throwing him into the wall of the Sporting Arena and leaving his coat singed in places.

Rolling his dragon arm in its socket as he drops free from the wall, Weiss's grin turns predatory, and he trots over to Tempest with twin summoned swords in hand, swinging them haphazardly at the mare, who dodges with ease, weaving kicks and explosive spells in-between her dodges and leaving him looking more and more brutalized as she chips through his strangely tough skin.

Finally, panting without a wound on her, and staring down the heavily damaged, but still grinning Weiss, she dares to let out a smile of her own.

His next words, however, wipe the smile right off of her face. "I'm going to be honest with you, Tempest. You will never... ever... defeat me with those ridiculous attacks."

Tempest snarls. "And why, pray-tell, is that?"

He chuckles. "Because you haven't hurt me once."

Tempest's snarl turns apoplectic. "Then what do you call that," she says, pointing to the battle-damaged Weiss.

Weiss's smile doesn't fade by even the smallest amount, and in a wash of smoke, he's left untouched and seemingly unharmed, save for the scuffs on his vest and armor.

"Pity." He says, mindful of the amount of magic he had been burning through to dismiss and regenerate this clone fast enough to make it look like healing.

A few more minutes of her wailing on this shadow clone, and he might actually be in danger of running out of magic entirely.

As the mare's wounded pride forces her to pull a round, crackling object from her belt, however, he is forced to hide just how much more he wants to grin. Exactly as he had been hoping, she's brought out her trump card.

Tempest takes a few deep breaths to regain some small amount of strength, and stands up tall as she holds up the dark orb filled with crackling green energy. "Then I guess that's that."

Rushing inside of Weiss's pitiful guard again, she once more twists around and bucks him into the air, before kicking the orb after the stunned unicorn stallion, where it strikes him in the chest and explodes into a cloud of green smoke, rapidly transmuting his body into obsidian as he crashes to the ground, petrified.

Breathing heavily as she herself lands, she chuckles in no small amount of relief, closing her eyes. "I got him."

"Well, it's certainly a handsome visage, but what about the location!?"

Her eyes snap open in horror as she spots Weiss staring at his own, petrified face, scratching his chin and chuckling as though he hadn't just been hit by the Storm King's unstoppable petrification bomb.

Weiss glances over to her. "Now, you see, if I were going to petrify somepony, I'd probably do it a bit more like... This!"

Tempest shouts, trying to dodge out of the way of the vile green magic streaking towards her, but despite knowing that she successfully dodged the beam, she feels the cruel, dominating magic somehow hit her in the back, black crystals already spreading over her body.

Weiss walks over casually as she struggles against the curse climbing up her hooves like an infection, turning her into crystal.

"Good night, Tempest Shadow," Weiss says softly.

Before it can spread up over her head and broken horn and end this, Weiss suddenly grabs her by the neck, his claws preventing the curse from spreading up further before he can get his last words in with the struggling, panicking mare.

"Shhh... Just relax, and think about-"

He ponders for a moment, before finishing as he lets go of Tempest's neck. "-Fireworks."

And with that, Tempest Shadow was no more.

(Weiss Report) The Holy [Merciful Flash]

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I don't actually know when this entry was written, as he didn't actually organize this book's physical pages chronologically. a lot of it has been marked over and torn.

I've finally done it. I've mastered this damned spell. It's finally mine to command.

Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation is a spell which creates black crystals, infused with the will to dominate life. Under normal circumstances, the spell's crystals are able to control minds and control the living. A spell tailor made to imprison and enslave, plain and simple.

Sombra's Crystal Curse is a spell which expands upon this property, taking it to the next, horrifying level. When cast on a target, it grows those same black crystals on them, but unlike SC3, the Crystal Curse spell also transforms the imprisoned one, turning them into a living, petrified statue, shackled with dark magic.

Until today, I had no cure for the latter. And without a cure, I could not cast it. Not only because I did not want to, but because my magic itself rebelled at the idea of killing something using the power of domination. But now, all of that has changed. I have realized the curative properties of the Black Flame, and with that, it's as though a lock on my own mind had been jimmied open.

Indeed, as with many things, the secret was always hatred. And I despise Sombra, more than anything else in this world. More than anything in any world. And through that hatred, I have managed to create a black flame that not only burns away everything Sombra does or creates, but does so perfectly. I can now sear away any foul ailment he inflicts, leaving the pony beneath unharmed.

I can take his signature spell and twist it to my own uses.

Its first, and most obvious use. If I can turn flesh to crystal, then I can grow flesh. Wounds that would once threaten my life, I can now cure in moments, by turning the curse and it's cure inward on myself. It might take a triple-spell to use it this way, combining both Royal Crystal Growth, Black Flame, and my curse all at the same time, but it can be done with sufficient focus. The irony is that Royal Crystal Growth, when used on myself, merely restores me, without any changes. After all, all of my qualities are my best ones. There is no improving upon them, obviously.

Its second, much more important use is it's ability to stint wounds. Where before, I would only grow weaker and weaker as I sustained damage in battle, I can now dismiss injuries I take to becoming inert crystal, on both myself and others. Thus, my own version of this spell is a medical spell, at it's core. And triage is it's simplest use, on it's smallest possible scale. Effectively a bandaid, if a bandaid were made of twisted black magic.

Its third, but certainly not its least critical use is it's ability to put a pony into stasis. I can now save ponies from even the depths of mortality by simply petrifying them until a healer can be brought to them. Though it requires my direct intervention to use the spell in this manner, it essentially means that in times of turmoil, I can give my ponies time. The rarest, and most quickly lost resource in an emergency.

What dramatic irony, that I've been able to turn this, what is the darkest among dark magics, a spell that transforms a pony into living mind-control crystals, trapped in place at the whim of another, into a spell whose medical uses are endless. I'm sure if Sombra could see how I've twisted his spell into this sick mockery of itself that it is now, he would be writhing in his fucking icy imprisonment right now. I'll have to remember to rub it in his face while I'm murdering him, I suppose.

If this whole immortality thing doesn't pan out, I could probably use the spell on myself to pass the next millennia or so until his return. I don't really want to nap away perfectly good time I could spend planning his death, but if needs must, I suppose it's yet another option I now have available to me. The only reason I have to live so long is to end him when he returns after all. There's nothing else left.

It really is odd, just how arbitrary magic can be. All of my crystal magic suddenly becomes applicable, the moment I cast my curse on something. Even though the spell does indeed turn something into crystal, it is still merely a transmutation, with the true form of the creature merely censored beneath it. The fact that the curse makes them vulnerable to crystal magic implies odd things about magic that I suppose merely mark it's nature more boldly as a force of feelings, rather than strictly one of facts.

One thing I suppose is worth noting. Even though my crystal might appear as black as Sombra's when I inflict my curse on a living thing, some deep, primal part of my soul scoffs at the idea that they are the same blackness. Where Sombra's dark gems are born of a cold, uncaring disdain, when I see my own spell, it seems so obvious that it is the same shade of my hair, the same black as my cutie mark. It is the unique color of hatred.

Not merely a hatred that I have directed at something, or the petty hatred that others feel, but the same hatred that forms that precious, tender core of my soul. A hatred so strong, and so perfected over these years that it slides over my surroundings like the tenth plague. Quiet, infinite, and unstoppable, but sparing the ones I care for. It seems that, in the end, the Black Flame of hatred has once again destroyed that which I despise, though instead of doing so physically, just this once, it has instead metaphorically destroyed Sombra's Prized spell, and from those ashes, I have scavenged this, my most merciful dark magic.

That being said, I have decided to call it the Merciful Flash. A reference to...

...The rest of the entry has been scribbled out.

(Past Chapter 10): Fun and Games

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My first taste of real power was intoxicating.

I stand in the dream realm while Dr. Real stands in the real world, monitoring my vitals.

"Now, let's start with something basic. Activating Golem Proxy at twenty-five percent. I'll be attempting a fire spell."

The speakers in the medical room relay my message to the doctor, who nods as he adjusts both the apparatus attached to my horn, and the golem statue of me equipped with a similar apparatus.

The glass bulb filled with Stoppered Time attached to my forehead begins to bubble faintly as I channel my magic in the dream, attempting to cast Prestidigitonium.

In the real world, however, my horn's glow is sapped by the liquefied frozen time, making it change colors, bubbling and hissing as the liquid substance is forced up through tubes by the pressure and slowly drips out into a bottle strategically placed below.

The golem does this as well, though instead of a liquid, it begins producing a gas, prompting Dr. Real to nervously attach a rubber gasket to the bottle to trap the gasses coming out.

Before long, roughly a third of my magical energy is drained into this one spell, prompting me to call it for this particular test.

"Alright Doctor, seal up that bottle, and get a new one ready. Label it 'Fire'."

The remaining two-thirds of my energy will go towards the next bottle's fire spell, followed by a period of recovery.

"We're going to be here a while."

As I stand out in the blistering snow, a table hastily assembled next to me, and large training dummies made of ice arrayed in front of me, I can't help my excitement.

"Sir, I'm not sure what effect will occur if you drink these outright. It could do anything," Dr. Real says, bundled up in his thick coat.

I wave him off. "That's why you're here, to drag my dumb ass back inside and pump my stomach if something goes wrong. Now give me the Vance labeled 'Bigby's Crushing Hand'."

He nervously hands me an ornate, tiny bottle, filled with a glittering, white liquid. Like snow in summer.

Popping the cork out with my teeth, I lift the bottle up, and drain it down.

Instantly, I feel the power overtaking me, burning, like a grease fire inside my lungs.

I take deep, consistent breaths, trying to overcome the bone-deep pressure pushing on me from within.

I can't afford to fall down right now, despite my knees shaking as the liquid courses through my veins, since I told Dr. Real to perform immediate extraction if I actually fell over.

I suspect if it hadn't been my own magic used to create this, it would have been overwhelming. But it was, and it's not. Inch by inch, little by little, I slowly force the magic down, compressing it mentally until, with a metaphorical 'Click!' it settles inside of me, a mass of compressed magic, frozen in time, waiting to be unleashed.

I wait until the feeling of pressure has completely subsided, before looking to my trusted doctor and smirking. "Stage one is complete Absolutely. Are you excited?"

His expression is properly mad with glee, he's always been so weak to my demands when I dangle potential science like this in front of him.

"Are you prepared to begin stage two, Lord Weiss?" He responds. If he were a younger stallion, he might be hopping in place right now, like a child watching his parents bring in an especially large birthday present.

Looking to the first snowpony in the distance, I nod.

"Bigby's Crushing Hand!" I shout, intent filling my words as they mentally unlock the spell I had just swallowed.

My horn instantly ignites, and in less than an instant, the snowpony has exploded in the grip of a gigantic telekinetic hand.

I start to chuckle, and Dr. Real simply stares on in glee and satisfaction.

My chuckling turns into outright laughter for a time.

"Let's go through all of them now. One at a time," I tell him, making his enthusiasm die down.

"Are you sure, sir? Eight hours worth of magic is a lot to contain."

I nod. "If It gets to be too much, then we'll stop at my limit, and mark down how many bottles of Vance I can manage at a time."

Fire, Flare, and Frizz. Three spells containing One-Third of my 'Normal' magical capacity.

Fira, Flara, and Frizzle. Each one with Two-Thirds of my capacity.

Firaga, Flarus, and Kafrizz. These ones containing every last scrap of magic I can muster at my peak.

Fireja, Kafrizzle, Kerfrizz. Measured in time instead of capacity, each of these spells were the work of one solid hour of continuous casting and regeneration.

One after another, I painfully absorb the magic I stored in these potions the night before. For this test, I had only made variants of Prestidigitonium inside the bottles of Vance, as it had the most obvious and measurable effect, and required the least harmful emotion, in case there was backlash.

Each time, the pressure seems to grow, but with each bottle, I become more capable of managing it, and each spell eventually shrinks down inside me, socketing into place as though they had always had a place waiting for them there.

I look at poor A.R Homeopathy, who had been forced to carefully watch me down each bottle to see if I was about to explode.

"It's alright Doctor. That's the last one."

And it's a good thing too, considering just how full I feel now. Though the pressure from absorbing the spells is gone, there is now a weight, not one on my body, but on my spirit. Like some blend between eating too much and carrying every grocery bag into the house in a single trip.

I'll conquer this challenge as well. The power I feel now is too incredible to give up because of something like that.

"Let's stress test this. I'm going to use up one of the D-Tier Vances, so stand back Doctor," I say, pointing my horn at the next snowpony.

"Fireja!"

The next few minutes include some ringing in my ears, and me blinking light out of my vision.

The ripped up landscape and pyroclasm of fire washing out over the land in front of me strongly implies I may have underestimated the yield of D-Rank Vance Fluid.

"Doctor, let's get the fuck out of here. I'm pretty sure Tartarus heard that one," I say as the ringing in my ears subsides.

The stunned and blankfaced stallion just sort of nods numbly, and we trudge through the snow to the nearest fast-travel station.

After I blow up the table and empty bottles with a well-placed "Kafrizz", of course.

I return home to the sight of Celestia and Luna, casually taking up space in my office.

I turn to Tablet, my secretary, with an expectant look.

"They arrived a few minutes ago looking for you sir, I'm not certain why, I'm sorry."

I sigh, glaring at Celestia before shrugging it off. "It's alright, thank you for sending them in, Tablet."

I slowly walk my way inside, transforming my crude cloak of Black Fire into a hazy dress suit with some force of will. Style is worth working hard for, after all, and nothing says business like a three-piece suit made of pitch-black flames.

I take a seat and steeple my hooves onto my desk. "How can I help you fine ladies?" I say casually.

Celestia looks like she's about to say something, but Luna interrupts her. "We hath been keeping our gaze squarely on thee, Lord Weiss Noir. There art few days in memory whence a pony, however briefly, ascends their strength to..." She looks to her sister.

"Three-hundred and sixty times the strength of spells we had formerly sensed thou casting," Celestia finishes for Luna.

The eerily specific number she used doesn't comfort me at all. Neither does the fact that they're apparently monitoring my spellcasting. The fact that they're coming to me for answers, however, presents potential.

I school my expression, and decide to exclusively answer to Luna, before doing exactly that. "Well, Princess Luna, I had warned you that I had been working night and day for the sake of the Shadow Realm."

"Is it any wonder that my hard work in the nights would pay off?"

Luna is unamused. "Lord Weiss, even now, thine body overfloweth with magic. One unexplained by the brief glimpses and snippets we see of thy dreams at work."

I smile faintly. "Luna, I've been practicing magic all night last night. Every spell I have at my disposal now was born from that sort of hard work, and precious little else."

Celestia slams a hoof on my desk, mindful not to break it. Obviously not mindful enough to not crack it, of course, as the gash splintering down it can attest to.

"Thou shalt stop thine idiotic runabout and give us the truth!" She shouts.

"Thou drawest upon the hatred of ponykind for mundane heating, and with thine other face, tell us that thy brutish power here is built on a night's work alone?"

Luna has to calm her sister, because my face certainly isn't going to.

My smug expression gives way to words in a similar tone as I distinctly avoid looking at the solar princess, and answer her sister instead. "I haven't lied since you got here, Princess Luna."

Celestia turns to her sister for confirmation, who I notice has piercing, clearly enchanted eyes poking through me metaphorically.

She shakes her head. "He's right. His tone and words mock us with honesty alone. And whatever foul well from which he is drawing this unnatural strength, he dug it himself."

Celestia's anger comes out with her words. "If we could prove for even an instant that thine power came at the expense of another..."

I shake my head with good humor. "You won't because you can't, Your Majesty. So why don't you get the hell out of my office, if you don't have any good reasons to threaten me today."

She stands up suddenly at that, before an odd smile crosses her face. "Very well, Lord Weiss."

"It may comfort thou to know that a pony's eyebrows do indeed grow back. I hope your newfound power will allow you the basic hygiene we alicorns enjoy, if nothing else... Soot is a poor look for a ruler, after all."

With that, the Diarchs of Equestria leave my office, while I just look confused. What was that about?

I only realize later what she meant, as my potent fire spell being fired off so close to my head had... unintended consequences, according to my mirror.

"That bitch," I exclaim with a grimace, before chuckling involuntarily at just how ridiculous I look in the mirror.

I'm surprised they kept a straight face with me looking like a cartoon bomb just went off in my face.

Obviously, this means I just have to double down and escalate. I wonder if I have enough time to put together a clown outfit before their next "friendly visit".

Priss just stares on, dumbfounded, at Eclipse's idea.

"You know that the mine isn't actually restricted, right? We could just go in and ask."

Eclipse shakes her head. "No way, you're not thinking about the big picture here, if we just asked for some Frozen Stone, then Weiss would know, and he would know that we know, so then it wouldn't be a secret trump card that we can use against him!"

"Look, just help me look for the stuff while Oil Slick keeps watch, Ok?!"

Priss just rolls her eyes, while Oil Slick shrugs.

"If it will shut you up. Why do you need it, anyway?"

Eclipse huffs. "Weiss might know that I know what his new secret weapon is, but what he doesn't know is that I know he doesn't know that I'm going to also use his secret weapon that he knows nopony else knows about."

"You did that on purpose," Priss deadpans, dampening Eclipse Flash's mood.

"Whatever, let's get this over with. I needed to pick up some Rupture Drops anyway. I'll need em to break into Weiss's room and dump more snow in his bed."

Eclipse carefully ignores Priss's ridiculous prank plans and trots into the mining tunnels, intent on fulfilling her own justice-fueled plans.

"I don't get it, it's not supposed to make this junk, it's supposed to make a liquid!" Eclipse shouts, as if she could shout loud enough to turn the result of her experiment into the ones she wanted.

Priss just groans internally, sipping at her citrine juice as she sits on a large rock next to their pile of snacks and trinkets while Oil Slick is napping in a corner, table full of sapphire holocards left loosely organized.

Eclipse pounds her head against the walls of their secret clubhouse, groaning much more audibly.

"Ok! I can work with this, just because Weiss's stupid project folder is a load of lies doesn't mean I can't still do this."

She plants her hooves on the ball of crystal that was left behind when she used black flames to melt it down, and focuses on casting a Lucky Shot Charm into the spherical gem.

"Time freezing liquid, time freezing crystals, what's the difference."

The difference, Eclipse finds, is quite vast.

After watching Eclipse fruitlessly bash her head against this project, she feels the need to interject.

"Maybe you should take Weiss's advice. He's always ranting about how magic is 'Subjective inconsistent bullshit that you just have to figure out'."

Eclipse tilts her head at her cooperative rival. "That sounds vaguely specist, but Ok?"

"The problem is, these stupid crystals aren't absorbing energy like the liquid is supposed to. They're just absorbing the... Imprint."

Priss shrugs, picking up the bauble.

"Just add energy."

The two fillies promptly discover the first use of what Weiss will later call Timeshift Crystal as a result of Priss casting the Lucky Shot Charm bound inside the glittering sphere, her leg jerking out and smacking the pile of goodies they had piled up in their clubhouse over the past week, sending them flying into sorted neat stacks from the magically enhanced impact. She also strikes Oil Slick's table by mistake at the same time, making his cards fly up in the air and land in perfectly stacked decks.

It's an impressive feat considering Priss didn't actually know how to cast that spell.

Priss nods. "Ok, that's pretty cool."

"My system!" Oil Slick shouts, jolted awake to the sight of his reorganized Duel Monsters cards.

"It's going to take me all day to re-sort all of this!"

As my mind relaxes in the grip of sleep, I can feel the mental claws I had wrapped around the spells loosen involuntarily.

"Damn. Easy come, easy go, I guess," I say to myself as I feel my leftover spell slots empty as I slip into the dream realm.

It seems I'll need to be mindful of the fact that the effects of a Vance can't be carried over between days unless I discharge them into new bottles before going to sleep.

Walking to the border of my Moon Crystal, I open the port to Iron Diamond's dream, and zip over there to give him the results of the experiment.

I'm faced with what would be a legitimate nightmare for anyone else, as I watch how Iron Diamond has used his virtual space to turn his dream into a hellish, frozen pit with demonic icy horrors emerging from every wall.

My breath comes out in shrouds of mist as one of the creatures rushes me, prompting me to unleash a wave of fire from my horn.

"Iron Diamond! I'm here to give you that report I promised!" I shout, blasting away another one of the monsters with dismissive ease.

Upon seeing me, Iron almost seems disappointed at the interruption, but forces his dream to evaporate, transforming our surroundings into a simple stone arena, with the moon directly overhead.

"I'm assuming your get-strong-quick scheme didn't work?" He says right off the bat, making me smirk like a bastard.

"Oh I don't know. It didn't under-perform as much as one might have expected," I say, bringing up a mirrored screen showing my memories of yesterday.

Iron Diamond is unimpressed. "Please tell me you can use combat-viable spells with that," He groans in a low tone.

I'm confused at this. "What part of a gigantic fireball isn't combat viable?"

He gives me a hard look. "The part where you spent twenty seconds blinking smoke and light out of your eyes and barely singed the snow because the fire wasn't concentrated or sustained?"

"It blew up a city block worth of the terrain!" I argue.

"It could do more," He retorts. Something I don't have an answer to, other than, of course;

"I'm listening."

As I stare out of the Moon Crystal at Luna's face pressed up against the glass, I slowly close the shutters to stop her from looking in on my attempts to plan out my next batch of spells.

Iron Diamond convinced me to break out the Divine Phantasm project again, despite the Arcana Nox rendering it mostly obsolete. He had a good point, I suppose, in that doubling the effective punch of my spells for free was worth the hassle of carrying it around. Even though it meant I would have to remember an even longer list of code words.

I'll have to dip into my reference material even more, to pick out good phrases to use for combinations of Divine Words and Vancian Spells.

Since I'm probably going to be using these every day for the rest of my life, if I know what's good for me, I'll have to start planning out very carefully what spells are useful for me to keep on hand, for any given situation.

Thankfully, I've got a few ideas.

"Weiss, please let me in. I wish to discuss your new abilities," Luna says, face presumably still pressed up against my window.

I groan, shouting back. "Luna, can it please wait until tomorrow night? I've got to take care of this."

I hear her huff in mild offense, before her presence disappears.

As Priss, Eclipse, and some unknown third colt walk up to me with collective proud looks, I'm prepared for anything.

When I see all of them wearing collars with glowing spheres set in them, my mind instantly shoots to the most logical conclusion available to me.

It's not helped at all when Eclipse opens her mouth.

"Jealous, Weiss? I've already reverse engineered your plans and improved upon them in every way, say hello to the future of spellcasting!"

I wait for her to continue, at which point she has Priss walk up and, with visible force of effort, cause one of the spheres to glow, before she's able to grow a simple, but impressive quartz crystal from the stone floor.

"I hope you're not hoping to have some of these for yourself, because you won't find them in any poorly secured files. They're entirely new!"

"Are those fucking Materia?" I say, staring at them with unabashed hunger in my eyes.

"What? No! I mean, I don't know what those are, but no! They're new!" She retorts violently, stomping her hoof.

Priss groans. "Darn it Eclipse, why did you have to say that, now he's going to start one of his dumb stories to explain it."

"What's a materia?" Oil Slick asks, making Priss's groan increase in volume when I happily answer their question.

"Well, that requires a bit of context, so get comfy. I'll start the story while we head over to one of the break rooms for some seats and snacks. It'll be a long one."

"This story begins in a land called Midgar, and follows a pony named Cloud Strife."

"Why did the lady 'decide' to call it the 'Sister Ray' when they had already been calling it that up until now?"

"How did Sephiroth know about the parts he wasn't there for?"

"Why is the story called Final Fantasy when this is apparently the seventh installment in the series?"

I answer them each in turn. "Continuity Error, Sephiroth was in Cloud's head, so he knew stuff like that, and the writers didn't realize they were going to strike gold with the first one."

Eclipse suddenly returns to her surly mood, where she had previously been enthralled by the tale. "Well, I'm still not calling these Materia."

I shrug. "I'm still going to call them Materia."

Priss and the teenage colt (named Oil Slick apparently), nod in agreement, making Eclipse squeal with outrage.

"I brought you two here for backup! Don't agree with him!?"

Oil Slick just chuckles nervously. "It's kind of a catchy name, though, and you gotta admit, these things work almost just like in the story!"

Before Eclipse can pull out more of her hair in frustration, I feel the need to confront her.

"Eclipse, whether or not you share your secret new tool with me, you really should share them with others who need them. The soldiers and workers alike could use what you've invented. I expect you to work out what you feel comfortable sharing with the public, and providing a list to an authority figure detailing the discoveries you feel warrant sharing."

"Are we clear?" I finish.

Eclipse nods. "Well of course, I've got to give the rest of the ponies as much as I can to get a leg up on you."

"That's all I ask. Good work you three. Now If you'll excuse me, I've got business to attend to."

They nod, and upon leaving, I think about what it might do for the Shadow Realm for every one of my soldiers to be as magically capable as the strongest link among them.

Even if Eclipse holds back the lion's share of her discovery, It's almost as tasty a potential boost in power as my own personal one was.

If I knew how they worked, of course. They could be borderline useless, for all I know.

With a stock of Vance carefully stored in my personal safe, I feel comfortable skipping a night to quell Luna's endless desire to pry into my business.

As if sensing this, the Lunar Royalty is already waiting for me as I fall asleep.

Words unspoken, I manifest the airlock and let her in.

"So, what's the trick?" She deadpans, clearly unwilling to engage in banter.

I try to come up with something suitably clever to say, but she raises her eyebrow and interrupts my thinking.

"Come on. I am being serious."

I sigh. "Improved magic control. Does that explain it well enough to get you off my back for now?"

She giggles slightly as she gets comfy on my dream couch. "It will do."

"You know, you really shouldn't provoke my Sister like that. She is still very capable of squashing you."

I have no choice with how I respond to that. "At this point, it's a game. If she gives in, I win. And she knows it."

Luna outright guffaws at that, rolling around. "That she does... You should be more wary, Weiss, she has been playing games longer than you have been walking," Luna says lightly, humor tinting her tone.

I just shrug, bringing up a few of my less-secretive projects to work on while I engage in small talk. "Luna, I hate to say it, but in a battle of wits, your sister should mind that she hones her weapon rather than merely shining it."

Her boisterous laughter forms a suitable backdrop for my next project.

Dear Weiss Noir

Today I learned a valuable lesson in Foeship. Even your friends can be totally willing to flake on you if they think it would be funny. 'Materia' my flank. Just because I didn't have a good name yet didn't mean they had to leave me hanging like that. Although I guess it's made up for by the fact that they're willing to help me organize a conspiracy against you and help me with my magical studies in actually creating the things. Still going to replace their Materia with all 'Coat-pinkening' ones.

Your Traitorous Student, Eclipse Flash.

(Noir Report) Eclipse Flash's Guide to Assisted Spellcasting [Materia]

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Entry #10, Day 81

Foreword:

As my student has yet to reveal the full scope of her methods and the secrets of Materia, the remainder of this entry will thus be guest-written by Eclipse Flash, as she is currently these relics' only expert. I would prefer it if none who read this tome "spoil" it for me, as I plan on discovering their secrets for myself.

The most important thing about Assisted Spellcasting is that you still have to be capable of the spell. The way these gems work, they carry an imprint of their creator casting it, which is briefly impressed on the user. If you lack the magical power or skill needed to cast the spell, the gem won't work. It's been suggested that I attempt to store multiple, escalating spells in a single materia, so that the user can gain access to stronger magic as they "grow into" using a particular kind of magic, but I haven't figured out how to do that yet.

The way you activate the spell is easy enough. You just need to focus on it, Weiss complains that I don't announce the spell's name when I use it, but he's a dork, so I would ignore him if he tries to tell you that. You don't actually need to shout it out loud, you just need to focus on the gem. After that, you should feel something weird, that's the gem releasing the imprint it has stored of a different pony casting the spell. Let that feeling do what it needs to do, and you'll be able to match it, draining some of your magic to follow through with the spell.

The way to create an Assisted Spellcasting Gem is fairly simple. First, you need a specific type of crystal. Some ponies are already growing them, so you shouldn't have a problem getting one if you really need it. Then, you take the Timeshift Crystal and you cast a spell into it while touching it. The crystal has to be a perfectly round sphere though, or it won't work. And it has to be the right size, too. Bigger spells need a bigger Timeshift Sphere. When you do all of that, the sphere absorbs the spell's imprint, and can be used for Assisted Spellcasting.

I got the first Timeshift Crystal from using Black Flames on Frozen Stone, I thought I was going to get something else, but Weiss said not to talk about what it was supposed to make, and also to stop trying to make it. After that, we've just been growing them from seed crystals. The crystal farmers have apparently been messing with them a bit, seeing what they can do. And that's cool, I guess.

I don't really think Timeapples are going to be that popular, though.

I also found out, due in no small part to Weiss's interference, that ~~Materia~~ Assisted Spellcasting Gems can be used even if they aren't touching your body directly, as long as they're socketed firmly enough in an object laced with Timeshift Crystals. This means if you ask the carvers, they might be able to help fix up something nice to keep your Assisted Spellcasting Gems in!

I've been making some of the gems myself, being able to cast really exacting spells without much variation is actually really useful, with some creativity. Like, some of the decorators have gems with one specific carving spell in them shaped like a cool tile, so they just cast it over and over, and carve tiles into the floor in a snap! And the soldiers have been practicing with these really accurate needle launching spells, since they can do it exactly the same every time, instead of having to spend so much time focusing on aim.

The gems I keep on me have a bit broader applications, though. I've been keeping a gem for "Bellowbore's Strength of Limb", "Surefire's Lucky Shot", and of course, a Crystal Growth spell on me at all times. It's pretty handy when I need to climb up shelves or put away my books, since I can just jump up there, and kick my books right where they should be. My friends all keep a Lucky Shot gem too, for similar reasons, since it's normally a hard spell for an Earth Pony to cast. It's just so much more useful though, when it's easier to cast like this!

This might be conjecture. In fact, it probably is, but I also noticed that the more you use a particular gem, the easier and faster it is to use. Before, I had to take a five minute break after using Lucky Shot to put up all my stuff, but now I don't need a break at all. I guess practice makes perfect. I don't know if the same thing happens with other Assisted Spellcasting Gems, but It's worth keeping in mind, I guess.

One thing that's kind of annoying, we can't take Timeshift Crystals above a certain elevation without permission, since if you break one near snow, the snow turns into saltwater for a while. I don't know why it happens, but when Weiss found out, he looked really annoyed for some reason. Maybe he doesn't like saltwater? It turns back into snow when the time magic wears off though. He said he was going to "Get his dudes to work testing some stuff", but I don't know what that means.

The point is, if you don't have some of these, you should get some. Weiss made it so you can get some for free from some distributors in every zone, though the really high quality ones you still have to pay some GP for. I think it's worth it. Some of the Assisted Spellcasting Gems that everypony's been making are really cool and useful, and even though it doesn't help you learn the spell for real, it's a good way to help ponies really see what they're missing. Maybe this will make more ponies become interested in learning spellcraft themselves, when they can give magic a trial run like this? I sure hope so.

(Present Chapter 10): Come True

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Celestia stares at the crystal statue now adorning the Ponyville Sporting Field, while Sunset looks incredibly nervous.

"D-"

"Did he just kill her?" Sunset asks, unsure what just happened.

Celestia shakes her head. "Check the Grimoire Weiss. I believe he calls it his 'Merciful Flash'. It's a variant of the crystal petrification curse geared towards medical use."

Sunset does as she's ordered, and begins flipping through the book, eventually finding the page.

Sunset's face scrunches up with confusion. "I don't actually know when this entry was written, as he didn't actually organize this book's physical pages chronologically. A lot of it has been marked over and torn."

After a moment rapidly reading through the entry and it's diagrams as well as she can, she's unable to piece out how the spell works, with so much of the entry marked over and torn out.

"...The rest of the entry has been scribbled out."

Celestia just hums to herself, as Weiss is surrounded by Tempest Shadow's soldiers, who look violently angry at what had just occurred.

The smallest one, Grubber, takes point, and looks uncharacteristically upset.

"Fix it," he says, glaring up at the aloof Weiss.

"Fix what?" Weiss says, stretching with a yawn.

"Your stupid spell, take it off her, you prick!" The squat hedgehog curses.

The soldiers balk slightly at his harsh language, while Weiss just picks at his ear with a pinkie.

"I didn't quite hear that. You wanted me to fix something?"

He looks over at the petrified Tempest Shadow, and puts a hand to his mouth in mock shock. "Oh, right."

"Well, far be it from me to not correct a mistake. Come to my tower with your ship and your men, alone. If you do this, then I'll gladly return your commander. As unharmed as the day she was born."

Weiss throws his head up in the air, dragging Tempest and himself away in a blast of lightning.

"No!" Grubber shouts, trying to leap for them before they can get away. But it's too late, and he just leaps into the grass.

"Everyone, back on the ship, we're going to get Tempest!"

They all raise a shout as they stomp to their airship with intent to cause havok for the pony who would dare to hurt their Commander.

Tempest Shadow awakens with a gasp, looking around with wide eyes.

The bed that she's on, unadorned walls, a window made of slats instead of glass. An empty doorway, devoid of any sort of door. 'Some sort of prison?'

Something feels... different. Something she can't put her hoof on.

What happened? Suddenly, she remembers. 'I challenged that pony, but he just toyed with me, I wasn't able to leave a mark on him... And then..!'

She looks over her body, checking for any remaining traces of the curse. Nothing out of the ordinary.

"Oh, good, you're awake. I've never had to do this sort of operation myself, you know. Although I certainly knew what I was doing."

Her head shoots up, glaring at Weiss, who is leaning on the doorway, two more sets of limbs stuck on him now with that same flaming hair stuck on his head, just larger than before.

So he had been hiding his real power this whole time.

"What did you do to me? Some kind of poison? I know you've done something to me," her eyes narrow.

The bastard just shrugs with glitter in his eyes. "Just some insurance to ensure that you hear my offer," He gestures upward, jutting his nose up for a moment along with his pointer finger.

Slowly, her eyes trail up, and her heart freezes in her chest as her eyes widen.

it can't be real

Her hoof slowly raises up and...

Clunk!

Tempest jumps a bit, startled at feeling the horn on her forehead, recognizing the feeling she had since she woke up.

"I'm whole..?"

It was her, all of her.

is this a dream?

Quickly, she looks around the room and finds a vase with some old flowers in it. Igniting her horn, she slowly pulls it over to herself, in a...

Telekinetic grip!

She laughs, softly at first, but before long, she's waving the vase around, laughing and laughing and sobbing with relief, decades of suffering, of that bone-deep emptiness that came with her lacking her horn, endless nights of desperately searching for anything to fix her, of her doing anything to get back what she knew in her heart of hearts that she needed to satisfy that core desire every pony has to fulfill their destiny.

Oh sure, it might be a funnier shade than she's used to, it might even be cursed. Ok, who is she kidding, the fact that the regenerated part of her horn is a brighter shade of purple than the rest of the plum-colored bone means that it is definitely cursed.

'But it's still whole!' her being screams at her, as she skips around the room, lost in mind-shattering relief and joy as her eyes cross to keep looking at her horn and burn the sight into her memory.

Eventually, she stops running around the room, wipes the nasty tears off of her face, and tries to get serious, as she turns to Weiss, daring him to mock her with a glare no less sharp than the ones she has always been capable of.

"Why? Why do this?" She questions, needing the answer before she can be wholly at ease.

Weiss chuckles, walking forward.

He whispers, in a smooth, resonant tone. "Because I'd like to be friends, Fizzlepop. You're a very useful pony to have on one's team."

"Friendship is worthless," Tempest responds insistently.

Weiss laughs. "Then I'm offering you a good deal."

"But no, I'm afraid you've simply got a... Narrower view of friendship than most are used to."

"Friends are supposed to... be there for one another, to help each other out, yes? But that's not how it always works in the real world, is it, Fizzlepop."

Tempest doesn't respond, but she agrees wholeheartedly.

"So what's your real offer. What's to stop me from walking out this building right now, and never looking back?" She says firmly.

Weiss shrugs. "Not a damn thing. You could walk out of that door right now, horn intact, and never see me again, I assume. And if you did, it would still play right into my hands."

He continues. "But I haven't finished my offer."

"I want you on retainer. You'll be paid monthly wages, and room and board will be provided free of charge."

Pausing to let her take it in, he continues when she doesn't respond immediately.

"You're gone, Tempest. Dead and gone, metaphorically. What else would you do?

"Go back to the Storm King? I'm sure he's the type of person to trust in your loyalty when he can no longer dangle your heart's desire in front of you."

"Live here in Equestria? Go back to the life you had as though nothing ever happened? Fat chance of that. And you wouldn't want to anyway."

"Or maybe you'll go out into the world and drift aimlessly, now that the tool you've forged yourself into no longer has a use? I think we both know that wouldn't satisfy you."

Weiss walks up until he is inches away from Tempest's face.

"Face it. You're aimless. Aimless and alone. No threat to anyone without that painful desperation in your heart giving you your unstoppable determination. You were willing to serve the Storm King until the day your horn was restored, some unknowable amount of time in the future. It could have been a few more days, or it could have been the rest of your life. All I've done is pay you in advance to transfer that loyalty to me."

The world fades to grey as Weiss's face becomes neutral, and he speaks seriously for the first time since she had met him.

"So here's my question, Fizzlepop Berrytwist. How many years of your life have I just bought from you?"

Tempest is unable to keep eye contact with the mad sage, and turns away.

"I won't abandon my crew," She offers.

Weiss chuckles, banishing the oppressive atmosphere. "Well, they're right outside, trying to bash down my front door. I'll hire them too."

She snarls, but oddly, can't seem to force very much into her tone. "They are loyal to the Storm King alone."

Weiss shrugs. "I believe they hold loyalty to another. Let's find out who's right," he says abruptly, encasing them both in magic that shifts them away.

Teleporting them both to the gigantic double doors, they arrive just in time for a gigantic hook to smash through Weiss's door and force it open, as Grubber and the Storm Soldiers rush in, weapons drawn and ship floating menacingly in front of his tower, thick chains trailing from the hook to the ship.

"Give us Tempest! Oh... Hi Tempest!" Grubber waves cheerfully.

Spike is there too, though he's more disgruntled at the fact that he had to bum a ride from the storm dudes.

Tempest waves back awkwardly.

Weiss suddenly gives them all his best salesman grin, before speaking aloud. "Hello, all of you! I've made our mutual friend here an offer, and I'll make a modified version of it to you!"

"I'll hire you all out from under the Storm King, monthly wages and free room-and-board, for all of you and your commander."

"Anyone who doesn't care for the idea, you can walk right back out of my doors, and the guards Celestia posted roughly one-hundred meters from my tower will arrest you on the spot!"

"So how about it?!" He says, making all of the Storm Troopers pause at the confusing juxtaposition, and of course, Tempest Shadow's shiny purple horn. What she's going to pick seems obvious to a few of them because of that.

Grubber searches Weiss's face for any trace of deception, before turning to Tempest.

After a long few minutes, he asks the one pony in charge to answer for him.

"Well? What's the call, Tempest? Are we working for this guy now?"

Tempest is shocked at this. "Pardon?"

Grubber gives her a funny look that she doesn't quite understand. "Well we're obviously all going to pick whatever you pick. You're our commander!"

She looks to see if any of the other Storm Creatures hold this level of... misattributed loyalties.

Why are they all nodding in agreement? They're not supposed to be loyal to her, they're supposed to be loyal to the Storm King through her!

She looks out into the treeline past the entrance to Weiss's tower, to see if Weiss was bluffing, but the Anti-ship balistae poking out of the bushes imply that, somehow, Celestia knew they would land their ship here to try and rescue her.

She's really not a big fan of the smug look on Weiss's face right now, but she's also fairly certain that there's zero danger of the Storm King somehow defeating Weiss, considering what she has seen.

She can't believe she's been played like this, but the feeling of being whole is making it really hard for her to feel anything negative right now.

"Well... I'm obviously not going to choose prison," She half-mumbles, half shouts for all of them to hear.

This is met with a loud cheer. Sweet Celestia, were they always this quick to betray the Storm King?

Weiss walks up close enough to whisper. "See, Fizzy? Friendship isn't useless. You just had useless friends. And my friendships don't contain useless ponies."

Before she can respond, Weiss shouts to all of the Storm Troopers. "Get that fucking ship in here before Celestia decides to shoot it down just to spite me! I know she'll do it, too!"

They don't listen, instead waiting explicitly for Tempest's go-ahead.

She nods in affirmation, but by that point, it's too late.

A bolt flies out of the treeline, intent on making a truther out of Weiss, before a pink glow grabs the log-sized arrow out of the air, and drops it.

Tempest's horn stops being surrounded by it's smooth, reflecting-pool-like aura, and she starts shouting.

"You heard the stallion, get your flanks in gear!"

They hastily bring the ship down as low as it will go, so it can fit through the gigantic double doors of Weiss's tower and into the safety within.

She shoots Weiss a smirk as he stares at the log she stopped via her telekinetic grip at about fifty yards. Is that a drop of sweat she spies?

Now isn't that an interesting thing for somepony to have when they were previously mocking her for being unable to harm him?

...Then again, maybe it would be wise to cut the pony who just gave her a new lease on life in the span of a day some slack.

She'll just have to try and figure out how ponies are supposed to show gratitude for a Hearth's Warming gift that large. Maybe try that 'friendship' thing again.

'I mean... He did pay in advance for it.'

"You know, one thing I still don't understand." Tempest asks, as she stares at her new boss working on whatever it is he's working on.

Weiss mumbles something indistinct to prompt her to continue.

"How did you hit me, when we fought? I know I dodged your attack."

"Portals. It's dragon magic so it didn't break the rules." Weiss mumbles with a wrench between his teeth, pulling a bolt off of his work-in-progress mecha.

Tempest's jaw drops. She's never heard of a pony cheating by doing something harder than the actual challenge at hand, but that definitely sounds like it qualifies.

"Well well, if it isn't 'Tricked Lunatic'. Come to see what artistry looks like?" Full House sneers at Trixie in triplicate.

Trixie bites back easily. "Oh no, Trixie heard that you planned on embarrassing yourselves in front of thousands of ponies, and simply had to come see it."

Full House chortles "The only embarrassment here is you, Trixie. The best act you've ever pulled was dropping out of performance school. Tata!"

As the mare(s) trot off, backstage, Trixie's snarl prompts Twilight.

"What the hay was that all about?" Twilight questions.

"The only reason Trixie 'Dropped Out' was because Full House forged letters getting her expelled! By the time Trixie realized what had happened, she had already been in Baltimare, trying to eke out a living."

Gilda puts a talon on Trixie's back. "You know we don't have to watch this if you don't want to, right?"

Trixie shakes her head. "No. Trixie needs to see this, so she'll know exactly how to blow Full House's act out of the water."

Nothing left to say between the three women, they find their seats, and wait for the show to start.

Soft violin music marks the curtains opening, as three unicorns slowly drift down in a cloud of glitter, swirling slowly around one another in a spiral as they smile faintly through the veils they wear over their faces.

One by one, they gently fall onto the floor, before trotting around one another in unison, as the violin music is matched by an ethereal flute.

The ponies turn inward towards one another, and take a running start, before the wires on their back allow them to jump between one another, landing on opposite sides.

Running around now in a full gallop, the ponies use their wires and their grace to run in sync while leaping over and under one another.

One of them lights their horn, releasing blue smoke into the air, then, another one begins releasing a deep green smoke, with the final one unleashing a red smoke.

In the stage lights' glow, the smoke wafts down, covering all three of the mares before being blown away to reveal them standing on top of one another's shoulders.

Looking over the crowd smugly, their eyes land on Trixie, and with a wink, the trio leans down, and leaps into the air off of each other's backs, performing a series of flips that land them in a straight line behind one another, throwing up a small cloud of glitter.

The mare bows briefly to the cheering, before attempting to continue her act, wires dragging the hers into place, an odd expression crosses her faces before she hiccups nervously, her horn letting out a faint "pop!" as she does so. Another pony appears on the stage, flopping over like a ragdoll as it is thrown free from one of the mares.

Breaking out into a cold sweat, Full House attempts to continue her act as though nothing is wrong while a stagehand subtly drags the extra copy off stage.

As she begins running around again, this time waving ribbons in her telekinetic grip to weave them into one another as a giant colorful ring, she lets out another hiccup, and then a third one following that immediately.

Two more pops herald two more clones being flung free of her magic, and the audience lets out a low murmur of laughter as these ones are also dragged off the stage, throwing off Full House's groove.

Her act is noticeably more jerky now with the extra clones being wrangled into harnesses backstage to keep from hurting themselves, but she attempts to push forward with her best trick.

Two pegasus mares wearing flamboyant outfits walk on stage for the next part of her act, as her wire rig pulls the three of her up onto one another's backs again.

Once, twice, and a third time Full House does some test jumps, throwing herselves in the air and then back down again.

Eventually, she is leaping high enough that the pegasi who are a part of her act can quickly swoop in, flying underneath her each time she jumps.

The audience is impressed with this feat of timing and perfect synchronization, until the death-blow hiccup throws her off, one of her legs buckles, and the mare and her body doubles collapse to the ground bonelessly, trying to get up while hiccuping over and over helplessly as her stagehands attempt to help her get back on her feet while she flings clones everywhere.

The curtains draw closed to a room filled with deafening laughter and faint hiccups.

Gilda, at this point is chuckling herself as they walk out of the theater. "See Trixie? That hack's got nothing on you," She says, turning to see Trixie with a look of horror plastered on her face.

"Whoa, what's wrong?"

Trixie shakes her head. "Trixie can't do this. T-that could have been me up there getting laughed at!"

And indeed, that's exactly the moment she had flashed back to, her being humiliated in front of Ponyville, but on an even larger scale than before.

Gilda grabs Trixie's face, smooshing the confused mare's cheeks slightly. "Look at me. We've got this. You're not going to screw it up, and even if you did, we'll be right there to pick up your slack. This is your Dream, right?!" Gilda squawks.

Trixie nods nervously, her smooshed cheeks shifting under Gilda's grip.

"Then you've got this. You just need the Courage to go out there and take it! Tomorrow, we're going to blow the roof off of this place."

"We'll just have to make sure they swept all the Full House off the stage first. Wouldn't want to trip over some garbage," Gilda jokes.

Trixie nods more firmly. "Very well. Can you let go of Trixie's face now, she would prefer it return to it's normal shape," she mumbles out.

Gilda flushes with a small amount of embarrassment, dropping the mare's head like a hot stove. Loudly and noticeably.

Twilight goes over her checklist for the twenty-second time in as many minutes.

"So, the prismatic pyrotechnic projectiles are prepared, the hoops are hopefully hanging overhead, the false floorboards are fixed, and I think we've already touched on Trixie's trick-toting tophat twenty-two times today."

Before this farce can go on any longer, the stage director informs them that it's almost showtime.

Trixie breaks out in a cold sweat as she adjusts her new star-spangled blue top hat and cape, swallows loudly, and trots out on stage.

The curtains open, as Gilda watches confidently, and Twilight nibbles her hooves with worry.

As soon as Trixie sees her audience, she manages to put on her old mask, and belts out boldly. "Fillies and Gentlecolts, thank you and welcome, for you now shall witness the amazing feats of Equestria's flashiest unicorn, The Great and Powerful Trixie!"

With her opening words spoken, the stage erupts in light and fire, awing the crowd briefly.

"But Trixie is sure that words alone will not convince ponies as savvy as Las Pegasus's finest, so allow me instead, to show you all exactly who stands before you! With the help of her lovely assistant, the High Flying Gilda!"

With that, Gilda swoops down from the rafters above, crashing to the ground with a deafening thud, a screech of predatory might, and flared, glitter-coated wings as the spotlight settles down on the griffon.

"Oh yes indeed, she will play an important role in Trixie's first trick, the flaming huntress!"

With a flourish from her hat, Trixie reveals three flaming spheres, each with a long handle poking out from them.

"Behold, the prey!"

With a burst of telekinesis, the spheres are flung into the air as she begins to juggle them one after another, while Gilda tenses up and leaps into the air in a glide.

Trixie carefully watches Gilda weave between the flaming spheres, swooping down and then up again in between each one.

"Gilda stalks her prey with ease, tracking them down, moving silently between the flames!" Trixie shouts.

After a short period of this, Trixie tosses them higher than before, and Gilda responds by performing three back-to-back loops, grabbing each one, before throwing them into the crowd, who gasp, before Trixie's three beams of magic turn the blazing spheres into pie-tins filled with flowers!

"Ahh, it seems the hunt was successful, wouldn't you all agree!?" She shouts to the ponies in the crowd, who are cheering and laughing at the act.

"But it's not all fun and games for Trixie and Gilda, no, we have faced trials as well, ones such as... The Thunderbird!"

Fireworks shoot off from below the stage, erupting into the yellow outline of a fearsome monster, swaying from side to side as large, crackling hoops are dropped down in front of it, looking as though they are erupting from the beast's mouth and wings.

"Yes, indeed, and only by performing the rare and dangerous flying horn could we have ever defeated such a creature!" Trixie shouts as Gilda flies down, picking her up and lifting her to the electrical rings, prepared to fly through them with her passenger in tow.

Once, twice, and a third time Gilda loops in the air, building up speed, but she spots Trixie's nervousness.

"You've got this, alright!?" Gilda says just loud enough for Trixie to hear, before flinging her forward, cape flapping in the wind as her arc takes her right to the illusory bird.

As Trixie passes through the hoops, she spots the crowd. If she messed this up..!

Then her friends will be there to pick up her slack!

Her horn ignites, and she unleashes enough fireworks to dazzle the crowd, and completely hide her landing off stage on the padded pillows that were prepared.

She rapidly runs under the stage, for her grand re-entry, as Gilda lands above her on the fake floor.

"Oh indeed, Trixie's sacrifice would have been a grand one, to defeat the dreaded Thunderbird..!" Trixie hears the mumble of Gilda speaking melodramatically through the floorboards.

She flips the board over in a puff of smoke, obscuring her appearance, and shouts out for the entire crowd to hear.

"But with someone as Great and Powerful as Trixie, it was as easy as..."

A fourth Pie-tin filled with roses falls from the rafters into her outstretched hoof.

"Pie!"

A few moments of silence from the audience leave Trixie feeling extremely nervous.

But then the cheering nearly blows her hat off... and it's like a dream come true.

"So you two are really going to start doing shows together?" Rainbow Dash questions, looking at Gilda curiously.

Gilda shrugs. "I mean, It's not like we're ditching Ponyville. We'll still be hanging out here between our acts, but it's been pretty fun, so I figure I should keep doing it."

Trixie nods. "Trixie has never felt as fulfilled as she did yesterday, and is more than excited to begin performing professionally. Now that she's not a one-mare act, it's like a whole new world has opened up for her!"

Twilight smiles. "Sounds like somepony may have learned a lesson about friendship. Would you like me to take a letter?"

Trixie shrugs as Gilda flaps off to look over their new cart, a real top-of-the-line cart, too.

"Trixie supposes she did learn something, yes."

Gilda, satisfied with her quality-assurance, notices something odd.

"Hey, Twilight, what's this button on your doorway for?" Gilda asks, going over to the Library and pushing it.

The loud doorbell noise that rings out from her home makes Twilight literally explode with rage. The literal portion being her eyes, mane and tail erupting into flames as she leaps in the air.

"WEISS!"

Dear Princess Celestia,

Today I've learned that when you're feeling in a slump, and feel like things just never seem to change, sometimes all you need is a brief change of scenery, a short break from your dull routine, and friends to help push you somewhere fun. If it weren't for my courageous and bold friend, I doubt I ever would have gotten the chance to perform in Las Pegasus, and I certainly wouldn't have had as much fun doing it.

Trixie Lulamoon, and her incredible stunt-flying assistant, Gilda Grizelda Gruff.

P.S. This is Twilight Sparkle, I hope you don't mind, Princess Celestia, but I'm also sending evidence of fraudulent forgeries with intent to cause misfortune. I've already cast the Sender-sensor charm, and confirmed the guilty party. I believe a pony named Full House may be guilty of some sizable crimes, which she has avoided punishment for.

(Weiss Report) Aperture Magic [Homeward Portal]

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Entry Number Twenty, Day Two-hundred-and-Thirty-five

Welcome, gentlecolts, to Aperture Horsemagic. Royal Guards, Wonderbolts, Cloned Dragons we keep in the basement, you're here because we needed the best, and you are it.

So, who is ready to learn foul arcane secrets? Now you already met one another on the minecart ride over so let me introduce myself. I'm Weiss Noir. I wrote this book.

Now that the obligatory jokes are out of the way, I've figured out how to make portals, And, as is clear from my little joke up there, I'm a bit excited. Previously, while I could use Avidus or Dragonfire to teleport objects to one of my homes or vaults, getting things out of my vaults was a real problem. I simply had no choice but to actually go to the physical location of my possessions to obtain them when needed.

Now I can just snap my fingers and portal up some goodies at will. By combining Greed, Excitement, Anxiety and Anticipation, I can create a portal in any location that is either near me, or near a place I've convinced myself qualifies as home. By combining two sets of portals, I can also create short-range portals by simply daisy chaining a portal from my location to a hoard, then from that portal to another one right next to it, and out in another location near me. Any objects thus sent through one portal on my end goes into my horde, through the other portal on that end, and then out the other portal on my end.

It's complicated, and a bit of an energy hog, but it's still combat portal usage, which is of course, a useful trick to have in combat. I'll need to make sure I have some empty hordes explicitly for combat portal usage. Unfortunately, this is yet another spell that I can't really teach to the public, due to it requiring mind-numbing levels of greed. Some enchantments might be worth testing out, however, and of course, long term or permanent portals might be possible.

Now, I know what you're thinking. "Can I cut people in half with my portals?" And the answer, and this is such a weird answer, is no. In fact, you can quite literally jam a portal open by physically propping it open. It's insane, and doesn't make any sense, but it's useful, I guess. It's unique among spells in that you can make a portal spell as magically durable as whatever you can jam inside it to prop it open. A portal spell quite literally cannot be aborted until whatever is blocking it is forced out. One thing you can do, however is portal-cut something if you use a sufficiently strong dispelling charm. The more you attempt to dispel a portal, the tighter it's grip becomes. By exploiting this, you could pull some shenanigans, but the dispelling magic required is a bit steep for it to actually cut anything useful.

Though, a much more obvious use of this is as a restraint. Albiet an awkward one, you could theoretically use portals as... rope? Glue? I'm not sure what to qualify this as, as it just comes across as so bizarre a concept to me. You can use weak portals as durable bindings to hold objects together with. The literal twisted fabric of space and magic, turned into a glorified rubber band. What a world.

Well, whatever world I now live in as a result of this discovery, it's one that now has a useful toy to mess around with in it. I've been doing some experimenting with Portal Ropes, two strands of portal strung tightly across a gap, and wound up until it becomes like a thread. It's so confusing, and I swear I taste copper if I stare at one of them too long, but, again, nigh-indestructable "material".

I just can't get over the fact that, upon stress testing this portal magic, I've found more uses for it in structural engineering than in actual transportation.

Also, as a side note, it seems that objects passing through portals are briefly unaffected by gravity, based on some sort of complex equation my R&D Dudes tried to explain to me before I got bored. Apparently, an object moving through a portal creates some sort of drag on the space around it. The more mass is doing this in one place, the longer the effect lasts. It kinda put the kibosh on just setting up portal-loops to turn gravity into infinite power, but honestly, I can see some far more interesting uses for that effect.

Portals don't like it when you break them forcibly, as I just now found out. I also found out that they do have a limit, I just didn't reach it with my earlier tests. By applying sufficient pressure to a sufficiently weak portal, you can indeed make the fabric of space snap. And much like a rubber band, or a steel cable, when it snaps, it flips around. I had been testing the possibility of making portal-weave armor to create even more indestructable armor plates, when one of the threads snapped. Upon snapping, the entire area for roughly ten meters around the portal was swapped with ten meters of area from the other side of the portal. I say roughly, because it seems once again, magic's merciful side wins out, to my detriment, and living things caught in this effect aren't moved along with it, save to be moved out of the way of incoming objects.

Of course, just because it's not lethal doesn't mean it isn't useful. I've already got plans in the works for cage bombs, and methods by which I could instantly teleport one of my battle arenas to wherever I'm fighting someone. It takes an extreme amount of energy to snap a portal large enough to make this quality useful, but it can be achieved, with the proper equipment, and since portals technically have no mass, I can wind up a portal inside a very tiny space, while giving it enough juice to move a theoretically vast chunk of the surrounding area.

If I could figure out a way to make this effect work on ponies, I could probably make a pretty fucking sweet bug-out capsule. Maybe put it in a pony's teeth so they can escape capture or something.

I wonder if Equestria has air in space. If not, then maybe I should look into getting a nice, Lunar Summer Home just in case I need to escalate a situation...

Nah. Luna would probably be pissed if I used the moon as a glorified garbage dump for anyone I needed to get rid of badly.

Well, that would have been useful to know about when packing for overseas trips. I'll have to see if Twilight would be willing to teach Spike this trick. Face to face correspondence is so much more pleasant, wouldn't you agree, Sunset?

(Past Chapter 11): Turbulent Times

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My first experiences with time travel were not at all comforting or enjoyable.

I pace around my office with my latest paperweight. A single, cube-shaped hunk of Timeshift Crystal.

The blue crystal glitters mockingly in the light of my office, as though taunting me with it's irrational behavior.

My door opens, letting in a disheveled mare who clearly has something to pose to me.

"Sir, I believe we may have a problem. Violence in the Hidden Palace Zone has been steadily increasing over time, according to our latest reports."

This piques my interest. "Satisfaction and friendship levels?" I ask, wanting to know if the ponies becoming more violent is correlating with a decrease in their quality of life.

The mare blushes. "That's... The odd part."

"It seems that, despite the increase in brawling and physical altercations in Hidden Palace, ponies are more satisfied than ever, and the violence isn't impacting relationships negatively, if at all, it doesn't make any sense!"

I'm tempted to quote a certain Draconequus, but I have no desire to accidentally attract him here, if he's even out and about at this point in time.

"Alright. Here's what we're going to do. Tell Tablet to send a message to the lab dudes, I need a computerized survey system in every home. Hook it up to the Arcana Nox so I can send out questions and get a read on the situation by asking the ponies more directly. Clearly, we're losing a handle on the city's behavior and motives, so this should help me put a hoof back on it's pulse."

The mare nods with some confusion, ready to leave before I stop her to say a bit more.

"Don't worry m'am, I'll figure out what's going on, and correct the problem if one exists."

This seems to assuage the disheveled mare somewhat, so I feel comfortable dismissing her to go do what I ordered.

I need more time to perform my experiments, and, unfortunately, this fucking crystal, in a grand sweeping gesture of irony, is only going to exacerbate that problem.

So let's automate democracy.

"It doesn't make any sense at all. This is not how causality works!" I growl, as my Chief Materials R&D Dude, a mare named "Bright Bulb", doesn't react much to my ranting as I stare into the sealed chamber where a large sample of the crystal is being tested on by more R&D Dudes using large golem-powered mechanical limbs.

My reaction is perfectly sensible when you consider that, even deep underground, a layer of snow transforms into a patch of surface ocean, complete with tidal shift and what appear to be fish, when Timeshift Stone is activated near it.

"I believe what we are witnessing implies that it is, sir." Bulb says, typing out her observations onto a holographic screen nearby.

I shoot her a brief glare, before returning my gaze to the chamber, gears in my head already turning at this.

"But it still doesn't make sense. It's like these damn crystals are just paying lip service to the idea of realistic time manipulation, Or did you forget what happened when we tested the crystals on the snow wall?"

"Sideways gravity-defying oceans didn't exist in the past, Professor Bright."

She shrugs. "It's clear that the crystals aren't able to perform paradox-threatening or timeline-generating manipulations to the chronal fabric. It's just projecting a modified field which emulates a hypothetical past distinct enough to be distinguished from the present. That's why the seawater turns directly into snow, when taken outside of the field's radius."

I chew this over in my mind. "Effects on living things?"

Bulb looks at me like I just said a bad joke. "None, as expected."

I decide to coin a term. "Creatures taken out of... Pasted areas?"

"They disappear entirely, when taken outside the radius of a Timeshift Crystal. They're just products of the time magic, so they disperse unless maintained, and only form vaguely meaningless animals and certain types of monster in the first place."

I hum at that.

"Continue testing, Doctor Bright. I need to do some experiments of my own."

What was Sombra's top flightspeed again?

I wipe the sweat off my face with a rag, staring at the crude vessel I've managed to whip up by weaving together sapphires and graphene. I don't know a damn thing about aerodynamics or whatever, but smooth long shit is better, right?

Walking over to the holographic panel, I have the golemic claw carefully pick up the large Timeshift Crystal I had enchanted, plugging it into the vehicle's middle, exposed on the deck. It might be a bit oversized, but for right now, this is just a proof of concept, so a larger radius for pasting is fine.

The next step, obviously, is adding the backup Timeshift Crystal, this smaller one's purpose is just to narrow the distorted time, so no living things appear in it's radius. Nobody wants to fight a sea monster, after all.

Whittle looks at my ship with no small amount of disgust. "You really should have simply let me make it. You aren't very good at working with crystal."

I shrug. "You'll be the first to know when I need a few hundred of these puppies. Know anyone who can handle a boat?"

She scratches her chin with a hoof, as she uses her own holopad to control mechanical arms that scrape and polish the hull of my little ship. "Well, my cousin, Transmittal tried her hoof at sailing once."

"I'll call her up, if you like."

I nod. "That would be best. I'll call up a few other ponies too."

"Soon will be the time for this ship's maiden voyage. I'm thinking..."

"Boaty McBoatface," I say with a straight face.

She gives me a look. "I refuse to let you name it that."

I give her a challenging look in response as I smirk. "On what authority?"

Her own smirk betrays her attempt at seriousness. "I will find an authority to deny you riding around in anything named that. You have a reputation to uphold, so at least make your jokes a bit more subtle, for his majesty's royal ship."

I sigh dramatically. "Oh if I must."

"Fine, then, I'll call it the Holy Diver. How's that?"

She nods. "Much better. Though I hope you're intentionally being ironic. Ships need neither Holes nor should they Dive, most of the time."

I chuckle. "Most of the time, yes."

"Are you sure about this, Eclipse?" Oil Slick wonders aloud as the filly he's questioning glares at the odd, bulbous device that Weiss has stashed in one of his secret labs.

"Oh I'm positive. They're taking this thing out today, and I want to see what exactly he's up to with this thing. I've already got a plan for us to get aboard."

She pulls out a bright orange Materia. "We'll just use Hotbar's Hotswaping Hex, and swap ourselves with the backup Timeshift Crystal aboard the device. They'll never even notice us."

Oil Slick looks nervous, but decides not to argue with Eclipse.

"Alright, they're hauling the thing to the surface, now's our chance!" Eclipse shouts quietly as hooks are drawn down and begin pulling the vehicle into one of the Fast Travel Stations to send it to the surface.

She grabs Oil Slick's hoof and juts out the sphere.

"Earth be with earth, Hotswap!" Eclipse whispers, making the materia light up before, in a flash of light, the duo are inside the dark depths of the Holy Diver, and, where they were standing, the backup Timeshift Crystal that was formerly in it plops to the ground with a crack.

"We're in!" Eclipse whispers giddily, before turning to Slick.

"Don't tell anyone I used a mnemonic for that Materia. I just needed a little extra focus that time, got it?"

Oil Slick nods rapidly, and the pair sit in silence for a while as they feel that odd sensation of moving up at high speeds as the Holy Diver is brought to the surface in a magically powered train.

I walk out onto the deck, putting a hoof to my ear to activate my helmet's radio.

"This is Weiss, Weather Report, please," I say, curious where Sombra is right now.

I get a timely response. "No clouds in sight. We'll give you a forecast if that changes."

Hmm. He could be anywhere then, but most likely, he's in the empire itself right now.

I turn to Transmittal Miss Priss, the pilot that Whittle suggested. She seems unused to the complexity of the craft, but, then again, there's never been a boat like this in existence until today, most likely.

"Is she handling alright, M'am?" I ask, trotting over to the mare.

She nods. Quite the taciturn individual, it seems.

To be frank, I had actually heard of her previously, as she had been one of the ponies to help develop the radio crystals. Judging by her cutie mark, a trio of music symbols wafting off of a crystalline gramophone, it's the sort of invention she was practically born to make.

"Well, keep it up. I want to do a short circuit around the area for a few hours, and then we'll pack it up. When you get more comfortable with the controls, be sure to amp up the speed. We need to test how well this ship handles at seventy knots an hour or so."

She nods again, and I leave her to her business.

Being in the radius of the Timeshift Crystal's glow is an odd feeling. Especially when you can see the blue border separating temperate, if slightly cold water and air, and the blistering cold that waits beyond the crystal's magical radius.

While I'm not exactly comfortable looking out over the artificial ocean surrounding the Holy Diver, Iron Diamond seems to be enjoying it a lot more. I've discovered very quickly that he's quite the speed-demon when he gets the chance, first with the Fast Travel Stations, and now this. I'll have to see about getting him a ship of his own, if he's having this much fun just looking over the edge.

He turns to me with a grin, before schooling his expression back into a more formal, disciplined one.

"It seems that the ship is operating as expected," He says, trying to hide how much he's enjoying coasting around at almost ninety miles per hour.

I chuckle, giving him a shove in the side. "Don't you play coy with me, you dog you. I'm no stranger to speed either, you know."

Iron Diamond gives me an eyebrow raise at that. Right, he was one of the ones who heard about the first time I used the Fast Travel Station...

"I mean, I'm not as gung ho about it as you are, but I can appreciate watching the horizon try to catch up with us as much as anyone else."

Iron Diamond allows himself to smile a bit more loosely. "I like this. Ma always said I aught to have wings, as fast as I liked running. And this is even faster."

Well, that's a bit more sharing than I'm used to from the gruff captain. I'm definitely getting him a speedboat then. I'll have to splurge on features. What kind of Captain of the Guard doesn't have the fastest vehicle in the fleet, after all? Not a Captain I'm willing to let exist, that's for damn sure.

As for wings, though... Ehh. I probably shouldn't try for any flying contraptions just yet. Not until I find a better way to deal with the various ways that one can stop flying.

After all, flying is just an elaborate way to throw yourself off a great height with minimal injuries.

I manage to heft myself off of my comfy folding chair, to stretch my hooves as Transmittal makes the last pass around.

I chuckle to myself when I spot Iron Diamond with a fishing pole, and can't help but walk over to poke some fun.

"You know you're not going to get any bites, right? There's no fish in those waters."

Iron gives me an odd look. "What do you call those, then?" he points into the crystal clear water, where fish can be clearly seen.

My eyes widen. "That's not supposed to happen."

I turn in place and begin quickly walking to the door leading below deck. "Hold on. I need to check on something."

I enter the bowels of the ship, beelining it towards the backup Timeshift Crystal that's supposed to be blocking out any living things forming in the water.

Pulling the hatch open, I clip my way down the stairs, ignoring the occasional hiss of steam and magical glows.

Finally making my way over to the chamber where the padded, well-secured Timeshift Crystal is supposed to be, I twist the valves, pull the door open, and experience my own blood quickening.

My eyes widen, and my mood instantly sours at the sight of that colt that's been hanging out with Eclipse, and of course, Eclipse herself, both sitting in the giant socket where the crystal is supposed to be.

"Please tell me this is an elaborate prank, and the backup crystal is like, behind a fake wall," I groan, yanking the two out of there by their ears as they yelp, and Eclipse drops her book with a shout of protest.

"What's the big deal?! It's just a backup, right? I already heard you talking about it!" Eclipse says, managing to grab her book as I pull them up onto the deck.

I hiss back. "Idiot! It's not a redundancy, it's a failsafe!"

I turn to Transmittal Miss Priss, barking out orders. "Captain, take us to the nearest Fast Travel, we need to get this thing shut down as soon as possible."

"If I know my narrative conventions, this is exactly the kind of shit where something goes horribly wrong, and I'd like it if we could simply avoid that nasty business."

"What, like some kind of sea monster popping up the exact instant that you've caught us? Isn't that a bit unrealistic?" Oil Slick asks with a raised eyebrow.

Huh. So you can be blinded by rage. Or maybe it's the spray of seafoam that just washed over the deck from a gigantic horror emerging from the water near us, swimming alongside the ship.

So it's just metaphorically blinding rage.

As the monster rears up, I can see the clearly magical winds that surround it's backside whipping and churning visibly, the long, sharp teeth, and the eight, massive tentacles that whip out and grab hold of the Holy Diver's hull.

"Transmittal, push max speed, if the monster falls out of our range, it'll cease to be!" I shout, shoving the children behind me as my armor grows and my Divine Words whip out and around me.

"Death Beam!" I shout, enchanted crystal shards forming into a lens as a black beam lances out of my horn, and, hitting the lens, becomes a pencil-thin ray of Black Flames. The laser rips through the beast's head, revealing glittering time magic underneath instead of grey matter and blood.

"Damn, of course it wouldn't be that easy. Iron Diamond, any ideas?" I shout, dodging a flailing tentacle as he tries to keep a grip on the boat while the Sharktopusnado fires balls of slicing winds over the deck.

"Little busy here!" Iron says, pulling out his spear and jamming it into the tentacle nearest to himself to pin it down.

I look up at the Timeshift Crystal pretending to be a mast for the boat, the main one that's supposed to be sustaining this whole thing. I'm loathe to destroy this prototype after the work I put into it, but it might be necessary.

Seeing a ball of wind flying towards Oil Slick and Eclipse, my decision is made for me, as I leap in front of them and fire off another spell at the Timeshift Crystal.

"Space Ripper Stingy Eyes!" I shout, firing a thin lance of black water and slush from my eyes this time. The high-pressure fluid strikes the crystal, sending splinters flying off off it as it cracks.

"Yes! It's a hit!" I shout as the field of warped time begins to shrink, and the huge chunk of crystal goes flying out of it's socket as I block the ball of air intending to harm the two children. The ball cracks my armor, but fails to shatter it completely, leaving just a few tufts on my chest and neck exposed.

Unfortunately for our continued health, the Sharktopusnado is a grabby son of a bitch, and actually snatches it out of the air as our boat goes flying away from it, crashing into the snow.

"Nobody get off the ship, that thing's still coming, and you don't want to be in the snow when it does!" Iron Diamond says helpfully as the beast swallows the Timeshift Crystal whole, it's wounds healing up from the energy inside of it.

Shit.

Ok, I've got this.

"Everyone stand back, I'm not out of tricks yet!"

I wait until the beast begins charging, before planting my hooves and shouting with confidence.

"Flarus Sword!"

The crystal shards of my Divine Words instantly assemble into a complex lens array as my horn ignites with white-hot fire and unleashes a beam of pure flame energy.

The beam passes into the arcane golem construct, which refracts and redirects the laser, sweeping it across the Sharktopusnado's center of mass the moment it leaps out of the water to attack us.

With a hiss of steam and a violent shout on my part, the laser actually clips the hull of the Holy Diver a bit by mistake, sending a splatter of molten metal back at me which hits me in the chest as I back up and try to slap at it to get the painful bits off of me before they cool.

The sea monster, however, has a much less pleasant time of it, crashing onto the deck as the ship is suddenly floating in water again. It's body is cleaved in two, with the Timeshift Crystal inbetween it's halves being the only thing holding it together.

Despite this, the monster is clearly even more pissed, even as the crystal it's feeding on flickers and dims slightly.

"Transmittal, hit the gas! I've got an idea!" I shout, backing away from the flailing monster.

Before I can elaborate, the creature builds up magic in it's eight tentacles, a white aura of whipping razor sharp wind that leaves me extraordinarily concerned.

I'm already down two B-Rank Spells and an A-Rank, so I'm about to be running off of little-baby-Weiss magic, and that is not up to the task of slaying a creature like this.

Ergo, it's time to break out the fun stuff.

"Alright you big bastard, I hope you've enjoyed your little blast from the past, because it's time to stop!"

"Dragon..."

"Of the Darkness Flame!"

My entire body ignites with black flames, growing larger and larger as the Sharktopusnado unleashes it's Octuple Slash at me and my crew, the black flames absorbing them all as they tear at the magic and devour it.

Two white eyes ignite in the corners of my bonfire as the Vance's blueprint activates and forces the Black Flames to pull themselves free of my body and take shape.

"Now, witness what a real monster can do!" I shout, gesturing at the beast as my new, dragon-shaped spell unleashes a silent roar and rushes the aquatic monster, crashing into it's body and ripping at it with it's eradicating claws.

Our boat plops back down into the unaltered snow as the Dragon forces the shark clean off the deck of the Holy Diver, and into the false ocean below.

Although the ocean water spilling in instantly turns to steam on contact, the Dragon isn't quenched in the slightest, as it uses it's black flaming fangs to rip and tear at it's foe, who lashes back with whips of water and wind.

A regular battle of the titans, really. Watching to make sure none of the attacks come close to us, I step to the edge of the ship, and prepare to use my last major spell.

"That's right, now just hold still. Dragon! Full Nelson!" I shout, hoping my spiritual beast can hear me and actually opts to listen.

Oh it certainly hears me, but it seems to be enjoying itself far too much to let this end just yet. To be frank, I can hardly blame it, an opportunity to rip apart a monster with your bare claws doesn't come along every day, so it's pretty much exactly what I would do in that situation.

Oh well, looks like I'll just have to eyeball this one.

As soon as enough of the Timeshift Crystal is exposed by the Dragon clawing away the fish's magical timeflesh, I prepare my spell, targeting the ship, everyone on it, and of course, the crystal itself.

Wait for it... There we are.

"Chimera Wing!"

With that, my horn instantly erupts in a massive aura, locking my armor to protect my body from the recoil as I emit a massive wave of force, launching the Holy Diver in a long and tall arc towards the nearest Fast Travel Station, and yanking the Timeshift Crystal out of the monster's chest along with us.

In an instant, it's left behind as the Timeshift magic rushes away with the crystal it was tied to, and the Sharktopusnado is no more.

Eventually, we all crash land and skid across the landscape for a while as the ship weathers the impact, with the Timeshift Crystal itself finally giving up the ghost as it shatters completely as it lands.

Iron Diamond looks way too fine with his first aerial experience, while everyone else is suitably terrified from having been so high up, and having been moved so fast.

As for me, it seems the adrenaline that was keeping me from feeling the fairly intense damage my body had just underwent is starting to wear off.

Oh cool, I haven't blacked out from exhaustion. I guess that's one benefit of storing your spells instead of draining yourself dry in combat.

"Could one of you cut me out of this armor? I locked it up to keep me from breaking every bone in my body. But I don't think it worked."

Good old Iron Diamond to the rescue.

Eclipse looks suitably ashamed of herself as she looks over my full body cast.

"I'm... So sorry. I never meant for all of this to happen," She explains.

"I just... I don't think I deserve to be your student now," Eclipse hangs her head, clearly ready to isolate the shit out of herself and start avoiding me.

I would shrug if my shoulders weren't fractured. "Ok, idiot."

She looks at me in mildly offended shock. "Excuse me?"

"Go ahead. Ditch your responsibilities, if you don't have the stomach to own up to your mistakes," I explain in a simple, even tone.

"Do you think this is a game, Eclipse? If it were a game, I'm sure I'd be having a lot more fun. In the real world, when a student makes a mistake, they are chastised, corrected, and taught. Just because I don't have expulsion in my curriculum doesn't give you the moral high ground to drop-out when you think you deserve it."

"I'm the only person here who decides how badly you've fucked up, and to be frank, you caused me a lot more problems the last time you screwed things up on this scale. This is just a flashier mistake that left me looking a bit more hamburger-helper than usual."

"But here's what you're actually going to do. You're going to do the right thing, learn your lesson, write me a letter detailing that lesson within the week, and then you're going to work harder than ever to expose my evil plots and help your fellow pony."

"Because if you run away now, all that tells me is that you didn't learn anything from this. And that means you've wasted my time."

I painfully shift so I can lean up and looker her in her wide little eyes. "And I assure you, wasting my time is a far greater offense than merely causing me injury."

Eclipse seems to realize what I'm trying to say, finally, and nods. "Yes, Lord Weiss."

I wave her off. "Good. Now begone with you. I expect you to study the blueprints of the Holy Diver as well, so you know not to remove vital components from machinery in the future."

She nods rapidly, and runs off to do just that.

"Oh good, she's gone." I say to myself with just a hint of delirium before unleashing a loud stream of intense pain-induced curses until a nurse can sedate me due to how much I aggravated my injuries just now to gesture at my student and move around in general.

Two times, Weiss had just leapt in front of her and Oil Slick, just to block that monster's attacks. Three months, and she doesn't have even a scrap of evidence to imply Weiss is anything other than what everyone says he is, aside from his own testimony and melodrama.

Eclipse tries to think of what to write, but eventually, there's only one thing she can write.

She's going to have to admit that she made a mistake.

Lord Weiss Noir,

Today I've learned a valuable lesson. I'm not sure I can continue to be your enemy. I wanted to be, I very dearly wanted to believe that you were everything you had implicated yourself to be. But I am no longer sure I can consider you my foe. I am no longer certain of a lot of things. You have terrifying power, and gain more by the day. You have the undying support of the ponies, and their resolve to follow you only deepen by the day. You have plans that run deeper than I could possibly understand until you've already executed them, and all of them, I now realize, have only served to help the ponies that live in the Shadow Realm with every day you rule.

Despite all of this, you have expressed the desire for me to uncover you for what you really are. To understand the nature of what an enemy is. And, if I am to grow in my understanding of what an enemy is, I have no choice but to confront what an enemy isn't. I will continue my studies under your tutelage, but I believe I will learn more about Foeship from this point forward, if we were instead friends.

Your least traitorous student, Eclipse Flash.

(Noir Report) A Disclaimer and Explicit Re-Warning [Chimera Wing]

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Entry #11, Day 85

My acting physician has demanded that I make this entry, after I myself had become the victim of one of my own spells. Namely, the spell Prestidigitonium. Thus, this entry will be a continuation of my previous entry on the subject, dealing with the dangers and risks of using powerful instances of Prestidigitonium, such as my own personal variant, the Chimera Wing spell.

The Chimera Wing variant spell is one in which I use Prestidigitonium to launch myself, and a list of chosen targets in an arc towards a location of my choosing, while locking myself in armor to help prevent my limbs from being harmed by the intense recoil forces created when the spell is cast, as, to reiterate, Telekinesis and Prestidigitonium will invariably apply forces to the body of their caster, in order to apply forces to the objects they are choosing to move.

This leads to situations in which, by lifting or throwing a sufficiently heavy object, you can instantly injure yourself. Now, needless to say, readers of this tome are unlikely to be doing something as unreasonable as flinging a boat several miles away, but if they were to do so, they would find themselves with every bone in their body cracked in an instant. The recoil force required to launch a heavy object a long distance is too much for a unicorn's body to take, without some form of extreme durability enhancements.

Earth Ponies and Pegusi have advantages that would in theory make them more suitable subjects for levitation magic, as their durability is naturally greater, but, for now, that is a moot point. A pony's body is naturally strengthened by several magical factors, from the amount of magical energy they have inside them at a given moment, to the amount of microspells they have cast on themselves, magical spells that a pony casts without even being aware of it, from minor feelings paired with minor desires, such as a pony desiring to pick up an object, and thus picking it up.

A Unicorn's body, meanwhile, has very few microspells associated with durability, leaving them ironically unsuited for one of their signature spells, although in most cases, Telekinesis requires too much power for a unicorn to cast it powerfully enough to risk harming their body, Prestidigitonium has no such compunctions, as it focuses the force it emits into an extremely brief timespan, making it especially capable of accidentally causing injury, especially when the user is frustrated, and thus, may be more careless.

Thus, for any aspiring mages who plan on following in my footsteps regarding this spell, I strongly recommend that enchanted items be used instead of casting the spell directly for large scale applications, unless of course, the caster has an even greater mastery of the spell than myself. A relic made of strong substances could bear the brunt of the spell, allowing it to launch the user's chosen targets, destroying the relic, but allowing a free casting of the spell.

In theory, if a unicorn were to cast the spell in such a way that all of the forces they emit equalized themselves, then no harm would occur. This is obviously true when Prestidigitonium is used to create fire, as no amount of raw, undirected force used to create the flames causes any harm to the caster, as the forces applied to their body are all perfectly equalized. In that same respect, if the caster emitted multiple vectors of force, each perfectly calculated to result in a neutral recoil thrown back onto the caster's entire body, then no harm would occur, regardless of the spell's intensity and power.

However, such a skill is beyond even me. Tests that I have performed imply that failing to do so would be even more devastating than taking the blow directly, as any misalignment would cause the forces to twist the caster's body, instead of merely pressuring them. There are few things more dangerous to a living thing than a twist in the wrong place, with more force than a body can take. Ergo, I cannot suggest attempting to use the spell in that fashion, unless the user knew of a way to negate the risk of harm that emerges from a failure to align the vectors of force perfectly.

More importantly, such a method of protection would have to be an internal one. I attempted using external bindings to protect my body from the worst of the effects of Prestidigitonium, however, it was mostly ineffective, the internal damage still taking place, although my limbs were bound to prevent them being pulled out of their sockets, or worse. Ultimately, physical means are unlikely to work for enhancing one's durability. Unless they could turn their bones to metal or something else strong. A pointless statement to make at present, considering there are no safe methods to do that.

In the end, even now I write this entry in traction, recovering from the intense damage caused by misusing magic. I pray no others suffer a similar fate.

As an aside, the same should be said of Black Flame, to a much lesser degree. While I wasn't directly harmed, I have discovered that the heat Black Flame creates can cause heatstroke indirectly, if you surround yourself completely in the flames, much like a greenhouse, or an oven. Something which, having learned my lesson, will now prompt me to include ventilation holes in large scale instances of casting forth the flames of hatred, if only to provide a nice backdraft for cooling purposes.

These past weeks, I have been humbled by the power I sought to wield, and I will strive to retain the caution this has inspired in me. I urge readers of this tome to share in my caution, and carefully consider the indirect consequences of powerful magic, should they be so lucky as to acquire a magic of supreme potency.

I suppose if I start enchanting items with the Chimera Wing Spell, I should call them suitably appropriate. Maybe Hearthstones? That might enrage the Duel Monster's crowd, though...

(Present Chapter 11): It Might As Well Be Spring

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Tempest's new boss is actually insane.

"Look, I understand what it is you're trying to do, I just don't get why you're doing it," Tempest says, hoping Weiss will give her a better explanation of why he's designing a fortress whose purpose is for it to be possible to break into it.

"It's really simple, Tempest, you just need to hear me out. Ponies are weak, when they aren't challenged. I've got some prophecies telling me that a specific group of ponies are going to repeatedly save the world, but the problem is, prophecies aren't a perfect science, and I'd strongly prefer if they had more experience under their belts, and some better tools to work with."

He gestures to his blueprint, spread out over the wall. "So I'm playing at villainy as a hobby. And that starts with me constructing this, the Star Road. It's got everything I need, housing and parking for your crew and your ship, security for the Star Rod of Wishes, and, of course, a staging point for me to threaten Equestria to prompt their heroes to rise up, challenge the temple, and claim the Star Rod for themselves."

Tempest visibly tries to comprehend Weiss's words. "But what do you get out of it? There's no reason to go to all of this trouble, if you're just going to force them to grow stronger, why dress it up?"

Weiss just shrugs. "It's a really... really entertaining way to enhance the insurance keeping our world from being destroyed. If you want, I can include you in my next evil plan, I swear it's a fun time messing with them."

Tempest slowly raises a hoof to her head and rubs her face.

"Ok, fine, so you've gone through all of this trouble to recruit me... To help you with what amounts to convoluted pranks?"

Weiss huffs through his nose. "What? God no. What I recruited you for is much more important," He says, slowly mulling over a modified version of a speech he knows by heart before reciting the paraphrased scene to Tempest, slipping into his best impression.

"Please, use your imagination. Do you ever wonder why only a handful of malign beings make their way into Equestria and other civilized locales, such that a Princess and her buffoonish guards are enough to stop them nowadays?" He pauses for effect.

"Risk Management."

"Celestia and the other powers of this world have seen fit to seal up every noteworthy foe larger than a single hoof, so only very small, and crafty evils get through."

"But I have sensed creatures... The size of shopping malls, buried within crystals so potent that there's simply no way out from within."

"What if one of these ancient bindings were undone, so any monster that was once trapped within could pass at their leisure, regardless of size or strength?"

"What an unpleasantly exciting world that would be."

Weiss stands up from his chair, and walks over to the table near his desk, picking up a bottle of some sparkling, bubbling liquid and pouring himself a glass. "Celestia wants to run the world with Harmony, but what if it could be run by fear, by monsters?"

"There's a evil coming who wants to completely redefine the food chain. But not even you and your crew are enough to complete my plans to destroy him."

"The real power is in the Element Bearers, but Equestria's so soft that they'll be unwilling to train and prepare for what's to come... Unless there was a wild card."

"I've got less than a year to finish preparations for a vengeance one-thousand years in the making, and with your help, I will exact it."

"But in the meantime? We'll have fun playing with the locals. Enjoy some good food, some relaxation, some amenities, all on me."

Tempest mulls over his words, but something doesn't seem right. She's got enough experience to understand motives like his, and this is clearly personal. So, the question is...

"What about after that?" Tempest questions.

Weiss gives her a strange look, as though he hadn't really seriously considered it. "I..."

He shrugs, taking a sip from his glass. "Well, after that, my work will be done. I take care of the evil to come. The villain is slain. The heroes rejoice."

"I'll finally be able to rest easy."

See, now that's the sort of answer Tempest had been hoping he wouldn't have to that question.

At least she's got an idea of how to repay him, after she's done helping him with his plans.

"So you called your planned housing for me and my crew 'Star Road'. Why is it called that, when it doesn't look like a road at all?" Tempest says, changing the topic and looking over the star-shaped structure Weiss claims is going to be built as permanent housing and assigned to her.

Weiss smiles. "I'm glad you asked, you see, it's actually based on an ancient legend, about a road that wishes were ferried along to be granted. One version of the story actually calls the place itself 'Star Haven', but I've just been calling the entire thing 'Star Road', like it was in the original version."

Tempest sneaks a glance to the doorway of Weiss's office as he begins his long winded story. She'll confront the rat later. It wouldn't do for her boss's careful bluffs and reputation to be ruined by more of his secrets slipping out.

She's almost certain by now that Weiss Noir loves keeping an air of mystery and theatrics to his actions, and it's hard enough to do that when the rat reading his screenplay continues to try and peek behind the stage curtains and spoil the plot.

Weiss snaps his fingers to get her attention.

"Alright, now that Sunset's done spying on me, we can discuss my actual plans. Namely, I'm going to see if Celestia has the Alicorn Amulet, and if she does, I'm going to blow up her castle and rob it."

Tempest almost giggles at just the sheer shock-value of what he just said, but manages to choke down the laughter at the last possible moment.

"I fail to see how manual labor will be enjoyable," Tempest says, as she and Weiss walk up to a skating Pinkie Pie enjoying time on the frozen lake.

"Shh, this is going to be great. Hey, Pinkie Pie! Working hard or hardly working?" Weiss shouts to the pink mare, who waves back as she skates on one hoof.

"Hi Weissy! Here for evil?" Pinkie questions, skidding up to the pair.

"Oh you know it sister. I'm just waiting for Twilight to come by before I start my monologuing, you can go back to what you're doing, don't let us bother you."

"Okie Dokie!" Pinkie nods, prepared to leap back out onto the ice.

"Oh, I'll be over in a few weeks to throw a dungeon party, hope you don't mind!" she says, spinning in place before skidding out with grace.

Tempest gives me a questioning look. "That sounds like a security breach."

Weiss smiles "Don't worry, she's a trustworthy security breach."

Tempest rolls her eyes good-naturedly at that, cottoning on to his standard-operating-procedures quicker than most.

Before long, and after creating a small throne of black ice, and a folding chair of black ice for Tempest, Twilight arrives, before, with an internal groan of dismay, she notices Weiss.

"Hello, Weiss. Care to explain the bucking doorbell you installed in the library without my permission?"

"No, but I can explain my plans for today. You see, I've grown weary of all this cold weather, so I believe I'll participate in Winter Wrap-Up."

"Aren't I so kind?" he finishes, arousing Twilight's suspicion.

"You do know that Ponyville was founded by Earth Ponies, right? You can't use your magic to help with things."

Weiss chuckles to himself, crossing his arms behind his head. "I've never been one for tradition though. In fact, I think some traditions were made to be broken, unless, of course, you disagree?"

Twilight plants her hooves firmly. "I'm not going to let you mess with Ponyville's traditions, just because it's easier doesn't mean it's right. Ponyville has been wrapping up winter for years without using a bit of magic. It's part of its culture!"

Weiss's smile widens, as he looks up to the sky. "Someone should tell the pegasi that, then. I've never seen one of them fly without magic, after all. Or how about the Earth Ponies? They don't even realize how much of their strength comes from their own magic."

"No, I think this year's Winter Wrap-Up will be a lot more enjoyable with some... Hired Help."

Twilight braces for impact when Weiss's horn lights up with a dim purple light, and from it, four specters emerge, Pony shaped masses of Rocks, Wind, Fire and Water, respectively.

"What do you think of my butlers, dear? They're a personal favorite of mine whenever I need to do some spring cleaning."

"If you disagree with their methods, you could always try to convince them to stop, but..."

The Rock Specter steps in front of the others, grinning maliciously with its blocky tombstone teeth.

"They can be a bit hardheaded," Weiss finishes, smiling as Twilight summons the Master Sword into her magical grip.

"Oh good, you've got some fight in you. Well, you'd best be after them, in that case. Tata for now," Weiss says, walking off as his specters rush away in all four directions to different locations.

Tempest watches Twilight grit her teeth as she trots over to the frozen lake, where Pinkie is trying to skate around and avoid the rocky monster skidding around on the ice.

'Ok, this is pretty entertaining' Tempest thinks to herself, watching the unicorn fumble around with that weapon of hers.

'I see what Weiss meant by them not knowing how to fight, though.' Her internal monologue continues as she watches Twilight try to reach out far over the ice with her sword to swat the rock monster.

Twilight feels like pulling her hair out when she's unable to reach the creature with telekinesis.

"Twilight, we gotta do something about that thing before it does all my work for me!" Pinkie says, sliding over near enough to speak.

Twilight wracks her brain trying to come up with something, when a voice brings her out of her contemplation.

"You're going to need to get close enough to actually hit it, if you plan on using that weapon of yours," Tempest Shadow says casually, walking up to the duo.

"Well, it's not like I can just skate over there myself, I've never skated before!" Twilight responds, watching the rocky thing scratch gouges in the ice.

Tempest points to it. "It's avoiding the cracks in the ice that it makes. You can use that to lure it over to one of the edges. Always try to figure out a weakness when you're observing an enemy."

Twilight notices what Tempest pointed out, before nodding. "Right, Pinkie, I need you to try and lure it over here, skate near it and try to herd it!"

Pinkie salutes, jumping back onto the frozen lake and skating over with determination.

While the pink pony tries to block off the Rock Specter, Tempest further corrects Twilight's battle strategy.

"You're holding that sword wrong. It's balanced like a griffon or a minotaur sword, not a unicorn one. You're holding the entire weapon, but the center-of-mass is in the middle, instead of near the bottom."

"Focus your grip on only the handle, or you're going to lose most of the power in your swings trying to compensate, or worse, you'll just be spinning the sword around without swinging it properly."

Twilight is confused at how this unicorn mare knows so much about combat, that she can tell that much about a sword just by looking at it, but follows her advice, shrinking her telekinetic grip so it only covers the sword's handle, unlike before, when she simply held the weapon, blade and all, in an even coating.

"Who are you, anyway? I'm Twilight Sparkle," she says, getting ready to swing.

"Tempest Shadow. Now make sure the edge is straight pointed in the direction of your swing, Sparkle. If it's even slightly off-center, you'll lose cutting power," Tempest says simply, as the Rock Monster careens towards them.

Twilight, listening to her advice, tries to follow it, swinging the Master Sword somewhat clumsily, but with extreme force.

The blade ignites in a flare of white light as it cleaves through the monster like ballistic gel falling into a plane propeller. The Rock Specter explodes in puffs of purple smoke that swirl away into nothing.

Pinkie arrives shortly afterwards. "Thanks Twilight! Now I can get the rest of this lake scored up the old-fashioned way."

Twilight nods, before turning and running towards where she believes one of Weiss's other spells ran off to. "You're welcome Pinkie, thanks for the advice Tempest, I have to track down those other monsters, sorry to run off like this!"

Twilight is a bit surprised when the plum-colored mare actually follows after her.

"I've got some free time," Tempest shrugs, trotting after Twilight with a much more natural gait than the bookish unicorn's more frantic scramble.

She's a bit surprised that the baby dragon riding on Twilight's back has been asleep this whole time, with how jerky Twilight's running is.

Weiss puts on the fake Alicorn Amulet that he made to his exacting specifications, pulls up his camera, and snaps the selfie photo, waving it to help it develop.

In the corner of the photograph, he writes; "Hi Princess! Wish you were here! I think its my color! Yours Truly, Weiss Noir."

He then applies a tiny black crystal to the photo, before covering it up with a wax stamp.

"Let's see if I can make a princess jump on command," Weiss chuckles to himself, before biting his tongue and emitting a puff of dragonfire, sweeping the photograph away in a cloud of smoke to Canterlot.

Pulling out a complicated looking controller, he clicks a button that makes the mirror in his room light up, displaying the stats of his little spy.

Princess Celestia jumps in shock when she sees the artifact around Weiss's neck in his picture.

Eventually, though, the poor quality of the fake sticks out to her like a sore hoof, and she chuckles.

"Did he really think that would trick me into thinking he had already stolen it from me?" she mutters softly, before throwing the photo onto the table and continuing her tea time unruffled by Weiss's bluff.

She'll be sure to check the vault later today, however. In case Weiss is running a double-bluff. It pays to be sure when unfathomably powerful magical artifacts are involved.

What she doesn't notice, however, is the softly buzzing chip of crystal in the wax seal, relaying her words back to Weiss.

"Oh goodie. I get to go with Plan A," Weiss sneers happily.

"Alright Princess, enjoy your tea. I'll be over to pick up my things soon enough."

Chuckling to himself, he sets down the controller and turns to a small bottle on his table. "Malifessence" is displayed in simple cursive on the bottle's label.

"This is going to be so much fun."

He picks up the bottle, and deposits it safely inside a portal to one of his secret vaults.

Twilight tries to slash apart the Wind Specter, but it keeps flying out of reach while Fluttershy panics and tries to calm the animals that its loud whistling are awaking rudely.

"Any advice for this one, Tempest?" Twilight says with some frustration.

Tempest rolls her eyes, sitting on a rock nearby. "When a strategy isn't working, stop using it. Don't you have spells you can try?"

Twilight realizes with some embarrassment that she's been too focused on using the Master Sword to try one of her numerous types of spellcraft.

"Right, sorry," Twilight says sheepishly, sheathing the Master Sword on her back and unleashing a blast of magic. "A weighting charm aught to do the trick!"

The pinpoint laser from her horn rushes up to the flying enemy and pierces through it, turning its white winds into purple ones, and dragging it to the ground as it whistles madly and tries to scramble away on the ground.

Before it can get far, Twilight fires off a raw blast of arcane impact, blasting the windy devil apart.

Twilight turns to Fluttershy, who is trying to comfort a trio of crying baby snakes. "Oh there there, the scary noises are gone now."

Twilight cringes at this. "Sorry I couldn't get here sooner, Fluttershy, Weiss has sent these darn things all over Ponyville to ruin Winter Wrap-Up!"

Fluttershy shakes her head. "Don't worry about it Twilight, go help the others, and I'll take care of things here."

Twilight nods. "Sorry again for the inconvenience."

Tempest follows Twilight at a relatively sedate pace while Twilight herself huffs and puffs.

"You really should get more exercise, Sparkle. Try running like I am, you'll last longer," Tempest snarks lightly, skipping ahead so Twilight can observe the proper way to gallop long distances.

"Sunset, dear, you've got a package!" Weiss shouts through the P.A system of the black tower, prompting the cinnamon mango swirled unicorn to get up form her seat and trot to Weiss's office.

When she gets there, she spots Weiss's smarmy grin, unchanged from the day she met him. In his hand, he holds a bright red strip of fabric, clearly and heavily enchanted.

"Say hello to the cure for what ails you. The Super Ribbon! It might not grant immunity to instant death, but it's the closest I can get on my budget."

Sunset takes the ribbon in her hoof, looking at Weiss with no small amount of suspicion. "And there's no catch? Even after finding out what I've been doing? It's not going to come to life and do something humiliating?"

Weiss snickers. "Really? Sunset, kid, if I wanted to do something to you, I'd just fucking do it. I cultivate a reputation of consistency. If I say that the ribbon itself isn't cursed, then it isn't cursed."

"The only reason I would have to be upset over you spying on me and plumbing my secrets is because you aren't ready for them. You aren't ready for a lot of things, to be frank, but the Grimoire Weiss is most certainly one of them."

Sunset balks at this as she ties the Super Ribbon around her neck. "Then why not take it back?"

Weiss shrugs. "The fact that you're saying that implies that there's no point. Celestia has almost certainly photocopied all the pages already, and I'm obviously not going to be writing anything more in it if it can be translated."

"You've really taught me a lesson about writing down anything I discover."

For some reason, the blunt way that Weiss claims he no longer has any intention of recording his work causes Sunset to feel a pang of disappointment.

"And there's nothing I can say to convince you otherwise?" Sunset says with a sudden bitter taste in her mouth.

Weiss's stare turns distant, and when he returns to the present, his eyes glitter with a hard glare. "Why would I waste my time doing that?"

Sunset just leaves the room when he says this, looking at the Grimoire Weiss she had been reading through avidly when she reaches her quarters.

Did she just kill the golden goose?

The crack of Applejack's whip marks an upturn in her frustration as she tries to keep the Flame and Water Specters from melting the snow on her farm and taking the water away.

"Applejack, are you alright?" Twilight says, running up next to her.

"I'm fine Twi, do you know what the hay is going on here? These things have been trying to clear out the snow, and I am rightly ticked off!"

And indeed, Applejack's statement rings true, as most of Sweet Apple Acres is only mildly damp from the Flame Specter melting the snow, and the Water Specter ensuring that the melting snow doesn't flood the area.

"Yeah, Weiss made these things to try and speed up Winter Wrap-Up, I've been destroying all the ones I can find, I think these two are the last ones."

Applejack snorts. "I'm gonna kick that fool where the sun don't shine, I sware it," Applejack says through her grit teeth.

The Fire and Water specters giggle at the duo, while Tempest stands behind the pair.

Tempest offers her suggestion for Twilight. "You'll need to work together to kill these ones. Look at the way they're sticking close to one another? They're working in tandem too effectively."

Twilight nods, having noticed the same thing herself. "Applejack, I can get them away from one another, but I'll have to use magic to do it. Which one do you want to take care of first?"

Applejack whips at the air, cracking the air to drive the Fire Specter away from one of her trees. "It don't matter none Twi, just get it done and I'll take em down. They're too squirrely for me to pin one of em down,"

Twilight nods, slowly pacing around the pair of cackling specters, activating her horn and preparing to cast a spell.

Before she can finish the spell though, she realizes these specters must be smarter than the last two, as they briefly combine their powers to emit a haze of steam that obscures the sight of them.

"I can't see!" Twilight shouts, prompting Tempest to rub her forehead slightly.

"Complaining isn't a combat tactic!" Tempest shouts back. Hopeless, the lot of them.

Twilight backs away from the cloud of steam, trying to come up with a solution.

'Every spell acts like its caster... So what would Weiss do?'

She looks up.

"Applejack, hit the top of the cloud!"

Applejack nods, snapping her head forward and throwing the whip's tip up into the air, where it cracks with a roar of flame.

The cloud of steam disperses as the Flame Specter explodes, leaving behind nothing but the Water Specter, which, seeing that its prospects are dipping by the second, decides to try to make a speedy escape, before Tempest, having maneuvered behind it, fires a beam of magic through it's head and disperses it.

"Good work," Tempest offers, trotting off now that her work's done. She has to admit, that was pretty fun.

Twilight's head tilts. "What a weird pony."

Celestia, having finished her tea, decides to go off and check up on the vault of dark artifacts.

When she has left the room completely, the photograph that was left on her table rumbles, floating into the air as the wax on it cracks like a cocoon, releasing a small orb of black crystal, which expands, unfolds, and grows into a flapping ball of fuzz and feathers, with batlike wings and a single, bright purple eyeball.

Silently, and swiftly, the little eyeball flaps it's way after Princess Celestia, following her all the way to the vault, watching...

Recording.

Twilight sits on a bench, dismayed that she failed to really help out with Winter Wrap-Up, as she was too busy trying to stop Weiss from "helping".

Spike sleeping through the whole thing didn't really improve her mood that much either. Although he was a lot more tired looking than he usually is.

Mayor Mare, looking absolutely frazzled, ends up walking by Twilight, turning to her with desperation. "I don't mean to tell you how to do your job, but perhaps you should help with something? We're behind enough as it is!"

"Behind?" Twilight asks. How could they be behind after Weiss's magic tore through all of the tasks?

"Yes, behind! Just like the year before this, and the year before that! We're behind on bringing birds back from migration, we're behind on making nests, we're behind on removing the winter clouds so we can bring in the spring ones!"

Mayor Mare looks at Twilight with annoyance, mistaking her thinking for laziness.

"Oh, Celestia... Spring is going to be late again. Another year of scandal and shame. If only we could be more organized."

Before Mayor Mare can walk off, Twilight suddenly jumps to her hooves. "Wait, did you say organized?"

Well, that's certainly something she's better at than fighting off magical monstrosities...

Spike drowsily writes down the words Twilight dictates to him.

"Dear Princess Celestia,

Winter Wrap Up was one of the most special things I've ever been a part of here in Ponyville. It helped me to learn we all have hidden talents, and if we work hard, we're sure to find and cultivate them, and as always, with good friendship and guidance, ponies can accomplish anything.

Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle."

"What do you think, Spike?"

Spike shrugs as he blinks sleep out of his eyes. "It'll do?"

Twilight giggles. "What's got you so tired, Spike?"

Spike blankly snaps his claws, creating a portal to Celestia and stuffing the letter through it, Celestia's surprised face blinking before he closes it.

"Been practicing hard," He says blankly, before falling back to sleep with a yawn.

(Weiss Report) A Wind Sorcerer's Best Friend [Eyeroc]

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Entry Number Five, Day One-Hundred and One

I can't encode me sticking my tongue out and pulling down my eyelid mockingly in text format, but assume that I'm doing so to Luna right now. She poked fun at me for trying to make golems capable of winged flight, but here we are. Now I'm the one poking fun, and also the one laughing. In fact, my laugh is the last one, to take this metaphor to it's logical conclusion. And the first thing I've done now that I can make flying golems is to create my very own spy-eye. Because really, you can't be a dark lord without some adorable fuzzy flying eyeballs with batwings to do your spying for you.

Of course, the only thing better than a flying spy is an even more secretive one. I've worked out a good system, they start as small enchanted pebbles, roughly the size of a tooth, soon I'll be able to make them even smaller. Then, when I send them a signal, the magic activates, and the graphene, sapphire, and water grow outward into a complex system of thin hydrolic tubes, gossamer wings, and adorable fuzzy feathers, complete with the most advanced golemic camera I can produce.

What makes them especially effective, however, is their suite of abilities. Normally, an Eyeroc is able to instantly destroy itself if it detects someone's eyeline about to cross it, and it can send signals using magically enhanced radiowaves back to any magic mirror, and receive commands in the same fashion. However, this isn't the end of it's phenominal talents. If the automatic self-destruct is disabled, they have a suite of methods to deal with someone spotting one of them, from flashbangs to small claws hidden in their fluff.

Of course, the biggest hurdle to creating these little golems was figuring out how to fly, since the golem only knows what I knew, I had to actually learn to fly on my own.

I don't want to talk about it.

Anyway, on to more entertaining facts. This little invention actually combines some things that I try to keep under wraps, but the way I've set it up should help to keep it's destructive uses under the radar, namely, combining Royal Crystal Growth with Black Flames to create and destroy royal ice as a hydraulic fluid. By combining this with some dream training to give me some practical experience, I can use Royal Cloth filled with Royal Water to emulate muscles and tendons, wrapped around Royal Vibranium Bones. The end result is a Golem that looks and feels organic in useful ways.

Golems that use this complex method of locomotion are actually much smoother than other forms of golem, if only because they act more like a living body, and thus, are easier for me to understand how they need to move in order to function. My other methods of creating golem movement, via Prestidigitonium, are much jerkier and unstable, though, they're easier to enchant and require less magical power to run. When finesse and smooth movement are required, this method of Black Flame/Royal Ice hydraulics will serve well for that purpose.

So far, I've produced ten or so Eyeroc Seeds, in case I ever need to spy at a distance, but future generations will probably include more features. I've got plans to use razors embedded in the wings, a few laser cells in the eyes themselves, and possibly bringing in some actual Crystal Ponies to enchant them with Crystal Cloth Feathers instead of Royal Cloth ones.

I've also been considering a few variants, one big example of a variant Eyeroc I'll have to indulge in is a raven or crow shaped one. Crows are fucking awesome, and screw anyone who thinks otherwise. I'll give it rocket wings and laser talons, and it will be named "Killblivion Ragnarok". I'll also include a function that makes it turn into a boomerang or something. That'll be cool.

To be honest, now that I've got hydraulics and pseudo-organic golemancy, I really should get to work on making body doubles. Especially after what has happened lately. Having a few fake bodies to have walking around can only be useful for the next time my life would otherwise be at risk. Although I'll have to make absolutely sure that they can self destruct. I'm not exactly comfortable with magitek like that getting out, especially in the form I'd be using it in.

At the same time though, I could take it entirely too far, and just make my body double explode into some horrific giant mecha whenever it takes damage. Now THAT sounds like a fun rumor to cultivate among my enemies. "Oh yeah, don't fuck with that guy, he turns into a metal monster if you so much as touch his ass."

Yeah, now that I think about it, that's clearly the way to go. I've already got the timeshift tech prepped for smaller structures, so I'll rig up the body doubles and Eyerocs to unfold into larger combat modes, complete with submersible capabilities. Just fucking melts into the snow like a terminator and then you're riddled with spears and exploding.

I have to keep escalating, I still don't have the firepower to keep myself or other safe. This new tech is going to let me do the spying and fighting that I need to get done, and will give me the perfect platform to start building my real weapons. The best way to keep a weapon out of enemy hands is to make it a living one, after all. And while golems aren't technically living, strictly speaking, I don't think that will matter when I'm blasting Sombra's ass away from my fucking ponies.

Maybe I should just keep this one to myself. It shouldn't hurt much, considering how outdated this entry is, compared to his later stuff. Right?

I'll tell Celestia if I find anything really important.

...Oh who am I kidding, it's a little late to grow a conscience about this now of all times.

(Past Chapter 12): Hot Wings

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The first time my mad scientist created life, I wasn't mad. Just disappointed. Actually, that's a lie. I was furious like I have never been before.

Luna's really messing with my groove right now, I realize, as the drone I'm controlling in my sleep smashes into the wall when I lose control of it.

"You do realize wings were meant to be flapped, yes? Unless the goal was to 'Get Wrecked', as you say," She chortles, watching me tweak my blueprints for a fixed-wing flying machine.

I know for a fact that it can be done. I just have no idea whatsoever as to the details.

When Luna can't look at my latest design without laughing, I find myself possessed by a petty annoyance.

"Well, if you're going to spectate, then you might as well help," I say, popping off Luna's wings and dragging them into the blueprint editor for use as a model.

This doesn't make Luna's laughter stop, as she rapidly regrows them as easily as can be done in a dream.

"How bold of you. Should I begin keeping my wings behind glass in the waking world? Your fantasies are quite disturbing."

I try to ignore her heckling and keep any humor her words may or may not have inspired in me to myself, as I lower the details and quality of the dream-image until I have a simple, geometric image of an extended Pegasus Wing.

I decide to throw some shade back at the princess, designing my next attempt at a flying golem. "I thought you would be overjoyed. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery."

Luna smirks at that. "I dare say, if I saw one of those in the air above me, I would be more concerned about being flattened than flattered.

"Yes, perhaps not even the wings of a princess are enough to bring your works above sea-level. What a cruel blow to my reputation indeed," She says as my latest printed drone spirals out of control and crashes into a wall.

"In all seriousness, though, you will never create flying works of magic if you yourself do not understand how flight is achieved. Do you believe your spells can learn what you have not?"

Luna makes a good point. Luckily, we just so happen to be in the one place where you can sink more than once when sinking or swimming.

So, I'll simply learn to swim (through the air) in the Arcana Nox.

Dr. Absolutely Real Homeopathy is so stressed out. What Lord Weiss Noir wants, it's impossible!

For the past two months, Weiss only had one true job for him. Clone dragon tissues, and make them compatible with a pony.

But it's not possible!

Dr. Real scratches his head, and straightens his coat, trotting through the halls of his Laboratory in the Wacky Workbench Zone. Weiss had apparently set up a lot of these secretive labs here, with different groups of scientists in each, ordered not to communicate with one another or the outside world without Lord Weiss's express approval.

Dr. Real stops at one of the large crystal tanks, holding a floating dragon's tail, suspended in gem-enriched fluid. A topaz gemstone attached to the base of the tail makes it twitch from time to time.

Real has tried everything. Blood samples, tissue samples, bone samples. Every medical spell in the long list of the ones he knows, and a few he had to dig up just to attempt.

No combination of individual pony cells and dragon cells are able to coexist for very long. The sympathetic emotional components just aren't there.

The only thing Real hasn't tried is... The one thing Weiss told him to never do. Two simple rules, Real had thought at first. "Don't grow brains or spinal tissues."

A bit naive of Weiss to demand, considering that doesn't cover the myriad of nervous tissues that aren't found in the brain or spine. Especially in a dragon.

If he only had some way to properly study the emotional content of a dragon, he might at least have a starting point! A place he can work outward from to develop serums and fluids to suppress or smooth over the emotional conflicts between pony and dragon cells.

But there's only one thing that can help him study a dragon's feelings. And all he has to do is disobey Weiss and create it.

He puts a hoof on the tank, staring at the lightly twitching tail inside.

"Ugh. This feels like homework," Priss says, tapping away at the holographic screen that popped up in her virtual dream, offering the chance to fill out a survey.

Eclipse couldn't disagree more, this is amazing!

"Are you kidding, Priss? If what Lord Weiss said can be trusted, the answers we give to these questions will have a real impact on the Shadow Realm's dealings and administration. If there's anything you don't like, this is a good way to ensure it reaches the proper authorities," Eclipse says, tapping away at her own answers.

Priss looks unamused. "I'm not sure I would call 'Should the Shadow Realm's tunnels be widened to aid in foot traffic' the sort of question that has a 'Big Impact'."

Eclipse returns with her own rebuttal. "Maybe not, but I bet 'Should street fighting be more tightly regulated' will. I swear they've been setting up boxing rings near the hidden Palace Black Flame, Priss."

Priss shrugs, clicking through the multiple choice questions on her survey. "I guess. It still feels like homework though.

"I think he's having a bit too much fun with these," Priss snarks, when she reaches the last question.

"Should there be more or less surveys in the future?" The question reads out.

Eclipse giggles. "Maybe a bit. Yeah."

Finally, the pair answer the last question, and type out a comment to go along with it. "Ok, let's get back to our game. I still have to beat your high score."

"You wish!" Priss shouts, as the Virtual Dream shifts back into a complex snowball arena.

As I crash to the ground for the fifth time, Luna swoops down with the sort of grace that only comes from eons of practice.

Strangely, as soon as I suggested practicing, her stream of banter dried up, replaced with keen, quiet observation when it comes to my repeated failures. She's obviously had a lot of practice playing the social game, considering how endearing it is.

"You know, as adorable as that shape is, I can't help but wonder why you did not simply add wings to your own original form instead," Luna questions, as I pilot the little bat into pulling itself back onto its feet.

"I'm not making pony-shaped golems. So practicing as a pony-shaped flier won't help me," My voice emerges from the dream-avatar I had been controlling, as its wings ruffle, and I teleport it back to the top of the cliff that marked the highest point in the virtual space.

"But a bat, Weiss? Surely you could pick a more regal shape, all of your dreamworld in your hooves, and you choose to be a flying rat."

I scratch my chin at this. She has a point. There are way cooler things I could pick for a potential flying minion, like crows or...

Luna jumps back in disgust at the new form I shift my little minion into.

"Really, Weiss?" She says, looking at the rotund, bat-winged creature as it opens its one, gigantic eye.

"Luna, be reasonable, the Flying Eyeball is a staple of any true overlord," I say, flapping its wings frantically to try and get into the air.

I finish by returning to myself as the eye barely manages to flap up enough to land on my true form's back. "And it's more adorable to boot."

Luna looks on at the black, fuzzy monster with curiosity bubbling up in spite of her disdain. "I have never seen such a creature before."

I'm a bit shocked at this, but decide to play it off. "They are a common staple of the stories back home."

Luna's eyes narrow. "And just where might that home of yours be, that it has such strange and varied stories, and produces such a strange and varied pony?"

I just smirk at the princess. "Luna, you wouldn't have nearly as much fun if I just told you all the things you want to know. Really, you'll enjoy life a lot more by figuring out such things on your own."

"Fun?" Luna asks, her ear flicking at the word.

"Yes, fun. Frivolities, entertainment, diversions of the enjoyable sort?" I explain.

She ponders my words. "Very well, if you insist on me experiencing 'Fun', then I shall partake in fun."

And then she kicked me off the cliff.

It'll be easy. Dr. Real already has the stem cells he would need to do this. He's not working with scraps.

Weiss really did have foresight, when it came to harvesting cells from that dragon for cloning purposes. Something that genuinely confuses Dr. Real from time to time. How could Lord Weiss know so little about biology and healing, and yet know little scraps of trivia and information as crucial and obscure as that?

Well, it's not Dr. Real's place to question that. His job is to do what Lord Weiss has demanded, even if it means defying his rules.

The thin stallion rubs his eyes tiredly, walking past the tubes to his work station. The red lights in the walls flicker softly, casting long shadows across the floors.

He grabs a sterile fluid repositioning rod, and draws out a measure of dragon cells from one of the stored vials.

His first attempts might not work, so he'll use redundancies. Rule of threes is a good one to abide by.

He walks over to some of the tanks, one holding samples of dragon skin, a disembodied claw, and a lung. With a flick of a switch, black flames flood the tubes, eradicating the samples within.

The tubes hiss open, and he levitates three masses of liquid into the chambers, before sealing it back up, and typing into the holographic keyboard.

With a few keystrokes, the backs of the chambers hiss open, revealing a space where enchanted crystals can be placed in order to perform experiments. For these tests, Dr. Real places three Moon Crystals into their sockets. He'll need a way to study their emotional components, and the Arcana Nox is as good a place as any to do so.

Closing the hatches, he returns to the control panel, typing out the commands that will go on to determine what organs and tissues will be grown by the healing crystals inside.

One after another, he goes down the list of organs and tissues, checking them all off as subjects for cloning.

"Confirm?" The panel reads out.

For a moment, he realizes that could still stop. He doesn't have to do this. It would be crossing a line, wouldn't it?

Dr. Real shakes his head, and wipes the sweat off his forehead with a handkerchief from his pocket.

If he doesn't take this further, he'll either have to keep telling Weiss that he's made zero progress, or, worse, write the project off as impossible. Nobody will have to know. He'll get the information he needs on dragon empathology, finish the research that Weiss needs, and...

Science will be done accordingly.

"Confirm, access code; Dragon Chasing."

The machine bleeps with green light, confirming his decision to grow three entire juvenile dragons in these test tubes, at three different biological ages, for variety.

He throws some tarps over the tubes, marking them down as "Light Sensitive", before slowly walking off to bed to sleep off this all-nighter.

"You know, your mind is normally much sharper than this, Weiss. Might I ask what troubles you?" Luna says, only just now noticing how simplistic the Virtual Dream I have running is.

I shrug. "I've got enough painkillers running through my bloodstream right now to put down an... uh" I guess technically "A horse" would be accurate, but I'm not sure it would come across correctly.

"I've got a lot of pain-reduction crystals on me right now, and those aren't exactly suited for mental clarity and acuity," I finish.

Luna looks more curious at this, as we both continue to fall down an infinitely stretching rocky hole, attempting to practice flight more practically.

"And what injury would have such prescribed to you?" She questions, reclining in the air on a cloud as we scream down at terminal velocity.

Seeing no reason not to answer her, I do. "I'm heavily injured right now. Telekinesis accident."

Luna hums at that. "A shame you lack an ethereal mane. Tis' the secret to withstanding magical recoil."

I'm curious enough at that to press her. "And how exactly does someone get themselves a floating do'?"

"Strong magic, strong emotions. A pony's body reacts to the presence of incredibly potent emotion by turning their mane into a wash of magical energy. There are those who believe it to be a defense mechanism, as it can bear the brunt of any magical backlash the user is forced to experience when casting in a heightened state," She explains.

I clamp my mouth shut at this. It seems my questions might be alluding to facets of how I'm casting the spells that I'm casting that I'd rather she not know just yet.

She notices my expression and chuckles. "Yes, Weiss, it does not happen often when one's magic is augmented. Even if you've... augmented it using your own power somehow. Is that what the look on your face means?"

Damn it. Well, that's one secret she's managed to weasel out of me.

I'll have to work on my poker face. It's not fun when someone figures out my secrets too easily.

"You've earned that one Luna, but you'll have to work a bit harder if you want more."

Luna chuckles, giving me a half-lidded stare. "I think you overestimate how much work it will take."

Suddenly, her expression turns odd. "Why are there dragons sleeping in your realm, Weiss?"

"Pardon?" I question, my eyes narrowing.

"I'm assuming there aren't meant to be three of them using your crystals?" Luna questions, not at all as deeply concerned as I am with the matter.

"Could you show me where they are?" I ask, and thankfully, she nods.

Opening up a port to the Arcana Nox's central crystal, we zip over to a private port that looks to have been locked off and isolated from the rest of the network.

Unfortunately for whatever dumb bastard set this up, I own the network.

"Master Access Code," I say, opening up the window to input my password.

♪"We'll meet again"♪

♪"Don't know where,"♪

♪"Don't know wheeen!"♪

♪"But I know we'll meet again,"♪

♪"Some sunny daaay..."♪

With the password recited using the correct emotional contents (Threatening Nostalgia), The ports are forcibly opened, allowing me to read their exact location in the Shadow Realm.

"Wacky Workbench Zone," I say out loud. I neglect to also mention that it's in the Biomagitek Lab. Luna doesn't need to know that part.

"Someone is about to be in big trouble. We'll continue our conversation later, Princess Luna."

She looks at me with concern as I abort the dream and wake up painfully in my hospital bed.

Ignoring my pain for now, I call for a nurse to get me into a wheelchair, and have her begin wheeling me towards Dr. Real's laboratory.

Doctor Real is confused when he walks into the lab, only to see all of the lights have been turned off.

He ignites his own flashlight, stalking deeper inside. Maybe there was a magical surge?

Nothing seems to be out of place, and the cloning vats are all functioning.

Wait...

Suddenly, he frantically makes his way towards his secret project, surely that couldn't be the cause of all of this, could it? They are supposed to be sedated!

He runs into the hall containing the three tubes, only for the lights to come on all at once, blinding him as he stumbles back in panic.

Sitting before him, still wrapped completely in bandages from horn to hoof, Weiss Noir sits in front of him in his wheelchair, a deadly, oppressive aura practically radiating from the unicorn.

'M-my fight or flight reflexes seem to be... triggering.' Dr. Real thinks hysterically to himself as Weiss slowly wheels himself forward, somehow managing to stare down at the doctor despite him being sitting.

As Weiss comes closer, the terrifying feeling intensifies, until Weiss is close enough to look him in the eye.

"Hello, Doctor," Weiss says carefully, mindful of his fractured jaw. Those two words make their way out burdened by raw killing intent.

Dr. Real wants to run, but it feels like he's pinned to the ground where he's sitting, like a frog strapped to a table.

"I've noticed some... Idiosyncrasies, in your laboratory. I decided to come down here last night and see what you thought about it."

Pulling the tarp off of the tubes with his magical grip, Weiss stares blankly at the baby, the child, and the teenage dragon floating in the gem fluid. All three of them asleep and unaware of the world around them.

Is Weiss actually going to kill Dr. Real for this? Sure, he seemed serious about his rules, but-

"I must say, Doctor. I don't mean to be crude, but these are some of the oddest looking ponies I have ever seen. I wonder how it is that you convinced these three to come in for testing?"

Dr. Real gulps. "Whatever you are going to do, sir, I accept my punishment accordingly for creating them."

If Weiss's face weren't so tightly woven with wrappings, Real might have suspected that the unicorn was smiling, as a new wave of raw, murderous fury escapes his body.

"Oh? You created them? I must congratulate you, then. I may not know the burdens of fatherhood, but I have heard it can be quite fulfilling.

"Yes, if you had a hand in their birth, then they are ours. Every bit the ponies of the Shadow Realm that the rest of us are. I think you should let them out of that nasty fluid, though. You see, I've got the oddest feeling that they have yet to meet daddy."

Dr. Real sweats. "Sir, I'm not sure that would be wise, we have no data on their behavior yet, they-"

Weiss's violent air turns into a diamond vice around Dr. Real's neck. "If they tore you to bloody pieces in front of me, Doctor, it would save me a great deal of trouble.

"Someone is going to find out about this, and if certain, very exacting conditions are not met preceding that, it will destroy the Shadow Realm, and cast its ponies into anarchy.

"There's a few stories I could go for. The story where my royal doctor betrays my trust, and is brought low when his creations turn on him, and I have to put down the mindless monsters.

"I could probably spin that story well enough. I'm not liable for the carefully hidden treachery of my own, after all. It isn't optimal, however, because it would breed mistrust in the Shadow Realm. I can no longer protect the ponies from within without making some grand, sweeping gestures to reassure them that monsters will not emerge from their own homes.

"I could also spin the story where the desperate Dr. Real betrayed my trust and went against my orders, but as he had taken responsibility for his lovable creations, and taught them to be well-meaning members of society, I saw fit to grant him and his creations mercy. A resounding story of life emerging from the oddest of places, and of the ethical treatment my scientists employ, even in the direst of circumstances.

"That would be the best story for me to run with. It appeals to the better nature of those ponies. It would comfort them, and amuse them in equal measure, the flustered scientist with three adorable little children."

Weiss winks at the doctor. "It might even attract some enviable attention. How responsible of the doctor! And so good with foals!"

As Weiss laughs softly, Dr. Real offers a small laugh of his own, before the oppressive aura returns in full force, that pure, knife's edge knowledge that Weiss is now willing to end his life without any doubts, conveyed to him through magic.

"But I can't spin a fucking story where they find out my Royal Scientist is experimenting on fucking babies in my basement, without telling me! You'd look like a madpony, I'd look like a fool! Or worse! They would think that I approved of this God Damn Nightmare!

"Oh but they're clones, they aren't real dragons!

"Is that what you're thinking, Doctor? Because that's not what they're going to see. They're going to see living things down here floating in fluids they don't understand for reasons they don't comprehend! I mean for fuck's sake, it's what I see, and I know what the hell you're doing! It will be a disaster!"

Weiss wheels himself over to the tubes, making the hairs on Dr. Real's neck stand up on end.

"You'll be letting them out now. Give them a checkup. I'll release a report to the public in a few days, and your housing and rations will be expanded to care for the newcomers, if needed."

When Dr. Real is unable to move, Weiss snaps. "That means now! You idiotic, naive fool!"

This finally snaps the doctor out of his fearful paralysis, and he scrambles over to the tubes, bringing up the holographic menu and typing out the commands to drain the fluid and remove the sedating enchantments on them.

One after another, the trio of dragons slowly lower to the floor of their tubes, and after a few minutes of nervous waiting, the youngest one blinks blearily.

The hatches of the tubes open, exposing and freeing them. Revealing that, for some unknown reason, the dragons are all different colors from the green dragon that their cells came from.

Before long, all three dragons are sitting in their tubes, looking curiously at the odd ponies, with no frame of reference to compare them to.

Weiss chuckles. "Well, name them, Doctor. Isn't that what you're supposed to do at this stage?"

Absolutely nothing in Weiss's tone implies even for a moment that he isn't deadly serious, and so, with a gulp, Dr. Real walks in front of the tubes, looking at the dragons with nervousness and dread.

"W-well, erm." The smallest one is pink, the middle one is blue, and the biggest one is red, so...

"Padparadscha." The pink baby dragon tilts its head.

The blue one has a small white marking, almost like a scar on its cheek. Some quirk of the cloning process.

"Star Sapphire." The dragon child doesn't move, but its eyes widen.

And the largest one, taller than Real by a few inches, in fact.

"R-Ruby." He finishes.

The red drake, thus dubbed Ruby, simply snorts out a bit of smoke.

Weiss takes a deep breath, turning his wheelchair around. "Ahh, the joys of Parenthood. I'll be back in the morning to congratulate you, or clean up the bodies.

"Have a nice day, Doctor," Weiss says, leaving as though he isn't leaving Dr. Real alone with three potentially feral dragons.

It's only now that Dr. Real notices Lord Weiss's final mockery, two crates he had wheeled in the night before, milk and gemstones, shoved in the back of the room.

I heave heavily as I allow myself to panic. The Princesses are going to fucking murder me if they find out about this. I can't believe Dr. Real just fucked me like this. I'll have to try and keep this news away from Luna until I've grown strong enough to fend them off. Which might be forever, considering that they're God Damn alicorns. Dr. Real might think I can brush this all off with some sappy speech and political finagling, but he just put my ass in some hot water.

I wheel myself over to my nurse, who I had told to wait outside.

"Please take me back to my room, m'am. Sorry for the inconvenience."

The nurse just nods politely. "It isn't a problem, sir, I'm happy to serve."

At least someone's willing to do what I tell them to do.

Sombra knows they're taunting him at this point. Every once in a while, he spots one of the... snowships. Zipping along like little bugs on the surface. Sinking below the snow whenever he approaches, never to be seen again.

But this time is different. This time, he's finally caught something.

He's not sure what kind of pony could have enough magical power to create a dragon out of this strange, hateful fire, but he's certain they weren't smart enough to dispel it when they left.

Oh it fought viciously. For an hour, Sombra had fought to corner the living spell, until he had blasted it with his curse and encased the beast in crystals.

Now he has a spell signature. Now he can track down its caster.

Now he can put an end to this little game of theirs.

(Noir Report) The First Mastery of Hatred [Killing Intent]

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Entry #12, Day 90

The mark of true art, it has a profound impact on those around it.

That is what I have discovered today. A power of hatred previously locked off to me is now made manifest through my anger, through betrayal. And now I can share it with all of you. The secret to this next spell is a simple one, but oh-so-crucial. One must feel hatred sufficient to kill, and combine it with the desire to communicate that hatred to others. To make them realize just how close to the edge you really are. Through this combination of cold hatred and intention, the spell Killing Intent is born.

Obviously, it's not a spell I have tested extensively. Aside from the intense hatred it inspires, easily stronger than that evoked by Black Flames, it requires a difficult mindset. The capability to kill, without the impetus to go through with it. By leaving the subject of the hatred unfilled, the spell can also be turned into a wide ranged effect, expending more magic, but covering all living things in it's radius. This is the ideal method with which to use it, speaking generally, as it does not require the user to experience a more narrow hatred that would affect their reasoning.

I consider this spell to be a mark of mastery in the dark arts of hatred. It required a betrayal of the highest caliber in order for me to realize it's power, and a cold, calculating hatred that I don't normally experience. Indeed, I know more than well enough that my anger burns hot. Hot, petty and fleeting at the best of times. This spell required a hatred beyond that. One that burns slowly, and bites with ice instead of fire. Perhaps that explains some of it's numerous effects.

Those afflicted by Killing Intent who lack strong wills are, first and foremost, frozen in place. It's not a consequence of some sort of magical binding, but rather, their own fear when they sense the danger radiating from a caster. For most, this is sufficient to trigger the release of adrenaline, to activate the fight-or-flight response, while at the same time flooding their conscious mind with an awareness of the danger that leaves them unable to formulate a course of action to take.

Those who were willing, I allowed them to experience it, and the more strong-willed among them were able to resist it and act in spite of it. Curiously, however, my student was unaffected. They did not resist it, but rather, the spell simply would not touch them, it refused, whether I focused or not, to afflict Eclipse Flash with even a hint of the hatred. This raised interesting conditions that any aspiring Dark Mage should strive to remember.

Killing Intent is shattered when you attempt to turn it on the ones you care for. Even the ability of Dark Magic to enhance and correct your emotions only functions when you first cast the spell. After that, sufficiently strong emotions can fracture and dispel the magic, if you lack the ability to maintain it. Even a spell midflight could be disrupted if the conditions demanded it. This is important to consider, for those who may be forced into unsuitable situations, where Dark Magic is not a sustainable method of solving problems.

The spell is also capable of functioning on animals, monsters, and to a very limited extent, some forms of spellcraft. Only spells which are anthropomorphized are affected by it, such as golems and summons. A fireball won't be dissuaded from striking you by Killing Intent, though a bird made of flames might be. I would suggest that users not rely on the spell for use as a barrier, as, ultimately, it's not 100% reliable as a method of deflecting spellcraft.

Interestingly, the spell also mostly fails as an enchantment, unless the object enchanted is itself animate as well. Even then, it is a simple enough matter to resist even potent killing intent from a nonliving subject. Perhaps it has something to do with the nature of magic, or maybe just the nature of fear and hatred. Either way, it's uses for indirect casting are mostly limited to an ambience of unease, perhaps useful for aesthetics or a very brief shock, but not much else.

By mastering this magic, one can truly learn to control the immense power of hatred. To hate without acting on that hate. To make others comprehend without destroying them. In a twisted way, this spell forms the backbone of an enlightened dark mage, as it allows one to express their feelings without taking actions which would vilify them. It represents mercy in the face of an overwhelmingly violent urge to do anything but grant mercy.

In that sense, I suppose I should thank the one who helped inspire this new spell, as he pushed me closer to the edge than I had previously been pushed, and made me aware that if pushed to such a limit that I could back away from the precipice, however shudderingly I do so. No matter what I do next, I will take action with dignity and caution, instead of allowing myself to fall to mindless violence.

I would suggest to any who read this entry to first master the Black Flame spell before attempting to produce Killing Intent. Being able to manage hatred and find healthy methods to cope with the strong feelings are key to casting this spell, due to the paradoxical requirements of both intent to kill and restraint from doing so. I fear one who attempts this spell without being ready for it could find themselves performing actions that they would not make while possessed of a sound mind, ones which are surely regrettable.

This spell has one major flaw, however, beyond others mentioned previously. Namely, despite my best efforts, I cannot cast the spell in such a way that I radiate menacing symbols whenever I use it. Truly, this makes the spell borderline useless for my purposes.

(Present Chapter 12) Time Trial

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Tempest storms into Sugarcube corner, having finally found out where her boss was hiding out, as Sunset leaves, walking past her with confusion and what seems to be a migraine.

The pony in question is staring at her frozen with a cupcake halfway to his mouth. He clamps his mouth shut.

"Hello, FP. To what do I owe the pleasure?" He says, setting down his pastry.

Tempest groans. "Sir, you're supposed to be at the tower preparing for our assault. Why are you here stuffing your face instead?"

She doesn't even bother saying anything to Grubber, who is on the other side of the booth, his own chowing down not at all paused by Tempest's arrival.

Weiss shrugs. "I'm going to be honest with you, Fizz, this whole dang day is a write off. There's time travel afoot."

Tempest decides to play along to speed this up. "And what exactly do you mean by that, sir?" She says, taking a seat at the booth across from him.

"Well, it all started early this morning, when I was drinking my morning sodie-pop."

Weiss was drinking his morning sodie-pop, a delicious blend of mango, chile pepper, and caramel flavoring, looking out over the Everfree from the newly constructed Star Road.

"This feels like a picnic," Weiss says, as Grubber and some newly christened members of "The Fizz", as the Storm Soldiers had been renamed to Tempest's embarrassment, enjoy their break.

"I think this technically is a picnic," Grubber comments.

Weiss continues, ignoring Grubber's interjection. "There must be no other place as pretty as this town."

Grubber takes a bite from his apple pie. "Does this qualify as a town? I thought it was a flying fortress?"

"Chew," Weiss responds elegantly, taking another sip of soda.

"You're not listening, are you?" Grubber correctly assumes.

"What a beautiful Duwang!"

The hefty soldiers look to each other curiously, but none of them have anything to add to this frankly Bizarre conversation.

Suddenly, the yellow soil of the floating fortress begins to shake and shudder, as in the air above them, a strange machine begins to form in the air, floating down slowly.

The Fizz get out of the way and stand at attention in response to the unknown threat, while Weiss simply looks annoyed and confused.

Finally, the machine lands, and the cockpit hisses open, Sunset Shimmer hopping out while dragging three fillies by their ears.

"Hello, Weiss," Sunset says.

"You told me to bring these three here, to this point in time, they've got an apology to make and a time machine to return."

Weiss just stares at them.

"You three have been using my Time Machine? Jumping around all day today?"

The Cutie Mark Crusaders nod nervously. "We're sorry, Mr. Weiss, we were just trying to get our cutie marks, please don't disassemble our molecules..."

"What the heck are you three talking about? Wait, nevermind, please don't try to explain," Weiss rubs his nose with his right hand, while a second right hand rubs his forehead.

He takes a deep breath, trying to stave off a headache he can just sense coming.

He then turns to The Fizz and Grubber. "All of you have the rest of the day off. This whole day's fucked. Avoid going into Ponyville for now. I'm going to ignore that advice and get some comfort food."

He then turns back to the four ponies who brought his Time Machine here. "You three, go home. Stay home. Sunset, make sure they do that, and put my Time Machine in the tower. I'll decide what to do with it later."

All of that said, the frustrated Weiss Noir teleports away, intent on trying to enjoy the rest of his day before it inevitably goes straight to hell.

Tempest soaks in Weiss's explanation.

"So why does the fact that three fillies are time traveling today interfere with our preparations?"

Weiss gives her a half-hearted glare. "Because things are about to get really weird, if Sunset bothered to take them to me.

"And time travel gives me a headache."

The bell of Sugarcube corner dings, as the Cutie Mark Crusaders walk in cautiously.

"Hi Whis! Uhh, having a nice day today?" Applebloom says, walking up to his booth.

"What are you three doing here? I told you to go home," Weiss deadpans, confusing the trio.

Sweety Belle realizes what's going on, and explains. "Oh, uhh, you haven't told us that yet."

It's at this point that another trio of ponies walk through the door, frantically.

"Other us'es, don't try to make Whis feel better, it's jus' gonna make him real mad!" Applebloom #2 shouts, running over between Crusaders #1 and Weiss.

Tempest and Grubber stare at this exchange with a befuddled blink.

Scootaloo #1 responds. "Well dang it Applebloom, this was your idea, come in here, try to make Weiss's day better, so he doesn't go crazy and start chasing us!"

Scootaloo #2 shakes their head. "Yeah, but like, us being in here is going to make him get real mad, so we gotta try and find some other way to calm him down!"

Weiss is rubbing his temples, his face buried in the table.

It's at this point that the bell to Sugarcube Corner dings open, marking the entry of Crusaders #3.

Sweetie Belle #3 grabs Sweetie Belle #1 and #2 "Girls, we need to get out of here, all nine of us being in one place is going to make Weiss-"

"Ok, that's it! I changed my mind. I'm sure as shit that I can bootstrap a better timeline than whatever farce this is going to turn into!" Weiss shouts, standing up and turning to the nonio with confused fury, prompting all three of the temporal crusaders to squeal, and run out of the shop while Weiss gallops after them angrily.

"Get back here! I'm not going through this again! And it's Weiss!" he shouts, horn flaring as the three sets of fillies scramble into their three time machines and warp away, the first set of Crusaders failing to hear his shout.

Tempest walks up behind Weiss, whose flaming mane is beginning to pop and flare up. "If it's any consolation sir, I don't understand what just happened."

"Don't think about it too hard," Weiss snarls, turning and walking off.

"Where are we going, sir?" Tempest asks as she and Grubber take point on either side of their boss.

"Sweet Apple Acres. They'll have to have gone to their clubhouse at some point in this timeline. It's too good of a staging area. Even if they aren't there, Applejack probably knows where they are."

Meanwhile, at the beginning of this sequence of chronologically confused events, the Cutie Mark Crusaders are walking sadly away from the school house.

"Maaan. Any ideas for what to try today, girls?" Scootaloo asks, as they make their way to Sweet Apple Acres to hang out.

Applebloom shrugs. "We'll figure something out, I bet."

Before long, they begin making their way to the clubhouse, but before they reach it, they spot something... odd.

In a clearing, they spot the rounded, bullet-shaped thing, painted up in greens, yellows and reds.

"What the hay do ya think that is?" Applebloom wonders, trotting up to it.

"I bet it's a spaceship!" Scootaloo shouts, hopping up onto the glass dome on top of it.

Sweetie Belle huffs. "It's not a spaceship, it doesn't even have any means of propulsion."

Scoots's messing around on top of it causes the hatch to pop open, sending her tumbling down to the ground.

"It totally is a spaceship, it's got a cockpit and everything!" She shouts in awe.

"Well, help us get up there, I wanna see!" Applebloom shouts, with Sweetie Bell nodding in agreement.

Orders given, Scootaloo holds her hoof down so the other two can climb up as well, but once they get up, her grip slips, sending her flying back as they all tumble inside.

Applebloom and Sweetie Belle fall into a pair of padded seats, while Scootaloo herself slams into a lever, making the hatch shut as the machine makes odd noises, hissing and bleeping angrily while they lift up into the air.

"Wait, I ain't ready to go to space!" Applebloom shouts, looking at Sweet Apple Acres below her.

"Oh Celestia, we're being beamed up!" Sweetie Belle squeals in terror, looking around for something she can do.

At this point, the machine's rumbling reaches a fever pitch, and it fades into the time stream, sending them all bouncing around inside the Time Machine before it slowly fades back into reality, landing softly on the ground.

The crusaders peek out over the edge of the weird cart they found and hopped inside of moments ago, spotting themselves walking up to another one of the weird cart. This prompts them to come to a realization as the other versions of them explore the device, and then accidentally activate it when Scootaloo falls inside and hits a lever.

They turn to each other, and, as if reading each other's minds, shout in tandem.

"Cutie Mark Crusaders Time Travelers, Yaaay!"

"Can you stop, for like, five minutes?" Weiss says, annoyance coloring his tone as he is forced to dodge another swipe from Applejack's whip.

"Oh sure, ah can stop, jus' hold still so ah can kick ya till you can't walk!" Applejack snarls, attempting to grab one of Weiss's legs with a sweep from the Vampire Killer whip.

Tempest and Grubber watch from the sidelines, as Weiss requested.

Weiss attempts to explain, as he flips backwards, scuttling like a spider briefly on his extra limbs, before throwing himself in the air to avoid another swipe. "I need to know where the Crusaders are, it's urgent."

This clearly isn't the right thing to say, as Applejack charges him. "You try an stink up my farm with yer rotten magic, harass the tar outta my friends, ev'ry word that comes outta yer mouth ain't honest and now yer after my dang sister and her friends?"

"I haven't lied since I got here," Weiss says smugly, dodging to the side when Applejack rears back and kicks at him.

"Oh yer sure proud of that, you ain't a liar, but you sure ain't honest either," she growls.

Weiss just shrugs, shaking his head with closed eyes. "Oh come now. I'm perfectly honest. I'm just not trustworthy. I've been perfectly transparent about what I'm about. Is it really my fault when people want to believe something other than what I'm telling them?"

Instead of continuing to banter like he wants, Applejack instead bucks him in the head, sending him flying into a tree.

Applejack snorts, before spitting on the ground. "You talk too much."

Weiss just chuckles, stumbling to his feet before spitting out a few teeth himself. "Got it all out of your system? Cause I still need to get my Time Machine back from those kids, and I'm really fucking pissed today.

"Unless you want the Cutie Mark Crusaders to be time traveling around, trying to get their cutie marks?"

Applejack sweatdrops. "They're in school, they'll be coming this way after," She says.

Weiss trots over, nodding. "Thanks for the help. I'll be sure to get my Time Machine out of their hooves before anything too bad can happen."

Suddenly, he punches Applejack in the kidneys, doubling her over with three separate fists that briefly flash with a black luster.

"Doesn't feel too good, does it?" Weiss says with a frown.

He spits out some black smoke onto the ground as his teeth regenerate painfully. "Let's get the hell out of here. I think I have a concussion."

With that said, they leave the coughing farm pony in search of Crusaders.

It's only via coincidence that they actually miss the fillies, who warp in on their Time Machine next to Applejack after they leave.

"Oh my gosh, Applejack!" Applebloom says, leaping out of the machine to help her sister up.

"What happened?!"

"Weiss, that lowdown snake, got me off guard." Applejack coughs.

Applebloom gasps as her friends come up as well. "He's been after us all day!"

Applejack nods, slowly working through the pain as she stands up with help from her little sister. "He's after that thing y'all are riding around in. And he's mad."

Sweetie Belle ponders this. "Maybe if we keep him from getting mad, he won't be acting so crazy! Let's go back to this morning and try to calm him down before he can hurt Applejack!"

The two nod, ignoring Applejack's frantic headshaking as they hop into the machine and warp away.

"Alright Applejack, gotta pony up and get some ice," The mare mutters to herself, slowly walking inside to get some relief for the painful bruises that damn unicorn gave her.

Maybe Big Mac won't mind if she gets into his hard cider...

She's confused to find Applebloom in the livingroom, with some ice packs and pain medicine ready.

"You alright, Sis? Need some help?" The filly says, bringing a glass of water and asperin.

"How'd you get here?" Applejack asks, confused.

"I've been here for a few hours, uhh, it's a time travel thing. I'm supposed to hang out here for the rest of today," Applebloom shrugs, smiling awkwardly.

Applejack takes the asperin and downs it. It's going to be a long day.

"Yer grounded, by the way," Applejack says casually.

Applebloom just nods, like she knew Applejack was going to say that.

Yeah. Long day indeed.

"Alright girls, here's the plan, we'll just go to the end of today, and ask our future selves if we managed to get our cutie marks for whatever it was we were going to end up doing, then, if none of those worked, we can try something different next time!" Sweetie Belle explains, dialing the machine for the end of the current day.

The machine rumbles and shakes, taking them through time to the clubhouse of the future, but when they arrive, their future selves run towards them, leaping out of the clubhouse.

"Y'all gotta fire this thing up, Whis or whatever his name is is comin'!" Applebloom shouts as the Future Crusaders scramble up into the time machine.

"Hey, what the heck are y'all doin?!" Applebloom shouts as her future self kicks her by mistake climbing in.

Suddenly, the Clubhouse's door flies open, Weiss Noir running forward.

"I finally found you brats, now get the hell out of my Time Machine!" He shouts angrily.

He unleashes a wave of force that coincidentally knocks the past Crusaders out of the machine as he runs towards them.

Future Sweetie Belle shouts after them. "Just run! We left our time machine behind the barn! You can make it!"

With that said, the Future Crusaders warp away in their time machine before Weiss can reach them, and the Past Crusaders scramble back as Weiss roars with the promise of violence.

"When I get my hands on you kids, I'm going to disassemble your molecules!" He shouts, prompting them to run.

"Why's he chasing us?!" Scootaloo shouts, leaping up over a magical blast as they run through the forest of apple trees.

"I don't know, but I don't want to find out the hard way!" Sweetie Belle says, as they take a hard right towards the barn.

Applebloom, spotting, wouldn't you guess it, an apple tree, has an idea and kicks it hard before continuing to run.

The yelps of pain from behind them indicates that the falling apples managed to distract the mad unicorn.

"Damn it, why is it always the face?!" Weiss shouts when an apple hits him right in the same spot where Applejack kicked him hours before, sending waves of pain through his head.

They finally spot it, the Time Machine their future selves had left behind the Apple Family Barn.

Jumping inside, they spot Weiss glaring at them, his two minions running up to either side.

"Don't you dare! I'm going to make what I did to Applejack look like a damn massage if you brats don't get out of that machine right now!"

"Applejack's hurt? Sweetie Belle!" Applebloom shouts, making her friend nod as she punches in the coordinates.

With a screech of frustration, the mildly concussed Weiss leaps for the machine, but it fades out of reality before he can grab it.

"We gotta check on my sis, it sounds like he mighta hurt her!" Applebloom says, as the machine crests the time waves back to earlier today.

The fillies ride the waves of time elsewhen, when Scootaloo groans. "Man, I can't believe we ticked off Weiss like that. I guess we aren't getting our cutie marks for calming ponies down."

Applebloom shrugs. "Let's just head to the clubhouse and take a break, Ah'm getting kinda sick of all this zipping around, and I'm startin' to get the feeling we're just loopin around without actually changing anything..."

The other two nod in approval, and they dial the machine to take them to the Cutie Mark Crusader's clubhouse.

When the machine arrives at the wrong location, plopping down behind the barn instead, Sweetie Belle sweats slightly.

"Uhh, girls, doesn't this look kind of familiar?"

Scootaloo is the first to catch on. "Oh man, we're about to show up at the clubhouse, we've got to warn, uh... Us!"

Hopping out of the time machine, the trio gallop through the forest to their clubhouse, unaware of Weiss Noir and his minions near enough to spot their loud scrambling.

"Well, looks like they're finally making a break for it. I'll go get them and find out where they stashed the machine, you two get to searching. If it's around here, I want it found."

Grubber and Tempest salute, while Weiss Noir himself stalks into the forest, intent on catching those little annoyances before they can muddle up the time stream even more than they already have.

As a matter of fact... He's got an idea.

He opens a portal, pulling out a small crystal which he holds to his ear.

"Sunset. I need a favor. Go to Star Road for me, and wait for a Time Machine. A couple of brats stole yours and took it on a joyride. Grab all three of them the instant they come out. I don't know why, but I believe they're going to pop up there. If they don't, tough luck, I still want you to wait there. Call me when you get them. Got it?"

Some high pitched muttering from the other end confirms that Sunset heard his orders, and is exacting them.

"Good, over and out."

He portals the phone crystal away, rubbing his aching head.

"I swear that apple bitch cracked my skull. Christ this hurts."

Shaking his head as if it would sooth the pain, he continues his walk into the forest in hunt of Crusaders.

Sunset has no earthly idea why Weiss told her to come here. Whatever.

"So what exactly is Weiss paying you guys for, anyway?" Sunset asks one of the former Storm Soldiers, who just responds with a shrug, before going back to eating their sandwich.

Sunset doesn't have much else to say to them, and the silence passes awkwardly.

She levitates up a chunk of soil from the Star Road, studying it curiously. She drops it in shock when a small ring sweeps over the clod of dirt, leaving it weightless.

"Huh. Enchanted soil."

Sunset continues to wait, until a rumbling noise alerts her to her Time Machine materializing in front of her. Standing to her hooves, she prepares her magic, snatching the three fillies when the hatch hisses open.

"Ahh! Please don't vaporize us, we brought it back!" Sweetie Belle shouts, eyes squinted shut.

Sunset pulls out her communication crystal. "Weiss, I've got them. What do you want me to do now?"

Some low pitched mumbling leaves her slightly confused.

"Why this morning? Oh," Sunset responds as Weiss explains part of the confusing events leading up to now.

Sunset turns to the three fillies. "You've got an apology to make to Weiss."

"What? Why do we gotta apologize? He was chasing us like a madpony!" Scootaloo complains, as Sunset plops them all into the machine and dials it for several hours ago.

"Because what you did was very reckless, and this machine isn't a toy," Sunset explains with exasperation as they ride the timeline backwards to this exact location.

Finally, the yellow soil of the floating fortress begins to shake and shudder, as in the air above the Star Road, their time machine rematerializes and floats down.

The Fizz get out of the way and stand at attention in response to the unknown threat, while Weiss simply looks annoyed and confused.

Finally, the machine lands, and the cockpit hisses open, Sunset Shimmer hopping out while dragging three fillies by their ears.

"Hello, Weiss," Sunset says.

"You told me to bring these three here, to this point in time, they've got an apology to make, and a time machine to return."

Weiss just stares at them.

"You three have been using my Time Machine? Jumping around all day today?" He questions, dreading the answer.

'Man, today's going to get weird if they're bringing me into this.'

The Cutie Mark Crusaders nod nervously.

"We're sorry, Mr. Weiss, we were just trying to get our cutie marks, please don't disassemble our molecules..."

"What the heck are you three talking about? Wait, nevermind, please don't try to explain," Weiss rubs his nose with his right hand, while a second right hand rubs his forehead.

'And there it is. I must have gotten pissed and chased them around trying to get my machine back, if they think I'm going to atomize them. I probably used that exact threat since that's how perfectly safe teleportation works,' Weiss thinks to himself with a large amount of displeasure at the amount of work he's going to have to do today.

It's going to take all of his focus to play along with the ideal course of events and try to bootstrap his ignorance into a safe, not-dangerous sequence of timeloops.

He takes a deep breath, trying to stave off a headache he can just sense coming.

'Ok, send them home, get the originals out of the way, then go into town until they piss me off badly enough to hunt them down and fulfill the loop. I'll give the soldiers the day off too, to minimize variables.'

Finally, Sunset manages to track down Weiss, who had apparently gone to Sugarcube Corner to eat cupcakes.

Walking inside, she spots him and Tempest's lackey, chowing down on cupcakes.

"So, is there any reason why you threatened a bunch of kids and chased them around firing off dangerous magic attacks, or was that just today's entertainment?" Sunset says, plopping down in a seat across from Weiss, as Pinkie comes over and provides him with another cupcake.

Weiss just shrugs. "Time Travel is for immortals and fools.

"They were scared of me, which means I had to have done something to scare them. Which means now I have to go and do something to scare them sometime today. The fact that they're alive means I won't succeed even if I broke out every combat spell in the book, and the fact that you brought them to this morning means that future me knows that, and told you to take them to this morning, because he figured out what was going to happen."

Weiss chuckles, taking a bite from his pastry. "And people wonder why I hate time travel."

Sunset gives him a curious look. "But if that were the case, then why didn't you just act nicely to them, and have all of this play out differently?"

Weiss frowns. "Because I will have haven't. If I don't do it on purpose, then that just means I'll have done it on accident, and the time loop will conclude accordingly. The only thing I can control at this point is how it plays out based on my own ignorance.

"The kids are going to run around, try to change the past, coincidentally ensure that the past plays out exactly the way that they were trying to keep it from playing out as, and then they're going to try and return my time machine, take it to Star Road, and then I'm going to call the past-you to go catch them. Try to avoid meeting yourself, by the way. It will just make things get even weirder until past you goes back in time and becomes you-you."

Sunset swears that she tastes copper for a moment. "Alright. I'm going to go, this is entirely too confusing."

"Have a nice day!" Weiss calls out, after her as she walks out of Sugarcube corner with a small migraine, trotting past Tempest Shadow, who looks angry about something as she storms past her.

As Sunset finishes recounting the story to Twilight, the unicorn shudders.

"That sounds awful. Remind me to never mess with time travel magic."

Sunset just nods, taking a sip of her tea.

"I regret looking at the Time Machine's security camera footage. I believe Weiss's exact words on the matter were 'Just don't think about it too hard, it'll just piss you off and it still won't make sense'."

Twilight nods at the sage advice.

"Spike, take a letter," She says, prompting the baby dragon to pull out his quill and paper.

"Dear Princess Celestia,

Today I've learned that time travel will give you a headache, even if it's only explained to you through a third-party. It is much better to try and forget that any instances of time travel happened, so as to save yourself the time and headache powder.

Yours truly, Twilight Sparkle.

PS. This isn't technically a friendship report, strictly speaking, but it is something important I learned from a friend."

Weiss knows she's taunting him at this point. Every time he's seen her since Sunset had begun to translate his book, she had that smug, self-assured smile on her face. As though he wasn't a threat anymore, now that she knew his playbook.

But this time is different. This time, he's not going to use a sneaky trick.

He's not sure what kind of pony could have enough magical power to do what he can do with his delightful, wonderful dark magics, but he's sure that no ponies exist that could defeat what he has created on their own.

Oh it was excruciating. For weeks, Weiss had fought to empower the almost expired Stoppered Time with his most powerful magics by using his most powerful Dark Materia to ensure he cast the exact same spell into it each day. Weeks of not being able to sleep because he had to be awake to cast the spells without his Arcana Nox.

Now he has a SSS+ Rank Vance. Now he has the firepower needed to remind Celestia of why she needed the Elements and Weapons both to take him down the first time.

Now the games can finally begin.

(Weiss Report) Changing Gears [Color of Arms]

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Princess, I wanted to get your opinion on this. Have you ever seen Weiss Noir use anything like what he details in the following entries? If not, I'm concerned he may yet be hiding the lion's share of his power. Furthermore, this is yet another magic which I believe could serve to better ponykind.

I'll be sure to have a look at it as soon as I am able, Sunset. If it concerns you that much.

Entry Number Thirty-Five, Year Two

Well, it's not as good as real Armament Haki, but mixing graphene into my Shadow Clones was the smartest thing I ever started doing. Almost unnoticeable, no real counterplay or downsides, and it's incredibly effective. The only real flaw is that I can't use it both invisibly and rapidly. If I grow the Royal Cloth too quickly, it changes the color of my Shadow Clone to black as it briefly rejects and regenerates itself.

This technique only works on Shadow Clones, due to graphene of any kind being a potentially toxic substance, sadly, but I've been pondering the matter. The biggest point of pondering has been on two fronts. Making it safe, and making it cheap. Royal Crystal Growth is an expensive spell. There's no getting around that, however, I've been considering a few things about spellcasting's most basal forms.

I already know that Black Flames can destroy any crystal I create with contemptuous ease, as the crystals themselves react to my desires. Could I expand on this, and create a variant spell of Royal Crystal Growth that is temporary and fleeting, instead of permanent and sustained? Do I even need Black Flames to destroy crystals that I have created, or could I create the crystals in such a way that they naturally cease to be, shortly after I create them?

The answer to that question is yes. Through will and desire alone, I am able to cast the spell in such a fashion that it decays into nothing shortly after casting. The secret, I have discovered, is to appreciate the beauty of something that is fleeting, and to breed a mindset in which things that are not eternal can be coveted just as much as those that are. Gems, crystals, gold and stones, all things which last a long time. But aren't there other things that could inspire greed in me? Things which aren't as long lasting?

Things exist within this world which are all the more beautiful for their briefness and mortality. Flowers, paint and songs alike. Without that understanding, the Royal Crystal Growth spell will not allow you to include a self-destruct function in it, it rebels against the idea of something being taken away from it's caster. Born from Avarice, this is a part of it's nature which must be expanded upon in order to achieve Arcane Apoptosis.

It is once again that one must make whole dark feelings in order to master them, where rejecting them will serve no purpose. While I can't inflate my bones like balloons, I think harnessing this new Color of Arms will be a stepping stone to unlocking new gears of my own in combat. I may even be able to risk using the technique without a proxy, so long as I have a method to heal the damage caused by the Royal Cloth appearing in my hide. It might be worth looking into training to thicken my skin, maybe with some sort of method of abrasion. Thicker skin gives me more to work with, if I'm going to be infusing it with magically conjured armor in a fight.

Now that I've learned Arcane Apoptosis, my Bound Swords have officially become costless. The blend of Dragon Magic returning my strength when I destroy them, paired with the utterly low cost of manifesting them from temporary crystal instead of permanent crystal means that I can summon blades freely, and dismiss them freely. Something that I believe will serve me well in a fight, allowing me to mix and match true and false Bound Swords that I discard, confusing my enemies, and arranging any battlefield to my liking with my litter.

But what is far... far more important is. There is now nothing stopping me from utilizing the pressurizing effects of Royal Crystal Growth at my leisure. There's no longer danger in possibly leaving behind enough of my scraps for someone to reverse engineer. I need merely to produce a weapon, pressurize it with Royal Ice, and unleash it's fury, only for it and everything comprising it to decay as quickly as they erupt. It will be yet another spike in my power, to use the Wave Motion Gun freely.

By combining it with my Shadow Clone technique, and principles derived from my Eyerocs, I believe I can even create a combat-ready Shadow Clone, and by powering it's strength with hydraulic pressure, it should be as strong as the substances I use to create it can physically withstand. And, as my many years have taught me, there exist materials that can withstand a very great deal indeed. I think, since it involves using Royal Water to enhance the musculature of one of my Shadow Clones, I'll call the technique... "Kelpie Gear".

I have indeed seen some of what this entry describes. Weiss had never seen fit to explain the blackening of his limbs in combat, but I had my suspicions. What may interest you to know, however, is just how infrequently I have seen it. Either he is very clever with hiding the tell, or he uses his Shadow Clone very rarely, as I've only seen him use it in a few circumstances.

As for his "Wave Motion Gun", I've only seen it used once, personally. And I believe that it was before he gained the ability to dismiss what he created. The streets were flooded with purple water, and he frantically obliterated the construct with a Black Flame almost as destructive as the Wave Motion Gun itself. His paranoia knew no bounds in those days, when it came to his most secretive techniques.

And lastly, I have seen the strength of his Kelpie Gear once before, and it failed to match Luna's in an outright test. Despite his visible efforts. It would take far more muscles than he has to match an alicorn's strength. No matter how much water he bloats them with.

Do you think he's improved upon these techniques since then?

It's possible. Why do you ask?

I'm just... Curious. If he has, he hasn't written it down.

Well, I suppose there's nothing to be done about it. It's not as though you can simply ask him.

...

(Past Chapter 13): The End of The Beginning

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So long as I'm protecting the Shadow Realm, I can't ever lose again.

Now that I've started using the newly christened "Arcana Liber" to handle collating the opinions of the Shadow Realm, productivity has shot up. Nearly my entire timeslot devoted to office hours has been me sitting bored in my office, now that there's not as much need for me to personally meet with representatives. I wonder if Celestia has started her weirdass Open Court thing. Maybe I should do something like that, but obviously not as poorly as she implemented it. Maybe something like me vetting private meetings with individuals, or video conferences in an Arcana Nox server?

Someone finally comes into my office, a primly dressed mare I recognize. She's one of the ones to have been volunteering to go around the four Cells of the Shadow Realm and get opinions previously. She still sends them to me, but now they're much more manageable.

"Sir, I'm just here for a small report, there's been a few ponies who are curious about Project Howl. I just thought I'd tell you, and suggest that you perhaps distribute some clearer information on it later."

I nod. "I'll be sure to do that Mrs. Share, is there anything else?"

She shakes her head. "No, it's been pretty dead in the offices, now that we've moved to using digital management, sir. I'll send you a dream if anything comes up."

A "Dream". I never would have come up with a term like that. Well, people are funny. "Alright. Have a nice day, Mrs. Share."

She nods, trotting out and closing the door behind her softly.

I hum to myself, thinking about what projects I could develop next. Maybe do some more public appearances with Doctor and his kids.

I'm shocked at how quickly the Shadow Realm's attitude changed about the little dragons when the red one got into a fistfight with some pony in the street. They just instantly fell in love with the dragons after he punched that one pony's lights out. The Hidden Palace Zone's Black Flame furnace has got to be messing with our heads, somehow. Or maybe it's not a direct consequence, but a side effect of the citizens being allowed to express their anger so freely after escaping the Crystal Empire.

At least I was able to convince them to restrict fighting to appropriate buildings, and start using safety gear. I just had to market the stuff as "Civilian Armor", and suddenly it's in fashion for everyone outside of Wacky Workbench to be decked out in padded wraps, bike helmets and softened horseshoes.

Despite the sharp increase in ponies just... deciding to get into fights... Satisfaction has been higher than ever. They're just getting it out of their system, and then going right back to being as friendly as can be. Almost like the Black Flame furnace itself. Sucking the hate up, and turning it into warmth. There's probably something poetic to say about that, but for the life of me, I can't think of anything.

Yeah. I think I will check on Doctor. He's not a psychologist, but maybe he can give me an idea of why my ponies are turning into a bunch of saiyans. And little Padparadscha is always a treat to visit.

I press a hoof softly onto my intercom. "Tablet, if anyone calls, tell them I'm out for a long lunch. I'm straight up ghosting today."

"Yes sir, Lord Weiss."

And with that, I limp my way out of my office.

"Yes, sir. It has been rather strange, but I've already looked into the matter. There's no external force that's causing the effect. It's almost like something is being drawn out of the ponies instead. Due in no small part to the Shadow Realm's structure and activity, I'm certain," Doctor tells me.

"There's a lot of high-energy entertainment to be had, there's a war going on, however quietly we may be waging it, ponies are warm and fed. This sort of environment is going to make ponies more bold."

I nod, taking a sip of my tea with a grimace. I'm not really a fan of tea. "How have the little ones been treating you?" I say, changing the topic.

He tries not to encourage my smug expression too much, when he responds. "It's been fine. They're good listeners. Ruby has been soaking up everything I say like a sponge.

"I believe they may not have the same hoarding instincts as ordinary dragons, though. I've had to apologize on Sapphire's behalf more than once. He seems to enjoy stealing things and then leaving them in random places, with no rhyme or reason."

I chuckle at that. "Now that sounds fun."

Doctor nods. "It's not."

I hum to myself. "Any luck on project Senzu, Doctor? I'm sure I'm not the only one who would like a speedier recovery for my injuries."

Doctor nods again. "We've been working as fast as we can. I'll let you know when we have something."

Through Doctor's doorway, the little Padparadscha waddles in, nightvision goggles hanging loosely on his head. "Hi uncle, can I go hang out with Boolean, Doc? I done my work already."

"Yes, Paddy, you may. Take Ruby with you, please, Boolean's father has some research I'd like him to pick up," Doctor responds smoothly.

I hide my smile behind another sip of tea. "Work?"

Doctor looks a bit nervous. "Well, I have to teach them something. And they seem reasonably interested in biology. Ruby has chosen to be Dr. Axiom's apprentice, though. He has a real head for numbers."

I chuckle, mostly unfamiliar with the way the Crystal Empire handled it's education. A lot of ponies opt for apprenticeships over engaging with a school. That sort of bit me in the ass when I had to repurpose more than twenty school buildings that would have gone mostly empty, had I attempted to enforce my poorly thought out ideas for public schooling.

"I trust they'll be even more skilled than yourself, one day," I say, nodding with confidence.

"I also trust you've been treating them well? I did ask that you only extract data from them through observation, if you were going to do as you had planned."

Doctor nods much more rapidly. "I couldn't bring myself to bring them any harm or discomfort like that. They've been too good to me, sir."

That eases at least one of my fears. I'll skim over the security footage later today, to see if Doctor has gotten better at morality, or just better at lying.

"So where is Sapphire, then?" I question.

Doctor takes a drink of his own tea. "Oh he's at one of the stadiums. He's started playing Duel Monsters. I don't understand that game, but both he and Ruby seem to enjoy it."

"Tunnel 12-D Center Stadium? Isn't that normally for golem combat?" I question, trying to remember all of the stadiums in Wacky Workbench.

Doctor shakes his head. "No, the 13-B Center Stadium in Hidden Palace. He commutes there from time to time whenever he's ahead on his work."

I nod. That makes sense. "Pardon my ignorance, but, how exactly did they learn so much in a week?"

Doctor shrugs. "Magic. They were made to be a certain age, and they started acting it. I'm unable to give you a better answer right now."

I'll accept that for now, but it's certainly odd. Roughly a week after they're born, and they're speaking English, doing math and learning biology from the Royal Scientist himself.

I bet there's something useful to be found, studying that little phenomena.

"I'll head over there myself. I believe my student's friends play the game as well. Enjoy the rest of your day off, Doctor."

He nods. "As you command, Lord Weiss."

"Now, Elder Windego, attack his life points directly!" some blue kid shouts, as his monster unleashes a chilling blast of virtual ice at Sapphire, reducing his Life Points to zero.

Seems like this game has gotten pretty popular, judging from the packed stands.

"So, Eclipse, you like this game too?" I ask, looking askew at my student.

She shakes her head. "It's alright, but I'm mostly here to cheer on my friend Oil Slick, he's in the tournament too."

I nod at this. "That's an even better reason to be here than just being a fan. I'm here to check on Sapphire, myself."

"The dragon kid that was up there?" Eclipse asks for clarification, to which I nod.

Looking up at the stage, I see Sapphire is mostly taking the loss with grace, shaking the blue pony's hoof and probably saying something respectful. "Yup."

I slowly get up and limp my way down to the exit hall to meet up with the young drake, whose eyes widen when he spots me.

"Uncle," he states simply, looking me over.

I nod. "How have you been, Sapphire? Has Doctor been treating you well?" I ask, making him nod happily.

He points to the stands, indicating that he wants to watch the rest of the matches.

I just decide to acquiesce to the taciturn drake's request. As we walk back to the stands, he finally says what he had been chewing over since seeing me.

"You're healing, Uncle," Sapphire says simply.

"Slower than I'd like, but yes, I am," I confirm.

As we walk into the stands and take our seats, he speaks up again, as evenly as before. "I lost the game, uncle."

I nod. "That's not a bad thing. It's harder to grow when you don't lose once in a while."

Sapphire doesn't respond to that, but his eyes squint a bit as he chews on my words.

The Ref steps up on stage. "The next match will be between Oil Slick and Cabal Counter, as the final round of the Hidden Palace Duel Monsters Championship!"

Eclipse stomps and cheers while I stare on. I stand to my feet, much to Eclipse Flash and Sapphire's confusion, before summoning my armor and activating the silent alarm.

Instantly, ponies are quietly and rapidly leaving the stadium, dragging others along with them as the guards' radio crystals signal an alert.

Half of the ponies have already run, two particularly fast guards leading out Eclipse and Sapphire, the former of whom is shouting in confusion as to what's going on.

I sense it before I see it. That feeling of looking out from inside a mirror.

In the middle of the stadium, rising up from the holographic field emitter, Sombra appears in a slowly roiling cloud of smoke, smiling as brightly as the fires of hell.

"My, my. Look at this. Like rats, scrambling around in the dirt. Trapped in the dark.

"That's no way to live... No way at all," King Sombra tsks.

The dark king turns to face Weiss, who is standing tall in the stands alone, slowly walking around to the stairway leading down, never breaking eye contact with the dark ruler.

"And the king among the rats. Rising to the top, and yet still crawling underneath.

"Just to hurry things along, I'd like to let you know that there will be no more hiding," He says, throwing a small black dragon statue to the floor, where it cracks and splinters.

"I can track you into any hole you hide in. Well, aside from the one you've dug yourself into," Sombra chuckles.

Weiss pauses for a moment at the sight of the petrified Dragon of the Darkness Flame. After staring at it for a moment, Weiss simply continues his silent walk towards Sombra, while the rest of the ponies run away and vacate the stadium.

"What's wrong, cat got your tongue?

"Does the specter not speak?" Sombra questions, stepping forward.

Weiss's eyes narrow for a split second. "Shadowus!"

A tidal wave of black flames wash out from Weiss's horn, flooding the entire room and the various tunnels in front of him, as he jerks to the side and limps behind a pillar while the room is still darkened by the light devouring fire.

'Just have to hold him off until they can evacuate.'

The flames abate, leaving a surprised Sombra lowering a magical shield. "My, so quick to violence. I hope you aren't counting on hiding from me, now that I can sense you and your silly flames."

He chuckles, stalking forward. "Oh, who am I kidding. I really hope that's what you're counting on. It'll make things very entertaining."

Weiss considers this for a moment, before a sharp jolt of pain runs through his leg. 'Damn it, I'm not ready for this fight.'

"Trapfloor, Trapflora" Weiss whispers, making the ground around him flash twice, before he launches himself backwards, out of the way of Sombra's attack spell.

The blast of green and purple magic strikes the pillar, causing it to erupt in black crystals that spread over the ground like a blanket. Underneath, a flash of light signals Weiss's spell going off, as spires of purple crystal try to erupt and fail, only cracking the layer of Sombra's crystal smothering them.

Sombra laughs. "This is just cute. Like watching a child play pretend. Did you think I would fall for a trap like that? That I couldn't disarm it?" He comments casually, as he walks onto the cracked crystals and stalks closer to Weiss.

Suddenly, the floor flashes again, brighter than before, as Sombra tries to leap back before twelve gigantic purple thorns rip through the cracked black glass, spearing through Sombra's body, and forcing him into his shadow form.

'They always fall for the second one,' Weiss thinks, limping towards an exit while Sombra tries to reform as more and more crystal thorns rip up from the ground around him.

Stepping into the archway, Weiss creates a layer of stone that makes the exit he used look like a smooth patch of wall. It won't stop Sombra from figuring out where he is, but it might make Sombra try using a different route to get to him.

He activates his Radio Crystal. "Report, is Hidden Palace evacuated yet?"

"Negative, sir. Crystals have grown up all over the Fast Travel station, we're trying to break through them, but we need more time!"

Weiss curses. "Keep trying, mine around the crystals if you have to, but get those ponies out of there, I'm going to try and lure him to the Black Flame Furnace, keep all guards off of that route."

The wall behind Weiss explodes, as a much less amused Sombra walks forward. "I'll be honest, you're really not all that enjoyable to fight."

"Death Beam!" Weiss shouts, waving his head around to manually sweep the beam across the tunnel. Without his Divine Words, he's even less prepared than normal for this fight.

Sombra just frowns as the tunnel collapses on him. Weiss ignores this and continues limping towards the furnace as fast as he can.

"Please, you have to tell me what's going on, where is Weiss?!" Priss shouts as the burly guard escorts her near one of the blocked off Fast Travel stations.

"He's trying to buy us some time," The guard responds plainly

'Time? Time for what?' Priss thinks to herself, before making the connection between the black crystals blocking the exits, the sudden and full evacuation, and Weiss himself fighting whatever it is that's threatening Hidden Palace.

She breaks out into a cold sweat.

"There has to be something we can do to help!" Priss says, but the guard doesn't respond, unknowing.

Eclipse runs up at this point, followed by Captain Iron Diamond. "Priss, can you break into Weiss's room?" Priss nods, as a plan is formed.

Iron Diamond explains. "Dr. Real is on his way with the Heavy Lobster, but it won't activate without Weiss's magical signature. Eclipse thinks we can use one of his Materia."

Iron receives a report through his helmet radio that makes him pale.

"Let's hurry."

Sombra walks out of the rubble, coming face to face with a wall. hastily erected in the tunnel.

Rolling his eyes, he begins to speak. "Really? What's next, curling up in a ball? This is the magical equivalent of doing that, in case you were unaware."

With a lit horn, Sombra blasts through the wall, which unleashes a geyser of purple water that crashes into him, flooding the tunnel.

Narrowing his eyes, Sombra takes the form of smoke in the water, slipping through the cracks and emerging on the other side, dry as bones.

This is rapidly turning into the most annoying battle Sombra has ever fought.

He finds the panting, limping foal of a unicorn standing next to a strange glowing square, covered in symbols being projected from the wall.

He tilts his head. "You know, if you just give up now, I'll be nice and kill you on the spot. It's downright uncharacteristic for me to be that merciful, you know."

What Sombra fails to realize is that this particular tunnel is one of the venting chambers for the Black Flame Furnace. And while Weiss isn't certain that a blast from that would kill Sombra, he's more than certain that turning the fans on will worsen Sombra's day.

"Flare! Flarus Sword!" Weiss shouts one after the other, releasing a wave of red fire down the tunnel, which Sombra blocks with contemptuous ease using a magical barrier.

What he fails to block, however, is the white-hot beam of plasma that pierces through the shield and his head, hidden by the bright puff of fire in front of it.

As Sombra's body turns into smoke, he feels disoriented when a sudden howling wind rushes through the tunnels, throwing him around and sucking him backwards after Weiss presses the holographic keys to turn on the Black Flame Furnace's ventilation fans.

He returns to normal just in time to hear Weiss shout again. "Shadowus Sword!"

Shadow Form again and more tumbling for Sombra, this time from a lance of black fire piercing his chest.

Sombra growls, flexing his magical power and casting a much more potent shield spell, more than suitable to block the rest of this cretin's pitiful magic.

"Alright, you've officially-" Sombra looks down the hallway, but Weiss has already stumbled away deeper inside.

Sombra's teeth grit. "I'm going to enjoy breaking this rat like crystal crackers."

He decides to keep the full power barrier up this time. No more falling for these idiotic two-part attacks.

The black crystal wall cracks, and then it shatters entirely as the rail-bound vehicle crashes through it, the crystal shipping crate on top of it skidding and trailing sparks everywhere as everyone nearby backs up for safety.

With four distinct clicks, The crate falls apart, revealing a gigantic, crab-like monstrosity, made entirely of a blend of Orichalcum and Adamantium, woven into one another forming large, bulbous armor plates.

Eclipse Flash runs over, holding up the pitch black sphere. Weiss's "Black Flame" Dark Materia. Priss follows shortly behind.

"I've got it!" She shouts, handing it off to Iron Diamond who tests it out, his posture briefly turning slack and casual before a puff of black fire erupts from his forehead.

"Let's hope this works," Iron Diamond nods, walking up to the machine and using the Materia to spoof his identity as Weiss. With a loud hiss, the Heavy Lobster unfolds, revealing a complex looking seat. Dr. Real runs up to explain.

"The cockpit was recently redesigned with the Arcana Nox in mind, you just have to get inside, and you'll be able to control it directly. Keep in mind, Weiss never designed this machine to combat Sombra, only delay him. You've got less than an hour before most of the fuel tanks and crystals are drained entirely, so don't waste it."

Iron Diamond just nods again. "I'll get in there, pull Weiss's ass out of the fire, and get out."

He activates his radio. "Weiss, you still with us? Where are you?"

"Fuck off Iron. You're not throwing your life away today," Weiss snaps back with a whisper, soft asynchronous hoofsteps clacking over the other end.

"I've got your Lobster," Iron responds.

Weiss, on the other end, shakes his head. "That won't work, I'm almost at the furnace, and-"

"Good, I'll bring it there. Hold tight," Iron Diamond says, hoof already moving up to his helmet.

"No! You idiot, don't-" Iron hangs up on Weiss, interrupting him as Iron hops into the cockpit.

As the machine hisses shut, it begins to dispense sleep gas that rapidly knocks Iron Diamond out.

The captain falls asleep to the sight of a complex looking heads-up-display, and moves his hoof. Instead of a hoof, however, a giant crab claw is moved in front of his face.

"This'll work."

Activating the rocket boosters, the Heavy Lobster shrieks down the tunnels, following the inbuilt map to the dark furnace's depths.

"Fuck me I wish I had some of my killbox rooms deeper down in the tunnels." Weiss says to himself, slowly stumbling into the Black Fire Furnace's antechamber, the massive pit in front of him roaring with a pillar of pitch black fire.

"How was I supposed to know people wouldn't use the damn entrances to attack?"

His armor is cracked in places, and most of it has been thrown free of his body automatically by the enchantments in it the instant one of Sombra's crystal curses struck any part of his armor.

Having realized that his signature spell isn't working, Sombra had switched to much more effective direct combat spells, blasts of elemental fury and beams of magical energy striking Weiss and punching through him in various spots.

Holding out a hoof over the pit, Weiss confirms his theory. The flame made up of the Shadow Realm Citizens' hatred isn't harming him directly.

He resummons his armor. "NulAll, Protect."

As the mixture of Royal Cloth and Royal Vibranium sweeps back over his injuries, he's left looking mostly unharmed, if he wasn't swaying so much.

Sombra walks in angrily, surrounded in a skintight layer of magic repulsion.

"You can't keep running forever, I can tell just by looking at you that you're bleeding out. How many more hits do you think it will take?" Sombra asks, curiously.

I laugh. "You're a fucking idiot."

Oh yeah, that pissed him off.

"Why do you think I brought you here? You can sense me, right? That's how you've been following me around?

"Well, that ends here," I state, before using a pillar of Royal Crystal to fling myself across the gap, through the Black Flames in the middle of the room.

Landing painfully on the other side, I unleash a sweeping Flara Sword across the room as a distraction while I prepare my real technique.

"So even when it's impossible, your answer is to try and hide from me? You don't understand how sensory magic works, do you?" He says, his voice echoing around the towering room.

"Oh I've got a few ideas." I mumble to myself.

"Foxfire," I whisper, as I expend some of my real inner magic to painfully create two suits of armor like mine, and fill them with shapeshifting black flames. Making sure they're limping correctly, I send one of them walking around the pit to the right, as I walk around the pit on the left side. Both of us entering Sombra's line of sight at the same time.

"You're really beginning to put my patience to limits I've never before experienced. You know I can still sense you, even with this twisted little decoration between us, right? Standing on the other side of a fire doesn't make you invisible to me."

The clone behind the flames begins to speak, just as planned. "Oh trust me, Sombra. If I were trying to hide from you, your patience would reach it's end."

Meanwhile, I myself prepare to unleash one of my forbidden techniques.

"Wave Motion G-" Suddenly, I'm interrupted by a loud crash. That dumb bastard!

I see Iron Diamond has completely disobeyed my orders and tried to bring that thing here, and, just as I was hoping he wouldn't, he tried to fit it inside the Hate Furnace reactor chamber...

"I tried to tell you, you dumb bastard, the Heavy Lobster won't fit through the access tunnels, it's useless right now!" I shout angrily, before turning to Sombra.

"Wave Motion Gu-!" I attempt, before Sombra blasts me in the shoulder, sending me falling backwards towards the Black Flame, and into the unknown depths below.

(Noir Report) Convergent Evolution in the Development of Basic Spellcraft [Foxfire]

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Entry #13, Day 91

Is there any reason why, if Prestidigitonium can create flames through undirected force, that Black Flames cannot create movement with directed force?

The Black Flame spell is already capable of a great many things. More are achieved with each passing day. That being said, I have found the emotional components needed to tweak the Black Flame ever so slightly. Spite. By mixing in the barest hints of Spite, just a small drizzle of it for each ten parts of hatred, the Black Flame can be given physical presence, like it's namesake. It's not solid, but it becomes able to emit force.

Combining it with the ability to shape Black Flames, I will call this new variant Foxfire, and I'll be working to turn the flames blue as well, for more accuracy to it's source material. This spell's best use is in the creation of what I call Anima Mercury, an enchanted container of Foxfire which animates the object it is inserted into, so long as it is one whose shape can be parsed by the spell. I'm certain none reading this tome need a reminder on the usefulness of golems, but if they did, I would remind them that the only thing better than a good golem is a good golem made quickly.

Now, once you can create fire that impacts with physical force, the next step for all individuals who succeed at this is to use it as a weapon. Especially by combining it with the ability to shape black flames. So far, I have managed to fling fastballs, curveballs, and various loosely packed weapons made of nothing but that hateful flame. I've also been working to create an enchanted hilt, which emits the flames in the form of a saber.

A Darksaber, if you will.

The main flaw of this variant magic is that it consumes more magical power. Which makes sense, but is still annoying to me. In theory, at least, if one could somehow pack more spite into the spell without disrupting it from a lack of hatred, one could create a black flame which emits no heat, and is entirely solid. Of course, I have no evidence to support this theory, for now, at least.

By combining Foxfire with Royal Crystal Growth and Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation, a caster can rapidly create extremely crude golems by simply forming an empty, jointed shell, and then filling it with the force emitting flares and commanding it accordingly. A mastery of this technique is important, if one wishes to create golems in combat, as opposed to preparing them in advance. Otherwise, it would require that the user create enchantments which drain large amounts of magical energy and require unsuitable amounts of time. This alternative cuts the speed from painful minutes to life-saving seconds.

Another use of Foxfire is as an alternative to Prestidigitonium. As the flame itself is emitting raw force in all directions, it naturally forms an equilibrium that protects the caster from the worst effects of magical recoil. While I don't recommend stress testing it, this means that the user can safely assume that sustaining Foxfire won't meaningfully harm them in the heat of the moment, the way Prestidigitating force might.

I haven't yet worked out the ideal method by which to cast this spell within Unicorn Light, but when I do, I believe it might form the backbone of a very potent attack spell, as a beam which emits force to it's sides could rip apart anything it penetrates, creating a very lethal cavity, combined with the heat and destructive power of Black Flames themselves. Learning to do so will give any mage yet another powerful tool in their arsenal, suitable for destroying objects and monsters alike.

I am curious if a spell exists fueled solely by spite alone, and what effects it might have injected into the other spells of this tome. I've never been one to exhaustively explore combinatorial explosions, but in this one circumstance, I may make an exception. Force Emission is the foundation for many intriguing abilities. Not least of which is flight of both objects and persons. Even with Foxfire alone, I've been able to develop techniques and artifacts which allow for a limited amount of hovering over a surface, by emitting force between the ground and an object such as a board.

A... Hoverboard, if you will.

Foxfire can also be summoned as a brief explosion, instead of a sustained flame. This makes it a much simpler and safer way to perform a second jump in midair, as opposed to my previous methods of using summoned crystal pillars, or Prestidigitonium to launch myself with recoil. By emitting a pulse of Foxfire at one's feet, the caster can very briefly emit force sufficient to push off of, and, with a firm kick, could propel themselves higher than they would otherwise be able to.

I've discovered an interesting feature of Foxfire, if it isn't one unique to myself. Namely, that Foxfire is able to confuse methods of detection. The blend of Spite and Hate together make the flame capable of confusing golems and enchanted items. Unfortunately, I have my suspicions that this is merely because Spite and Hatred come so naturally to me that the spellwork can't distinguish between me and a mass of the emotions. I'll be sure to update my security accordingly, as it would be quite embarrassing for that to be the cause of a breach in it.

If other users do find this same property to occur in Foxfire, I urge you to contact me, so I may update the book accordingly. If that were the case, it would make Foxfire an excellent spell to combine with illusions, such that they can begin to fool automated systems as well as living creatures. A core of Foxfire buried in a mass of holographic illusion points could make a virtually undetectable body double.

Of course, if that turns out to be true, I'll have to start putting leaves on my head.

(Present Chapter 13): Spring Cleaning: Part 1

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Sunset Shimmer bursts into the dock, searching for Weiss, who she finds ordering around troops loading barrels and crates onto the newly upgraded airship. Tempest Shadow is watching one particular band of Fizz Troopers carry in a large glass bottle filled with round metal balls with a hawk-like stare that helps ensures they are very careful with it. It also ensures that they are sweating with nervousness under their commander's watchful gaze.

"Weiss! You can't seriously be preparing to siege Canterlot Castle, do you have any idea how many ponies could get hurt?!" Sunset shouts, prompting Weiss to raise a hand to stop Tempest from escorting the mare out.

"I've already got a letter written. I'll send it to Celestia so she'll know to evacuate everyone from the castle."

Sunset doubletakes at that. "What? You're just going to tell her that you're planning to siege her castle? You think she's just going to, what, send all the guards home for the day?"

Weiss shrugs. "She knows better than to send guards at me. It would be complete foolishness for her to do otherwise. I'll come in, rob her vault, and leave. She'll probably try to stop me herself, and I'll get the opportunity to remind her of the difference between casualness and disrespect."

He turns to look her in the eye. "Did you think there wouldn't be consequences for trivializing me and my secrets? If Celestia is going to break the rules when it comes to sussing out my tricks, then I'll just remind her that I don't need to be tricky to get what I want."

Sunset's eyes widen.

"When someone doesn't want to play games, Sunset, we find other things to do with our time."

She turns on the spot and gallops out of the door. Tempest Shadow approaches Weiss now that the potential danger has passed.

"I can't recommend against this more firmly than I am now, Sir. Telling the princess you plan to attack is completely unnecessary, and will only hurt our chances of a successful operation," Tempest warns.

Weiss just smiles vacantly, before pulling out a small scroll, and sending it off in a puff of dragonfire.

"It's not about the attack's success, Tempest. This is personal. Celestia is normally quite good about treating our rivalry with the respect and dignity it deserves, but cheating so she can read my book? Treating me like I'm washed up? That's a low blow. And when you cheat among those from the Shadow Realm, well.

"A penalty game is mandatory."

"Dear Princess Celestia,

This letter has been sent to inform you that I will soon lay siege to your castle, unironically, in order to take both the things that were once mine, and the things that I desire. I strongly urge you to face me yourself, alone, as I cannot assure the safety and health of any guards you attempt to throw beneath my hooves pointlessly. I await your timely response, and would like to know when you have completed your evacuation efforts accordingly so I may begin.

Yours truly, Lord Weiss Noir. Once-ruler of the Shadow Realm."

As Celestia reads over the letter, she's tempted to write it off as a joke, if she didn't know that Weiss was normally quite cautious with what he said.

Is this an attempt to trick her with his typical method of carefully choosing his words?

I-...

Is he hitt-

Suddenly, Sunset Shimmer arrives through a large portal. "Celestia, it's urgent, Weiss plans to attack Canterlot Castle!"

Oh thank goodness.

"I received a letter from Weiss to that effect, yes," Celestia nods.

"What do you think, Sunset?" Celestia asks, giving her former student the chance to offer an opinion.

"What do I think? I think we need to get the Elements Bearers here, amp up security, and stop him!" Sunset says hysterically, before Celestia lays a wing gently across her back.

"It's going to be alright, Sunset. Weiss has made an error if he believes I've grown soft without his annoying presence. I haven't spent a millennium eating cake and indulging in the peace I helped create, dear.

"I'll only need one guard to halt his little band of thugs, and only myself to halt him. He's behind the times if he's counting on his complex plans to overcome Canterlot's defenses."

Sunset doesn't respond, but her doubts aren't soothed by the princess's words.

"Shouldn't we at least bring the Element Bearers? The Elements of Harmony were able to imprison him once, surely they could do so again?"

Celestia shakes her head. "That would be a poor decision unless we're certain we can defeat him using the Elements. It was only when guilt consumed him that the Elements and Weapons of light were able to afflict him in the ancient past. He may no longer be vulnerable."

Sunset looks torn. "I think I may have done this, Celestia. He was talking about how you 'cheated' to read the Grimoire Weiss."

Celestia hums at that. "Weiss's code of conduct is strange, and convoluted. It does not surprise me that something so simple could have set him off. Please, don't worry, Sunset. I'm capable of defeating him. He's spent more than a thousand years falling behind the progress of magic and warfare in Equestria. He won't succeed here."

'But the Grimoire Noir alone was practically a thousand years ahead of Equestria's leading works of the era!' Sunset desperately wants to argue.

She just hums affirmatively.

"Wait, I might have an idea to stop all of this before it even starts!" Sunset says, leaping from Celestia's grip, and signaling to Spike to open up the portal again.

When the unicorn hops through and the gateway closes, Celestia simply sighs, and takes a stand, walking towards a certain other unicorn's office, her tea left ignored.

"Weiss, sir, you've demonstrated your talents are more suited for subterfuge and complex subversion of enemy defenses and attacks, why are we mounting a direct assault in the first place?" Tempest says, looking over Weiss's plan.

Step one: Use the airship to blast a hole in the castle and steal the entire, whole vault itself.
Step two: Weiss fights Celestia to cover the escape.

Weiss chuckles. "Tempest, that's just it. Celestia is expecting a plan. Raw force isn't a plan, so she won't be prepared for it. I've probably never used overwhelming power alone as a means to achieve my goals. It will confuse and disorient her.

"She's going to be waiting for the secret strategy that just isn't coming."

Tempest frowns. "If you're certain, sir."

Tempest Shadow certainly isn't...

"Do you have the portal bombs ready?" Weiss questions, to which she nods.

"All twenty of them."

"Good. If anything goes wrong, fire one of those off at the problem and it should disappear," Weiss explains.

She nods, and Weiss continues.

"Also, don't point the laser cannon at anything living, no matter what. If we end up killing someone, Celestia might escalate and call up the Elements, and I'm not positive that I'll walk away from a Care Bear Stare unscathed, even with my backup plan ready."

Tempest nods again.

Weiss cracks his fingers. "Now we wait."

Zecora is enjoying a small bowl of soup when her door is opened quickly, and a panting Sunset Shimmer walks in.

"Zecora, I need another favor, Weiss is going to attack Canterlot if I don't find some way to stop him," Sunset says, urgency in her tone.

Zecora ponders Sunset's words.

"If I continue wrangling Weiss, ~ He may stop acting quite so nice."

Sunset growls. "So you're just going to stand by and let him attack the capital of Equestria?"

Zecora shakes her head. "His honor drove him to obey me, ~ If I abused it, who would I be?

"In truth he asked my hoof I would stay ~ And had explained to me his plan today.

"He feels his honor has been harmed, you see ~ When one abused his hospitality."

Sunset growls. "Attacking Celestia and causing massive amounts of property damage aren't going to fix what happened to him!"

Zecora shrugs, sipping at her soup. "It is not me you must convince of that, ~ but the one who was harmed by lack of tact."

Sunset doesn't bother responding, instead turning around and making her way to Twilight's leafy book spire.

Twilight shakes her head. "I'm sorry, Sunset, but Spike was exhausted, sending you back and forth like that. He's napping right now trying to recover from magic exhaustion."

Sunset rubs her head. "Fine, I'll just..." She sighs.

"I don't know."

Twilight looks saddened. "We're just going to have to trust that the princess knows what she's talking about."

Sunset shakes her head. "I trust Celestia, but I don't trust Weiss. I'll take the train. Try to do something."

Twilight just stares on after Sunset as she walks out of the door. If Celestia hadn't expressly forbade her from coming to Canterlot after Weiss's threat, she would be there herself.

Weiss stands on the prow of the airship, waiting dramatically. Finally, after his long wait, he belches up a response.

♪"We just got a letter, we just got a letter, we just got a letter...

"Wonder who it's from?"♪ he sings softly, unrolling the scroll.

"Lord Weiss Noir,

I'd like to see you try.

Princess Celestia."

Weiss smiles to himself, before yelling back at The Fizz.

"Alright Tempest, let's get this show on the road! We just got our invite, and the party's a-waitin'!"

"Oh man, I hope there'll be cake at the party," Grubber says, chewing on a slice of cake.

The crew chuckles before Tempest begins authoritatively shouting them into action to prepare the ship.

From the Airship's sides, four massive machines open wide, apertures sliding open as streams of fire roar from them, lifting the ship into the air and then jerking it forward at high speeds. Only the magnet-foot enchantments on the deck keeping anything from flying off.

It won't be long now.

Celestia stands in the highest room of Canterlot Castle's tallest tower.

"Are you sure I can do this, Princess?" Shining Armor asks nervously, looking at the spec in the distance.

Celestia nods. "You're by far one of the strongest unicorns of this era. If you can repel Weiss's assault before it can even begin, it will demoralize him. And if you fail, it will be because he expended one of his carefully prepared solutions in order to subvert it. He normally uses magic to teleport around a barrier like this, but he hasn't faced our modern barrier magic yet.

"You'll do fine, Captain."

Shining Armor nods. "Alright, Princess."

That said, he begins charging his horn, before casting his legendary city-barrier, condensed to surround the castle itself in a nearly opaque sphere of pure magical might.

Luna, who was standing at the back of the room, suddenly stands to her hooves and makes to leave.

"Sister?" Celestia questions.

"I can't do it," Luna says, gritting her teeth.

"I don't want to see this. To see what he's become."

Celestia walks to stand by her sister. "Luna, what do you mean? Speak to me, please."

"I cannot face him as I am, Celestia, if it were not for me, he would have returned to the smiling faces of a waiting kingdom. Now he awaits nothing but ash and vengeance, and amuses himself by spreading suffering in the meantime. I can't face that."

Celestia simply hugs her sister, who is fighting tears. "You may return to your quarters, Luna. I'll take care of this, alright?"

Luna just nods, stalking back to the room that for the past several months has been her entire world in isolation.

Her sister placated for now, Celestia returns to the window, staring at the rapidly approaching ship.

"Are you sure you can handle him alone, Princess? I can still recall the guard, we've got the weapons needed to put down all sorts of monsters."

Celestia shakes her head. "Weiss is past his prime. If he spent days preparing a single spell, it wouldn't be enough to handle me."

The Eyeroc hanging from the ceiling giggles out loud, prompting her to look up.

She glares. "That's right Weiss. I'm calling you out."

She then destroys it with a searing ray and returns her gaze to the horizon, which is now marked with his airship hanging in the air, roaring flames keeping it aloft near the barrier.

She fails to notice the two other Eyerocs skittering along the ceiling, just out of sight.

Weiss chuckles. "She really brought out Surfing Armor for this little party? Now that's just impolite.

"Tempest, ready the Gaon Cannon," He commands, waving his hand dismissively.

"Grubber, prepare the Gaon Cannon," Tempest commands, waving her hoof dismissively.

In the bowels of the ship, Grubber receives the order himself and turns to the group of Storm Creatures, all of them shoveling diamonds into a gigantic glowing machine that only glows brighter by the minute as the enchanted carbonated water converts the diamonds into raw power through the magic of hatred.

"Guys, fire the Gaon Cannon!" Grubber commands, waving his candied apple dismissively.

One of The Fizz grins, pulling the lever, and allowing the large tube poking out of the front of the airship to unleash a beam of raw black that dims the sunny day around it briefly as it punches through Shining Armor's barrier dismissively.

In mere moments the barrier shatters, and the beam rips a smooth-edged hole in Canterlot Castle.

Spotting Celestia at a distance, Weiss takes the opportunity to wave giddily at her shocked face.

"Ahh, smells like Blast Day...

"Let's move in, folks, this is easy pickings."

With that said, the airship begins moving in, warping to the side when Celestia tries to use a blast of solar plasma to bring it down, triggering it's emergency teleport.

Weiss wags his finger at the distant princess. "Ah ah, no cheating."

Tensing his arms with a series of loud pops, Weiss transforms into a blazing ball of fire, ripping through the air towards the princess with a mad cackle.

Shining Armor is taken aback when his barrier is broken like peanut brittle, but he's much more concerned when Weiss Noir leaps off of the airship and starts screaming towards them.

Celestia glances at Shining Armor. "I'm going to teleport you to the vault. Protect it."

That said, Celestia's own mane erupts into flames, as she flaps her wings firmly and warps Shining Armor away.

She summons a barrier of her own, which Weiss's flaming form splatters over before reforming into the dark mage as he flips off of it and lands on the floor.

"Hi buddy!" Weiss shouts, whipping out a trio of black longswords from a set of portals, swinging them rapidly at the princess in three two-handed grips.

When they cleave through her shield spell as though it doesn't exist, she immediately sets to dodging the weapons until she can figure out how to counteract them.

"You know I'll have you imprisoned for this, yes?" Celestia says, ripping one of the blades out of his hands and into her telekinesis as she swipes at him with it.

Weiss laughs. "You quite literally cannot imprison me. Don't worry, you'll catch on."

With that said, Weiss flips his swords over, and, holding the blades, performs a twin mordhau on the blade in Celestia's telekinetic grip, the two crossguards striking the blade on both sides and shattering the sword she stole from him, spraying fragments of black crystal everywhere.

Celestia unleashes a wave of solar fire that floods the room, instantly turning the tower into slowly sinking magma.

Weiss drops the molten remains of his swords with disappointment, flexing one of his draconic limbs. "Come now, we're both creatures of flame, princess. You just did that to annoy me."

Princess Celestia responds by tackling him off of the tower and into the courtyard below.

"I'm fairly certain I can imprison you, Weiss. I know this isn't one of your Shadow Clones. I can see your soul, right in your chest." She says, holding a hoof to his neck.

Weiss giggles, staring up through a black eye and some small cuts. "Princess, you shouldn't believe everything you see. Especially when you're right."

That said, Weiss explodes into smoke, leaving behind a copper lamp as he reforms behind Celestia and bucks her in the neck with twin eruptions of steam, sending the princess flopping down the courtyard.

He reaches down and picks up the lamp, slowly sinking it inside of his chest as his body turns to smoke around it before reforming smooth fur and skin.

"Sometimes the truth hurts, Celestia."

Weiss chuckles, walking up to the dazed and concussed princess while summoning up a crystal dagger filled with pressurized liquid.

"And the truth is, I'm still imprisoned.

"So why don't you stop mocking me, and actually come out for our playdate, Celly?"

With that said, Weiss Noir stabs Princess Celestia in the stomach. The crystal blade erupts with a variety of enchantments designed to disrupt hatred, allowing it to easily penetrate her skin and magical fields.

Just as Celestia's pained expression intensifies, the dagger explodes, forcing Princess Celestia's Shadow Clone to turn into smoke, dispersing without the willpower needed to reform it.

The real princess teleports into the courtyard behind Weiss, looking as though she's in intense pain, though no wounds are on her body.

Weiss casually flips the used up dagger hilt between his fingers, before tossing it aside.

"See? Aren't things so much better when we get to see the real you? Stolen spells don't come with their master's mastery, princess."

"How were you able to cast the spell, then, if you are still trapped in the lamp?" Celestia demands.

Weiss shakes his head with disappointment. "Did you really think someone like me could break free from the Elements' curse? Of course not. They're the most powerful artifacts in this world. I couldn't move, I could barely even stay awake, princess. I certainly couldn't summon up my own magic for spellcasting.

"But one thing you obviously don't understand is that I forged the Shadow Clone technique myself, and I can do things with it that you can scarcely imagine.

"All it takes is Self-Loathing, Arrogant Egotism, and just a hint of Fear. Poor Gilda. She wanted so badly to believe she was in the right, but knew so desperately that she wasn't. When I felt those two emotions, well... I just couldn't help myself! I awoke from my slumber, and decided to give her a little scare.

"Arrogant Egotism, Self-Loathing, and just a hint of Fear, all in one tight, griffon-shaped package. Perfect for making my escape." Weiss smiles.

"But not even the Alicorn Amulet and the Minish Cap together are going to give me the power I need to truly open my prison. I'll need even more. Three new relics should be enough." Weiss finishes, smoothly, revealing his plan in no uncertain terms.

After a moment, he continues. "Honestly, I'm surprised you even let Bubble Boy in on our little brawl. I knew you wouldn't want ponies to see you fighting, now that everything's all peaceful and shit," Weiss says, stalking around the princess, watching her for any sort of reaction.

"That's why I gave you an out. I gave you an excuse for the two of us to fight, no holds barred."

Weiss holds his arms out at their full length as he continues, his palms outstretched. "It's just you and me now, Celestia. No whistles, no refs, no rules. Just you, me, and Sweet Georgia Brown."

The wind whistles through the courtyard, as Weiss finishes walking, positioned such that the exact center of the courtyard is between him and her. A small Eyeroc flaps over behind a statue, before returning to it's invisible state.

In an instant, Weiss's horn and Celestia's both ignite as they unleash waves of magical power, Weiss's portals pumping out enchantment powered fury, while Celestia's own horn releases pure alicorn might, the two beams of energy meeting in the middle and swelling like a basketball filled with a very small amount of nuclear hellfire before exploding, leaving the courtyard in flames, and leaving two ponies unsatisfied with how unharmed their opponent is.

Shining Armor's shield spell is at it's strongest near Canterlot's center, allowing it to block that strange cannon of theirs with ease, now that he's compressed it down so small.

"You might as well give up now, criminals. I can do this all week," Shining Armor grunts out, reinforcing the shield even further by drawing on the castle's enchanted bricks and mortar.

Slowly, the airship lands in the rubble, a gangplank falling out to allow a wine-colored unicorn to walk out, her mauvine horn glittering in the sunlight.

"My word, you've taken three shots, and you just aren't quitting, are you?" Tempest Shadow says, stalking forward.

"Sorry if I'm wasting your time, but I just wanted to take a crack at it myself, before we go ahead and take the vault by force," she continues, her horn slowly lighting up.

Shining Armor smirks. If an enchanted warship cannon can't do it, then a unicorn sure can't. "Feel free. I'm always happy to humble evildoers."

Tempest smiles. "And polite too. I'll make this quick."

Her horn lights up brighter, as a second aura begins to wrap around it, and then a third.

Shining Armor's eyes widen at the sight of what appears to be a triple-spell. What kind of pony could have that sort of built up magical power?

After that, Shining Armor's barrier automatically darkens to block out the intense light coming from her spell's ungodly explosion, and it begins to automatically mute the sounds as well, from it's deafening roar.

For a moment, Shining Armor genuinely worries that his shield might undergo some damage, before sighing in relief when it holds.

The mare looks disappointed, but not nearly as much as a pony should, when their plans are falling apart.

"Oh, dear. I really thought I could do it, too." Tempest says, frowning.

Shining laughs. "Don't feel so bad, there isn't a single pony in Equestria who can break my shields, not when I'm here in Canterlot. The whole castle is equipped with the strongest shield-amplification spells that there are, and you're looking at the pony who put them there. You weren't even that far off, to be honest."

Tempest smiles at that. "Honest praise, coming from a goody-four-shoes like you. Alright boys, open the portal."

Shining armor just smirks even harder. "You think my shield isn't rated against portal magic? You're not getting a portal to open in here."

Tempest has to keep from laughing at that. "You're right. The portal isn't opening inside of your shield." She points down at Shining Armor's feet.

"Bye."

Shining Armor's eyes widen when the airship fires a bomb at the ground that opens up a yawning void beneath the entire room, sending the vault and his shield along with it tumbling into the titanic portal below.

Tempest Shadow holds her breath as she walks back onto the ship, all the way back to her quarters, before she finally lets loose with helpless laughter. Those "captain" types are just too funny!

She pulls out her radio, wiping away a tear. "Alright boys, let's pack it up and get the hay out of here."

As Celestia dodges another spray of diamond-like blades, one of them bounces off of her, leaving a shallow scratch that she instantly scourges with anti-poison charms.

"You're drying up, Weiss. And I'm only getting started."

Her horn lights up, and she fires a wave of energy that sends Weiss flying back inside a hamsterball made of crystal that he had summoned for protection.

She stares off at the airship flying away rapidly, trailing insane amounts of smoke from what looks like massive battle damage.

She smiles victoriously. "Looks like your lackeys failed. I would know if my vault had been opened."

She takes a step forward. "You've lost, Weiss. Against an alicorn, you've come up short."

Weiss fires a wave of liquid helium at the princess, encasing her in ice.

Weiss just chuckles. "You know, Celestia, normally, I would just let you maintain your ignorant view, since it directly benefits me, but I really want to piss you off right now. I've already got the vault. Used a giant portal to steal the entire thing. Probably took Shining Armor along with it."

Princess Celestia simply frowns, the movement of her facial muscles cracking the ice, before her flaming mane melts it entirely. "Then I'll have something to do after I pulverize you and encase your lamp in molten metal."

Weiss smiles. "Oh? And how are you going to do that when I'm breaking your left leg?"

Celestia's wings flare out as she jumps in the air, and dives at the dark sage, pulling up at the last second when he turns into a mess of gigantic thorns, before looping around and firing a kinetic pulse at him that smashes the needles apart and sends him flying into a fountain, turning it into a shower of rubble and water.

Celestia scowls, her mane glowing hotter and hotter at Weiss's impudence, as her eyes narrow more and more. "I don't think now is the time for bluffing, Weiss. I'm going to hurt you. I'm probably going to hurt you more than you deserve. And then I'm going to imprison you in that deep dark hole that I found and deepened.

"After that? Who knows. I'll probably enjoy some tea, visit a birthday party. Something nice and peaceful."

Weiss slowly pulls himself out of the rubble, smoke trailing from his body. "That sounds wonderful, princess, but before all of that, I'm going to win. I'm going to defeat you exactly like I've defeated everyone else.

Weiss's body regenerates in an instant, as an aura of darkness begins radiating off of him.

His eyes turn pure green, and green flames begin spurting from him like a leaky balloon as he laughs madly, thrusting his arms out to his sides as he begins to float into the air, green flames and black smoke rising up from the ground to surround him.

"Now, shall you deal with me, oh Princess. And all the powers of Hell!"

Weiss's body explodes, magical black muscles growing over magical black sinews growing over magical black bones.

By the end of his horrifying transformation, Weiss Noir has been replaced with the terrifying form of a building-sized dragon, coated in charred purple scales, with his six massive arms hissing steam in all directions as his tail smashes apart the remains of the fountain he was thrown into.

A pair of thick, leathery wings finish the transformation's reveal as they spread open wide, casting away the smoke and fire that had formed the basis of the spell.

He clenches his fists, staring down at them with piercing green eyes. "Well, princess? What do you think? I've combined my Kelpie Gear with something to give it a bit more... heft."

"I call it Malifessence."

(Weiss Report) Material Components [Expired Aspira]

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Entry Number Sixteen, Day Two-hundred and Twenty

I'm beginning to suspect that my hatred of diamonds has officially moved into the pathological. I decided to revisit the weird slime that I make whenever I'm trying to grow diamonds using Royal Crystal Growth, and it turns out, that stuff is incredibly flammable. Not normal flames, no, but Black Flames. It's like this stuff is concentrated jet fuel for hatred based magic. It's bonkers.

I've got my dudes set to start growing a ton of diamonds, and some enchantments to convert it into this new substance... Expired Aspira. That sounds cool enough. I can't help but see the irony in trying to obtain a ton of diamonds, now. At least they've got a use this time. You can't eat diamonds, and they aren't worth anything without a brand marketing them to be valuable. God... I would know.

Being surrounded by so many diamonds, it reminds me of a life I'm more than happy to leave behind. If I have to work with these damn gems once again, I will. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

The first thing I tested was the most obvious thing. If it is flammable, can it be made to explode very easily? Yes. Very much so yes. Which means this little invention goes right into the "big book of things I have no intention of sharing with the wider world" unfortunately. And god does it light up. A small canister filled with the stuff turned a Black Flame pilot light into a massive conflagration of hateful ripping fire.

By using Royal Crystals, I can direct this flame somewhat, though there's only so much I can do on that particular front, just due to it's rapid expansion. The intense and sudden heat is enough to warp or even fracture nearly all forms of crystal I can create, if I attempt to make the explosion large enough. This mandates that I shelve that particular use for now, at least until I find something able to withstand that kind of heat.

What I can absolutely do, however, is combine Expired Aspira with Foxfire to create a terrifyingly powerful bomb. It's ability to emit force is horrific when combined with the already rapid expansion of heat caused by Expired Aspira going off from Black Flames. To that end, I've made a few small grenades, just in case. You never know when you might need to make a Sherman tank fly off into the distance in twenty pieces like Team Rocket.

I've reached the limits of my era's technology in refining Expired Aspira further. I've discovered that it can be made more potent by melting down the diamonds in a liquid solution instead of relying on Black Flames to do the job alone, but the problem is, the less fond I am of the fluid, the less hatred can be safely contained inside of it. If only I had access to some kind of super-loved fluid, I could convert diamonds into a liquefied hatred so strong that... I don't even know what could be done with it. But it would be phenomenal.

Water can contain slightly more hatred than unrefined Expired Aspira, fruit juices can contain slightly more than that. But all of them rapidly become saturated, where any further diamonds put into it will either fail to be converted into distilled hatred, or, worse, will cause a premature ignition. Needless to say, when dealing with substances this magically potent, the words "Premature Ignition" should never enter into the equation.

I've done some experiments with solid-state hatred storage, but it's unsuitable for a number of reasons. Unlike liquid storage of hatred, storing it in solid form means that any damage, even a small amount, to the medium will cause it to rupture and explode. Violently. I can attest to this by the two days it took Doctor to pick out emerald splinters from my leg. It wasn't very fun, and I wouldn't recommend it.

A second reason that it isn't suitable is, when you start packing that much hatred into a solid object, it can become aligned. And when hatred becomes aligned, it's potency increases by orders of magnitude. The most common result is something I dislike going near a Hatred Crystal, only for the crystal to suddenly emit a magical laser that chases after it and destroys it.

Actually, now that I think about it, that isn't really a downside, huh?

I've gone through the list and tested some more materials. Black Iron can handle the heat, but it can't handle the pressure. Royal Vibranium is a bust, and Crystal Vibranium still fails when stress tested. Royal Cloth and Crystal Cloth can end up being shredded when the heat denatures them, and most ordinary materials didn't fare much better. Expired Aspira, distilled or otherwise, is simply too potent for what I've got right now. Maybe in the future I'll find some stuff that can handle it.

I also took the time to check out some more fluids, including a few that were brought up by my own R&D Dudes, like mineral water, steam, oil and, in one regrettable instance, Monster Blood. I don't know why they had me test the last one, but it took all day to wrangle the Hateblood monsters into cages, and it took a week to figure out that they are vulnerable to hugs. I swear, they weren't just being metaphorical when the poets say bloodstains don't wash out. They were very literal, and I've had to burn my favorite outfit accordingly.

For now, my research into Expired Aspira ends. It's a good bomb, but I've got better ways to do everything it does. Until I can find materials that, right now, I simply do not have, it's an unstable method of storing power for extremely narrow uses. My time would be better spent producing Vance, Enchanted Items, and Golems, instead of having my ponies grow diamonds just so I can melt them down into hatred.

Although... Maybe it could be used for some kind of potion? I could make a real version of Haterade.

It has come to my attention that you can in fact eat diamonds, so long as a crystal pony has cooked them first. That's my bad.

(Past Chapter 14): I Hate You

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Eclipse screams at the holographic feed from the Heavy Lobster, while Priss and several others just silently tear up.

He just fell in.

She turns to the center of the gigantic, auditorium-like room, where, just a few floors above, Lord Weiss Noir was thrown into the Black Flames that she can see blazing upwards from the bottom of the pit.

No one could survive that.

Huh. I survived that. Good thing there was a gigantic barge filled with garbage to cushion my fall.

...It would have been better if all the garbage from the Shadow Realm wasn't made up of rocks and broken glass, though.

I drag myself to my feet, staring up at the Black Flame Furnace's blaze. I guess I must have fallen down a few floors. Better not fall too much further down, or I'll end up in the Fast Travel room.

I can't feel my left leg at all, so that's probably broken.

I'm also not reacting very strongly to what should probably be a frankly unreasonable amount of pain, so I'm probably going into shock right now.

And here comes Sombra, burrowing through the ground like a damn mole. Guess he couldn't take the express elevator down like me, what with it being full of pure destructive hatred.

He's saying something, but I can't really hear him that well.

"I'm gonna be honest, Somber, I'm pertty sure I'm about to blag out. So if we could get on with the fighting?" I slur dizzily.

"Trick Room." I state, as Sombra just frowns.

My horn ignites, the space between the garbage we're standing on firms up as I expend raw, unaltered Stoppered Time on it. No point losing this fight because I tripped over something.

I smile behind my helmet. "Now, I believe we left off at..."

Sombra's horn flares as he tries to blast me, but the time warping effects of my Trick Room come into play, allowing me to easily stumble out of the way when it freezes any magical energy moving faster than a set speed.

"Wave Motion Gun!"

From my armor, crystals rapidly sprout at insane speed, forming a gigantic structure in front of me, a barrel. Inside that barrel, Royal Ice grows so quickly that it doesn't even have time to turn to steam from the pressure increasing exponentially.

Though it looks like someone strapped a gigantic water bottle to my chest, it's ridiculous appearance is offset by it's much less amusing destructive capabilities.

I smile even wider at Sombra's befuddled expression. "Fire!"

With that, the Wave Motion Gun unleashes a beam of water as wide as my torso, like a Pokemon Brand Riot Hose. The mixture of steam, water and razor sharp lonsdaleite powder rips through Sombra's magic shell, and in turn, his body, pushing him back closer and closer to the Black Flame Furnace's raw destructive fire in a blend of steam and writhing smoke.

The stream of water and diamond fragments actually splits off of him in a few places from the sheer force, causing spurts of the beam to splash over the walls and floor, instantly ripping thick gouges in the solid stone and garbage from sheer water pressure.

Come on, just a little bit more, you freak. There's no blocking this one. Just a few more inches and this all ends.

His spells can't travel rapidly, and Unicorn Light will fail outright, with the Stoppered Time in the air freezing any magical energy that moves too quickly through it, while allowing my stream of water to punch right into him.

I scowl when black crystals begin to rush back up my Wave Motion Gun's beam like vines in stop motion, forcing me to break the gun off of my armor so I can dodge the creeping curse with a small pulse of Prestidigitonium.

I swear I feel my legs bend slightly when I hit the ground, but ignore that for now as Sombra reforms. By now, I'm able to hear him again, the haze in my head dispersing with time.

"You know, I was being sarcastic about killing you, but I really do think you're winning me over," he says, walking away from the Furnace and towards me.

I smirk at him, but it's a fake smirk. I'm running out of Vances that can handle him. I could try the Dragon of the Darkness Flame, but that clearly didn't work last time, and my Trick Room would just slow it down enough for him to hit it with another Crystal Curse.

"Oh, was it just how cute I am, or my winning personality?" I snark back, stumbling onto my ass when I accidentally try to put weight on my broken leg.

Sombra shrugs. "Six of one, half-dozen of the other."

"Flare Sword!" I shout, firing a beam of fire at him. Unfortunately, it seems F-Rank magic isn't going to do the job, as the beam deflects off of his magical shell harmlessly.

Sombra's smile returns. "Oh thank goodness. You're running out of steam," He mocks, sighing with quirked eyebrows.

Suddenly, I feel his telekinesis trying to break the armor around my neck as he pins me to the ground.

"Now, I'm a bit rusty at murder, so pardon me if it takes a few tries."

I run through my spell list trying to think of something I can do to get him to back off, but before either of us can get to work debating my mortality, the black flames behind Sombra part as the Heavy Lobster's hellfire engines send it flying towards us, claws outstretched.

How the hell did he get that thing in here?!

Iron Diamond isn't even slightly nervous, as he backs up to the end of the hallway. If the Heavy Lobster won't fit, then he'll make it fit.

To be honest, he's not that big a fan of this machine. Ponies were meant to get tactile feedback from pony bodies, not giant metal crabs in a virtual dreamscape.

Ignoring that for now, Iron Diamond flexes hatches on the wings of the Heavy Lobster, opening up it's hellfire reactors to full bore, while the feet release thick skis to protect them from skidding.

"Let's ride or die." Iron Diamond quotes, as he rockets towards the narrow entrance and smashes through it, flying through the Black Flames and directly into Sombra and Weiss.

"Get the hay off of Weiss Noir!" Iron Diamond shouts through the Heavy Lobster's speakers as a claw opens up with a wave of flames, forcing the evil king off of Weiss.

Picking up Weiss softly with the other claw, Iron Diamond places them behind the Heavy Lobster, out of danger, before turning to Sombra, who is becoming increasingly angry.

"And now we're doing this. Delightful," Sombra groans, his horn igniting with the power of the Crystal Curse.

Suddenly, the Heavy Lobster's face opens up, revealing a white glowing crystal with a Hexagonal shape and another crystal floating in front of it. A magical speaker made of enchanted sapphires.

"Sonic Destroyer!" Iron Diamond shouts, causing a deep throb of pure bass rips through the space between Sombra and Iron Diamond, blasting the evil king back and disrupting his concentration.

Sombra growls at this, although his shield managed to hold off the worst of the damage, being yelled at by a crab is entirely too painful for his liking. He unleashes a wave of black crystals that infest the land around him, crawling towards the Heavy Lobster.

Unfortunately for Sombra, another rippling wall of noise crashes into the black crystals as a result of Iron Diamond activating the Sonic Destroyer again, making them vibrate and explode on the spot, spraying Sombra with fragments of the black glassy material.

Returning to his normal form after the glass has all finished falling, Sombra's snarl grows in fury. "What a clever toy. I'll enjoy scraping out it's insides."

Waves of purple lightning and green fire rip free from Sombra's horn, crashing into the Heavy Lobster and smelting off small parts of it's armor before it's rockets ignite and send it sliding around the garbage pile, arcing towards Sombra with it's claws outstretched to block the magical attacks.

Nearly a ton of Orichalcum and Adamantium smash into Sombra when the Lobster punches him with it's rocket powered tackle, sending the Dark King flying into a wall, before, with a roar of anger, a rippling black field appears around Sombra, growing in size before he fires it at the Lobster.

Unable to dodge the attack in time with it's thrusters still recharging, the ball of blackness explodes on impact, sending the Heavy Lobster flipping end over end into a pile of rubble, where it slowly and painfully groans back into a standing position, one of it's wings broken off, and one of it's claws half-melted.

Damn it, this is the price of me not being ready. I can see now that the Heavy Lobster might have stood a chance, if I was the one piloting it, but Iron Diamond is barely even beginning to tap into it's features. His method of charging Sombra head on and swinging those claws around like maces just isn't going to work...

I need to help, somehow, but... Yup, leg's still broken. Fuck me.

Suddenly, an idea hits me. It's incredibly risky, but it might just work.

I shakily pull out a granule of sugar from my utility crown, before growing it into a larger chunk of Royal Sugar.

I should be within range... I swallow the sleeping drug, and-

"Weiss? How did you get in here?" Iron Diamond says, trying to get the Heavy Lobster to pull itself up from within his holographic dreamscape harness.

"Not important, but just for future reference, I need to fix a security leak in the Moon Crystals later," I answer, shoving him out of the virtual pilot's seat.

"Keep a camera on my body, Iron, I'm kind of busy napping right now," I finish, assuming direct control over the Heavy Lobster.

"Activate Combat Mode."

Sombra stares at the metal crab. It seems like it's caught it's second wind somehow, if it's unfolding armor is anything to go by.

"You know what they say, Sombra. If you want something done right..." Weiss's voice comes out of the monster, making Sombra turn to look over where he last saw the whelp.

He's still there, passed out on the ground, so how..?

"You do it yourself," Weiss finishes, as the Heavy Lobster unleashes a swarm of Crystal Shrimp. Sombra, recognizing the shrimp, explodes with anger, firing waves of magic at them, trying to destroy as many as he can before-

Sombra explodes into smoke as one of the shrimp crashes into his head.

Dodging is not something Sombra enjoys doing. At all.

Weaving between the shrimp, blasting them when he briefly reforms, and flying away from the Heavy Lobster itself using his shadow form are all slowly beginning to drain Sombra's magical power. Something he is fully aware of, like the first hints of lactic acid appearing during a strenuous workout.

"Hey Sombra, are you familiar with the concept of air pressure?" Weiss shouts, as the Crab's back opens, revealing a set of yellow crystal pylons.

'Oh what nonsense is this now?' Sombra scowls, obliterating a swath of the shrimp with a twisting barrier of gem blades from within his shadow form.

Suddenly, his chest feels tight as the smoke composing his body is crushed together like a toddler mushing a ball of playdough into a ball, just in time for a Crystal Shrimp to bleep red and explode in his face without him being able to reduce his body's density to avoid it.

Sombra crashes to the ground, bleeding from a long gash on his face as the Shrimp hover in the air around the Heavy Lobster.

The pair stand off, Sombra, having taken the first injury he's felt in years, and Weiss, having delivered it.

Sombra's eyes begin to bleed green smoke, drawing on his arrays in the Crystal Empire to recover his expended magical energy, the raw potency of stolen fear bloating his spirit with arcane might. "I believe I'm done.

"This game ends now."

Weiss's chuckles ring out from the Heavy Lobster. "I couldn't agree more."

Sombra chuckles as well, before shouting to the heavens.

"Submit!"

As waves and waves of black crystal sweep over the garbage pit, the Heavy Lobster's sonic cannon prepares to disrupt it once again, before a lance of magic spears through it, cracking the speakers.

"Not this time!" Sombra shouts, galloping towards the machine, his black crystals growing up from the ground to snatch the Crystal Shrimp before they can hit him or explode.

A missile from the Heavy Lobster's remaining wing surprises him, but he ignores it, instead firing two more beams of magic at the Heavy Lobster's Topaz Pylons when they emerge to restrict his shadow form. This allows him to simply slip past the heavy ordinance, sliding around it without detonating the impressive-looking warhead.

With an almighty roar, Sombra fires a gigantic Crystal Spear that pierces through the Crab, narrowly missing Iron Diamond's vitals, but obliterating the machine's.

The feed from it's holographic camera eyes shut down entirely, along with it's radio output.

Sombra looks over to Weiss, who had jolted awake when the attack happened, and, with a fanged grin, begins the slow walk towards him to end this.

"So tell me, then. Weiss Noir. Give me your last words. Give me something good, too. I want to see what you'll say to try and convince me not to kill you.

"Will you offer your service to me? Your undying loyalty?

"Or maybe you'll offer me your wealth, that I'll be sure to claim postmortem anyway.

"Heh heh heh. Maybe if I'm really lucky, you'll just start begging."

Sombra finally reaches Weiss, who has managed to stand up by this point, his blank visor staring into Sombra's mad eyes.

"Oh that's an easy one. You're not going to kill me, because I'm green.

"I'm a novice, an amateur. And if you kill me now, I'll be a martyr. The ponies you reclaim today will fight that much harder, because you had to put me down before I reached my peak. Because there exist ponies who can threaten you if you don't stop them before it's too late.

"But if you left now... If you kill me after I've grown to be your peer... The ponies will be thrown into the depths of despair. The Princesses of Light have failed them. The Sage of Darkness has failed them. There would be no more hope, and they would finally fall in line.

"If you don't let me live, you'll never get the chance to prove once and for all that you can't be beaten, even by a master of the dark arts," Weiss says, smugly.

About halfway between the two, Sombra notices something on the ground. A large chunk of metal, grey, but glittering.

Sombra ponders this for a moment. Then, a few more moments. He smiles widely, and slowly nods, a thought popping into his head, almost as if by instinct.

"You know... The funny thing is, I know you're playing me...

His fanged grin turns knowing. "But you're right."

Behind my mask, I stare in shock. What did he just say?

"Not about that, no. But about you," Sombra says, lifting up the piece of grey metal in his telekinetic grasp, admiring it fondly.

"You see, you're under the impression that I refuse to accept the idea of someone being a threat to me. You've gotten this idea in your head that my arrogance is supreme."

How did he make a reference to that show? The phrasing was too exact, too exact!

Sombra turns the head-sized chunk of metal over, examining it for any imperfections. "But you're right. You see, I'm aware that you could become a threat to me, one day. That's exactly why I'm going to kill you."

Right after I nearly quoted the show line-for-line about me being a novice. Is he in my fucking head?

Sombra tsks, shaking his head, but I'm frozen still in shock. "You know, I'm disappointed. I'm assuming all of this below our feet is garbage, yes? Refuse?"

I take a step back, but a pulse from his horn binds my feet in an almost playful spurt of black crystals from the ground.

Sombra begins firing little pulses of magic at me, tiny instances of his crystal curse that make my armor fly off to reject it touching me, triggering my NulAll's automatic armor ejection function, designed specifically to counter curses. "But this right here is a piece of genuine, pure Migrant Iron. It's so useful for torture, so I don't know why a self-professed master of the dark arts would just be throwing it away."

I struggle, but it's no use.

"It's like dropping a stone into a pond. When a piece of Migrant Iron touches a pony's body, it just sinks right in, harmlessly.

"And just like a cork in a pond, it floats around to the pony's whims.

"But the moment they fall asleep, the metal does what it does best. It sinks down towards their chest, without a conscious mind to hold it in place."

I unleash a wave of Killing Intent, to try and distract him, but when he feels it, he just laughs, as though he learned something from it.

My struggling halts in an instant when he presses the boulder of metal into me, and I can barely feel anything other than the heavy weight on my ribcage.

"And stops their heart," He finishes, before firing a blast of magic through my shoulder, making my bleeding intensify, and my vision dim.

I hiss, before looking him straight in the eye. "If you think I'm going to give up hope, you're wrong.

"Because I've got my friends behind me.

"I told everyone that if I ever fought you, to call the princesses and tell them to come here. By now, they're probably less than five minutes away," I struggle to say through the pain.

"And with that power, my ponies will go free."

Sombra just pats me on the cheek, like some kind of child. "Try not to let that blood loss make you pass out, my little Pale Shadow. I'm going to go downstairs and give everypony the good news. It'll take me less than a minute to spirit them all away, I imagine."

With that said, he sinks into the floor. I try to use magic to stem the flow of blood, and willpower to stay awake.

This is the sort of thing Sombra lives for, it really is.

Looking down at all their fearful faces, a crowd of ponies, staring at their master with stark horror in their faces.

He's probably got time for a speech, considering that he's already won.

He lands on the floor, walking up to the fearful crowd of ponies.

"Your hope has died. Weiss Noir, a pony who aspired to be my defiant equal, but fell short. A pale shadow of what real power looks like," Sombra starts, looking at a filly in the crowd who has a defiant look on her face.

He smiles, trotting up to her with a swagger in his step.

"You have the same look he did, little one. He wanted so badly to hate me. He tried to harness that anger to hurt me.

"He failed for two simple reasons. Firstly, he tried to harness hatred, something even I can't do." Sombra admits, surprised at his former foe's unnatural resistance to the flames.

He shakes his head. "But more importantly, he didn't hate me enough.

"If I had to guess, he joined your little cause out of pity."

Sombra gives off a smug air of superiority at the word "Pity".

"I've certainly never met the unicorn myself, so he couldn't have had that personal encounter that sets a pony's soul on fire seeking revenge." Sombra says, looking up ponderously as he considers the facts idly, while casting a spell to wrap all of the ponies in a teleporting curse to drag them back into the Crystal Empire with him when he's done.

Magical chains sweep through the hall, linking them all together as a physical manifestation of his teleporting curse.

"My point is, if your so called 'Sage of Darkness' couldn't do the job, then you certainly can't, little foal. So why don't you just cower with the rest of your disgusting worm-kind," Sombra says, glaring at her as he uses his magic to try and inspire mind-shattering terror in the child.

He's a bit shocked to find that it doesn't work.

Priss's eyes narrow, even as tears stream down her face. "I hate you."

"You took away my best friend!" She screams, spittle flying into Sombra's shocked face.

Another filly steps forward, a firm set to her expression.

"You took away my teacher!" Eclipse flash shouts, glaring daggers at Sombra.

He looks over the crowd, whose expressions of fear are turning violently angry.

"I hate you! You took away my wife! Get away from my children, I won't let you take them too!" A stallion shouts, holding his foals tight.

Guard Captain Helmsplitter steps forward. "I hate you! You took away my daughter! I'll fight you until the end!"

Dr. Absolutely Real Homeopathy steps forward. "You made a mockery of my life's work! You think just because you didn't slaughter ponies in the streets that they weren't dying?!

"Your crystal mine outputs corpses every single day! An endless procession of the dead and dying, because of you! I hate you for making me face ponies whose lives I can't save!"

Whittle Miss Priss throws a rock at Sombra, which he ignores as it passes through him. What he can't ignore is the lash of black fire strikes him in the back immediately after that, blasting away a chunk of his shadowy body. He turns to look at the Black Flame Furnace, which is roaring, louder and louder.

"I had twenty sisters before your dumb-shard regime came along, now thirteen of them are slaving away in your marble-bucking mine, and I want them back, do you understand?!"

"I hate you more than anything else in the world!" She roars, tears streaming down her face.

Sombra backs away from the furnace, sweat dripping down his face as he stares at the yawning black fires lashing out from it, swelling up with every single instant.

The crowd of ponies by now are all shouting, screaming and shouting with decades of buried feelings being unleashed in one single moment.

"Get out of our home!"

^{"I hate you!"}

"Go away!"

"I hate you!"

"Don't you dare touch them!"

"I hate you!"

Sombra turns back to see Eclipse Flash standing right behind him, her body glowing with a black halo.

Priss is right there next to her, not glowing, but instead recalling something Weiss explained to her a long time ago.

With nothing but a lovely pair of words from Priss, her and Eclipse Flash's souls are laid bare to the dark ruler. "Fuck. Off."

Almost as an afterthought, Eclipse adds; "And by the way, I hate you too."

And with that, the Black Fire Furnace explodes, a tidal wave of endless hungry fire roaring through every tunnel, every room and every corner of the Hidden Palace Zone, scouring every surface clean in an instant as Sombra is thrown through the tunnels and forced to cast his teleportation magic to escape total annihilation.

His slaves, all of them scoured clean of his magic by the eruption, were left exactly where they were standing.

As he appears in his throne room, body nearly burned away entirely, he stares out the window at the landscape of the Frozen North. Furious. In pain. Confused.

Shadows drip onto the floor mixed with blood, an inky black color that perfectly reflects what he sees in the distant frozen north.

The land itself is on fire, an endless conflagration of void surrounding the Shadow Realm's borders.

His confused, pained expression leaves no room for him comprehending how Weiss Noir could have done this, how any one pony could have prepared a spell of hatred so potent that it could force Sombra himself to flee. What kind of madpony would make a contingency spell that kills everything nearby?

Because surely the baying of those worms alone couldn't have done that..?

He stalks into the hidden chamber below the throne room, if he doesn't, he suspects he might very well die from his injuries.

The chamber opens to reveal the sounds of terrified screams, and a fog of green.

Sombra's body seems to almost disappear as he stumbles into the ocean of fear-powered magic, his body already beginning the slow process of regenerating as he walks deeper into the haze.

If it's the last thing Sombra does, he will make The Sage of Darkness pay for these wounds.

The doors slam shut, and the throne room goes silent.

Iron Diamond finally pulls himself free of the Heavy Lobster's wreckage, and stumbles over to Weiss, three steps at a time. A wave of Black Flames washes over them both, wiping away the garbage and black gems alike, and dropping them gently to the ground in the process.

He manages to catch Weiss before he falls to the ground, when the black crystals holding him up are erased by the flames as well.

His radio headset crackles with a report. One Weiss presumably hears as well. "Scenario fifty-one. Storm's been repelled."

Weiss smirks groggily. "Come on you crazy bastard, let's get us some life-saving doctors, and a couple of cute nurses," Weiss mumbles when Iron pulls him onto his back, and stumbles down the stairs to the Fast Travel station.

Priss's lip wobbles, before she finally falls to her knees after the furnace's explosion, sobbing. Eclipse and her parents are at her side within moments, attempting to comfort the filly.

Suddenly, she hears a voice that is unmistakable.

"The reports of my death... Are greatly exaggerated!" Weiss shouts.

"..I've always wanted to say that." He chuckles weakly, as cheers erupt, and several ponies run up to their ruler outright.

"So I can black out, now, yeah?" He says to the throngs of relieved faces, before doing just that.

"Weiss... You need to wake up. Please." Luna says.

So I do. Luna's always been a trustworthy authority on sleep, after all.

I open my eyes to the sight of the two rulers of Equestria doing some sort of funky magic to my chest.

Oh right, I was dying of heavy metal "poisoning". With a flex of my intentions, the metal chunk rises up out of my chest, and settles there, not moving any further.

Luna looks mournful, while Celestia's eyes spray out fat unrestrained tears as they cut the power to their horns, and the glow around the metal ball disappears.

Doctor... Dr. Real walks up to me. "I'm sorry Weiss. The princesses were able to keep the Migrant Iron out of you for now, but I'm not sure if there's anything we can do beyond that.

"We've only delayed the inevitable."

I raise an eyebrow at my doctor, prompting him to continue.

"The only way to remove Migrant Iron is by passing it on to the living flesh of another sapient being, but that's... Not suitable," he explains, glancing towards the princesses.

"And it can't be completely removed from any body that it touches otherwise, we can cut parts of it out, but only up to a certain point.

"The solution that we normally use is..." He gestures in a chopping motion, making Princess Celestia bawl unabashedly.

I take a deep breath, before laughing. God, whatever healing magic they've got me on is the good stuff.

"So tell me something right quick," I ask, as I shift the chunk of Migrant Iron around, until the boulder is in the middle of my leg, parting both halves of it with nothing but the metal between them.

"Why can I still feel the rest of my leg, even though there's Migrant Iron between the two halves of it?"

He looks confused at this. "Because it's magically transmitting the signals and energy across, sir?"

The princesses look confused as well.

I laugh, sitting up. "Dr. Real, you're an idiot, I'd like that on record."

Moving the boulder of metal onto my back, I stand up out of bed, the two princesses backing away from me. "Please take me to the Biomagitek lab, Dr. Real, this metal's curse has entirely too many loopholes for me to take it seriously.

"Princesses, thank you dearly for preserving my life, but I'll take it from here. Princess Luna, I'll be sure to send you a report tonight." I say confidently and dismissively.

Luna responds, cautious hope clearly in her tone. "You believe you can remove that cursed metal somehow?"

I smile greedily. "Now why would I want to do something like that?"

I'll just have to move up the timetable on project Asura.

Author's Notes:

The song of the day is "Struggle of Sadness" from Yu Yu Hakusho.

This concludes the "Black Eye of the Storm" Arc.

Thank you all for following me along as I wrote this story, it's been a long few months, but your support has done nothing but encourage me to write even more than before! I've got a lot of plans in the future, and I look forward to writing a heck of a lot more for you all!

If you want to contact me or support my work, I've now got a Discord Server, a Paypal for one-time-donations or commissions, and a Patreon.

Discord Link!

Paypal Link!

Patreon Link!

While I don't need the money to continue writing, it does let me write even more, and you can't imagine how much I would appreciate any support that any of you offer. I look forward to seeing some of you in the Discord Server, if you ever want to discuss the fic with me more directly!

(Noir Report) Establishing a Metric of Measurement [Spell Rankings]

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Entry #14, Day 101

For the sake of regulating magic in the Shadow Realm, such that our guiding principles of Safety, Secrecy, and Dramatic Monologuing are adhered to, I have decided to publish my standardized method of ranking spells, on a scale from F to SSS. These rankings will be used to help label enchanted items, Materia, and recorded spells, based on their creator's personal strength.

We will start with the lowest and weakest spells, labeled Rank-F Magic. Magic of this rank can be cast with a mere third of the caster's strength, or less. Spells of this class are the most basal, small fireballs, pulses of magic, and brief surges of strength all fall under the umbrella of F-Ranked magic.

Next, D-Rank Magic, which requires two thirds of a pony's magical capacity. Spells of this rank should be logically considered to be roughly twice as powerful and demanding as spells of the F-Rank, and treated with the same caution that one would treat a weapon, as spells of this rank represent magic which could exhaust a pony to cast more than once in a short enough timespan.

Finally, the highest rank of magic that is possible to cast with a single pony's power, a C-Rank spells. Spells of this rank are ones which would completely exhaust a given caster's magical energy, bringing them to their dregs in only a single use. Spells of this class are restricted in the Shadow Realm, due to the risk of driving a pony to unconsciousness, if they abused a spell of this rank while being below their maximum magical capacity.

After this, spells are no longer ranked by the creator's capacity, but by timespan. A spell of the B-Rank, for instance, represents a spell which would require that it's creator spend a continuous hour of casting in order to match it's output. Spells of this rank are expressly forbidden to be used without the standardized two-witness system, of one witness on-site, and one witness via telepresence. This is due to the danger of activating spells which, when created at this level of power, could vary from destroying buildings to triggering cave-ins, in the case of destructive or elemental magic.

As those who live in the Shadow Realm may attest to, B-Rank spells are not to be trifled with, as my own Dragon of the Darkness Flame technique is merely a B-Rank spell.

A-Rank, S-Rank, and SS-Rank spells continue this trend, at 2, 3, and 4 hours of continuous casting respectively. These spells are restricted exclusively to those who obtain a licence for high order magic, and must have witnesses who hold official rank in the Shadow Realm's Hierarchy.

The final, and highest rank of spell is forbidden to be cast without my personal presence and express approval. An SSS Rank spell is any spell which requires upwards of 4 hours to cast for it's creator. Spells of this rank could risk mass-infrastructural damage to an entire cell of the Shadow Realm. Any attempts to prepare or cast a spell of this magnitude in defiance of these rules, I would like to re-iterate, will be heavily punished.

In the future, these Spell Rankings may be used from time to time in the Grimoire Noir, in reference to specific feats of magic, such that readers may obtain a crude metric by which to measure the power and difficulty of a given spell. I understand that this means by which to measure a spell's power is subjective, rather than the objective means by which other authors choose to measure spell power, and that is intentional on my part.

The methods by which one learns magic are subjective. Indeed, the methods by which one casts magic are subjective. In it's purest form, the Grimoire Noir is designed to give ponies tools, tools of the mind through which they can establish their own perfected methods of spellcasting, rather than the emulation that other books attempt. By using a subjective metric to mark my spells, those who study this tome are given no false pretense of what they should expect from their own attempts. Only the information that I myself have obtained, in as objective a format as I can dare to manage when describing powers born from the heart.

In that same manner, I urge any prospective spellcasters to one day take account in their own words, and develop their own methods of sorting the talents they have in ways they understand. I cannot, nor can any other sages create a perfect series of boxes, that all things magical can be placed within and sorted neatly into. It is up to the individual pony to grow and establish the boundaries of their abilities. Both of what they are capable of, and what they can become capable of. To do otherwise would be a travesty against the latent potential that a pony has to establish for themselves a talent that makes them wholly unique.

There are those among us that can create finer cut gems than I could, with the greatest of ease. There are those who can create medicines able to cure ailments that I could not even diagnose. There are warriors whose hooves are stronger than iron, and whose kicks cut like diamond. Among those, brave and meek alike, there are an assortment of talents which I simply do not have. Talents which I could never hope to aspire beyond with my own work.

What I can offer is a simplistic tome that offers whomever reads it a comprehensive guide in the art of harnessing their negative emotions, in twisting them into powerful magics. I can offer fires from the pits of hell, I can offer cutting winds and heavy stones, created through petty spite and greedy covetousness. I can offer golems and darkness, and sorcery most foul, but it is up to you, the reader, to turn my words into deeds. A day may even come when my work in the Dark Arts is held in the same esteem as a child's paintings. Naive and crude, from a time so early that it is viewed with amused pity.

And if it should come in my lifetime, I will simply have to grow ever stronger and more knowledgeable in response.

(Present Chapter 14): Spring Cleaning: Part 2

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Celestia steps back in shock. "You're mad!"

Weiss, however, just takes the golden opportunity to flash his new pearly whites as he rolls his eyes at her. "I'm so glad you noticed, I've been working at it for years!"

Celestia's eyes narrow, planting her feet and casting a Blunting Charm, in case Weiss's new meter-long claws aren't just for show. It might deepen her voice and timbre, but it's worth the expense. "Weren't you the one that told me that 'Monstrous size has no intrinsic value'?"

Weiss just chuckles. "I've refined that thesis since then."

With that, Weiss's gigantic fist blurs towards the alicorn of the sun, her horn immediately shining with the power of a shield spell.

The bus-sized fist stops an inch away from her shield, before, with an eruption of purple steam from it's elbow, it smashes through her barrier and throws her into the air, her body spinning and flipping like a boomerang in flight.

She halts herself with a flare of her wings, summoning up the power of the sun to smite the monster before her, but before she can react, the several-hundred-ton abomination has already leapt up to her height, punching her into the ground and throwing up a storm of debris with her rag-dolling body.

'So what? I get to use some of the Alicorn Suite? Haven't gotten to do that in a few centuries...' Celestia thinks to herself, letting her wings and mane smoulder with hotter and brighter fire as the veins in her eyes begin to turn yellow.

Climbing up out of the rubble, she scowls when Weiss is on the other end of the courtyard, all six of his arms crossed as he looks down on her.

"Be honest Weiss, you made this form just so you wouldn't be the shortest pony at the monarch club, didn't you?" She says, cracking her neck.

Weiss shrugs, an achievement normally reserved for industrial machinery, with arms as heavy as his are now.

"It may have been a factor in the design process. Mostly, it was the 'Pushing Celestia to Her Limits' thing, though."

This time, Celestia's eyes are sharp enough to catch Weiss in motion, his wings and back releasing streams of glowing steam into portals that are created on the spot.

'If he's trying to cause havoc, why redirect the exhaust elsewhere?' Celestia thinks, leaping out of the way of another punch that blurs into place before pausing long enough to unleash a stream of steam to propel it suddenly.

Grinning as he throws another punch, Weiss somehow ensures that his arm doesn't explode instantly when Celestia unleashes her Brightning Beam at it, the fist plowing through the beam as though it doesn't exist. She then feels a second fist at her back.

Glancing back confirms her fear, moments before the two fists smash into her like the dust between two professional boxers.

Before she can recover from the dazing crush, a third fist crashes into her from another angle, sending her flying, with Weiss in hot pursuit.

She prepares a series of lightning spears, the swarm of artillery magic appearing behind her in a flash of light. During that same flash of light, however, Weiss's entire left half seems to explode with plasma that instantly turns to steam, throwing his body around in an arc as he sweeps behind the alicorn, pummeling her with two hammerfisted blows, one after another.

His titanic wings barely even alter his trajectory, much less slow his fall, without a hint of pegasus magic to enhance them. This works in favor of his twin clawed feet crashing into the ground, burying Celestia deep enough to be eye level with most basements.

She teleports out to the comical sight of Weiss trying to pull himself out of the loose rubble of the street he had obliterated, before his head turns around to the princess, a sheepish grin on his face, his body shriveled up from the release of plasma, but swelling back to normal quickly.

She empowers her body a little bit more, just enough to deal some damage, while keeping things interesting. By this point, her eyes have turned into slits. The consequence of casting sensory magic of the highest order.

Her hoof flashes out as her body buries itself in Weiss's neck. A moment later, a pulse of force emitted from her leg allows her to rip the draconic limb clean off of his body. Passing over the artificial body's neck stump, the graphene hoses inside of it unleash their payload inadvertently due to her decapitating move. Royal water so pressurized that it turns to plasma when it exits blasts her golden armor completely off of her in a cloud of vaporized gold.

She stares down from the air as Weiss reaches over and plops the severed head back where it came from. Regenerative magic begins to fuse the false crystal skin back together.

"My my, Celestia. If I didn't know any better, I'd think you were fighting me right now!" Weiss rasps, as his speaker-crystal vocal chords slowly regenerate, and he pulls himself to his feet, wings flaring in preparation.

"I'm glad you understand that I haven't started fighting yet, Weiss," She quips, letting herself drop a few meters before a flap from her blazing wings breaks the sound barrier and sends her directly down towards him.

Shining Armor has no idea where he is.

He stares at the black chamber he's found himself in, and cautiously steps down from the rubble surrounding the vault.

As soon as he does, he jumps back at the sight of an illusion. A chibified version of Weiss Noir, complete with droopy eyes and cel-shading on it's 3-D model.

"Hello! If you're hearing this, you've been teleported directly into my tower's prison dungeon, probably because I didn't want to deal with you right this instant. You can try to escape if you like, but it will end poorly for you! Thank you, and have a nice day."

With that, the hologram waves happily, before poofing away in a shower of digital sparkles. The gigantic obsidian doors that Shining Armor didn't notice before begin to slide open, the entire room rumbling as the innards of the tower shift around.

'I could try a teleport, but... I don't know where I am, or where a safe place would be.'

He lights up his horn, creating a magical buckler made of raw shield magic before slamming it into a wall experimentally. The wall cracks, but at the same time, a patch of wall begins projecting the hologram from before.

"Howdy, it looks like you're trying to cheat! Chances are, I can't stop you, but if you go this route, I can't guarantee your safety any more. The traps here are designed to leave you mostly unharmed, but the magic and guardians buried deeper within these walls may not spare you harm!"

"Please go through the designated areas if you want to escape or rob me, it's for your safety!" The hologram points at the gigantic obsidian doors, before winking and disappearing.

Shining Armor debates the merits of simply ignoring this advice and bashing through anyway, but ultimately concludes that Weiss's minions have already gotten him once.

Risking them pulling off the kiddie-horsehoes isn't his idea of a smart plan.

He walks through the doorway, into a hall that lights up with skull shaped torches. They're shaped like monkey skulls, if Shining's high-school biology class taught him anything.

In the middle of the hall, he pauses when three piles of large metal pendulums, wooden limbs, and burlap sacks are dropped from the ceiling, crashing down with clattering and thumps.

What he sees next confuses him and inspires no small amount of caution, as he surrounds himself with a small shield dome. "Are those... bugs?"

And sure enough, what must be thousands of tiny black bugs scuttle out of the walls and into the sacks, slowly bloating them up until they look like scarecrow ponies, each one having their right leg, left leg, or head replaced with the large, sharp looking blades.

If their appearance wasn't enough to bring Shining Armor into combat mode, then one of them flopping over into a cartwheel and leaping towards him with it's glittering blade sure did.

He blocks the nightmarish monster's scythe with his dome, backing away as the other two sway over like marionettes, attacking him in sync with sloppy, loose movements.

What really makes this whole experience strange, Shining Armor feels, is the heavy metal music blaring over hidden speakers in the walls.

"Dang it, I don't have time to play games!" Shining Armor shouts, his shield dome growing spikes before he spins it in place, shredding the scarecrows to pieces as he runs forward.

'Even though this game is pretty darn fun. This Weiss guy should have written an Ogres and Oubliettes module, he'd make bank!' Shining thinks to himself, before shaking his head to rid them of nerdish thoughts.

'Gotta get back to Canterlot and inform Celestia where the vault is, I can't defend it this deep in enemy territory,' He thinks to himself, galloping forward with his shred-barrier returning to an ordinary dome to save energy.

As fast as he's running, he nearly falls when he comes to a giant pit, bordered by a series of windows. He looks out the windows in shock, seeing the horizon is diagonal, for some reason, and distorted like it's being seen through a fisheye lens.

Thinking harder about this, he has a startling realization. This whole place must be one giant hallway, twisted in on itself somehow.

If he had tried to just punch through one of the walls... It wouldn't have felt very good. A genius trap.

Well, traction isn't a good look for the Captain of the Guard, so he's just going to have to deal with it and try to find an entrance where the warped space normalizes.

He stares down into the pit trap that he nearly stumbled into, spotting netting at the bottom. Another trap, or a safety feature? Both?

He dispels his Shield Dome, and forms a new one, a piston made of shield magic extending across the gap, and branching out with more cylinders to fasten itself to multiple parts of the wall at once, in case any of the pit was designed to give way when someone does this.

"One magical bridge, coming up!" Shining jokes to himself, trotting over the gap before , with a click from a tripwire he stepped on by mistake, a sandbag is suddenly fired from the wall, in such a way that it wouldn't hit someone unless they were exactly level with the pit.

As Shining falls into the netting and it inevitably snaps around him, he tries his hardest to not be too pleased with how clever a trap that was.

He might have to get his old Ogres and Oubliettes pals back together, what with all the ideas this is giving him. Well, after he figures out a way to get out of this net without falling into the pit he's hanging over, anyway.

As Celestia lands on the ground after dodging another one of Weiss's paused punches, she can't help but wonder.

"So, is there a reason you continue to hesitate during your attacks, Weiss, or are you just too chicken to hit a princess properly?"

Weiss laughs at this. "Oh princess, I have to give you a fighting chance, or you might just turn tail and run. I'm surprised you noticed my little tells."

Celestia shrugs her wings as she trots forward, hardly even noticing when molten stone from a former archway drips onto her back.

"Well, of course I would notice. I've practically had time to play 'Eye Spy' while you shuffle around like a blushing colt at his first dance. You're boring me, Weiss."

Weiss's hand claps to his chest with a dull boom like dynamite. "Your words cut deep, deeper than any blade!

"I may be evil, but I refuse to be boring," Weiss claims dramatically, before the ground underneath Celestia explodes, flinging her into the air with a nasty bruise that would have been far nastier if her magic hadn't blunted the bladed tip of Weiss's tail, which had somehow grown through the ground underneath her.

As Weiss rips the tail downward back into it's hole, it becomes apparent that he had used one of his portals to do it. The magic flickers for a moment as Celestia grabs the tail with her telekinesis, and tugs on it.

"Don't you dare," Weiss deadpans, before, with a heave of her horn, she pulls Weiss through the portal, and spins him around her several times, like a tetherball struck by a professional toddler.

She attempts to finish this instance of an enhanced, improvised merry-go-round, but Weiss's tail muscles are strong enough to pull him against the centripetal force, and he rapidly throws two boulder-sized jabs at the princess, plasma and steam flying free without any hesitation combined with his hydraulic muscles, allowing him to hit far harder and faster than before.

Celestia swears she had heard ringing that time as she crashed into the ground, only to receive a portal-borne flick from behind that diverts her into the air.

As she rights herself in the air, Weiss taps his feet, waiting for the princess to overcome her dizzy spell. "So you do know how to throw a punch. You know, the mythological records were never clear on that," Celestia claims, floating to the ground and casting a spell which increases her durability a bit more, at the cost of making her even taller and larger than she normally is.

Tempest is trying, Elysium help her she is trying not to laugh, but it's just too good. She cuts the camera feed to Weiss's tower and returns above deck. This is some of the most fun she's had in years.

When she spots the pegasi guards trying to chase after her ship, she smiles.

"Alright boys, let's turn off the smoke, let em know how healthy we're feeling!" She shouts, prompting the crew into action.

She lifts up a spiked iron ball in her telekinesis, just taking a moment to enjoy the fact that she can for the fifth time today, before she flings it at one of them, the spinning orb whistling as it cracks the poor pegasus guard right in the dome, knocking him out harmlessly and sending the ensorceled sphere back towards Tempest.

Tempest spots one guard swooping down to catch the unconscious pony before he can hit the ground and break something.

"Better worry about yourselves, boys!" Tempest says with her ship's new speakers amplifying it, smiling as she refreshes the selective-masslessness charm on her ball on it's return trip and flipping over to kick it right back into the fray.

One of the Pegusus warriors attempts to dodge it, but Tempest just smiles as firework charms she packed in the sphere go off, altering it's course and allowing the sparking weapon to bash that one down too.

By now, the army of pegasi have started realizing that they're being played, as the "Damaged" airship has stopped smoking and sped up by a large margin.

Weiss was completely unreasonable, Tempest felt, to include this as part of his plan, but now that she's kicking around her ball, teasing the best of the best with her little love taps, she couldn't be happier.

She gallops over to the mast, running up it and leaping off to kick one pegasus in the head when they try to zoom in, using him as a footstool to reach her iron ball and kick that again as well. The rapidly spinning mass of spiked iron zips through the air, curving around and smacking two more guards before they finally all back off.

She catches her ball in a telekinetic grip, before a spear crashes into it, sending it flying over the deck.

Tempest frowns when she spots the Pegasus who did it, one who hasn't flown back with the rest of his troupe.

"Boys, could you bring out the bottle?" Tempest asks politely, The Fizz Guards gasping at this before rapidly running below deck.

In moments, they drag out a large reinforced glass bottle of Pyrotechnic Stars, little black spheres, each one roughly the size of a softball.

Tempest's horn ignites, as she begins lifting out all of the stars one by one, each one painstakingly crafted with her new magic.

She smirks at the one lone guard, before visualizing where to aim to hit the retreating pegasi.

Flinging the spheres in the air, she kicks them one after another, each one lighting up in a rainbow of blazing sparks and color before exploding and spraying hot sparks on the guards one after the other. At least a few of the guards grip their rears and yelp when a spark slips into a part of the armor it doesn't belong in.

She makes sure to hit that one pegasus that made her lose her favorite cannonball with three of the scented ones. He'll be smelling like blueberries for a year, if he's lucky.

'This is life,' Tempest thinks, leaping up in the air to buck the last, largest one over, the spinning sphere erupting with special black sparks that drink in the daylight like a negative firework that explodes with a gigantic, animated image of herself winking her eye at Canterlot mockingly.

Landing on the deck smoothly, Tempest breathes in the smell of gunpowder and smiles.

"Well, that was fun. Let's go home, boys. We've got a Captain to welcome, so let's not keep him waiting! Full bore to the engines, wings out! Chop chop!" she shouts, spurring them into action.

Grubber watches from the crows nest with a smile of his own, before returning to his spyglass to watch for danger, as he swallows an ice cream sandwich whole.

Tempest, meanwhile, feels a weird itch on her flanks, which she ignores for now, too busy yelling at her crew and trying not to smile too hard about it.

"You know, you're pretty fun to knock around," Celestia pants, covered in scratches and bruises.

Weiss doesn't look much better, more crystalline scar tissue than dragon by this point, pink glowing through various parts of his hulking form where the royal cloth is thin, and the heat of the plasma shines through without any scales to cover it.

Weiss smiles. "Sounds like someone's ready for me to move on to the next act.

"How about a little fire, scarecrow?"

That said, Weiss's throat glows with green fumes, before unleashing a stream of flames that Celestia very nearly scoffs at, before years of endless combat warn her instinctively of the danger, summoning a barrier to block it.

Celestia sweats when the liquid dripping off of her shield hisses on contact with the ground, and her barrier cracks from the high pressure stream of flaming liquid.

"You like it, Celly? I was doing some research for authenticity, and I found out that sulfuric acid and phosphorous mixed together burn with a green color!

"Alicorn lungs are made of hydrocarbons like the rest of us, I'm fairly certain, so if I were you, I'd take a deep breath... And hold it." He finishes, as the noxious smoke and puddles of flames begin to become a problem as Celestia backs away from Weiss's stream of enchanted acidic flames. Celestia is forced to cast her solar purification charm, turning her breath into flaming smoke, more than sufficient to obliterate any noxious gasses.

She hisses when her rear hoof buckles as she steps directly into one of the pools by mistake.

Her shield shatters, and she has no choice but to go directly into the deep end of her magical power, her coat turning into a nest of white hot filaments as the acid is kept off of her by sheer superheated temperature alone.

Her teeth sharpen into fangs as she casts an old pegasus spell, designed to boost one's physical power and speed with haste-enhancing primal magic. In an alicorn's hooves, however, it serves to accelerate their magical functions as well, turning Celestia's body and a few inches around her skin into a blast furnace. Ice magic emitted from her hooves serves to keep the streets from melting beneath her at this stage.

As she leaps back, clear of Weiss's new attack range, she notices that his body has swollen pink with what she now knows is the plasma his body is using as fuel. He had been using the attack to stall.

"Do you plan to blow up at me, Weiss? I believe you've already done that, coming here and mutilating my fair castle."

Weiss laughs, but it's a strained noise. "Actually, princess, I was going to break your leg."

Before she can process what he means by that, he's behind her, and the street is nothing but blinding light from all of his body's pressurized water plasma being jettisoned almost at once.

She looks back behind her and starts to rapidly kick as fast as she can, blow after divine blow striking Weiss's snake-like limbs as they try to coil around her for some sort of pinning maneuver, blowing them back with a combination of raw muscle and bodily transmitted telekinesis.

Weiss is finally forced back, skidding on his feet before his wings flare to slow him down.

"That actually hurt. A little bit at least. But-"

He smiles, teeth growing to replace the ones lost after her steel-crushing blows.

"-The objective of a combination move is to finish your opponent." Weiss says, his body swelling up for another burst of impossible speed as his limbs snap back into place after she had fractured all six of them in her panicked counterattack. She notices that they have stopped regenerating, hanging limply at Weiss's sides. What is he playing at?

"When performing a combo, each separate attack must be delivered... With the intent to kill!"

Celestia can see it coming, her haste magic gives her the mental speed to process his movements, and her sensory magic tells her every little twitch and shudder of his false, pneumatic muscles. She even has the time to consider that he must have studied the Giant Spider clans to emulate how their own musculature functions, in order to make this disgusting form.

All of that is moot, however, when twelve portals open between her and him, shortening one-hundred meters of space into two, and the entire back side of his false body turns into the fury of a volcano erupting towards her.

"God Devouring Hydra!"

Six individual punches strike her one after another, closer to cannonballs than the work of any sort of martial arts, with pure, incredibly compressed plasma jets replacing the power of any sort of muscle as it's primary mode of propulsion, all topped up with a headbutt like a whip cracking as his elongated neck sweeps around and snaps at her, breaking the sound barrier.

Before she can be sent flying with seven new bruises, a portal rips open on Weiss's body, and a seventh arm rushes out, grabbing her by her left hindleg before an eighth limb erupts as well, raising up in a knifehand and-

Sunset gallops towards the castle when she hears Celestia's scream in stereo, Royal Canterlot Voice is really not doing Sunset Shimmer's ears any favors right now.

Pushing through crowds of ponies, she sees a guard cordon trying to keep ponies away from the castle. Sunset snarls, teleporting past them. No time to play bureaucrat right now, damn it!

She walks past the ruined streets and courtyards in horror, stepping over puddles of acid and keeping a wide berth from the puddles of molten stone, ignoring the intently staring Eyeroc perched on a tall piece of rubble nearby, until finally, she sees a sight that chills her to her core.

Weiss had turned himself into a monster, some twisted beast from the depths of Tartarus itself, holding Celestia's limp body from her leg like a turkey, if a turkey were glowing so brightly that it left spots in Sunset's vision. Could this really be the same pony who she caught practicing keeping a casual expression in his room while choking down ranch-dressing flavored soda?

"Weiss, stop!" Sunset shouts, stepping forward with desperation in her tone.

Weiss looks over, his expression turning into a knowing grin, as though her arrival had always been part of his plan.

"You like what I've done with the place?" He says, throwing the princess to the side, where she flips in midair to land on her hooves, telekinesis holding her broken leg up and in place with practiced ease.

"Weiss, please, stop all of this. I'm the one you want. Celestia may have taken the book, but I'm the one that stole it's contents!" She shouts, waiting for him to turn on her.

Weiss's smile disappears like ashes in water as turns to her fully, his broken limbs snapping together and regenerating enough for him to hold them up approvingly, even as they shake slightly from weakness.

"When I came here, Sunset Shimmer, I had three main goals. Two of which are now fulfilled. I wanted to show the two of you one simple fact. Celestia believed that her knowing my secrets, my spells... She thought that knowing them made her better than me.

"But that's what I'm here to make her understand. It doesn't take the Grimoire Weiss to create a pony like me. It takes a pony like me to create the Grimoire Weiss!

"It was never about the book. It was about my reputation. A reputation that the two of you disrespected, and ruined. Celestia turned all the history books about me into puns! She didn't just uncover the Grimoire Weiss's secrets, she made a mockery of them! Of me!"

Weiss sighs, shrugging to himself, as he closes his eyes and shakes his head. "But I guess, perhaps I've taken it a bit too far."

A portal opens up behind Celestia, who doesn't notice what comes through. All she can see right now is red, and her vision has fully tunneled in the heat of combat.

Sunset looks mournful. "I'm sorry, Weiss. Please, stop all of this. I'm begging you."

When Weiss begins to shrink down in a haze of black fire, returning to his normal form with a faint smile, he looks Sunset Shimmer right in the eyes.

"If it's worth anything Sunset, I apologize for what you are about to see."

By now, Twilight Sparkle is pacing the room desperately. Obey Celestia, or try to help her? Obey? Help? Obey?

...Help.

Spike by now has already woken up and recharged his batteries with a pile of snacks, so Twilight has no problem asking him to open a portal to Celestia.

She runs through the portal, prepared for anything, but she couldn't have been prepared for what she sees, like a nightmare come to life.

Celestia, holding her hoof on Weiss's chest, her mane and tail a glowing solar flare, her teeth grit with smoke rushing out from between the lengthy fangs.

Her face twisted with wild-eyed madness.

Celestia's leg has already healed, but her ego hasn't. The blow had gotten the adrenaline flowing like nothing else had for the past millennium. Such a familiar feeling. She hadn't let loose like this for what must have been over a thousand years. She had spent so long cultivating peace that she'd almost forgotten what it felt like, the feeling of her heart hammering in her chest, of her horn burning with unrestrained fury, of being able to see every pore beneath every hair on a pony's face as she smashes through anything opposing her in a perfect dance of war.

She forgot how much fun this is.

The instant that Weiss finishes burning away his draconic form, she obliterates the air between her and him with the force of her wingbeats, pinning the dark sage to the ground, a hoof pressing down on one of his dragon arms, and the other one pressed firmly against his chest.

She converts a swath of her defensive spells into anti-spacial spells, preventing any new portals from being formed, and preventing anything else from teleporting in or out.

She leans down, smiling fondly and excitedly. "You know, this has been a lot of fun. Come on, what's next? I've missed our little spats so much, Weiss.

"You going to let loose with yet another spell that Equestria has never seen before? Summon some sort of mechanical beast, packed with wondrous weaponry and countermeasures tailored to me alone?

"I know you didn't just dispel that form of yours without a plan, Weiss."

He laughs at her, as she hears an odd flapping noise nearby.

Weiss flashes a knowing smile. "You put up a good fight Celestia. There's no way I could have beaten you in a direct fight. Even Malifessence was running out of power by the end. And you would have just kept regenerating, faster and faster, the angrier you got.

"But I've won," He finishes, still bearing his grinning smile even as his ribs creak dangerously.

Celestia's confused look perfectly indicates how her mind is, in that moment, flooded with ice and caution.

Weiss tilts his head at this, his ears twitching. "Oh, did I forget to mention... I cheated?"

And with that, the sky is blotted out by swarms of Eyerocs, all staring at Celestia and Weiss with laser focus.

Celestia looks around, uncomprehending. "What is this Weiss, Answer me!" She shouts, preparing a shield spell to protect herself from whatever this is.

"One thousand years of you trying to make ponies not be afraid of you, Celestia, and you've just pissed it away in half an hour. Even if I'm the obvious bad guy of this little story, you're now the entity of fire and justice, no longer a pony to be crossed or slighted, even in the most trivial matters.

"They've been recording our entire fight, and now the recording is being broadcast across all of Canterlot. You probably should have held back half of your pegasus guard instead of sending them all after my minions, then maybe you could have cleared up the smoke before the enchanted fireworks could turn it into the world's biggest television!

Celestia leaps off of Weiss in horror, looking up at the skies, where in high definition, Celestia turns herself into a feral god of fire and destruction, fighting Weiss. All displayed on the smokescreen Weiss's ship had left when it appeared to be damaged.

Her eyes widen in abject despair, as Weiss stumbles to his feet.

"Didn't it once seem odd to you, that I was fighting you head on? That I just walked right into your home and put my dukes up?" He asks, staring at the paralyzed Princess Celestia.

"But that wasn't even the best part. No, I've saved the best for last. The timing I had to set up was nearly impossible, if I hadn't used some clever magic to help me do the math to predict a baby dragon's magical recovery rate."

"You see, I got you a live audience for the finale."

Celestia only just now notices her student, Twilight Sparkle, and her heart sinks into her stomach, as she dismisses as much combat magic as she can, among the spells that can be dispelled early.

"Twilight," Celestia starts, but the rest of her words won't come when her student flinches at her movements, unable to tear her eyes away from her teacher's slit pupils, and fanged mouth, which, moments ago, were glaring down like a wolf looking at a particularly tasty piece of meat.

Weiss chuckles, before laughing out loud at Celestia's pitiful expression, pure sadistic pleasure running through him at the sight, like it's the funniest thing he's ever seen in his life.

"So, what are you going to do now, then, finish me off? Pop my clone like a grape, and dump my lamp into that pit you're so fond of?" Weiss says smugly.

He shakes his head with mock-sadness. "You know, your biggest flaw was the one I was desperately hoping you would have been able to overcome. You've gone soft.

"If you had started with your full, unrestrained power, you could have ended this fight before I even thought of transforming. You could have ripped through my chest instead of my neck, and taken the lamp out before I could physically react. Hell, if Luna had helped you, she would have seen through my invisible spies in a split second."

Weiss shakes his head. "At any rate, our debts are squared now.

"You ruined my reputation, and now I've ruined yours. You destroyed my home, and now I've destroyed yours. You stole from me one of my greatest treasures, and now I've stolen one of yours.

"I think that makes us even." He says, turning around and walking away.

Celestia snarls, turning to him. "You've won Weiss, but you won't be leaving this place. The Anti-spacial spells won't let you create portals. They won't let you run away."

She takes a threatening step forward. "Your lamp isn't leaving this courtyard."

Weiss's smile doesn't change as he turns back around. "Oh, this lamp? This one right here?" He says, pulling it out of his chest.

"No..." Weiss shakes his head, scratching his chin ponderously.

"You meant my Lamp, with a capital 'L', didn't you? Well, of course it isn't leaving Canterlot," Weiss says, ripping the copper lamp open and revealing a swirling portal embedded inside of it.

On the other end of the portal, another identical lamp rests on a soft looking purple velvet pillow.

"It was never here in the first place." He winks as the portal self-destructs and Weiss's Shadow Clone self destructs along with it.

As the skies of Canterlot display a high-definition theater release of Celestia unleashing righteous fury unlike anything Canterlot's peaceful ponies had seen before, the real Celestia falls to her knees and sobs. Neither of her students are able to approach her, each one having their own reasons for their inability to approach the monarch.

One held back out of fear, and the other, guilt.

Tempest Shadow pulls out a Black Materia, apparently one of several that Weiss had produced, for situations not too dissimilar to this one.

Activating the Materia, she briefly feels her disciplined stance slip away in favor of a more relaxed and casual pose as a flash of Weiss's time-locked memory washes over her, allowing her to cast the exact same spell he had cast when creating the Materia. The Shadow Clone technique.

A relatively small drain on her magic heralds a shadowy black eyeball with wings appearing in front of her, before it collapses to the ground with a smoky splat, and slowly grows into the form of Weiss Noir.

"Well, it's a bit forward of me to be wearing your magical energy Fizzy, but I think it's a good fit," He jokes, still riding the pure high of sending someone into despair.

Before long, the ship is brought in and pointed at the Vault that they had stolen.

The lack of sound of Shining Armor pounding on the inside of his soundproofed prison cell is music to Weiss's ears, as he has his minions use an intense blast from the Gaon Cannon to rip open Celestia's Vault of Dark Artifacts.

"Remember, boys, don't touch anything I don't sign off on. We're only taking my own shit back, and also the Alicorn Amulet, of course. We'll dump the rest of it back where we got it," Weiss says, looking inside.

"Ooh! A Moon Crystal! Looks like Celly's been holding out on me." Weiss says, picking up one of the crystals off the shelves. When he senses the swirling nightmare trapped inside it, he drops it in shock, as something clicks in his mind. The label reads: "Nightmare Gem, discovered in a Longma Village shortly before Nightmare Moon's banishment."

"Sorry boys, take the rest of the day off, I have to look into something," Weiss Noir suddenly shouts to the Fizz Guards he had requisitioned, before trotting through a sequence of rooms until he reaches the one with his crudely assembled dream-machine in it.

Plucking the strands of a dreamcatcher web he had purchased from an earth pony, Weiss attempts to contact the Arcana Nox again, suspicion burning in his mind.

"Inputting code phrase. Tarot Designation: 'The Moon', please respond," Weiss says into the microphone, waiting to receive the bleeps that either confirm or deny that a connection was successfully made.

The response is the same one he had been getting for months. A successful connection, but denied access.

Before, he thought it was damage to the system that had caused this denial of access, some crossed crystals somewhere locking him out.

Now, though, he suspects it may be compromised. Again.

♪"Oh life on the outside ain't what it used to be..."♪

Luna finds herself in a strange role reversal, attempting to comfort Celestia over how the views of her subjects did not favor her at the moment.

"I was such a fool, Luna. I wanted to believe that he would fight me like a real stallion so badly, I just... Didn't pay attention to how angry I was getting."

The Lunar Diarch pats her sister on the back. "Celestia, Sister, you need to get out of your room. The ponies still need you."

Celestia throws her hooves up. "What's the point?! Day court has been empty for weeks, they all think I'm going to vaporize the castle if any of them disagree with me!"

Luna couldn't decide whether to be offended or grateful that night court had filled up so vastly after that day, but, ultimately decides that the improvement to her reputation is not worth this.

Celestia continues quietly. "He made it feel just like old times, Luna. He kept riling me up, every time I became suspicious, he unleashed some fantastic new assault. It was so thrilling, I just fell into that old pattern. Win, at any cost."

Her tears grow fatter when she spots the newspaper, before Luna levitates it out of the room and shreds the unflattering bundle of paper to pieces. Her sister doesn't need to keep rereading that sensationalist garbage.

"What am I going to do, Luna?"

Luna smiles comfortingly. "You've always had a temper, Sister. All Weiss has done is prove that bottling it up and trying to hide it was a major misplay..."

Celestia looks at her sister ruefully. "What, so I should go back to defenestrating nobles when they do something asinine? I've tried for hundreds of years to convince ponies that I don't do that anymore..."

Luna shakes her head. "Honesty has never been your strong suit, sister, but you need it now more than ever. Didn't you say that Kindness was a firm hoof? What changed?"

Celestia sniffs. "You weren't here to reign in my... Boldness. I had to be the calm one, when you left."

Luna can't help it, laughter bubbling up. "I'm sorry, it's just... You were trying to-" she snorts

"Trying to fill my shoes while I was gone?"

Celestia nods with a fragile smile. "I suppose it was a bit ridiculous. I didn't want ponies to be afraid, and they had a great many reasons to be afraid when it was me alone deciding Equestria's policies..."

Luna cracks a joke, smiling at her elder sister. "Well, sister, I'm here now. Though I would ease into deleting ponies via window expulsion. This poor castle has been repaired enough, this year."

Celestia laughs, and Luna starts joking some more, ribbing the poor solar Alicorn's barely-hidden violent tendencies. She just laughs even more.

Just like old times.

(Weiss Report) Gate of Babylon, and Other Fun Party Tricks [Homeworld Portal]

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Entry Number Twenty-One, Day Two-hundred-and-Forty

Why are portals so God Damn cool? This has gotten pretty ridiculous, I'm not going to lie.

I'll start at the start, when I attempted to use portals to enhance my weaponry.

Turns out, when you combine weightlessness with heavy weaponry, the results can be... potent. Especially when you aim straight up. I'm still finding bits of tungsten from the balistae I had fired through a portal as a range test for weightless bolts. I'm sure no further rambling is needed to clarify my next step. I rigged up a few chambers with nothing but some modified spear launchers, in case I ever need to go Gilgamesh on some poor fool.

Speaking of weightlessness and things fit for a king, I've worked out an enchantment which permanently allows an object to enjoy the benefits of portal weightlessness. By passing portals over an objects in such a way that it's almost seamless, and doing so repeatedly, an object can be given selective resistance to gravity. If I had some sort of reason to, I could probably make an entire floating island with this. For now though, I think I'll settle for commissioning a few flying machines.

By combining Foxfire with this new Gravity-Disruption Magic, I've also taken the time to produce a few very special magitek devices, able to diminish the effects of centripetal and acceleration forces. I've started calling them G-Diffusers. I don't know if it's as good as pegasus magic, but tests in the centrifuge were very enlightening. They were also very sickening, and I don't plan to perform any more testing if I've eaten on the same day... It was unpleasant.

It'll all be worth it when I get to fly an actual Arwing, though.

Things became extremely strange when I tried to take all of this portal junk a step further, twisting up portals and dipping them in molten metal in an attempt to create improved armor plating.

The result looked like ordinary metal, but when I started blasting it with magic, it... Stopped working. The magic was able to plow through a few millimeters, but the end result was the magic rushing into the exposed micro-portals, flying out the other end of the portal. It didn't matter how potent the spell was, if it wasn't a solid attack, it would fail outright. The magic blasts forward, then goes into the portals, and out the other end.

It's not a perfect armor, since I still have to vent the attack out of a portal somewhere else, but... It's a hell of a start.

The metal or crystal in question also doesn't deal well with physical attacks, and mass damage can be triggered when one of the microportals fractures from a physical impact, making even large swaths of armor fracture and break from one strong impact. I'll have to keep that in mind, if I plan on using it to deal with combat magic in the future, since the material just shreds itself apart whenever something like a cannonball hits it.

The ease with which objects can be enchanted with portal magic is frankly unreasonable, if you ask me. I've done some experiments, and with some extensive effort, I can create an object which opens temporary portals given a trigger. Aside from making for great theft bombs, I've been looking into the best possible way to use objects enchanted to open portals, aside from simply using it in combat.

I've started having my dudes prepare what I like to call the Arcana Janus. Bolts of cloth designed to open portals when an object is pressed between them and a surface. By distributing these sheets of cloth carefully, I'm sure there are a number of Dirty Deeds that I could have Done Dirt Cheap. I've upgraded the fast travel stations with the Arcana Janus equipment, along with some safety measures that I'm sure will discourage abuse of it. Violently.

By that I mean I've set up some riot hoses to spray down anyone dumb enough to trigger an alarm near one of the Fast Travel stations.

The last thing I've revisited and improved upon is the use of Portal Rope as a weapon. While using it as a garrotte is a bit too kinky for my tastes, using it as a whip strikes the perfect balance between kinky and boring. Of course, I'm not very good at actually using whips, so I'll leave it to my R&D dudes and Soldier dudes to work out the details on that particular discovery. A portal is a hell of a thing to be whipped by, so I'm sure that it will come in handy.

I've also been considering whether or not it might be possible to chain together two portals in a literal chain. If I could do that, I'm not sure what benefits it would have, exactly, but the topographical implications would be interesting as hell, I'm sure. Maybe with some sort of enchantment, I could pull it off.

I wonder... If I'm enchanting items to create portals, does that make them Portable Holes?

Entry Number Two-Hundred and Thirty Two, Year Thirty-Eight.

Well, it's taken me an embarrassing amount of time, but I finally figured out how to make Swap Explosions affect a living pony. My R&D dudes finally cracked the code, when one of them posed an idea to me, and, when I tested it, sure enough, it worked. The secret was Love. Just a hint of love injected into the magical energies of the Homeward Portal, and it gains the ability to affect ponies as well.

I probably wouldn't have figured it out without the help of my R&D dudes. I don't have a lot of love left to give, lately.

I'll be sure to include this in my plans. Just another piece of the puzzle, for when I exact my final revenge on Sombra. Unlike our last battle, I'll be able to control the battlefield entirely, and I'll leave nothing up to chance. I've started preparing what I like to call my Final Boss Room. I've spared no expense.

Just nine-hundred more years to go, or so, before I can kill him for good.

(Past Chapter 15): Allusions of Grandeur

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I forgot my floaties.

The quiet ride to Wacky Workbench Zone is interrupted only by Dr. Real's questioning. "Sir, I'd really like to know what it is you're planning. My job is to keep you alive, and you've got a look that doesn't bode well with how tight-lipped you're being about your plan."

I smile in the pitch black tram we're both sitting in, my face only visible through our dark-vision goggles.

"Fine, fine. I'm going to use what you've been working on. Living cloned dragon tissues. I'll push the Migrant Iron into a cloned tissue sample. That's how you free yourself of the curse, yes? It can be passed on to the living flesh of another being?" I question rhetorically.

My smile grows. "Then, after that, we're going to begin Project Asura."

Real's eyes widen. "Sir, I'm not finished with my research, I don't have a means to safely integrate dragon cells and energy into your body."

I shake my head. "Then it's a good thing you aren't going to be doing that."

I tap the hunk of Migrant Iron attached to me. "We'll be using this instead. Disks of Migrant Iron, with alloys and locking mechanisms made of other materials to keep the iron from slipping below my skin. We'll use them as ports to attach the cloned portions. No direct contact between my cells and those of the clone means that there's no risk."

Dr. Real's eyes squint as he looks down and mutters to himself, considering my theory carefully.

Finally, he sighs. "I don't want to admit this, because I know you're going to interpret it as a guarantee, but... It could work."

"You know me so well, Dr. Real. Call me crazy, but I've got a gut feeling that I just can't ignore. This could be big," I explain, as our smooth ride comes to a slow halt.

And I'm telling the truth, at that. Ever since the idea popped into my mind, it felt right. Some instinct cropping up just to tell me that my insane idea might actually work. Like smelling gasoline, I felt like this was going to get things really fired up.

The doors hiss open, and we walk into the dim lighting of the Wacky Workbench, my home away from home. I'll get this over and done with, and have some kind of fancy speech afterwards, all in time for lunch.

As we walk into the Biomagitek Lab, I'm glad to see that Dr. Real hasn't attempted to make any other horrific crimes against nature that I didn't sign off on. Even though, to be frank, he failed to make anything horrific in the first place, really, with how cute those kids are.

"Alright doctor, just grow up a lump, and attach a nutrient tank to it, so we can get the metal out of me before we do anything else with it," I say.

He nods, and within minutes, we have a large, scale-covered lump of tissue, with a crystal tank poking out of it.

I move the Migrant iron Into my hoof and press it into the flesh bud, where it sinks in smoothly.

As soon as the metal is fused to both me and the clone, I feel a spark of something unknown, and I pull back, the Migrant Iron smoothly pulling free from me.

Curse officially defeated. Good work team.

Dr. Real is stunned. "Amazing. Even if we stopped here, Lord Weiss, we've just moved medical magic ahead by decades."

I huff. "Way to lowball our work here, chief. We've still got the fun part to get to. Let's get me those arms, I've got an itch that needs scratching, and a keyboard that begs for the touch of something other than these fucking clunkers," I say, waving my hoof around.

He gives me a funny look, but follows my directive, programming the vats to begin growing dragon arms.

I interrupt him when I see the number he punched in. "Actually... Let's get a little greedy doctor. Make it six."

He sweats as he stares at me, checking me for any hint of hesitation. Too bad for him, I didn't name this little project "Project Asura" for nothing.

I turn to the boulder of Migrant Iron as the limbs are set to grow by Dr. Real.

I carefully laser the boulder apart, wrapping it with black fire until it and the flesh it was formerly attached to is reduced to nothing but ashes and six identical metal disks.

I then take a few stainless steel ingots from the storage bin nearby, welding them into the disks to prevent them from sinking fully into anything.

The mechanical hands of the laboratory swing down at Dr. Real's behest, grabbing the metal disks and the limbs. Unfortunately, until our technology improves, I'll just have to deal with the limbs being fed from nutrient tanks implanted in them.

The temptation to grow annoyed when three of the limbs take the time to attach diagnostic crystals to my body is astonishing, but I hold myself back. It would be best if I simply let Dr. Real do what he is good at.

'Well, here goes nothing...' Dr. Real thinks to himself, guiding the mechanical claws in place to do the deed.

The procedure completes anticlimactically, limbs socketing into place without much fanfare or sparking.

Weiss jerkily lifts one of the limbs up, staring down a the white palm with a curious expression, before he suddenly begins to scream.

Panic floods Dr. Real's veins as he turns to the holographic display, the readouts on Weiss's emotional state. Greed levels haven't changed, like Real was afraid of but...

Greed Capacity is rising? That's not-

Weiss's screams turn into laughter, as his body shakes, fists clenching as he stares blankly into the air.

Dr. Real rushes to a drawer, pulling out the Drowsy Crystal and, in a moment of clarity, he grabs a Greed Crystal as well, a gift from Padparadscha, a few days ago.

Running over to Weiss, he jabs the unicorn with both of them, making the maddened unicorn's vocalizations slow, and finally cease.

One's mind expanding is not pleasant. I want it, so badly. What is "it"?

I don't know, but I want it.

But what was much much worse was when I didn't want it.

My normal feelings of covetousness, ones he thought were perfectly reasonable before this, were now like looking at the dripping stains at the bottom of a deep well gone dry.

In a very real way, I desperately wanted to want more.

I turn to Dr. Real in a brief moment of lucidity. "I think I may be having an episode, doctor. What are your thoughts on this situation?"

And, indeed, I'm feeling pretty damn good right about now. I feel like I could grab a shovel and just fucking dig until I hit gold. God, some gold would be really nice right now.

I'm reminded of when I had first seen dragonfire. Enough greed in one place to make any ordinary pony a drooling vegetable.

Is that what I'm feeling right now? It's hard to believe that this feeling is greed. I don't really think taking things from others is the right course of action, to get what I want.

I need to create.

Dr. Real repeats himself for the third time. "Sir, you need to take deep breaths right now, you're undergoing a sympathetic metamorphosis."

Is that what this is? Of course, how could I have been such a fool. I stole the very flesh from a dragon, coveted the blueprints to their most sacrosanct treasure, themselves.

I intentionally implanted a cursed metal responsible for what must be countless deaths, treating the vile material as though it was a trifle to be toyed with. All so I could snap my fingers and type on a keyboard.

My actions demonstrated the existence of greed in my mind of the purest and highest caliber. My body now has outright dragon arms attached to it.

A healthy soul resides within a healthy body, and a healthy mind. But my soul is realizing that it now resides in a greedy body, and a greedy mind, and is changing to accommodate this fact.

"Doctor, I'm having a hard time focusing right now, did I actually put anything on my agenda for today, or were those merely plans?" I question, trying to think if I actually made any assurances about what I was going to do other than strap clone arms to myself.

I need to create.

Dr. Real shakes his head nervously. "N-no sir, you cleared it for this experiment. Are you... Feeling alright?"

I shake my head. "I'm fairly certain I'm going losing it right now," I say, idly using my magic to grow a purple filigree on the walls made from Royal Crystals.

As soon as I'm done coating every surface in beautiful geometric edgings and patterns, I cross my arms behind my back in a familiar way. "Walk with me, doctor, I'm going to tackle this matter as best as I can until I can work out a better solution."

"What do you mean, sir?" He asks, nervously looking at my emotional reports being fed out onto the screen.

I smirk as I try to keep my vision from blurring from the sleep magic keeping me pacified. "Your artificial jolt of greed is starting to wear off. Right now, not feeling unreasonably high amounts of greed feels very painful. So that's not ideal."

"I need treasure, so I'm going to make some. I'm going to make a lot of it, actually."

"And Weiss has been doing this for how long?" Eclipse Flash asks the doctor.

He rubs his leg nervously. "About four hours."

She just stares, at the walls, where Weiss has apparently spent four hours just coating the tunnels of Wacky Workbench Zone with colorful crystal engravings, the gems glowing softly with inner light.

"It looks good, doesn't it?" Weiss smiles, finishing his depiction of a rose, the seven-hundredth one so far, a small tap from the chisel in his hands carving out the last thorn from the wall for him to fill with the softly glowing crystal.

Priss tries to softly let him down, cautious of his erratic behavior. "I think ponies will appreciate you put in the effort, Weiss, but it doesn't look very good. You could use some practice."

Weiss chuckles. "Yeah, it might not be the best. But It's mine, and I like it."

Suddenly, he freezes, gritting his teeth as though performing a monumental effort. "You all can... Remove it... If it isn't good. I'll put engravings somewhere more out of the way."

Dr. Real puts a hoof on his shoulder. "I'm sure nopony will mind, Lord Weiss, but... If you want the tunnels to be filled with engravings, why not have the engravers do it?"

Weiss shakes his head rapidly. "Can't. Have to do it myself. Can't make ponies give me frivolous stuff."

His strained expression instantly morphs into a smirk. "I've got a better idea. I'll go decorate my killbox rooms!"

With that, he drops the hammer and chisel he had been using before, arms flopping to his side as he trots off. His friends look on in concern before following him.

"See, the plan is, I'm going to keep on making beautiful treasures for the Shadow Realm, just to keep my head on straight until I can find a workable solution," Weiss explains casually, as his fingers trail along the wall and grow swooping purple swirls over it.

"As far as I see it, I just have to keep making everything opulent, until I've got enough beautiful treasures to... You know, not be crazed," He continues. Pausing in front of one of the support pillars.

He breathes heavily. "Could one of you call the architects? I want to destroy this ugly thing and replace it. I have to."

Dr. Real hastily gets out his Radio Crystal, before Weiss snatches it out of his hand.

"Just, hold on a second, Doctor. You need a proper case for that, something that fits with your aesthetic."

"S-sir, perhaps we should... Get that pillar replaced, before you focus on something as trivial as my radio?"

Weiss's eyes widen. "I did a crazy thing, didn't I? Shit."

He shakes his head, handing the crystal back and staring at the stone pillar, pointedly not looking at Dr. Real's radio. "Right, do it."

He taps his fingers anxiously while Dr. Real calls in the architects to come.

Need more. I want more stuff. It's ok that it belongs to the Shadow Realm ponies too. It's ours.

I have to keep that in mind. Can't risk abusing my authority for shiny treasure to stuff my room with. Have to make sure it's all communal.

I just need to keep making more treasure. (I should make a pile of gold coins... but keep it in a public lobby? No, that would devalue it.)

Remember your economics Weiss, supply and demand determines value. Value determines wealth. The more treasure that the Shadow Realm has, the more I have by proxy.

Where is that fucking architect? I kind of want to blast this pillar away. I've got this idea for like, a vine sort of thing.

Dr. Real is saying something, but I'm ignoring him for now. I don't want to hear something that might set me off by mistake.

Oh, good, the Architect is here. What was his name again?

"Good evening, Fat Stacks," I say, having remembered their name.

"Good evening to you, Lord Weiss. I've been told you wish to replace this pillar?" He says, adjusting his helmet.

I nod. "It's not aesthetically appealing enough. I'll be replacing it with one of my own, but I needed to know if it's load bearing."

"Sir? Should I contact the construction ponies?"

I shake my head rapidly. Can't get into that habit. If I start making ponies make treasure for me, I'm not sure I'll be able to stop. "No, I'll be creating it myself."

Dr. Real waves his hooves at the architect, shaking his head nervously.

The Architect's eyes keep drifting to my arms, but that's not important right now. "Very well sir, this pillar is not load-bearing, no. You may replace it if you wish."

I nod at this, smiling. "Thank you, you may return to your work."

With that, a flash of contempt enters my expression, and I obliterate the pillar into nothing with a burst of flames. Hmm, that felt pretty good. I'll have to watch out for that. I can't afford to be destroying ugly things just because it feels good.

I need to create.

When Weiss finishes growing the weird, candycane pillar, Priss is officially done with this.

"Weiss," she starts, making Weiss's ears perk as he turns away from his creation with a pleased expression.

"You want more bling in the Shadow Realm, right?" She asks, walking up to him.

"Priss, you need to stay a few meters away from me, I'm not sure how I'll react to whatever you're going to say," Weiss warns, stepping back.

She shakes her head. "Weiss, cool it.

"Call up some artists. We've got plenty of them, and you've told them all to just 'indulge in their hobbies', and you've been paying them to basically do nothing. Call them up. Have them start making some goblets and paintings and stuff, if you want it that bad."

Weiss shakes his head. "Can't do that Priss. Might not end well if I get the idea in my head that I can just make ponies give me treasure."

Eclipse steps forward, the two fillies creating a humorous scene of them backing the larger stallion into a corner as he holds his hands up as if to ward them away.

"If you go bad, you know I'll stop you, right? I'll kick you in the head until you come to your senses" Eclipse says firmly, with no room for doubt.

Weiss's formerly panicked expression softens at that, as something clicks in his head.

"Right, but-"

Dr. Real shakes his head. "S-sir, we need you doing your job. If that means we have to switch to monster-ivory straws in the mess hall and making sure all our sporks have illuminated text engraved in them, then you'll work out a cost-effective way to get it done, and the hunters and carvers will do their job."

"I've got Mrs. Miss Priss on the line," Dr. Real finishes, shoving the radio crystal into Weiss's clammy hands.

"Well... If-" Weiss gulps, temptation clearly burning in his expression.

"If you insist."

He puts the radio to his ear. "Whittle, I need you on a new project."

A medium pitched chatter sounds out over the crystal.

"No, nothing so practical, I thought I'd put you back on some more familiar work, we don't need to do evacuations as often, now that the bootleg crystal heart is burning up anything we don't want in here. So, I figure, let's celebrate and style up the place. How fast can you make three-thousand skull-shaped sconces? The flattened ones, not the pony ones."

More chattering, excited chattering.

"Wow, that fast? Alright, I'll send some ponies over to pick them up when you're done, start installing them and such."

He hangs up on the professional crystal carver.

"I'm not taking down the pillar." Weiss says firmly, crossing two of his arms.

His pout helps Priss make the executive decision to laugh at his childish demand.

As I sit in my office, trying to practice my handwriting, Luna herself walks in, her sister in tow. This is weird because I'm not dreaming, and nobody's dying.

They seem to have missed the memo on my little outpatient procedure, if their expressions are anything to go by.

"Do you like it Luna? I find it quite 'handy', myself."

She walks forward, staring at my white, scaled arms with something between awe and disgust.

"What have you done to yourself?" She whispers. Oh shit, that's worry on her face.

Celestia's nose quirks. "Heaven's sake, I can still smell blood on you Weiss. Does your madness know no bounds?"

I widen my arms, smiling confidently, "Now the power of the noble dragon race is within me, and with it, their supreme greed is mine to command. I am fire, I am death!"

"Weiss... Your spirit is corrupt" Luna says, frowning as her wizard eyes see something I don't..

Shrugging my new shoulders, I quote an old line that seems appropriate here. "I don't feel corrupt. In fact, I feel pretty good."

I tilt my head in confusion when she keeps staring at me. "What, am I dying or something?"

Thankfully, she shakes her head. "No, you have no shortage of life force, Weiss. How are you acting so casually?"

Celestia interjects, offering her own clarification. "Any other pony would be a slavering beast, if they were in your position right now."

I raise an eyebrow. "Well, I am quite the beast, but slavering is just rude, Princess. What was your business here, exactly?" I say, shuffling my papers together before stuffing them in my desk drawers.

Celestia tries to keep a casual expression when she spots me tapping my fingers on the desk. "I was going to offer my aid in cleansing your realm of the black flames that plague it. I understand it was not your intent for them to escape the chamber you were housing them in."

I chuckle, intentionally answering as if Luna had spoken instead of her sister. "Luna, why would I extinguish the flames when my ponies worked so hard to make them? Hell, they're only in the Hidden Palace Zone right now, I'm planning on spreading them to the entire Shadow Realm!"

Luna balks at this, while her sister fumes at being verbally ignored in no uncertain terms. "You plan to turn your entire kingdom into a pit of hatred and fire?"

I huff through my nose. "The flames are perfectly content to mind their own business."

Princess Luna shakes her head in disbelief as she actually backs away slightly in shock. "Am I to believe that the dark magic littering your kingdom's streets hasn't caused a single injury?"

I nod. "You got it in one, Luna. The flames are born from hatred. If the Shadow Realm doesn't hate something, then the black flames can't touch it."

Their eyes widen, demonstrating that they've caught onto my implication.

"Exactly.

My eyes narrow, as my smile turns vicious. "This is our edge. We'll be able to facetank anything Sombra tries to throw at us now."

Luna's ears quirk at that. "Facetank?"

I pause, trying to come up with a good explanation. "Er, it's a term that refers to a tactic in games, where one's active and passive defenses allow them to 'Tank' damage with their face. Hence the term."

She ponders this for a moment. "And you believe that these flames are enough to facetank all of Sombra's potential attacks?" She asks, assimilating the slang as her sister's pout turns into curiosity as well.

"It will when I'm done with it," I smile vaguely.

"Oh! That reminds me."

I pull out a folder and slide it across the table to the princesses.

"This contains the plans to create prosthetic limbs using Migrant Iron as an attachment point. As you can clearly tell, I'm very confident in the product," I claim, holding my limbs out proudly.

Luna picks up the folder, reading through it.

"Are you really comfortable merely giving us something so valuable, Weiss?" Luna poses suspiciously, but also with concern, watching me like I'm about to leap over the table to snatch it back or something.

I nod sadly. "That's fair princess. I am feeling very different than I usually do, after all.

"I saw a pony who needed this more than I do, and I felt something much stronger than greed."

Celestia's ears twitch at that.

"This can help people. Migrant Iron might be a cursed metal, but this is too good to pass up."

Luna's eyes narrow. "Migrant Iron is a cursed metal, and our laws normally forbid possession of it..."

Celestia looks at the files with unabashed interest, elbowing her sister in the side lightly.

Searching my eyes for something that isn't there, Luna looks at the files, and her tension deflates, as she clearly considers some of the same things I considered, looking over survey reports and meeting with some injured ponies myself.

"We will not dismiss this, Lord Weiss. The fruits of your labor, if we discover nothing harmful within-"

With a look from Celestia that borders on pleading, she sighs. "-our laws may be changed to suit them."

I interrupt her. "If you discover a problem with Migrant Iron Prostheses, tell me, and I will fix them. There's a lot of ponies counting on them here too."

Luna looks skeptical, but strangely, Celestia looks much more pleased with the idea. Kindness and Generosity, folks.

Ruby stares down at me with a glare and a smirk. "Sup Lord Uncle. Doc said you needed a lesson on..."

He drops to one knee, flexing his right bicep. "Dragon!"

He shifts to the left, flexing the other one.

I wait for him to finish shouting, but he seems to be distracted.

"Is that it?" I question in a deadpan.

He startles "Oh, sorry Lord Uncle, I was distracted by my Dragon!"

He flexes "Power!"

I'm not as amused as the blank faced Sapphire and giggling Padparadscha are, as they sit in the stands of the emptied out arena.

Ok, maybe it's a little funny.

"Yes, that's what I'm here for, Ruby. If you would?"

He nods, arms akimbo as he opens his mouth wide, and spews pink flames into the air.

The stream cuts off. "And that's how it's done! You gotta want it! Like when I find!"

He huffs out another blast of flame with a determined expression as his arms snap to his sides, fists forward in what he seems to believe is a martial arts stance. "Rocks!

"My room has!

"A big pile of Rocks and Slag!" He finishes, throwing a punch.

"I want that stuff, and then I blow fire at it, and it goes to my room!" He says, throwing another punch for no reason.

"Doctor Real!

"Really doesn't approve!"

I quirk my eyebrow. That really doesn't help me figure out how to create Dragonfire. I can want something all damn day, but I still haven't managed to huff out so much as a spark.

"I'm afraid I don't understand, Ruby. Are you sure there's nothing else to it?" I question.

Sapphire raises their hand, and I point to them. "Go for it, kid."

"Pain," He says simply.

Paddy nods. "Yeah, it stings like if I bit my whole tongue right before I breathe fire!"

Ruby nods. "Yes!"

Ruby points in the air, while clenching his other fist. "The Spicy Tongue!"

He points to me with confidence. "It is our eternal enemy!"

He points upward again, repeating his first pose. "Fire's companion!"

I think about that for a moment, Spicy Tongue?

No fucking way.

Chef Goodum didn't approve of me taking thirty of the raw Crystal Peppers out of his kitchen, but it was absolutely crucial to my experiment.

What sort of Loonie Toons bullshit is this?

I thought that it was just a visual gag, but in thirty out of thirty test cases, a pony eating something too spicy for them to handle results in them emitting a variable stream of flames from their mouth.

Pain isn't even an emotion, why are they breathing fire from it! Wait, is pain an emotion? I don't think it is...

I almost rub my eyes in exasperation, before realizing what the heck I almost did, and use a non-pepper stained hand to rub my eyes in exasperation with.

This is going to suck.

Oh, but I can stuff some peppers in Priss's lunch later, now that I've got the idea in my head.

(Noir Report) Outliers to Magical Theory [Fire Breath]

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Entry #15, Day 134

I have no choice but to conclude one of two things. Either Pain is an Emotion, or spells may be derived from more than simply emotions. The spell that has taught me this is one I've decided to call Fire Breath, as I am most certainly not the one to discover this extremely widespread magic. When a living creature combines the sensation of pain with the desire to expel pain from their mouth, Fire Breath is the end result. If you have ever spewed flames from your mouth after eating spicy food, you have been the victim of this magic.

I find it at least somewhat shocking that this effect hasn't been studied more in depth. Perhaps it's a consequence of just how common it is, leading to ponies merely accepting it as normal? In any case, I've only made the connection between spice and flames due to research into dragons, and of course, their flames. A dragon's tongue contains a biological gland which produces something very similar to capsaicin, allowing them to effectively burn their own mouths as part of their ability to breathe flames consistently.

Aside from this, a dragon's flames can be further intensified as they eat harder and more brittle gems, due to the abrasive powder restoring sensitivity to their mouths. I can't help but wonder if this is evolution at work, although how quickly an immortal species can evolve traditionally is unknown to me. In any case, although I now know the method by which to cast Dragonfire, I will not be sharing the method here, as an ordinary pony creating Dragonfire would be extremely unhealthy to their mental state.

It was certainly not healthy to mine.

In any case, the uses of Fire Breath are obvious, although I find it strange that pain is not among the feelings associated with Dark Magic. Thus, if you wish to cast Fire Breath, you will likely need a Materia, if you are unwilling to carry a bottle of hot sauce with you. I've ensured that the Materia Shops contain a few instances of Fire Breath, for use in cooking and hobby work. If you wish to obtain stronger Materia for the spell, you'll need to contact Research and Development.

I find it interesting to note that the flames created by Fire Breath are unable to harm the caster's mouth, even though they most certainly appear there, and are indeed real flames. I believe this may be for similar reasons that other spells are unable to affect their casters, namely, that one's desire to expel pain from their mouth will not allow the spell to cause more pain when cast. This serves as yet another instance of one's magic being unable to harm themselves, as the simple fact of the matter is, few individuals desire such.

One intriguing side-effect of this spell is when it is used to enchant an object. The first and most important feature is that any object enchanted with this spell, even if it isn't in the process of creating fire, will turn red, and begin to glow. Ponies that touch objects enchanted with Fire Breath also claim that it burns, although the objects do not inherently create heat.

Tests on the matter from volunteers also revealed a useful effect, namely, that large amounts of kinetic, evenly distributed force are emitted on a pony who lands on a surface enchanted with this Fire Magic, such that they are bounced into the air a sizable distance, at the cost of psychosomatic pain from the spell making them feel a sharp burning sensation. This effect also seems to turn them upright, regardless of their previous orientation.

This may be another example of evolution in action. It makes no small amount of sense that a magical species would develop a reaction like that, in response to landing on a heated surface. While I can only speculate on it, I can absolutely develop methods by which to exploit this ability. Namely, by creating Materia that allow it to be replicated. While it's absolutely not pleasing, a Materia can replicate the sharp, sudden pain that triggers a Shock Leap.

One may question what makes the Shock Leap and Fire Breath better than alternatives such as Prestidigitonium, or Foxfire, and the answer has several components. The first and most important component being it's efficiency and safety. A D-Rank Fire Breath spell produces more flames than a C-Ranked Prestidigitated Flame, while, at the same time, Shock Leap is both cheaper and safer than launching one's body using force from either Foxfire or Prestidigitonium, due to how it naturally distributes it's force evenly.

Aside from one's need to be mindful of the landing, Shock Leap could very well be a spell with no upper safe limit, though I don't recommend stress testing it underground, for obvious reasons.

Entry #16, Day 135

Recent events have forced me to retract my former statement, as I've discovered through several reports that some ponies who perform a Shock Leap of what is roughly the C-Rank will find their tails spontaneously combusting into flames in some situations. I do not know why this happens, or what qualifies a pony as being "Flame Vulnerable" when using Shock Leap, but I suspect it may have to do with their mindset, and whether or not they have a memorable experience of having been burned in the past, causing a magical echo when the spell activates.

Needless to say, if you plan on using the spell in spite of this, a method to extinguish yourself is paramount. Nobody wants to explain to friends and family why they are unable to sit down, I'm sure readers can agree. That besides, it would be no small embarrassment, having to explain the source of the burns to whatever doctor or nurse is required to treat it. Therefore, this is me saying, in no uncertain terms, do not use C-Rank or above Shock Leap Materia, unless you have either been tested for flame vulnerability, or are supervised accordingly.

I wonder, if I create an ejector seat that uses Shock Leaping, would that make it a hotseat?

(Present Chapter 15): Self-Righteousless

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Tempest Shadow is having a really good day today. Sunset Shimmer is nowhere to be found, Star Road has become the best damn base she's enjoyed the pleasure of occupying, Weiss has explained what they're going to do with their little guard captain, and something very special has happened to her to justify her not wearing armor today.

Activating her communicator, she opens a line to one of her subordinates.

"Status report, any activity on the Equestrian Side?" She asks, prompting the bulky soldier to shake their head rapidly.

"Nothing yet Captain, They've been really quiet after we got em."

Tempest ponders this. It's been almost a month since the attack. 'Maybe they're waiting to see what we do with Shining Armor.' She poses internally.

"Keep watching the cameras, Eyeballs. Dismissed." She says, deactivating her communicator and walking off the edge of the Star Road.

Casting a spread of specialized spells in freefall, Tempest's body is surrounded in a skintight bubble of reversed gravity that flips her around as she tucks into a roll for a moment before striking the side of The Tower.

A selective repulsion spell allows her to slide down it's obsidian walls with nearly no friction to slow her down unnecessarily, before the reversed gravity finally slows her down necessarily, just in time to hook her hooves over a window frame and pull herself the rest of the way down into it.

She can't help but smile wryly as she flips over inside the balcony's arch with practiced ease, before canceling the spell and flipping herself upright.

It's hard to believe that that spell was considered "unsuitable for flight", just because most unicorns can't do some basic acrobatics.

Weiss Noir has found himself with a conundrum, now that he's finally gotten around to examining the loot.

The minute he picked up the Alicorn Amulet, he got the oddest feeling. One that was just too delicious to pass up.

"My my Sombra, most ponies wouldn't leave their old crib laying around, but I suppose you've never been one to think things through, have you?" He mumbles to himself as he stares at the faceted gemstone, which he had ripped free from it's amulet for further experimentation.

He holds the blisteringly crimson gem up to the light. He can hardly believe it. The Alicorn Amulet, a complete misnomer. There's no small irony to that, Weiss finds.

That the gem powering the so called "Alicorn" amulet was really a piece of Unicorn Crystal. One that could have only come from one place on the planet.

The Umbrum Crystal.

'This must have been the vessel that Sombra used to escape it.'

Weiss's smile turns sadistic as plans turn about in his head. "You know, maybe killing is too good for Sombra," he poses to himself.

"Yes... I think I'll send him crying home to mommy, instead."

The door opens, and Weiss carefully sets the Unicorn Crystal down. "Ahh, Fizzy. You're early," He says, turning in his spinny chair to face his captain.

"Yes, forgoing my usual armor has improved my mobility. I didn't much care for the old branding," She explains with hidden cheer as she pulls up a chair for herself.

"Did you get what you needed, Sir?"

He shakes his head. "Unfortunately, I'm going to need to contract out some work to produce some synthetic versions of the crystal, this one has sentimental value," he jokes.

Tempest just smirks, not bothering to question Weiss. "And the prisoner?"

Weiss passes Tempest a letter. "I've already got the letter forged. Just send it to Twilight and then do as we had planned."

Tempest grabs the scroll with her telekinetic grip, hopping to her hooves, ready to leave.

Weiss raises an eyebrow. "What's got you so happy today, Fizzy? You're practically bouncing."

Tempest restrains herself from blushing. "None of your concern, sir. Just some good news."

He doesn't need to know that the twenty-something year old grown mare got her Cutie Mark last month. A glass bottle with a spinning ball of magical sparkles bouncing around in it.

He also doesn't need to know that she only just realized it yesterday when she saw it in the mirror and had been, before then, walking around ignorant of the fact for weeks.

Definitely not.

"So you can't make it? ~ Even with this example? ~ It's a good sample," Weiss says, holding up the diamond-shaped piece of Unicorn Crystal.

Zecora shakes her head. "To make that gem through Alchemy... ~ It is a feat that's beyond me.

"My pot, too small, it's fire, too cold, ~ My tools, such power, they could not hold."

Weiss scratches his chin.

"I could make a pot ~ It's fire would be blazing ~ Are your skills enough?" He asks, setting it on her table.

She stares at it, her eyes filled with an invisible light. The telltale sign of Zebra Cleverness Magic at work.

"I can see Liquid Rainbows. ~ Refined with Solid Shadows.

"A sphere made of Againte, ~ Holding Auroral Dente

"Mixed with magic from a pony's horn, ~ Creates Crystal of the Unicorn."

Finishing her analysis of the crystal, she blinks her eyes as they start to water from how firmly she was staring, and the magic coursing through her eyes while she did so.

"I am sorry about that. ~ Like being clawed by a cat," Zecora mumbles, rubbing her eyes.

"It's not a problem. ~ I'll get you the stuff you need. ~ Have a nice day, yeah?" Weiss says, waving as he picks up his crystal and leaves.

"Auroral Dente, huh? Well, I know where to get some of that. I'm sure she's itching for a rematch, if I set it up right..." Weiss says to himself, pondering how this is literally going to be like pulling teeth.

Twilight is confused when Spike belches up a letter, and slightly scared as well.

She unrolls the scroll which seems, at least on the surface, to be written by Princess Celestia herself.

"Princess Celestia cordially invites you to the wedding of Princess Mi Amore Cadenza and Captain Shining Armor." Spike reads off.

"What?!" Twilight shouts, confused and more than a little upset, snatching the paper out of Spike's hands.

Twilight growls. "Why am I getting a wedding invite now of all times? This is completely ridiculous, and Shiny couldn't even be bothered to tell me himself?" She shouts, uncomprehending.

"Isn't he still-" Spike starts, before the two hear a loud crash.

Rushing downstairs, Twilight is shocked to see her brother, hogtied and squirming on the floor of the library, a letter hotglued to his forehead, and safety glass sprayed all over her good flooring.

The letter just says "You just got Punk'd, and the wedding invite was faked, but your bro is totally hooked up with Cupid, that part wasn't part of the Punking.

Love Weiss."

Twilight unties her brother in a panic, him spitting out the skull-shaped ball-gag with disdain, finding it to have been completely unnecessary for Tempest to include that.

"I can't believe Weiss did this!" Twilight shouts, brushing her brother off as he stumbles to his hooves, shaking his head.

"Well, he is a violent criminal, sis." Shining Armor states, confused when Twilight ignores him and picks up a large chunk of broken glass, tasting it.

"He replaced my windows with sugar glass for this stupid prank!" She shrieks, tugging at her mane as she scoops it all up and flings it out of the window, where, in the distance, Pinkie can be heard briefly yelping in pain, before humming with satisfaction when she begins eating the glass. Those hums are then followed with more yelps of pain from eating the sharp sugar glass. The pattern continues from there.

She takes several deep breaths, before forcing herself to cheer up. "BBBFF!"

Shining Armor smiles as well. "Sup, LSBFF?"

Twilight pouts. "What's this about a wedding?"

Shining Sweats. "Wedding? I haven't even popped the question yet, there's no wedding!"

Twilight's eyebrow quirks. "What's this about a marefriend?"

Shining's sweatdrop increases in it's intensity, prepared to ascend to the next level. "Would you believe me if I said... I forgot to mention it?"

Twilight's slow walk to the kitchen and angry whump onto a chair imply that the answer to that question is "No".

"Can I at least send a letter to the princess, so she doesn't start hostage negotiations without me?" Shining pleads.

Celestia is nervous, what her sister is suggesting is utterly insane.

"Luna, are you certain about this?" She asks, making Luna nod mischievously.

"If he wanted to teach us a lesson, then what better way to disarm him than to learn it?"

"But claiming it was merely a failed test of our defenses? There isn't a pony in Canterlot that's going to believe that!"

Luna shakes her head. "They'll believe it because it's the truth, and Weiss will fail to distort it because it is the truth.

"He's playing villainy as a hobby, sister. He said so much himself. This is a political and moral trap, and he knows it. He can't deny us thanking him publicly for putting Canterlot's finest to the test. Not without going against his core nature. The importance he places on debts and justice bind him as firmly as any Elements could, and he announced your debt paid."

She jabs her sister in the side. "All you have to do is not counterattack when he inevitably grows incensed and strikes you on the spot."

Celestia pouts. "You're acting like I'm some sort of pit bull."

Luna's eyebrows could lift the moon right now, if it were supported on them. "I'm not finding evidence to the contrary."

Celestia's pout grows. "Fine.

"I'll turn the other cheek, just this once."

Celestia sighs, after a few moments of silence between the royal sisters.

"I hope you're right about this 'Defeating him, sister." Celestia pleads, her mind burdened with heavy thoughts.

"I am, sister. Now, put on your armor, if you are to establish a new reputation, then you should look the part.

"...And I'll do all of the work while you gallivant around." She finishes, muttering to herself before Celestia pokes her in the side in retaliation, making her jump in shock.

Celestia shakes her head at Luna. "I'm afraid not, sister, we're not getting back into that habit. You'll be coming with me, and you'll get your fair half of the glory."

This heralds in Luna's turn to be nervous. "I..."

Celestia's face firms. "You'll come with me. We cannot leave that vault in his hands, and I don't dare to attempt this without you."

A letter appears in front of the duo, which Celestia unrolls and reads, before smiling, slightly happier from the news she received. "Oh good, I don't have to rescue Shining Armor. Weiss fenstrated him into Twilight's home."

Luna glares at her sister. "That is not how you use that word, sister."

A few moments staring at her sister's carefully crafted face forces Luna to finally sigh. "Fine. Someone needs to keep you in check, if you're going to expose yourself to Weiss Noir's unfiltered personality."

'Ok, where's the fucking camera?' Weiss thinks to himself, his paranoia ramped up to staggering new heights when he finds Celestia and Luna knocking on his door like sane individuals who he didn't just last month attack with chemical weapons and cause mass property damage to.

This has to be a prank.

"To what do I owe the pleasure, Princess Luna? 'Princess' Celestia?" he asks, putting the second "princess" in air quotations, after he invites them into a side office for privacy.

Celestia takes a deep breath, before throwing her best smile at Weiss. Interesting, she's not using her magic to hide her expression? "Oh, we're here to invite you to be publicly thanked, Weiss.

"Your volunteering has helped us so dearly, to allow us learn the faults of the Equestrian Royal Guard."

Luna picks up where Celestia left off. "It wasn't for your noble and sanctioned efforts, we would never have considered ushering in a modern day revival of the ancient Alicorn Pact of Combat," Luna explains.

"Alicorn Pact of Combat, you mean that excuse you used to ditch court to beat up bad guys? Wait, sanctioned? I blasted your fucking castle to pieces!" Weiss says in disbelief, his mind rapidly trying to piece out just what their game is.

"Oh Weiss, if we hadn't approved of it, then why was the castle evacuated, and why didn't you sack the city afterwards?" Luna poses, rhetorically.

Celestia continues from there. "I dare say, our coordinated efforts to ensure the quality of the castle's defenses didn't cause so much as a single Bit of civilian property damage."

Weiss slams his fist on the table. "Because you were the only target!" he shouts,

"And now our debts are squared. I see no reason to hold a bit of property damage against you, when it's helped us so very much." Celestia smiles.

"I've really learned a valuable lesson from all of this, you see. I've spent far too long taking what you do personally, when I should be seeing it as...

"Constructive criticism."

Weiss fists shudder. "Care to put that to the test, you sanctimonious bitch?"

Celestia titters lightly.

"If you wish, but I don't think you'll like the result," She warns.

"Oh I think I will," Weiss says, his fist snapping out with a black shine erupting over the scales and skins on the moment of impact, snapping Celestia's head to the side.

His expression grows angrier by the minute when she simply dabs at her face with a summoned handkerchief.

"I did warn that you wouldn't enjoy the result, Weiss. I'll hope to see you in Canterlot tomorrow, so you may be thanked properly. For now, I have a student to meet." She says, walking out of the room with grace and civility, leaving Luna behind in the silent office.

Luna's eyebrows raise almost imperceptibly when Weiss picks up the teeth off of the floor that he had punched out of Celestia's mouth, dumping them into hastily assembled portals.

"You weren't supposed to come out of isolation, Luna. Who cracked your shell? My plans don't account for you being in public just yet," Weiss says simply, not bothering with subterfuge against Luna of all ponies.

Why would he?

Luna keeps her tone even. "You did. Did you think I could ignore my sister in her time of need after what you did?"

Weiss smacks his forehead with a palm. "Of course.

"I'm terrible at accounting for that sort of thing. It's so much easier for me to plan around a pony's flaws when I can isolate them."

"I'm aware, Weiss," Luna states.

Weiss's eyes cut to the princess. "Then why are you still here? Shouldn't you be leaving with your 'dear sister'?"

"Nightmares have been on the rise lately, and Chapter Black has all but disappeared in the months following my return. I believe these events are connected." Luna says out of the blue.

Weiss raises his eyes. He had heard that name before when researching this era's dark magic. Some bullshit Illuminati-style organization that arose from the corpse of his Shadow Realm hundreds of years ago.

A bunch of Earth-ponies pretending they deserve the name "Longma" and pushing for less regulations on Dark Magic, on the premise of fulfilling their "Ancestral Culture".

"Why should I care what a bunch of Shadow Realm cosplayers are doing? Maybe I should go and thank them, they've really been putting boots to asses in the courts for loosening up your anal-retentive Dark Magic laws."

Luna's half-lidded stare turns knowing. "Sunset Shimmer helped us realize that they've been censoring and altering the published copies of the Grimoire Noir that are available to the public. Do you really think ponies can perform the acts of good you dreamed of, without your dark bible to guide them?"

A tremor runs through Weiss's body at Luna's words. Some old, murky heartstring, plucked harshly, ringing true despite how long it had gone untuned.

If Luna wanted to turn Weiss's vengeful eye on Chapter Black for defiling the Shadow Realm's memory, then by god she succeeded.

"If you behave at the ceremony tomorrow, we'll be announcing a publication of your original draft of the Grimoire Noir that Sunset has spent the last three weeks in a sleepless haze translating from scratch."

So that's what Sunset's been doing. Weiss hadn't seen her since the attack.

"Luna, I wrote the book, you can't tell me all of the spells in there are legal," Weiss explains, as if trying to teach a particularly slow parrot to say 'Bribery'.

She shrugs. "Then we will end up handing out more fines than usual."

Weiss balks at this. "Luna, some of those spells were illegal in the Shadow Realm!"

"Then they will be large fines."

With that, Luna turns and walks out of the room.

For once, Weiss is at a complete loss of what to do next, sweat dripping down his neck in the most annoying fashion as the wheels turn in his head to no avail. There's no justice to be had here, no flaws to capitalize on, or errors to be chastised.

Celestia wasn't supposed to own up to her mistakes, she was supposed to fall into despair!

Luna wasn't supposed to break free from her isolation yet, she was supposed to wallow in guilt and stay out of Weiss's way!

They did the right thing, and it's pissing him off.

But more terrifyingly...

Luna.

She was acting just like she did before Pluck Night. Compassionate to a fault, and quick with a joke.

If he's not careful, he might start acting that way again too.

As Luna walks out of the room, sweat drips down her forehead, in spite of the three separate freezing charms she had placed on herself to prevent that. Despite everything Weiss had done, despite everything he was still doing.

Even considering what he'll do next, he was acting just like he did before Pluck Night. Petty to a fault, and quick with a joke.

If she's not careful, she might just start acting that way again too.

"It's been nice, getting the chance to catch up with you, Twilight!" Shining Armor shouts behind the over turned table, taking care not to step on the broken teacups and puddles of coffee.

"Likewise, Shiny!" Twilight retorts, halfway embedded in a wall nearby from their heated discussion.

Summoning a quick barrier, Shining Armor vacates out the window he came in through before Twilight can throw anything heavier at him.

He lands in front of Princess Celestia, who seems to be decked out in a full suit of golden armor, the only thing missing being her own crown.

"Hello, Captain Shining Armor. I trust Twilight is in?" She asks, prompting the unicorn to salute.

"Yes, Princess," He admits.

Celestia nods. "Good. As you were."

With that, Celestia walks past the captain and swings the door open wide.

When Twilight's eyes widen at the sight of her teacher, her fear levels spike to incredible heights, a spike ever sharpened by Celestia's next words.

"Twilight, come with me, if you would. I have something important to discuss with you."

As Celestia pulls open the tent and plants it in the middle of a clearing in White-Tail Woods, she fails to utter so much as a word. In fact, Celestia hadn't said a thing since she had ordered Twilight out of the Library to come with her, and they proceeded to walk for over an hour to this destination.

Twilight's pretty sure several horror stories have begun with this exact premise.

She's growing more and more concerned that she's about to be one of them.

Celestia, ignorant of her student's internal monologue, finishes setting up the tent, before finally turning to Twilight and spreading out a large blanket.

"Sit," Celestia requests firmly, making the unicorn plop down in an instant on the blanket along with her mentor.

Celestia takes a long, painful few minutes to decide exactly what she's going to say, before sighing and deciding to improvise.

"You've been made privy to a side of me that nopony from your generation has ever seen. It's a side of me that your parent's generation has never seen, nor their parents."

"You were witness to me fighting seriously for the first time in a long time."

Twilight gulps. "It was.."

Celestia visibly rolls her eyes. Something Twilight has also never seen her teacher do.

"It was terrifying, yes, Twilight. That's very well the point. To be perfectly honest, I'm sick of ponies being frightened of me when I haven't done anything to them. But more importantly, I'm sick of you being frightened of me. So here we are."

"You ask your questions, and I'm going to answer them. And we're going to keep doing that until nothing is left to the imagination regarding what you saw that day."

Twilight's burning curiosity flares up uncontrollably. If the princess wanted somepony to ask questions, then by Celestia they picked the right mare.

"Why did you look so monstrous? You looked like... Well, you know, a Princess Celestia version of Nightmare Moon! I'm not mistaken about that, the resemblance was uncanny," Twilight presses, starting with the most obvious thing to haunt her nightmares.

Celestia responds without decorum or hesitation. "That is the end result of myself and my sister having spent years collecting and refining a list of magic spells we refer to as the Alicorn Suite.

"The strongest bodily augmentation magic from across all three tribes of Equestria, tailored to give us the best chance possible of defeating what plagued it in the ancient past. Starswirl's Wizard Eyes technique, and a practical application of his famous Furnace Follicle Folly paradox."

Celestia hums, trying to remember all of the names. "Sir Predator's Sharp Haste, Hammer Crash's Blunt Body, the Rebreather charm, one of Weiss's creations, as a matter of fact."

Twilight's eyes have lit up at the thought of all that magic. "I've never even heard of some of those spells!"

Celestia relaxes, now that Twilight seems to have finally relaxed a bit herself. "Yes, that would be because, for whatever reason, there has been a great deal of magic that has simply been redefined as nonmagical tricks in recent years. It's certainly annoying when to obtain the latest information on Earth Pony Magic, you must turn to an almanac instead of an arcane tome."

Celestia tries to think of a clearer example. "The Apple Family consistently rewards my guard with some of the finest users of the Lucky Shot kick that exist in Equestria, for example. How else could they simply buck an entire tree of apples into a few small barrels?"

Twilight balks. "That's magic?! I thought... Well, I don't know what I thought, but I didn't think Applebucking was a spell...

"But, why aren't there any researchers, then, if it's really Earth Pony Magic, shouldn't there be, teachers, wizards?"

Celestia chuckles. "There are, they've just been calling themselves farmers instead."

Twilight looks vastly unsatisfied with this answer, but the wheels are already in motion in the little purple pony's mind.

Celestia decides it's time to move on to the next part of this discussion, one she had struggled with for a week, trying to decide if it was the right thing to do. "The way I see it, Twilight, the easiest way for you to overcome your fear is to experience casting the Alicorn Suite yourself."

Twilight's face scrunches up with pure befuddlement. "You mean the unicorn portions of it?"

"No." Celestia states, with all the finality of a lock snapping shut.

"Now, be gentle with these, as they weren't easy to obtain," She continues, slowly pulling out an assortment of glowing spheres in her magic.

Twilight's eyes widen. "Materia? How did you get your hooves on that many of them?"

Celestia smiles faintly. "I decided not to dismiss Weiss's advice."

Celestia's blood is quite literally boiling at the sight of what Weiss has done to her Vault. More importantly, what he didn't do to it, which was leave it capable of containing some of the darkest relics in Equestria.

And he didn't even take them all.

But the biggest cherry on this cowpatty cake is the Heart-shaped bit-store Hearts-and-Hooves Day card that Weiss left in the twisted and mangled vault.

"I thought that since you were now a student of the Grimoire Weiss, that you would have no further use for my old junk. It shouldn't be a problem for such an avid reader of my work to recreate anything they might have needed!

Yours truly, Weiss Noir"

This letter marked a distinct dip in Celestia's mood as hazmat-suited AMMO employees carefully picked through the vault to archive all of the relics that Weiss didn't even bother to steal. It seems he really did only take two things.

Everything that came from the Shadow Realm or from Weiss Noir himself... And the Alicorn Amulet.

"I've since taken the time to cultivate some of the Timeshift Crystals that were still in the low-security vault," Celestia explains.

"These spheres contain every spell contained within the Alicorn Suite. Some of them older than Equestria. Some, like the bone regeneration spell, I only added last month."

"According to both the Grimoire Weiss and the Grimoire Noir, Materia can allow their user to cast spells that they otherwise could not. It is only the Grimoire Weiss that revealed the breadth of this capability. You'll be able to cast the entire Alicorn Suite using these Materia, and it is my hope that this will help you understand them better, and me as well."

Celestia sighs, a certain vulnerability entering her expression. "Fear cannot survive understanding, Twilight. I want you to understand me, I want that very much. Are you willing to..?"

After a long moment's hesitation, which feels to Celestia like physical pain, Twilight finally picks up one of the glassy glowing orbs, looking curiously into her teacher's eyes. "What does this spell do, Princess Celestia?"

Meanwhile, in the bowels of Canterlot, in a dripping, dark place, two ponies who have no public connection speak quietly.

"So, it's true, then? The Dark Lord has returned?"

"I believe so, but they are not as the sacred texts describe.

"Perhaps the Elements of Harmony warped them."

"If so, then he's useless to us. Have our allies found the amenities to their liking, Gourmet?"

"Very much so. I dare say, they've done in months what we have failed to do in years."

"What else would you expect from Nightmares? Just be sure to remind them of who owns the Dark Lord's sacred Arcana. And who can destroy it, if need be."

"I'll be sure to do so, Black Angel."

(Weiss Report) Bootstrap Godhood [Materia]

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Entry Number Six, Day One-Hundred and Ten

I think I may have fucked up. Or, I guess technically Eclipse fucked up, but I'm taking responsibility for this instance of up being fucked.

I released an announcement yesterday that all existing Materia which uses Earth Pony magic needs to be brought to R&D, so they can be fitted with detection units to prevent one tribe's Materia from being used by another. The reasoning I gave was that attempting to activate a Materia containing a spell that you cannot empathize with causes intense and debilitating confusion.

What I neglected to mention in that announcement was that the spells would still work.

So, you know how unicorns have spells that only unicorns can cast, and earth ponies have spells that only earth ponies can cast?

Materia hasn't gotten the memo on that, and I'm pretty sure that's the sort of thing that would irreversibly distort equestrian society.

Thankfully, the Shadow Realm only contains one unicorn and zero pegusi. And that one unicorn is me. So I'm going to keep my mouth shut on this exploit, and nobody's going to find out about it before the Materia get their limiter collars.

I let some of my closest friends and companions know, so we could work out how we're going to handle this, and they were mostly in agreement.

If this gets out... It gets out. But when it does, it's going to change a lot of things that won't be comfortable for society to bear.

So, we beat Sombra first. Then we reopen that particular Pandora's Box.

The rest of this report will contain my experiences casting off-tribe magic using Materia to bypass my limitations, as soon as I collate my thoughts on the matter.

Oh my god

Experiment Number One. Lucky Shot.

An F-Rank Spell, by Eclipse's standards, I'm left in a dazed stupor for roughly ten full seconds after casting it. Thankfully, my leg involuntarily kicked when the Materia was activated, allowing me to test out its functionality. The spell seems to sort an object by the user's preferred means of sorting. In this case, my casting the spell uses Eclipse Flash's preferred sorting system. I can't make heads or tails of it, but then, I don't really sort things myself.

The spell functioned, and after the relatively short period of stupefaction wore off, I noticed no lasting side effects. My mind wasn't able to comprehend the emotion that the Materia made me feel, and, looking back on the memory, nothing I think of can invoke that same feeling. It's simply a feeling that won't come. At least that means there's no danger of swarms of pseudo-alicorns emerging any time soon from practicing Materia Casting.

Experiment Number Two. Iron Glass's Green Hoof.

Another F-Rank Spell. This one leaves me stunned for thirty-two seconds. The feeling of cultivating stone as though it were plant life does not resonate with me, and the Earth Pony emotion is one I remain fundamentally unable to comprehend. I feel like Giygue, only instead of Love, it's this odd sensation of righteousness, or maybe it's some vague sense of "Good"? In any case, the spell performed correctly, turning a chip of emerald into a crystal seed, which sprouted on the spot, with a glassy green leaf.

The leaf was edible, as the spell's description explained it would be. The method by which Materia functions leaves little to the imagination, and almost no control over the spell's end result. It tasted fine, but repeating the spell resulted in the exact same sprout, so long as the exact same size and cut of emerald is used. It can be safely said that casting spells via Materia simply turns you into a vessel through which the magic is cast. It's unnoticeable when casting spells whose motives and emotions you can empathize with, but it is put into stark relief when casting spells like this, one for which my mind and spirit have no frame of reference.

Experiment Number Three. Strength Enhancement.

This spell honestly makes me wish that I didn't have to keep these off-tribe Materia a secret. The feeling of raw strength flooding my body is intoxicating, plain and simple. Five seconds of stunning, in return for roughly ten minutes of enhanced musculature. I suspect there exist ponies who cast this spell constantly, without even realizing it. I've learned my lesson this time, however, and did not stress test this new strength, out of fear of harming my bones. These poor bones have been rattled quite enough, thank you.

One thing I noticed, which I suspect is absolutely not an intended part of the spell, is the odd effect this spell has on my forehead. I talked the matter over with Dr. Real, and apparently, the muscles in a unicorn's face are different from an Earth Pony or Pegasus. In any case, I can't even afford to use this spell subtly, as it turns my forehead into an intricate web of tensed muscles surrounding my horn. It doesn't look bad, per-se, but it would be instantly recognizable.

Maybe I can cover it with my helmet?

No. The risk is too great.

Final Thoughts.

The one downside of off-tribe Materia is the confusion inflicted on the user. If this were overcome or planned around, there would be no real downside, aside from the strict inflexibility of Materia themselves. Allowing those with ill intent to obtain access to unrestricted Materia would be extremely unsuitable, and would cause problems that, at this stage, I would rather not suffer the consequences of. Therefore, for now, this secret remains buried in the Grimoire Weiss, and shared only among my closest confidants.

I'll only consider utilizing this secret if I feel I have no other choice. Even the allure of casting spells from all three tribes of pony is not enough to defeat the temper of my caution. Once everyone knows that I can do it, they will know that everyone can do it.

I wish so dearly that we could be done with this awful business. The idea of a world in which Materia were used to their full potential is one I can't help but enjoy. Until Sombra is no more, however, they will remain restricted, and their true nature hidden from the world. I hope a day comes soon where the world is ready for Eclipse Flash's wonderful creation.

(Past Chapter 16): Blast Day

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The first time I had established a new holiday for an entire city of ponies, uhh... It was very awkward.

Even though here on the surface, it should be blisteringly cold, it feels perfectly toasty here in the Shadow Realm with the veritable wildfire consuming the world around me. As I stand on the wide stone dais staring out over the blackened, flaming land that we've made our own, I feel pride. I bet the ponies who are standing behind me feel that way too. I turn around and face them all, spreading my arms wide as my cape flares in an invisible wind, and my dress armor glitters fabulously.

"Today, we are all gathered here for one reason alone. To celebrate! We have won, we have struck the first blow against the Dark Tyrant.

"No longer will we be afraid. No longer will we be frightened of the monsters. We will rage! We will scream! We will Hate!"

The crowd's cheering and applause compel me to continue as soon as they quiet down enough for me to speak over the pounding of hooves on stone.

"Today, I've brought you all here to do exactly that," I say, waving an arm towards the Crystal Empire, where a giant hole opens in the flames obscuring the horizon, putting the Castle in stark relief against the moon for everyone's viewing pleasure.

"For this one night only, the unfortunately strict laws on military ordinance have been released. Those of you who were informed beforehand, please find a Guard Leader, who will guide you to your firing points. The rest of you, enjoy the banquets our good ponies have established. In three hours, it will be midnight, and we will be having a little show of force.

"I'd hate to spoil it, so for now, you'll just have to hype yourselves up on your own recognizance!"

I suddenly relax my posture, putting on a relieved smile as I let myself sag slightly with a sigh that is easily caught by my microphone.

I perk back up and end this dramatic speech with a nice, casual invitation. "Now that we're done with that boring speech, let's have some fun! Welcome to the Shadow Realm's very first Blast Day Celebration!"

The crowd erupts in stomping applause once again, as I hop down the stage and beeline towards one of the buffet tables.

Iron Diamond takes this rare opportunity to unwind a bit, piling a plate high and finding somewhere to sit nearby.

"Well well, if it isn't Pinkie! How the hay have you been?" Iron hears shouted at him, turning to look at Captain Helmsplitter.

He smiles at the nickname, it might not have been an enjoyable one in basic training, but he's gotten over himself, when it comes to his mane.

"I've been good Splithead. Doc's got me on the good stuff. I'll be back in action in a week," Iron says, swirling the goblet in his hand, full of some indistinguishably fruity punch.

Helmsplitter looks concerned. "You sure about that? You got roughed up pretty bad."

Iron grins firmly. "Yeah, I did. Might even happen again. I'm still going to fight, though."

The other Guard Captain snorts at this. "I'll drink to that," he says, heralding the tinkling of crystal cups clacking together.

Iron shifts uncomfortably, the weight not sitting quite right on his leg.

"Yeah. I'll keep fighting as long as I can," Iron poses simply, trailing off.

Helmsplitter decides to change the subject. "So, you're what, a bodyguard now?"

"Something like that. I'm to ensure that Lord Weiss and a few other ponies become more capable in combat. He has an obsession with doing things himself that only serves to put his inexperience in the spotlight," Iron Diamond explains.

Iron pauses for a while. "We're supposed to do some trial runs. To see if I'm still capable of fieldwork," he admits.

"If this new junk isn't good enough for it yet, I'm going to be benched until it is," Iron says, setting his punch on the table, and plopping his new mechanical arm on the table.

"I bet I can beat you in a hoofwrestle now, though," he says, lightening the mood as his mechanical limb's blunted claws wiggle in a challenging manner.

I stare blankly at what's sitting right in front of me, tempted to ask a question, but cautious of it being a dumb one.

"Is this... Meat?" I ask, staring at the steaming tray, filled with what looks absolutely like a titanic brisket.

"What, are you one of those snobs who won't eat monster? It's very expensive, you know, real Tetralisk." Head Chef Crackle says, her eyes narrowing.

"No, not at all! Sorry, I was just... curious?" I say, stabbing a fork into a few slices and dragging the almost cable-like... delicacy... onto a plate of my own.

The chef's pleased smile sends a chill down my spine, and I hastily vacate the immediate area.

It might be annoying, managing my newfound capacity for greed, but I have to admit, I've never gotten off this much on solid-emerald silverware before.

It even tickled some part of me in the back of my mind when the chef mentioned that it was a pricey dish that I was about to dig into.

And dig in I do. I immediately detect a practically overwhelming amount of flavors, the spices, and sauces far more intense than anything I've tasted back home.

I immediately notice a deep spicy flavor, carefully balanced with... Citrus? Oh yeah, that's citrus. It's almost like some sort of peppercorn, but with an acidic tang in place of the warm spikes. My jaw actually starts to hurt in that wonderful way that a jaw does when someone bites into something that is just too rich.

Before long, I've dominated the slice of brisket, and have no choice but to look for more food to sample.

I spot a clearing in the festival area where a bunch of ponies have actually started to dance, but I shy away from that. I suspect it would be embarrassing at best to get caught up in any sort of dexterous activity, even excluding my newfound limbs throwing my balance off.

Suddenly, a very large and familiar individual is bodyblocking me. "Well, well, if it isn't the Sage himself, down amongst us ordinary folk," The gigantic mare known as Drop Kick exclaims, pushing me dangerously close to the group of ponies dancing.

No, she can't be...

"M'am, I assure you this is treas-OOON!" I yelp, tossed into the fray.

"You sure that was the right thing to do there?" Glitter Bomb says in response to Drop Kick's questionable decision to, well, dropkick Weiss into the crowd.

The hefty mare chortles. "Well duh, that boy needs to loosen up. Poor kid's got diamonds in him, as wound up as he is.

"It ain't like we get a lot of chances to see the sky nowadays. So you're dark right I'm going to make the most of it."

Glitter Bomb's eyebrow raises. "Dark right?"

Drop Kick coughs. "Slip of the tongue."

The two watch Weiss bumble around in the crowd, flailing his arms around while everyone mostly laughs with him as he succeeds at making a fool of himself.

Before long, Whittle and Glitter Miss Priss meander around to watch the show, Priss's smugness grows to extraordinary new heights, before popping in the face of the overwhelming ridiculousness of watching the unicorn closely imitate a fish out of water.

"Oh, he's never living this one down," Priss says, before Whittle huffs, making her grin sheepishly.

"Ok, maybe maybe not never."

A determined set to Weiss's face follows a humiliating attempt to flip over onto his arms, which just results in him bashing his face on the floor.

He seems to be taking it well, though, if his laughter is anything to go by when Transmittal helps him up and they return to dancing.

The music playing, Priss notes, is a lot cooler than the music she usually hears. She honestly didn't think she was much of a fan of music, with how snobby it was, but the music here was a lot more energetic, something she's perfectly fine with, honestly. A particularly bold musician starts playing a complex piece on the piano that had been modified to play other instruments with a bit of creative magic application.

It might look strange, hearing some metallic wail come out of a piano, but the sound, now that's something else.

'Oh what the hay,' Priss thinks to herself, stepping out from the edges of the crowd to do some dancing of her own.

Eclipse isn't one for these big loud parties, so the first building built on the surface works just fine for her, where some of the quieter attractions are going on, attractions like the huge table that her friend Oil Slick has commandeered for their gaming.

Normally, Eclipse would be inside, curled up with a good book and a dry snack, but Slick had convinced her to come along, and when he mentioned that Heavy Hauler would be there, she was curious enough to cave to her friend's demands.

Honestly, Heavy Hauler was... Quite the sight. Easily taller than the burliest guards, the pale green earth pony with the Cutie Mark of three filled bins of stone stacked precariously on top of one another stood head and shoulders above everyone else, his long ponytail bunched up under his metal hard hat.

"Yeah, bro, I bet if we put Time Wizard in, we can do some crazy plays with your Spare Apparent. Maybe put in the Gate Guardian set, so you'll have something with some extra attack power to balance it out?" Heavy Hauler says, poring over a messy spread of cards with Jerryrig in the background, while Oil Slick loses his third rematch in a row against Cabal Counter.

"Man, I just can't figure out how to take out that Elder Windigo. Is there a trick to it?" Oil Slick questions, scratching his head as he stares down at the board.

Cabal Counter chuckles primly. "Well, your deck wouldn't do well with it, but my father told me he plans to release a new pack with Slifer the Sky Dragon in it. If somepony combined that card with something to lower attack power, Elder Windigo could be destroyed with that effect."

Oil Slick takes this to heart, gears turning upstairs. "Maybe if I removed Sludge Belcher and replaced it with Meepo?"

Cabal pauses at that. "It... Could work. You're taking a big risk, though. It just takes one Meepo being destroyed to destroy all the others in your deck. Seems like a bold way to get the sacrifices for Slifer."

Eclipse looks out the window, where Weiss seems to have gotten back up on his stage, speakers ringing out as he tests the microphone.

My legs are burning as I trot up the stairs, but not nearly as much as my face is. That was exactly as embarrassing as my calculations implied.

I tap the microphone a few times, mostly just to make the squealy noise before I begin to speak. "Well, it's been an exciting couple of hours, everyone, but now it's time to finish this party with a bang!"

At this, several large platforms are wheeled in, each one packed to the brim with blast shields and thick enchanted crystals blocking them from having sightlines to anywhere other than the towering city far in the distance.

All of them, when they are wheeled into place, click with finality as the wheels lock to prevent any recoil from pushing them backward.

"We may not be able to retake the Crystal Empire today," I admit.

"But tonight, we will remember why that is. We will remember our enemy. For this night, Blast Night, we'll be firing everything we've got. We'll unleash our hatred. We'll show those in the Crystal Empire that a reckoning is on the horizon. We'll show Sombra that a reckoning is on the horizon!"

"So enjoy the pretty lights, because there's about to be a lot of them!" I finish, turning to face the Crystal Empire myself.

I wonder if you can be sued for making a bootleg holiday? Well, even if I could, it's not like anyone can exactly reach me to do so.

I point to one of the platforms, which is being swarmed by a group of ponies doing last-minute checks. "Group One, 'White Lightning', Fire!"

With that, the platform unleashes waves and waves of Earth Pony Ordinance, gigantic diamond ballista bolts flying into the skies, fired towards the Crystal Empire, despite the fact that it could never reach it from here.

That's not the point though, as the ballista bolt explodes at the height of its arc, unleashing a glorious eruption of elemental magic. In this case, gigantic lightning bolts crashing down, sending sprays of soil and snow flying from the ground nearly a kilometer away.

The ponies ooh and ahh at the display, but I can feel it growing in the air. They've cottoned on, and their hatred is growing. I can practically feel it. Is this a pony thing, or am I alone in feeling this sense of... Destiny?

After the last Lightning Bolt explodes in the air, the ponies are all whooping and cheering at the display of our military might. The land is growing darker, even with the full moon directly overhead. One thing that isn't dimmed even slightly are the lights that came from the ponies here. From the torches to the explosives, those aren't absorbed by the black flames, instead displayed in brilliant contrast against the blackness.

I motion to the next platform. "Group two, 'Pyroclasm'..."

"Fire!" I shout, this time, the crowd shouting along with me in unison.

The second platform unleashes a single gigantic cannonball, which flies almost as far as the Lightning Bolt. The obsidian sphere halts in midair, somehow, before igniting like a second sun in the sky. Or, afirst sun, I guess, since the actual sun isn't actually up.

The Fire Ball slowly descends, periodically erupting, sending blades and lashes of fire at the ground below it, before with a heaving crash, the Fire Ball explodes, sending a pillar of fire into the sky that completely obscures sight of the Crystal Empire from here.

I doubt there's a single pony in the entire Shadow Realm who isn't imagining it right now, imagining Sombra trapped in that instead of empty air. Hell, I'm imagining it.

I point to the third, and final platform. "Group three, 'Diamond Dust'..."

This time, I opt for a countdown, so the entire crowd can shout along with me. I hold up three fingers.

"Three!" Iron Diamond and Helm Splitter shout, their hearts aflame with memories of past battles, and blazing with the promise of future ones.

"Two!" Glitter Bomb, Whittle Miss Priss, and Glitter Miss Priss all shout together, relishing in the warm freedom they've worked so hard to help preserve, each in their own ways, whether it meant digging up gems, carving gems, or even just being one.

"One!" Eclipse, Oil Slick, and everyone else in the building shout alongside one another, their imaginations caught on fire more in the past months than they have been in years. So many things to learn, so many games to play, and they'll have their whole lives to do it.

"Fire!" I shout, feeling something like a thread snapping in my chest, as the final platform simply unleashes a wave of glistening frozen scythes. They just keep going, and going. As they reach the height of their arc, the Ice Sickles begin to multiply, scythes growing from scythes in flashes of light and sound, the popping and cracking of ice filling the air.

In mere minutes, a storm of frozen razors is raining down on the land, blades embedding themselves in every square inch of the surrounding area.

When the final one lands, all of the scythes combine their energy, suddenly growing a forest of glowing frozen spikes that reach to the skies, as if praising the heavens with righteous fury.

The entire world turns into flames, as I had expected to happen when I made every pony in the Shadow Realm summon up all the hate they could possibly manage, but what I really, really did not expect was the color. The entire Shadow Realm, and the cells miles away all erupting in a rainbow of flames, a chromatic conflagration that spurts out in waves.

I feel my mind and spirit changing again, but in a way that feels so right, as though I'm becoming more me than I've ever been before.

When it ends, I hear a faint crackling noise that I realize is coming from my own head. I look up, seeing black flames. Obviously, this causes me to panic, screaming at the top of my lungs as I run for the nearest pool of water and dunk my head in it.

I hear a lot of panicked screams, and, to be honest, I should have figured out after the first few seconds that these flames aren't exactly the ones I've been familiar with, since it didn't actually burn me, and it also didn't extinguish. Ever.

What really solidified it though was the fact that everypony else's hair was on brilliantly color-coded fire too.

After everyone has calmed down and stopped trying to dunk their heads or rears in water or snow, and the last pony has been convinced to stop trying to pat out the flames with their scale-clad hooves, I tiredly stumble back up onto the stage, grabbing the microphone.

"Ok, look, I'm going to level with you all," I say, my voice being amplified to reach the rest of the confused populous.

"I have no fucking idea what the hell just happened," I admit.

"I'm pretty sure Blast Day accidentally turned us into dragon ponies? Uhh, Longma, let's go with that," I state.

The crowd murmurs, generally unsure.

I sigh. "Look, if any of you feel like amassing gigantic piles of treasure, please contact the nearest medical center, and we'll work this out, otherwise, it's been a long night, yeah?

"We are ponies of the Shadow Realm, and we will prevail!

"...Even if prevailing, in this case, means going the fuck to sleep and worrying about this in the morning. Until then, please do not try to remove the scales on your legs, I'm told they don't exactly feel good to just yank off, and don't try to dunk your head in water, or anything flammable. Have a good night folks, I'm going to go crash..." I say, trying to improvise.

I'm not very good at improvising.

I go ahead and get off the stage, and the ponies disperse, making their way back into the tunnels of the Shadow Realm and to their various homes.

Dr. Real tramples his way towards me in a panic, but I stop him with a raised palm. "It can wait until morning, Doctor."

"If you insist, sir," he acquiesces.

"If it helps, I am fairly certain I know what has occurred and will prepare a report in the morning for you."

I shrug tiredly. "Are we going to blow up or otherwise die in the next twenty-four hours?"

He shakes his head. "Not at all."

"Then it can wait till then," I finish, making my way into one of the entrance tunnels, intent on returning to my auditorium sized bed made of Royal Vibranium, Sapphire, and Emerald-filled softness-enchanted beanbag chairs.

Luna performs an honest-to-god Facehoof.

"Do you have any clue what you've done, Weiss Noir?" she pleads.

I shrug, cutting my eyes to the Arcana Liber screen, where ponies are rating Blast Day as "Mostly Enjoyable".

"No, but if you do, I'd love to be let into the 'knows-what-I've-done' club."

She sighs distressingly. "Weiss, you may be the only pony not in that club. You've changed the course of destiny for the entirety of the Shadow Realm. They are still Earth Ponies, but from this day forward, they are Crystal Ponies no longer."

I sweat at this. "Does that mean they're going to start sucking at crystal stuff?" She shakes her head, looking at me like I'm stupid.

"Do you think they're just going to forget what they know? None of their Cutie Marks have changed, so of course not. But there is no way of knowing just what their new forms will afford them in the future. Especially among the youngest." She glares lightly, making me shrink metaphorically, as I also shrink very literally.

"Sorry," I apologize, not sure what else to say.

Her tension depletes. "Do not feel guilty. If the ponies did not desire it on some level, it could not have happened. Some aspects of the world you cultivated for them must have been growing with each passing day. It could have been anything. Living in almost total darkness, the abundance of dark magic flames, your status as their leader, paired with your own theft of draconic traits."

"I cannot guess at much beyond your celebration being the straw that broke the pony's back."

I think long and hard about that. I had been trying to cultivate their hatred. Is it that simple? I doubt it. The ponies haven't been growing more hateful, just more... More.

Certainly more violent, but the only pony that has borne the brunt of their hate is Sombra alone. Even the fighting that had been growing steadily since I began using Black Flames for heating was resulting in increased camaraderie, not less.

"How do you know so much about this?" I ask, making her chuckle.

"I'm honestly just reciting most of what my sister had said when I had created my own Draugr," she responds smoothly, making me tense up slightly at the idea that Luna might be indulging in necromancy. I wasn't even willing to mess with that.

"Uhh... The undead kind?" I say nervously, unsure if Luna is admitting to being some kind of necromancer.

Luna snorts. "That is what the rumors would have you believe. No, there is not a single member of my entire guard who was made from a reanimated corpse." She says firmly.

"Oh... Sorry? For the record, I didn't think you were slapping the undead template on everything," I say quickly, trying to backtrack.

She ponders something. "Template?"

I shrug. "Is there a better name for it?"

"I suppose not." she concedes.

"I notice that your mind is looking particularly more-" she pauses to think of a good word.

"Stable."

And indeed, my virtual-dream has increased in stability since Blast Day. Where previously, the unstable spikes of greed could ruin my vances or other projects with sudden realizations of my new opulent obsessions, this latest transformation has evened out my emotional state drastically, at the cost of intensifying it.

I don't feel comfortable sleeping on anything but shiny jewels now, but if that's the cost of my newfound status, I'll take it.

"Yeah. I'm feeling a lot better. Different, but better."

Luna smiles at that. "I'm glad you haven't gone mad. I think the world would be a, er."

"It would be a brighter place without your dark mind in it," she jokes, prompting me to laugh loudly.

Yeah. I can work with this.

While Eclipse is nervous and cautious of the changes she's undergone after a good night's sleep, Priss couldn't be happier.

"Do you have any idea how cool this is?!" Priss shouts, hopping up and down with her scaled hooves.

"Watch this." She exclaims, before holding her breath and tensing up.

Her hair erupts larger than before, cherry-red fire rushing upwards before shrinking back down.

"As you can tell, I consider this change to be the best possible one."

Eclipse is skeptical... But that might just be because her own mane and tail look strange as a conflagration of barely-shaped red and yellow energy.

Priss, noticing her best friend's apprehension, throws the final bone. "Weren't you the one who was talking about recoil management? Watch this."

Priss pulls out her Foxfire and Force Redirection Materia, before casting them.

Her hoof glows with veins of magical energy between the scales, while the ground between them ignites with crimson fire. Priss thrusts her hoof into it, and her enchanted hoof goes to work redirecting the kinetic energy all the way up to her mane, which, no longer being a physical object, just thrashes around as it absorbs all of the recoil force.

Eclipse's eyes widen, as she hesitantly sticks her own hoof into the fire, feeling the raw force and heat.

"Priss, our manes being able to absorb force aside, that fire's got to be as hot as an oven, we shouldn't be able to just jam our hooves in it."

Priss shrugs. "Our hair is on fire too, and I don't have so much as a heat blister."

"But the ones on our head are lukewarm at best, Priss. Water didn't even steam when I dunked my head in it." Eclipse complains, but can't muster any real bite into it.

Eclipse's awe-filled look fails to abate during the next few hours as they stick their hooves in various superheated things with ease.

(Noir Report) The Unique Properties of Unity [Kingdom Heart]

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Entry #16, Day 169

The purpose of this report will be to collate what information I've obtained on the black flame furnace, or, it will be called from this day forward, the Kingdom Heart.

According to the research we've performed, the Kingdom Heart is perfectly safe, it has been growing in magical weight since it's inception, slowly aligning itself with the hearts and minds of those living in the Shadow Realm. It draws out the passions of ponies, and absorbs their hatred, easing the burden of hatred on one's mind, and transforming that hate into an offensive shield.

The Black Flames that flood our kingdom now are in almost every way a guard dog. Protective, smart, and loyal to a fault. It visciously and murderously attacks the things that we hate until they are gone. Whether that be from them running, or them ceasing to be. The garbage which has no use, the monsters that scrabble at our doors, and Sombra's works alike. None can enter our kingdom, unless we will it.

When I say that it is an "Offensive Shield", I mean that it is different from other protective barriers I know of. Where an ordinary barrier magic repels harm, the Kingdom Heart instead emits it. Where a barrier born from something like safety or caring simply keeps out threats, the Kingdom Heart does not push away things that enter it's field of effect, instead pulling at them and assaulting them directly with eradicating fire.

I have seen Tetralisks from time to time roam into our borders, only for the geysers of blackened fire to suddenly rip free from the earth, creating pitfalls that leave everything but their "drops" in ruin and ash. I suppose, having tried it myself, Tetralisk meat is exactly the sort of thing that the Shadow Realm's people would not want the Kingdom Heart to destroy, and so, it doesn't.

Indeed, I have even seen odd things growing among the flames, plants that have sprouted up in the ashes coating this land. Possibly dropped by birds, or even by ponies who have been venturing out to explore. I know at least one group of Longma have decided to cultivate this wild flora, and their work is stunning. Obsidian trees are certainly the sort of foliage to invoke a mood, especially as of late, where the ponies had decided that it was now the season for their pink, blazing leaves to fall, like embers on the wind.

The effects of the Kingdom Heart are born from the hearts of it's cultivators. I suppose in that respect, it should have been expected that a city of ponies so in tune with nature would strive, even subconsciously, to ensure that it's plantlife is appropriate to it's tone.

Those among you who are now Longma, I and my researchers have poured over data, surveys, and studies done on those who were willing to undergo experimentation. Thankfully, the results are good ones. It seems that the blazing hair that Longma ponies possess is the direct result of something known as "Passion Peaking", a process that can occur, even in ordinary ponies, when their emotional state reaches levels far above the average.

It is the direct result of your body preparing you for the resulting magical spike and power spike that occur when your emotions are sufficiently intense. A social fight-or-flight response that gives the subject a method of enduring the recoil of any accidental high-order magic they may cast during a state of emotional duress or intensity.

While our research is still ongoing as to the long-term effects, in the short term, we believe that Longma will experience consistently stronger emotional states, and that their body has adapted to handle the higher state of raw emotion. Once again, the flaming hair is not a cause for concern, and indeed, it's temperature is within perfectly safe levels, so long as the pony in question does not experience an even more unnaturally strong spike in emotion, which may trigger very brief periods of ignition temperatures.

Thankfully, the flames created by this "Hair-fire" are magical in nature. Even should you ignite something, do not panic, when your emotional state normalizes, the fires caused by it will also extinguish. Panicking in such a situation will only prolong the effects.

Lastly, on the subject of scales, I feel the need to state once more, this time, immortalized in text format, that Longma should not attempt to pull off any of the scales on their legs, they are rooted more firmly than hairs, despite being enchanted crystallized keratin, pulling one off has been described to me as being more akin to pulling a tooth than plucking a hair. If you have found stray scales sprouting in aesthetically displeasing locations, see a medical professional, they will be far more able to remove the scale with minimal pain and risk of infection, and magic has been developed in order to suppress their regrowth for upwards of weeks.

We have reason to believe that the scales are another indicator of emotional potency, as the amount of a pony's legs that are coated with scales can actually increase or decrease magically, based on the pony's mood. While we have not seen any instances of a Longma's scales spreading above their cutie mark, there is no reason to believe that a sufficiently strong emotion couldn't result in any part of the body being temporarily coated.

We also believe the scales may be another form of adaptation, in this case, the combination of Longma living in an environment containing extreme heat, in the form of the Kingdom Heart's black flames everywhere, and actual flames that can occasionally crop up as a result of those. The magic of the Kingdom Heart may have noticed my dragon arms, and taken them as a modified template to apply to Longma when their traits manifested.

An extreme resistance to temperature has been noticed among Longma, even in areas where scales have not formed. Keep this in mind, as you may find yourself unaware of how hot a surface is until it causes ignition in something flammable. There have been a small number of reports of chefs accidentally causing fires while cooking food due to what they perceived as faulty oven equipment.

I wonder, if the Kingdom Heart is a protective magic, does that make it Shellfire?

(Present Chapter 16): Into the Highest Depths; The Star Sanctuary Temple

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The blistering cold means nothing to the cloaked figure rushing through it, and the fools standing between her and the ruins mean nothing as well.

"Oi, you best get on the ground, afore we make this hurt, trespasser," one of the thugs says, stepping forward with a malicious grin. This one thug in particular being a minotaur.

The cloaked figure snarls. "Don't be so bullheaded." At that, they leap forward, bashing the minotaur into instant, bloody unconsciousness with a headbutt, before turning to the other two, who look nervously between one another.

"Getting cold feet? I thought you were going to ice me. You should really chill out, before you get the cold shoulder."

With that, the cloaked figure charges the pair, who try to strike her down, only for her to shoulder-check one of them into the other one, sending them both crashing into the snow.

"Fortune can be so icefickle, especially when you aren't glacier of who you're fighting," she says darkly, walking up to the scrambling pair of pony thugs.

She stares them both in the eye, her own eyes glowing with invisible light from within her hooded cloak, as a bottle of swirling liquid makes it's way into her hoof, ready for throwing. "Now, I'm going to flask you nicely. Fuck off, before I decide to put you on ice."

The two thugs turn to each other with an unspoken agreement, before grabbing their friend and running as fast as they can to their camp.

The mare looks to the entrance of Chaos Cacophony zone, before shaking her head sadly. Not so much as a hint of black flames to indicate the Shadow Realm's revival.

She'll have to keep searching, then. What a waste of the past several months. She really didn't think this plan through very well.

"Hey, wake up!" Gilda shouts, staring down at the pony infesting Bustling Beans' with their exhausted presence.

Sunset Shimmer jerks awake, her eyes already drooping back down as she stares up at the griffon she had met once or twice on errands for Weiss before...

She yawns. "What's up, closing time or something?" Sunset asks, grabbing her coffee and drinking the now-cold swill as fast as she can to minimize the experience.

Before Gilda can answer, she returns to the spread of papers that she had been poring over.

Gilda snapping her talons distracts Sunset enough to return her gaze to the griffon, where she notices Twilight and Trixie as well.

"We've been a bit worried about you. Have you been here every day this month?" Twilight asks, stepping forward with concern in her expression.

Sunset shakes her head. "Only every other day. I've just been pulling a lot of all-nighters is all. Translating this book is a lot of work..." She says miserably.

Gilda and Trixie share a knowing look. "You thinking what I'm thinking?" Gilda says before a window is shattered in an instant by what at first glance appears to be a black bat.

What confirms it isn't, aside from its gigantic eyeball, is the holographic projection it displays on the table.

"Hello there, suckbag! If you're receiving this message, it's because you are an element of Harmony, and I'm feeling a bit bored. Luckily, I have the perfect solution!

"You might have noticed the floating island over the Everfree, well, guess what, that's Star Road, and even as we speak, it is gathering the wishing energy of every pony in Equestria!

"Now, I know what you're thinking. Keep thoughts like that to yourself, young lady." Weiss's hologram says, glaring at nothing but empty air as Twilight and the others fight off confusion and annoyance.

"Anyway! Yeah, Wish Energy, I'm going to turn them all into shooting stars, but you better believe this isn't for the good of Equestria, I'm going to be using all of those stars to create a Relic of Darkness unlike any other~! You could try and stop me, but so long as the Star Rod of Wishes is embedded in the hidden temple of Star Road, it's hopeless!"

"Even if you wanted to take it, it's inside the most dastardly dungeon I can devise, protected by monsters, warriors, and traps alike!"

"Even now, my Minish Cap grows fat with the power of Equestria's wishes, I can hardly wait!"

"And just in case you've decided that a Monday is just not the day to be traipsing into a dismal floating fortress in search of treasure and glory..."

Weiss steps out of the hologram's radius, dragging in a tied up Pinkie Pie. "Hi Girls! I got kidnapped! Weiss kinda didn't do it right though, cause he asked permis-" Her mouth is clamped shut by a hasty Weiss running back on screen.

"Look, the point is I'm doing bad guy stuff, and letting me amass Equestria's wish energy is just plain irresponsible, speaking generally. Bye!"

The hologram pops, and the Eyeroc plops down onto the table, panting softly from pumping out such a high-quality hologram.

Gilda idly snatches the bat-monster before it can try to flap away, glaring it into submission while Twilight and Sunset ponder the message.

"So Pinkie's been kidnapped," Sunset says.

"Yup," Twilight responds.

"Weiss created some sort of machine to absorb and concentrate the wishes that are made in Equestria..."

"Uh-huh."

"I guess you're going to go stop him?"

Twilight sighs suffering. "I wanted to try and help you today, but I don't think I can take care of whatever Weiss has planned in a half-hour..."

Gilda snorts, bullying the small Eyeroc in her grip. "We could probably help out. Trixie's no slouch at nerd stuff."

Twilight looks unsure, looking to Trixie's blushing face. "If you think you two can handle it..."

What a waste of Weiss's time. If this wasn't going to get the Grimoire Noir finally brought back into the public eye, he never would have put up with spending the last four hours pandering to paparazzi and carefully choosing words to maintain his reputation as a villain without unjustly harming Celestia's reputation further.

But now, at long last, he can return to what he adores doing. Annoying others.

"Avidus!" Weiss shouts, only for nothing to happen.

Right. Figures they would have shored up that vulnerability. There must be anti-teleportation wards on all of Canterlot, by now.

Oh well. Perfect chance to remind them he's not that easily thwarted.

"Vas Avidus!" Weiss shouts, calling down an actual thunderbolt, which rips through the anti-spacial wards in Canterlot long enough for him to slip through the warped space back home.

As he stares at his lamp, which is mere meters away from where he teleported, Weiss considers the risk of his backup teleportation spell requiring that he be sent back to his lamp. Well, there's nothing to be done about it. Only something Weiss places the utmost importance on is a valid target for his Vas Avidus spell.

His lamp is probably the only thing left with that sort of value.

Grubber is already waiting in his office, drinking one of his bottles of buttered corn soda.

"Hey! I need that stuff to stop mind readers, don't drink it all." Weiss complains, grabbing a bottle for himself, popping the cork on it with a hiss.

"So, what's the progress on Star Road's dungeon?"

Grubber nods. "Oh yeah, it's pretty much done, we still gotta buy the paintballs for the paintball room, and get the safety goggles for that part, but other than that."

I nod. "Good. Get on that double-time. I'll start making the invite."

Grubber looks like he wants to ask a question, so Weiss decides to pose it himself.

"Wondering why I'm making the fortress designed to be conquered?" Weiss asks.

"Nah, Tempest explained that to me and the Fizz Guards. I'm just kinda wonderin'... Why bother? If you're doing this because you can see the future, then doesn't that mean they'll beat all the baddies coming whether or not you help?"

Weiss is stunned by Grubber's apt question.

"Well, it's because I saw the future once, and that's it. If I'm not careful, the future could change. Harmony likes to try and steer things back to a more ideal future if things derail a bit, but that can sometimes take years or decades before it puts things back on course. I'm just minimizing the amount of luck required for the Element Bearers to do what they're destined for," Weiss answers simply.

Grubber thinks about this, before summarizing. "So you're already card counting, but you're also stacking the deck just to make sure?"

Weiss nods.

"Huh. Well, thanks for the syllabus, boss. I'll get the boys on double-time like you want," Grubber finishes, as he drains the last of the soda and leaves.

One thing about this meeting leaves Weiss deeply unsatisfied, however.

How the hell did Grubber manage to tolerate that soda?

Twilight, Rainbow Dash, and Fluttershy stand at the top of the hill in the middle of the Everfree Forest. The one that Weiss's soldiers had apparently painstakingly forged a save path through the forest to, erecting towering chain-link fences with wildlife bridges over them.

A wooden sign at the top of the hill reads out for all to see.

"A recent event has caused the Star Road to fall to pieces, we're working on having the path up to it repaired, but without the five Star Piece Gems, it might take a long time!

Sorry for the inconvenience!"

Twilight hums at this, while Rainbow Dash just scoffs. "Who needs some dumb bridge. We could just fly up there, right?" she says, jabbing a hoof up at the floating island, chained down to the planet by a string of broken chunks of earth, the damaged portion that those so-called "Star Piece Gems" would help repair.

Twilight just hums again. "It's a shame Rarity was too busy today making our outfits for the Grand Galloping Gala to help us here. Her Gem-finding spell would have made this a snap!"

"Well, she ain't here, so Fluttershy and I will just have to carry you up. Ready?" Rainbow asks, looking over to Fluttershy, who had been sitting in on some of Gilda and Dash's flight practice sessions.

She nods, speaking softly. "I think I can handle that."

The matter settled, the two pegasus mares hook a hoof under Twilight and slowly carry her up to the floating sky island, the trio plopping down, with Fluttershy panting slightly from the exertion.

Twilight's eyes widen at the sight of a swarm of glittering, bug-like electrical golems flooding the airspace below the island, and the large crystal eyeball on a stick with a crude sign on top of it that reads "Five Pony Minimum", glaring at their distinctly three-pony group.

"If we had brought Applejack and Rarity here, we would have had to repair the bridge, or those bugs would zap you two when you tried to make more than one trip to carry everypony up..." Twilight says, picking apart the trap for what it was.

"I guess Weiss doesn't know what the hay a 'Day Job' is, huh?" Rainbow jokes at what must have been an incredibly expensive and time-consuming trap to devise, making Fluttershy smile slightly at the humor, while Twilight chuckles.

"I guess not. Let's keep moving.

"There's no telling what Weiss is doing to Pinkie Pie right now."

"Seven-thousand two-hundred ninety-three bottles of pop on the wall, seven-thousand two-hundred ninety-three bottles of pop!

"You take one down-" A loud crash rings out "-pass it around, seven-thousand two-hundred ninety-two bottles of pop on the wall!"

Weiss crushes another slab of stone to rubble with his armored forehead, trying to drown out the nightmarish torture.

"Pinkie, perhaps we could do something a bit more interesting?" Weiss begs.

"Just because I can't leave the room for fear of you escaping those ropes doesn't mean we can't do something more genuinely entertaining."

Pinkie looks confused. "I've been out of the ropes since bottle nine-thousand six-hundred and twenty-five, though!"

Weiss removes his helmet, flinging it at the wall where it explodes into flames and evaporates.

"Whatever. I'm just going to put some cameras on the Mane... Three, I guess. Want to grab some lunch while we wait for them?"

Pinkie shakes her head. "It's not an authentic kidnapping if we just up and leave! Don't you know the first thing about kidnapping a pretty mare?"

"Yes, and should I do that, I'll be sure to apply it," Weiss deadpans.

"Wow, tell me how you really feel, why don'tcha." Pinkie giggles, hopping off of the chair she had been tied to and trotting over to a window.

"Oooh, it's all tilty, how'd you make the window do that?"

"I didn't, I made us do that, This whole tower is twisted in on itself to save space. Like a candy cane made out of hallways," Weiss explains.

"Well, any tower that's like a candy cane is a tower that's alright by Pinkie!" She says, hopping up and down in front of the window, tilting her head back and forth as she amuses herself with the distorted skyline.

"It's like a funhouse mirror, but for Equestria!"

Weiss exhales. "Yes, I suppose it is. Look, I'm going to go micromanage my creeps, if you need anything, there's a radio crystal on the table."

With that, the dark sage exits the room, leaving the pink mare to amuse herself.

The instant the door closes, Pinkie freezes in midair, her eyes narrowing.

"Now my master plan can begin..." Pinkie says, slowly stepping down from the empty air she was hanging over, and chuckling darkly as she turns to the door.

If Weiss had read the "Equestrian Hammy Anti-Villain's Guide to Kidnapping for Fun and Profit", he would know exactly what the damsel is supposed to do when the villain leaves her unattended...

The door slams shut on Twilight, Fluttershy and Rainbow Dash, as three suits of armor crash into the room. To the side, a wall slides open, and a hologram of Chibi Weiss Noir appears.

"Howdy, Element Bearers! I know some of you might not feel comfortable with combat right now. If you aren't willing to give fighting my evil guards a try, there's an observation balcony right this way!"

With that, a neon arrow points down the side-hall, while up above, a patch of the wall turns transparent, revealing a window and three chairs. A table nearby possesses several bottles of ice water.

Fluttershy looks to Twilight and Rainbow Dash for an answer.

Twilight sighs. "Well, at least he's being polite now.

"Fluttershy, would you like to wait, while Rainbow Dash and I take care of... These?" Twilight gestures to the suits of armor, which are slowly being filled with tiny black bugs, glittering like obsidian in the golden light of the chamber.

Fluttershy nods, grateful for Twilight's understanding as she trots down the side hall and up into the observation room.

As she stares out into the room below, Twilight summons the Master Sword, while Rainbow Dash simply puts her hooves up in a martial arts stance.

The three suits of armor ignite with black fire that seems to intentionally restrain itself to the inside of the armor, only a few trace embers escaping their joints.

The bug-armors each pick up a wooden staff, charging Twilight and Dash clumsily.

Twilight blocks the staff with her sword, while Rainbow Dash flies over and bucks it's helmet off, making the armor collapse.

The two suits of armor look at each other nervously, stepping back, before charging in unison this time, trying to attack the pegasus.

Rainbow Dash just smirks as she performs an aerial spin-kick on one of them, dodging the other's swipe with ease.

"Well, I'm glad they're having fun," Fluttershy says with a soft smile, sipping at the bottles of lemon-water to cool off a bit. Though, to be honest, Fluttershy feels a bit uncomfortable, just watching her friends fight while she sits here in safety. Maybe she should have tried to help, but...

Twilight slashes one of the armor suits apart, the bugs inside swarming away into the walls.

Oh, those poor beetles! Fluttershy hopes Weiss isn't treating them poorly...

"Alright, since the two of you can't read English, and I don't have six-to-eight months to teach it to you, we're going to cut corners," Sunset explains, surrounding the Grimoire Noir with candles and chalk lines.

When the candles ignite with purple flames, casting the almost pitch-black room in an eery light, Trixie feels the need to start asking questions.

"Trixie wishes to know what exactly all of this... ambiance... is intended to achieve."

"Besides skeeving us out," Gilda interjects, looking around the room nervously, her eyes trying to adjust.

Sunset finishes lighting the last candle and drawing the last symbol. "It's just supposed to set the mood. I'm going to use a spell called Lively Lecture Liberation, and we need to get into the author's headspace for it to work. Luckily..."

Sunset pulls out the squirming Eyeroc "Weiss has given us a piece of his mind."

The Eyeroc spots the book and scrambles over to it, where Sunset's magical spell allows it to be absorbed into the tome.

The book opens, white letters swarming out of the book's black pages until they form a portal.

Sunset turns back to the pair. "Well? We don't have time to waste if we want to get this book translated."

"You never explained what the spell is supposed to do-Oooo!" Trixie shouts, as Gilda rolls her eyes and just grabs the mare in a football carry.

"Come on Trix, let's get this over with," Gilda says as they leap into the gateway.

Trixie has the presence of mind to grumble as they enter an even darker room.

In true Shadow Realm fashion, torches on the walls begin to ignite, one after another, leading down a long stone hallway. Snow howling overhead the trench in the ground.

Sunset Shimmer walks confidently forward, while Trixie and Gilda follow more nervously.

They hear a voice as they walk, one that sounds almost familiar, though it isn't nearly as smooth, and it's a great deal younger.

"Entry number one, day three."

"Until such time that I learn the pony who rightfully discovered this spell first, I will take the liberty of speaking of it in my own ignorant terms, such that a fresh perspective can be had on what seems to be the simplest dark magic." The voice says, with an unsure, but excited tone.

Sunset shakes her head. "I've already translated this part. We'll need to move through this subject quickly, so we can reach the untranslated text."

She steps forward and summons up a Black Flame from her horn, which makes the area become quiet and still at the sight of her proof of understanding before another gateway opens, one leading to another, different place.

Twilight finishes having Rainbow move the last gigantic block, pipes embedded inside the block connecting with other pipes to complete a sealed network that causes a pressure gauge on the wall to fill up completely, as the blocks can now transport raw stardust through them at a high enough pressure to register on the sensors in the room.

The door, previously sealed with spears thrust through and over it, slides open, allowing them to pass now that they've solved the strange puzzle.

Rainbow Dash rubs her neck, sick and tired of these stupid puzzles interrupting her action-combat time. "Man, this place sure is weird. Does this guy just have his guards move blocks around all day to get in here?" Rainbow Dash points out, as they walk through the golden halls, streams of yellow stardust rushing overhead like a river and illuminating the entirety of the Star Sanctuary.

Twilight nods, but it's half-hearted, something that Fluttershy agrees with verbally. "It's a very beautiful place, though." Fluttershy points out, looking up at the glowing desires of all Equestria hanging overhead in lazy, swirling eddies, funneled deeper into the Sanctuary by the gentle gradient of the ceiling.

Suddenly, a small yellow object plops down in front of them from the yellow sparkling mass, before popping like a balloon and spraying stardust everywhere.

Rainbow Dash's sneeze fails to drown out the little whisper that emerges from the shooting star hitting the ground.

"I wish I could be just like my dad." The tiny wish asks, before dissipating back into dust motes floating to the ceiling.

Twilight's eyes are full of metaphorical stars. "It's incredible. Ponies have always made wishes, but I've never heard of anyone trying to bring them all into one place like this. The similar wishes are all clumping together, and then falling down... I've only heard of events like that happening once in a millennium, naturally."

Fluttershy nods, while Rainbow Dash tries to rub the glitter off of her nose.

The trio makes their way into a large, circular room, covered in blunted spikes all along the walls, and holes in the ceiling where streams of stardust float up into, collecting en-masse.

As soon as Fluttershy crosses the gap, sharp spears thrust up from the doorway, sealing them all in as they shout with confusion, Rainbow Dash wheeling about to charge the blocked doorway.

She crashes into it with a ringing clang of failure, as Tempest Shadow drops down onto the ground, balanced on a large purple ball, marked with bright yellow stars.

While Fluttershy cowers and Rainbow Dash puffs herself up, the dark purple unicorn simply grins, balancing on top of the ball with a few rocking motions before hopping down to eye level.

"Hello, Heroes." Tempest Shadow says with the smoothness of velvet and polished steel.

"You're after the Star Rod of Wishes, aren't you? Here to put a stop to Lord Weiss Noir's plans?

"Then you should have wished harder, to not face me as the guardian of the Star Sanctum."

Twilight steps forward with a determined expression. "We're not afraid of you, Tempest Shadow!"

Tempest's smile turns into a mocking frown. "Oh but you hardly know me.

"Besides, this isn't a trial for you. It's a trial for the Bearer of Kindness."

Twilight's face scrunches up in confusion. "Fluttershy? But she's not going to want to fight you!"

"I sure as hay do, though!" Rainbow Dash shouts, before charging directly at Tempest, who simply steps to the side with ease as the chromatic pegasus crashes into the giant ball, bouncing off of it into the blunt-spiked walls.

instead of suffering a painful poke, though, the walls zap the mare, trapping her in a bubble that she fruitlessly tries to escape from.

"Then it's a good thing we won't be fighting.

"Well, those of us not in a bubble right now, I suppose," Tempest states bluntly, smirking at Rainbow Dash's misfortune as she aimlessly bounces around the room before the bubble finally pops, dropping her to the ground with a thump.

Tempest's words manage to pull Fluttershy out of her tier-two cowering pose, as she reveals her head just enough to question Tempest's statement. "We aren't?"

"This is a trial, not a brawl. We'll be playing a game to see if you're worthy of the Star Rod."

"The rules are simple, I'm the only one who can let you through this door," Tempest says, jutting her head back to point to the gigantic door leading into the Star Sanctum's Inner Sanctum.

"And we're going to play Dead Man's Volley, to help me decide whether I'm going to do that or not."

"I'll kick this ball at you, and you have to knock it back. Fail, and..." She looks pointedly at the glaring Rainbow Dash, who finally managed to shrug off the wall's zapping and disorientation.

"And what's to stop us from making you let us through?" Rainbow Dash shouts, ready for another charge.

Tempest Shadow stares on, unimpressed. "You mean aside from your skills?

"If you try to fight me, somepony might get hurt. And I don't think that sets the right tone for proving the virtues of kindness."

Something about that strikes Fluttershy as odd, even as Tempest almost gently lifts her gigantic bouncy ball into the air, and kicks it towards them like a cannonball.

Pinkie Pie zips behind a corner when a Fizz Guard lumbers past, back pressed against the wall as she silently watches them pass, giggling when they don't notice her.

The Fizz Guard turns around suddenly, but Pinkie had already zipped up to the ceiling, holding herself there with careful positioning.

The guard's eyes narrow suspiciously before he pulls a thick chunk of obsidian from his belt. "We've got a 47-Dancer. Heard a voice, can't find the source. Advise."

A smooth chatter rings out over the magical device, and the guard nods, before continuing his lumber.

Pinkie, who had been sweating, drops to the ground and giggles again.

"Good thing guards never look up!" Pinkie Pie says with a giggle, ignoring the security camera rolling its eye at her.

She bounces her way through the halls of The Tower with instinct and feelings guiding her all the way to the supply closet. Opening the closet, she finds a practical treasure trove of party supplies. "Good thing I stashed some here just in case." She mumbles to herself, stuffing all of it in her mane, the poof parting and flashing slightly, some good old fashioned Rock Shampoo Mane Care helping keep her mane firm even while she stuffs a gigantic caber and two hundred rubber ducks into it.

Strapping the Parachute on her back, Pinkie goes over to the nearest window, and, kicking it open in a spray of ultra-reinforced glass, leaps out through it, unaffected by the warped space twisting her body in unnatural ways.

She does that every other Tuesday for Yoga Day, for goodness sake.

The parachute on her back allows her to easily glide all the way down to Star Road in the distance, where she lands with a fwump and even more giggles as she starts stuffing the used parachute into her mane.

"Now, let's see..." Pinkie scans the island for her destination, before spotting it, Star Sanctuary. At least, that's what Pinkie's assuming, from the gigantic mass of swirly yellow suspended above it.

"There's the party spot, now for the party shot" Pinkie mumbles, licking her hoof and holding both her hooves up to frame the temple with one eye closed and a tongue sticking out with concentration.

"Yatta, I've got it," Pinkie says victoriously once she has calculated the perfect arc. She whips out her Party Cannon and hops inside, aiming for one of the ventilation shafts.

Of course, Weiss being Weiss, the shaft isn't actually large enough for a pony to fit through, but has that ever stopped Pinkie Pie?

"Well, there was this one time I got stuck in a giant sandwich, but-" Pinkie continues to ramble, even as she completes her final pre-flight checks, and pulls a helmet out of her mane, only to plop the helmet right back on her noggin.

"-So anyway, that's why I'm banned from three billboard factories in Vanhoover alone!" Pinkie finishes, yanking a cable that causes the Party Cannon to erupt, firing her and a massive wave of party supplies in a gigantic arc towards Star Sanctuary, where her and the supplies all crash through the vent with ease, landing in some sort of room right behind the antechamber.

"Perfect. Now my master plan can begin..." Pinkie says, her eyes narrowing with barely restrained party-power.

Twenty losses in a row, much to Twilight and Rainbow's consternation. Fluttershy, however, seems to have almost gotten off easy, Tempest intentionally avoiding kicking the ball too hard when it's aimed at her.

Handicap or not, it's quickly becoming clear that Tempest could do this all day, and there's no telling how much longer it will take for Weiss to complete whatever evil plan he has with the Minish Cap.

"Ugh, I don't get it, we keep losing, isn't she supposed to try and kick us out or something?" Rainbow Dash complains, trying to work the stiffness out of her muscles after having been knocked into the electrified spikes for the twentieth time.

Looking at the intimidating captain, Fluttershy gulps, stepping forward while Twilight looks on with intrigue, but also some confusion.

"M'am, I know we haven't won your game yet, but... Could you please let us go through anyway? We need to get our friend back, and umm..."

"Stop your evil master's plans."

Tempest ponders this for a moment. Or at least, she appears to ponder it.

"Ok, sure."

With that, the door slides open, and Tempest hops on top of her bouncy ball, using it to launch her up through one of the gigantic holes in the ceiling, as though she was never there at all.

Rainbow Dash balks. "What the hay! It was that easy? I got shocked like, fifty times!"

Fluttershy's ears twitch at the cursing, but she restrains herself from giving some extraordinarily gentle chastising words for it.

"She said this was a trial of kindness. Kicking a ball around was fun, but it didn't actually have anything to do with kindness." Fluttershy explains softly.

Rainbow Dash grumbles. "Neither is getting zapped like a hundred times in a row."

Twilight chuckles, before walking forward to pat Fluttershy on the back. "Good work, Fluttershy. I had a feeling you would come through for us here. Now let's put a stop to this!"

The trio walks through the final doorway, into a chamber that practically glows from within, with all of the sheer wishing power concentrated in it, swirling around the Star Rod in the center of the room. Hundreds of Stars lay on the ground around it, caked into the floors, and on the walls. Shooting Stars, each one containing the concentrated power of Equestria's Wishes.

Weiss sits on the opposite side, chuckling as he adjusts the purple cap on his head.

"Welcome to Star Sanctuary's Star Sanctuary! I hope the amenities are to your liking."

Rainbow Dash growls, planting her hooves. "The only thing "amenity" here is going to be your butt after we're through kicking it!"

Twilight sighs. "Do you mean 'On the mend', Rainbow Dash?"

Rainbow just points to Twilight as if to accentuate that, yes, that is what she meant.

"Well good luck doing that, the Minish Cap is almost charged, and even if you took the Star Rod out now, it can't be re-attuned that easily. I'd love to see you try, though. So feel free," Weiss responds, reclining back on his throne.

Twilight turns to Fluttershy. "Just like we planned, Ok?"

Weiss raises an eyebrow when Fluttershy walks over and pulls the Star Rod out of its holder with her teeth.

"Oh? You're going to make a wish?" Weiss chuckles.

"Good luck."

Fluttershy remembers what Twilight explained to her before they had started this trip.

"According to the rules of the spell Weiss used to create the Wishing Rod, it can only be used by someone who confidently makes a wish from the heart, without anything else muddling it, and his Minish Cap alone isn't going to be enough to transform Equestria's Wishes into a different form like Weiss is planning.

If you can just make a wish, any wish at all with the rod, it will fall under your control and ownership instead of his, stopping his plans cold. You're the only pony kind enough to have that kind of wish."

"I wish..." Fluttershy starts, thinking hard about what she really wants.

When she sees the swirl of beautiful wishes above her, She can't help but feel disappointed that this place will probably be discarded, when Fluttershy makes it useless to Weiss's plans.

Maybe with all these wishes in one place, they could start getting granted?

"I wish Star Sanctuary could be used for good instead of bad," Fluttershy wishes, making the Star Rod glow with golden light that floods the room.

Weiss wails melodramatically. "No! That's impossible! This cannot be!" as the lights intensify.

When the light fades after a few minutes, nothing seems to have changed, making Weiss look even more confused than Twilight, Fluttershy, and Rainbow Dash combined.

"Wait, that didn't work?" Weiss asks, hopping off of his throne and trotting over hastily.

"Let me see that damn thing, maybe the settings aren't set correctly?" He says, neatly plucking it out of Fluttershy's loose grip.

"I believe it worked correctly," Luna says, making Weiss jump and curse in unison.

"Christ, someone needs to put a bell on you, Luna," Weiss groans while the others bow low to their princess.

Luna plucks the Star Rod out of Weiss's own grip, bequeathing it back to Fluttershy. "Rise, my subjects. I received a letter claiming that 'Illegal amassing of Equestrian Magic' was occurring in our airspace, and I realized you don't have a day job, Weiss."

Weiss almost snorts at that, slapping a hand over his mouth.

Suddenly, a gleam enters Weiss's eyes. "Oh no! Now that the princess is here, my plans are truly ruined, I have no choice but to abandon my Glorious Star Sanctuary!"

"Curse you Fluttershy, curse you and your adorable mannerisms!" He shouts, charging the nearest window and leaping out of it.

Rainbow's confused expression borders on disgust for just how little sense this entire exchange just made. "So we won?"

Twilight sighs. "I think so? Let's find Pinkie and get out of here. I'm sorry for the inconvenience, Princess Luna," Twilight apologizes, but Luna shakes her head.

"It is no problem. Twilight. I believe it is more than made up for by your help in confiscating this flying Island from Lord Weiss Noir. It will be in better hooves now that Weiss is no longer using it for one of his idiotic memes.

"I will bring an attachment of guards here tonight, to see about distributing these Shooting Stars. Perhaps this era would do better, if the rumors about shooting stars weren't just wishful thinking."

As the group walks towards the exit, they open the door, nervous at the dark room ahead of them, before suddenly, the lights turn on to the sound of a kazoo in Pinkie Pie's mouth.

"Surprise! I went ahead and made a 'Congratulations On Saving the World From Sort-of-Evil' party for you all!" Pinkie shouts, herding them over to the cake she baked for the occasion, one shaped like Weiss's face, but with X'd out eyes and a tongue poking out.

Twilight sighs, smiling at Luna's befuddled expression. "Never change, Pinkie"

Pinkie tilts her head. "Well, I gotta change sometimes, otherwise my clothes would get all dirty."

"You aren't wearing any clothes." Luna deadpans, lifting a dainty slice of cake to her mouth and devouring it neatly.

"Well duh, that's because I'm changing!" Pinkie says, as though it were obvious.

As Gilda rubs her head, and Trixie groans in pain, Sunset just looks confused and deeply disturbed.

"I don't get it, as soon as we go past year ten, the book ejects us. This spell is only supposed to fail if we are no longer in the author's mindset, but the writing after year ten, it's like it was a different person entirely who was writing it!"

Sunset sighs. "Well, I guess I'll have to go back to translating it manually. I'm sorry you two weren't able to help much with this."

Gilda shakes her head, flopping an arm over Sunset. "Hey, I had fun. I'm just glad I got something out of all this," she grunts, making her wing glow purple on command.

Trixie nods "Trixie learned Prestidigitonium from a tome in her youth so she could learn to juggle with her magic, but that book did not go into nearly as much depth as this."

Sunset just sighs again. "Well, I'm glad for the help anyway. You two didn't have to help with this, and you did anyway. I guess that makes us friends?"

Trixie nods, while Gilda laughs. "Sure, why not. Book Buddies for life."

Tempest looks displeased. "I'm not entirely sure that Luna is just going to let me and my guards keep living in Star Road if she's occupying the Sanctuary with her own forces."

Weiss shrugs. "I'll work something out. I've already got plans for another base, now that I've got what I needed Star Sanctuary for."

Tempest looks unimpressed with what apparently required enough raw wish magic to account for every single one of Equestria's bright-eyed dreamers in order to create.

"It's just a pot." Tempest deadpans, staring at the dark tan vessel, almost like a vase, with two wings jutting from both sides.

Weiss shakes his head, dumping an apple and a balloon into the pot, before stirring them both into nothing.

"Oh, it's not just a pot, Tempest Shadow. This is the newest Weapon of Light, the Krak Pot!"

The thusly named Krak Pot erupts with light, expelling a gigantic apple, which floats up to the ceiling as though it were filled with helium.

Tempest looks slightly more impressed when Weiss breaks the apple in two with his magic, revealing that it isn't just a balloon, but an apple with the properties of one.

"I hope you're ready, Fizzlepop, because very soon, you'll witness the power of Almighty Alchemy."

(Weiss Report) Bug Out Bag [Wannabeetles]

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Twilight asked me about these, so I put special focus on translating this entry. I suppose, after a thousand years, Wannabeetles would be unrecognizable after the amount of breeding they've underwent. Weiss must have either had some preserved, or used feral ones for his own monsters, judging from how much smaller they are than the modern breeds.

Ahh, those creatures. Very cute, I remember when they were that small. If only I had known the smaller ones still existed, before Blueblood demanded one for a pet. The dreadful bug has a nasty habit of trying to steal the maid uniforms from storage.

Entry Number Fourteen, Day One-hundred and Seventy

These fucking bugs drive me to drink. So, apparently, the only thing you need for an infestation of Wannabeetles is warmth, food, and empty anthropomorphic equipment.

Although, I guess it isn't anthropomorphic. Equipomorphic?

Whatever. People-Shaped. These fucking bugs infest anything that isn't alive, is hollow on the inside, can articulate, and is people-shaped. What turns them from a nuisance to a major threat is that they also try to act the part. On a wedding dress? Kind of creepy. On a gigantic mechanized golem? Not exactly "Bugs" creepy, more like "Terrifying rampaging golem" creepy. But that's a story for another time. Right now, I've managed to tame the little buggers. Well, I've managed to exploit them, anyway. You can't really tame bugs.

The easiest way to prevent the bugs from becoming a problem is that I've started including sleepy closed eyes on all of my creations. Either carved into their heads, to make it look like they're asleep, or sewn into the fabric, if the object is an article of clothing. If any Wannabeetles try to inhabit it, and act like they think it's supposed to, the object will just act as though it's trying to fall asleep. Problem solved, spray the object with bugspray, and get em out of there.

Of course, that's just getting rid of them. And we all know by know that I'm more apt to exploit something than to simply get rid of it. So, I've decided to steal, well, actually, a bunch of stuff uses the classic "Bugs inhabiting clothing" meme, so I guess I'm not stealing this one? Well, I'm heavily inspiring myself with the Scarecrows from Devil May Cry. Just take some burlap, strap blades to it, and let those bugs have at it. A hidden golem flap on the inside controls whether they're awake or asleep by opening or closing a set of fake eyes sewn into them whenever they receive a specific command.

The main flaw of this is that these Scarecrows can be easily shut down if someone tricked the bugs themselves into thinking the command was sent. They'll just fall right asleep if you tell them to do so with enough confidence and authority. Luckily, who's going to think to do that when they're being bared down on by a flipping insane clownbag with guillotine arms? Nobody sane enough to get through any of my other defenses, that's who.

Now, you might be asking "Burlap Sacks and scythes? Weiss that's not aesthetic enough!" And you're absolutely right. Which is why I've also started keeping empty suits of Shadow Guard Armor in all the tunnels. Ones enchanted with black flame charms. In an emergency, bugs can flood the armor suits and take them over, while the black flames burn away any bugs that don't want to play ball and protect us. Wannabeetles are extremely good at mimicry, at least in raw power and rough behavior. Their skills leave a lot to be desired, planting them firmly in the "Cheap Throwaway Minions" bin. Luckily for these pests, that bin is one of my favorites.

As for managing the bugs, I've had my best doctor on the matter. We've developed a special modified form of Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Growth, which produces Black Crystal Sap that, when put in the Wannabeetle's food, helps us control and manipulate the bugs. We've started some minor experiments in seeing just how far we can take this, and I've brought in a specialist named "Iridescent Shell", who is apparently the mare who brought the bugs into the Shadow Realm in the first place. She'll be helping us with selectively breeding the bugs for obedience and friendliness. I swear to god, though, if these end up being like dogs, and we've just got like, children's toys walking around everywhere, I'm out. Animate bug-filled monsters I can handle, animate bug-filled plushy toys trying to hug you? Nope. Too far.

It's not like the Shadow Realm can become more infested with the bugs, so finding a use for them is more cost effective than trying to eradicate them. By combining Wannabeetles with empty shells, I can create minions much more cheaply than by using true golems to control and empower them. When it comes to quality, however, an enchanted golem still wins out in all respects. Speed, strength, intelligence. If you want something done almost right, you almost do it yourself.

In combat, sometimes you just need bodies. So many of them, and all of them cheap. By cultivating Wannabeetles with my own blend of dark magic, I believe I can obtain those bodies. And as the materials I have to work with grow, so too will the shells of my beloved trash mobs. Now I just need to make sure that the Shadow Realm is bug-proofed where it needs to be, and I might actually get something useful out of this whole mess with a bit more experimentation.

I'm especially interested in just how much I can tweak the behavior of a mass of Wannabeetles, based on the shell I provide for them to inhabit. Maybe if I dressed up the shell, I could grant them limited skills of some sort? Or I could try combining their shells with golemancy, to create novel golem behavior. The flaw of a golem is that, against the wrong opponent, it can become predictable. Wannabeetles may be able to defeat this limitation.

The entry mentions a story. Did something happen before this?

There is, but I've only heard it secondhand. I would have to ask Luna about what exactly happened. I'll be sure to do so, as soon as I finish cleaning stardust out of my mane.

(Past Chapter 17): The Champion

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The first time one of my creations turned on me, I didn't get there in time.

God, this feels incredible. I might not have been too crazy over bathing as more than a matter of hygiene, but that was before I managed to get my personal Bacta Tank up and running. I've been getting injured way too many times for my own good, and I'm pretty sure some of my joints have been starting to go as well.

Now I just hop in a tank of molten healing crystals and I'm right as rain. Of course, it would have been utterly insane to even consider this form of treatment, before Blast Day.

Who would have thought that heat resistance could be quite this useful? Well, me, apparently.

Apparently, due to Healing Crystals being made of enchanted salt, they normally need to be absorbed in order to function at their maximum potential. Something that was a hassle before, as simply eating it would make it take as long as eight hours to heal the subject due to the limitations of digestion. Even slower than if the crystals were simply applied to the skin directly, or via acupuncture needles.

Of course, that simply made me realize that salt has a relatively low melting point, all things considered.

The pod begins to drain, as a light attached to the device blinks green, indicating that my body is now at it's healthiest. Good work body.

As soon as the last of the salty magical goodness has swirled down into the drain to be purified and cycled back in, I shake off the hardening crust and step outside, chugging a large sapphire urn filled with water, placed strategically next to the healing pod.

Turns out, bathing in salt is also a great way to dehydrate the shit out of you. Who knew.

I groan slightly at the realization that I still owe Captain Iron Diamond and his demonic ally of torture, Captain Helmsplitter another hour of training. This little temporary reprieve was just that. Temporary.

"So you can't do cool dragon stuff, Doc? That's!"

Ruby drops down and begins doing one-fingered pushups to accentuate his points.

"Super! One! Lame! Two!"

Dr. Real sighs, ignoring his son's antics. "No, I'm not nearly so mad as Weiss Noir. What happened to him was a one-in-a-million, extremely unnatural occurrence.

"As unnatural as it may appear, the affliction that overtook the rest of the Shadow Realm hasn't changed what we are on the inside. I still lack sufficient greed to do the same things you all can do."

When Padparadscha looks downcast at this, and Ruby's pushups intensify, Dr. Real ponders something to comfort the children. "Although, it might be possible if the spell were... Extremely, extremely weak."

Sapphire, who had been listening silently as he sat on Dr. Real's couch, speaks up at this. "The research."

Dr. Real nods. "Ponies have been feeling stronger emotions overall, since the event. I'll bring the matter up with Weiss to see if it is possible. Would that make the three of you feel better?"

Ruby's pushups conclude as he flops to the floor, while Paddy simply nods, his tail flicking from left to right rapidly.

Sapphire suddenly stands up from the reinforced couch. "I'm going to the arena."

"Very well Sapphire. Stay safe, yes?" Dr. Real scratches his head, still trying to comprehend the blue dragon's taciturn behavior, swiveling back around in his chair to face his desk. The holographic interface in front of him displays the various reports from Shadow Realm Citizens, among the ones who came in for experiments.

To be frank, Dr. Real has been somewhat jealous of Lord Weiss as of late. Apparently, instead of using voice recognition or mouthwriting with a stylus like a normal pony, the unicorn has been using his extra limbs to operate some sort of keyboard. It certainly seems faster, considering Weiss finishes his paperwork in minutes, and Dr. Real still has six-hundred reports to go through...

"Why is it always in the fucking head!" I shout, stumbling back over to the table to drink some water.

"Because it's still working. You'll learn to cover your face better if I have to flatten it." Iron Diamond responds, the set of two golem arms on his back clenching and unclenching as he tests their strength and dexterity, switching the crystal mace between his hands.

I groan, rolling my eyes. "Ugh. Can we just move on to swords already?"

Iron Diamond gives a long-suffering sigh, while this match's only observer, Helmsplitter, is simply confused, having missed the context.

"I don't understand your obsession with swords. A spear would work a lot better in almost all circumstances, Lord Weiss."

After a moment, Iron diamond quietly rolls his eyes. "Fine, whatever, we can move on to swords. I'll need two blunted ones."

"And two for me?" I say, making Iron Diamond breathe deeply through his nose, as the fire on top of his head sharpens to a point.

"Lord Weiss, with all due respect, you can't handle yourself in a fight with zero weapons. Please, can we start with just one apiece? And a set of buckler shields. Do you know what those look like?" He says, glaring me into submission as I meekly create the two Royal Adamantium short-swords, blunted as requested, and a set of bucklers with Royal Cloth straps.

I toss one of the sets to him, while I draw the other one out of the ground fully, holding it in one of my hands, and strapping the buckler to another arm. I then cross the rest of my arms behind my back awkwardly to keep them out of my way.

Iron Diamond might not have any more experience than I do with holding weapons in a hand instead of teeth or hooves, but he's also almost twenty years my senior on the field of combat, and he had taken to my newfangled fighting technology faster than I could develop it.

The fact that he is using Golem Limbs attached to his back instead of the one replacing his leg indicates just how vastly he's holding back against me. Of course, the fact that he's using weapons at all, instead of just using one of his steel-twisting bucks to turn me into wall-paint indicated that just fine, after he gave a demonstration of why he was holding back during our training.

"When it comes to a sword, everything begins with your stance." Iron Diamond says.

I find myself tempted to continue with "You do it for him", but I've learned not to dick around too much when Iron Diamond is in control of how many bruises I get.

"You want a low stance, and you want to keep your eyes on my entire torso at all times. Grip your sword as tight as you can manage without harming your ability to control it."

As he swings his sword at me, I hold up my buckler, blocking the swing with a glassy click as the nearly indestructible weapons collide.

"Lower, and wider as well. Keep the sword in front of you." Helmsplitter comments from the sidelines, watching our fight with his own intentness.

I try to obey, but as soon as I move my sword, Iron Diamond swings again, much harder than before.

"Pay attention, you need to absorb information without compromising your focus."

This isn't nearly as fun as I envisioned it.

The mechanized pony lashes out with a rapid series of bucks, before a large piston erupts from its stomach, flipping it into the air and out of the way of the stream of flames from its opponent, a dragon-shaped golem with wicked claws.

As the Groundpounder lands with the loud ring of crystal striking stone, it gallops rapidly towards Freedomfire, it's opponent, dropping into a slide as it skids underneath another wave of fire, and, belly-up underneath the enemy golem, it's stomach-piston fires out again, shattering Freedomfire's armor, and making a loud bell ring out, signaling the end of the match.

Large cranes above the arena slowly move into position, and then rapidly drop down, grabbing the golems and safely depositing them with their respective teams.

"And that concludes Round-Three of the Enchantussle tournament, let's give a round of applause for team Freedomfire and Groundpounder, everypony!" the announcer shouts, waving a hoof towards the two teams, who are shaking hooves and chattering among themselves.

"Man, Miss Flash, you really kicked Freedomfire's flank, that tummy-thing is no joke." the orange-coated and topaz-scaled pony says, while the rest of his team works on repairing the golem's chest, which had been completely shattered and caved in.

Eclipse Flash preens at the praise. "It really isn't. I used an Impact-Storage charm to build up the kinetic energy though, so it isn't one-hundred-percent reliable."

The other pony seems to consider this, before shaking his head with a smile. "Well, you won't beat us next time, mark my words, Miss Flash, Freedomfire is going to be the best golem on the circuit!"

"I'll look forward to it!" Eclipse retorts, thrilled at the idea of Groundpounder facing off against such an impressive foe again.

As she walks over to the rest area, Priss is there, giving Eclipse a funny look. "I thought you hated fighting, what's got you so excited about this? I didn't even know you were doing golem fights."

Eclipse shrugs. "I mean, I'm not a fan of ponies fighting, but golems? That's entirely different, we're helping push Shadow Realm combat magic ahead with this, and nopony's getting hurt."

"Why'd you want me on your team, anyway? I don't know the first thing about enchanting," Priss continues.

Eclipse shrugs. "Moral support? You're really good at trash-talking, and that's an important part of golem combat."

Priss is tempted to call ponyfeathers on that, but holds herself back. "Alright, well, if you need me, then I suppose I can deign to stick around."

Eclipse nods gratefully, pulling a sheet of paper and a pen out of her saddlebags. "Anyway, I didn't really consider how it might be odd that I like golem fighting more than actual fighting. It'll make a good foeship report."

Priss just leans back in her chair, intent on getting some shuteye while her friend does her thing, before a tan pony in a suit walks in, looking busy with a crystalline tank of something on his back.

"Sorry ladies, I've gotta spray this room down, mind waiting outside for a bit?"

Priss groans, while Eclipse simply obeys neutrally, and the pair decide to take the opportunity to go hang out at their clubhouse.

Glitter Bomb isn't enjoying this.

"You idiot! I can say it until I'm blue in the face, but you just don't listen. For the rest of you, let me say it again. Do not detonate Rupture Drops near other Rupture Drops! Do not detonate Rupture Drops near the fuses! Do not store Rupture Drops with the fuses!"

Glitter Bomb's yellow and orange mustache practically licks the sides of the tunnel as the flames erupt from both sides of his face when he turns to face the pony who had accidentally done all three of those things, and destroyed a twelve-ton amethyst crystal that very well could have been one-in-a-million.

"As for you, get your ash out of here, because you're off this project! Go find another job!"

His statement clearly made, Glitter Bomb turns and bucks the stallion down the hall, where they scramble to their feet and run off, unharmed aside from some light bruising to their ego.

Glitter Bomb sighs as the yellow scales on his hooves recede back down below his knees, having spread temporarily during his fit of anger. "Alright, the rest of you, let's get back to work salvaging this mess. We can get some drinks at Drop Kick's after this. On me."

"Yes sir Boss!" The miners shout in unison, cheerfully going back to their jobs with fervor, increased focus, and at least a small amount of schadenfreude-fueled morale.

Glitter Bomb hears a squish when he goes to make the trot to his office to report a certain Mr. Hardheaded for incompetence.

Lifting his hoof, he sees that a bug made it's way underneath, prompting him to wipe his hoof off with some disgust.

Lord Weiss Noir,

Today I've learned a valuable lesson in foeship. Where normally, I dislike violence, I've come to realize that this feeling is more complex than I had once believed. Ever since I've begun to participate in the golem combat circuits in Wacky Workbench, I've found myself thrilled and delighted by the experience of designing my own war machine, and pitting it against others in the arena. My belief is that violence may be more enjoyable via proxy for some ponies, and that it's easy to inflict violence on others when you don't have to do it yourself, or when you're inflicting it on a non-person.

Your Traitorous Student, Eclipse Flash.

I read the letter, trying to rub the cramp out of my leg while I sit on the bench nearby. Iron Diamond and Helmsplitter are discussing something just out of earshot. Probably new and creative tortures to inflict on me as soon as I'm done recovering.

So Eclipse Flash is into golems, huh? Maybe I should make an effort to participate in that little patch of entertainment. I've got a few golems lying around collecting dust, so I'd probably just have to have them retrofitted to not have some of their spicier weapons.

Iron Diamond approaches me with what appears to be bad news.

"Sir, if I had any talent with fancy speeches, I would probably say this more politely, but-"

"You stink at this. Now, I can still fix that. I've taught more hopeless cases than you, but it's going to take time. A lot of time."

Jeeze, tell me how you really feel, Iron. I don't think my poor heart was wounded enough by that.

"So here's what I want to try instead."

Iron Diamond pulls out a set of padded gear, including what seem to be comically overstuffed boots.

"Brawling. It's mindless, and you can learn it from a teacher a lot more capable than me. The teacher I'm referring to is Pain."

I consider his words while I strap on the safety gear. I guess it couldn't hurt to try this. Maybe I'll have fewer bruises now that we aren't using weapons.

'Ha! What a joke.' I think to myself when I see Iron Diamond throw a few cursory kicks as he adjusts to the weight of the padded horseshoes. I swear I heard cracks, and he's not even hitting anything.

I feel an honest to god sweatdrop on my head as I quickly speak. "Uhh! Actually, before we start, I should probably take care of some stuff, take another dip in the healing pod, just so, uhh, we have the rest of today to train uninterrupted?"

Iron Diamond's blank expression bears down on me. "Sure thing. I'll hold you to it."

I feel especially doomed as I trot out of the room, the sound of cracking air fading away entirely too slowly for my liking.

The gigantic golem that Weiss apparently sent over comes complete with a small letter stapled to its shoulder.

"To my Least Trustworthy Student,

Say hello to El Toro! I dug up one of my old mecha and took out all the spicy bits, I'll start showing up to some of your matches after my bones finish healing, but until then, you can use this puppy, I wasn't using it anyway, so feel free to make any adjustments you want, you know what you're doing.

Your Evil Overlord, Weiss Noir."

Priss reads, looking over the large metal bull with interest. Most of the competition golems are made out of crystal, leaving her suspicious of its durability, but... Well, a gift's a gift, even if it is a fixer-upper.

Taking a power nap, she sends a quick dream to Jerryrig.

"Hey, Jerry, when you get a chance, do you think you could ask Heavy Hauler for some more vibrant vibranium? If he's got any, that is. I've got a new golem I wanted to try out, but Lord Weiss put some kind of metal garbage on it."

Waking up several minutes later with a yawn, Eclipse returns to the bull and detaches the plate on its chest, revealing that the golem is hollow inside.

"Huh. So it's like some kind of golem armor. Weird," Eclipse mumbles to herself, digging around in the machine's innards, before her Moon Crystal pings with an unread message, which she taps idly, making a hologram appear above it.

"Sorry, Eclipse, bro's only got one extra plate left, you can come to pick it up whenever, though. Sorry about that!" Jerryrig says before the message ends.

Eclipse rolls her eyes and groans. "Guess I know what I'm using it for."

Later that day, Eclipse goes on to attach the crystal plate to El Toro's chest after adjusting it's internal crystal control units, calling it done for now as she wheels it into a closet, and locks the door for now.

She fails to notice the skittering in the dark as she leaves the clubhouse.

My healing tank bleeps an angry red, indicating that someone REALLY needs me to not be in the pod.

I start the pod to draining, as I rip the straps off of me via Prestidigitonium, opening the pod to the sight of a hologram displaying a Code 1 in Wacky Workbench.

Namely, that something built in the Shadow Realm has turned on us, and is currently on a rampage.

"Fuck me." I spit out some salt and grab my water urn as I limp as fast as I can to the arena, chugging while I run.

What the hell could have happened to make a golem of all things go on a rampage?

Could be anything, maybe some sort of greed corruption, or a misaligned black crystal?

God, I hope someone didn't hijack the radio network or something.

By the time I get there, I'm too late.

Half an hour before Weiss's rude awakening, Eclipse is prepared to put the El Toro to the test in today's match.

Priss observes, as team Groundpounder's sole other member.

"Woo, you go Eclipse," Priss says, waving a tiny flag as she stares over the arena with a half-lidded gaze.

Eclipse giggles at Priss's halfhearted cheering, as she prepares to command her new golem.

"Alright, El Toro, activate!"

The Golem's red eyes light up, while its nose snorts out a hiss of steam. Mechanized muscles begin to pump, while its horns begin to glow white-hot as their temperature increases.

On the other side of the arena, a golem made entirely of fixed spinning drills begins to rattle around violently, glittering yellow armor plates jammed into the golem on various locations.

"Alright everypony, let's all direct our eyes to the arena for today's match, Team Groundpounder's El Toro, verses Team Woodchuck's Princess Urchin!" A tall, waifish mare says, flickering hair swaying smoothly as she gestures to the two teams animatedly.

Eclipse Flash's holographic screen brightens as she activates the verbal control systems.

She holds a hoof up. "Let the match... Begin!" she finishes, swiping her hoof down to begin the combat.

"El Toro, charge!" Eclipse Flash yells, prompting the mechanical bull to scrape the ground before charging towards the rattling, bouncing opponent.

Princess Urchin's drills begin to thrash wildly, spinning at incredible speed. This unpredictable spray of sparks and stone sends the golem flying into the air while El Toro charges the empty space where it was fruitlessly.

At this stage, Princess Urchin's second function makes itself apparent, as a small burst of magical force emitted from the golem adjusts it's course perfectly to land on El Toro.

What is stunning, however, is the total lack of damage even three crystal drills driving into the golem does, the weapons sparking uselessly against El Toro's unknown alloy.

"Whoa. Maybe I shouldn't have replaced that chest plate... Seems like whatever Weiss had on it in the first place is a heck of a lot stronger." Eclipse mumbles, softly enough to make Priss's ears twitch involuntarily.

"El Toro, buck them off!" Eclipse shouts into her holographic control unit, making the brazen bull obey, tilting forward sharply to launch Princess Urchin, before a set of hooves fly back, sending it crashing into the wall, where it explodes into a pile of drills.

"Ooh boy, looks like Team Woodchuck is going to have a hard time putting their golem back together folks! Let's give a hand for..." The announcer lady pauses when El Toro snorts again, scuffing the ground with a hoof as it looks around jerkily.

"Erm, Team Groundpounder, please deactivate your golem!" The announcer lady says before yelping when El Toro's white-hot horn prods the wall beneath the announcer's balcony, making it tilt dangerously.

Eclipse is slamming all the buttons on her holographic display, slowly realizing that something is wrong.

"It's not shutting down, I don't know why!

"El Toro, shut down immediately!" Eclipse shouts, slamming her hoof onto the "Emergency Shutdown" switch.

The Golem's eyes dim, and it sags slightly as it's horns cool. Suddenly, however, it's black gaze turns back on the announcer's box, as it moves jerkily back into a full standing position.

Priss stands up, concerned. "Why is it still moving?"

Eclipse scratches her head. "I don't know, the golem is shut down! There's no power going anywhere!" It's at this point that she spots a bug scuttling around the arena that had fallen off of El Toro before skittering back into a gap in its armor.

Eclipse Flash's eyes widen, as the bull butts its head into the wall with a snort of steam.

"It's infested with Wannabeetles, they're making it act like just like a real giant bull monster! Priss, we've got to do something, or that pony's going to fall!"

Priss gallops around to the chain-link fence separating the arena and kicks it with her front hooves.

'Well, if it's acting like the real deal, then this should work...'

"Hey, freak! Over here you useless pile of scrap!" Priss shouts, making the bull turn to face her instead.

With a dull chitinous roar, El Toro charges the fence, prompting Priss to activate her Shock Leap Materia at the last second, leaping over the automaton entirely, and directly towards the announcer's booth.

"Gosh, that stings! Lady, I'm going to throw you, you gotta get out of here, ok?" The fully grown mare nods with no small amount of fear before Priss activates her Throwback Materia and bucks the announcer over the fence and into the rest of the crowd, who have already started to panic and run away as El Toro turns to face them.

Priss growls as the bull construct seems to have lost interest in her. "Hey, El ToRoach, I thought you were mad? Come on, show me what you've got, or are you so scared that you'll rust your pants first?!"

The Bull turns back to face her again, its eyes slowly lighting back up with red light as it scuffs the ground, before charging the booth head-on.

This time, however, Priss is unprepared for its speed, and shouts with alarm when it's bullrush crashes into the wall, sending the balcony, and her along with it tumbling to the arena floor.

Priss briefly panics at the Bull staring her down from the other side of the arena, before she sees it's chest glittering from the crystal armor that Eclipse Flash had to retrofit it with.

She looks behind her, seeing one of the Princess Urchin's drills gleam ominously.

She activates her Royal Crystal Growth charm, allowing her to grow a large tarp made of red glittering fabric, which she grabs in her mouth, flapping it wildly at the bull to hide the drill behind her.

"Come on you bucket of rocks! Are you a bull or are you a chicken? Bugs like you aught to be squashed if they can't even pilot Weiss's garbage right! Come on, let's see that charge again, see if you can gallop instead of skitter!"

The bull charges her in a mad rage, so fast that her desperate leap to the side takes her right in front of its right horn, the wicked spike poised directly in front of her chest, and it's face covered with disgusting beetles.

Moments frozen in time begin to pass once again, as her leap takes her just barely out of the way of peril, rolling along the ground as she hears a violently loud crack.

Looking over, she spots the gross tide of bugs swarming out of El Toro, gushing from the shattered chest plate of the construct.

She also feels a weird itch on her flanks that has her leaping up and backing away from the bugs with no small amount of shuddering and wiggling out of fear that one of the bugs got on her or something.

"And that's the story." Eclipse Flash finishes, while I finish my rudimentary checkup of Priss, not finding any real injuries.

"Ugh, I can't believe I missed it! I swear to god, I'm going to have to get teleporters or something. This is ridiculous. Missing an honest to god bullfight with a gigantic robotic bull," I shake my head with pure suffering in my heart. I bet it looked totally badass, too.

"What you did was very stupid. But you also ended up not paying for it. As ruler of the Shadow Realm, I sentence you to three months of training to dodge better, because I'm fairly certain I can't convince you not to do this again if a similar situation arises," I say, familiar with how rambunctious magic pony children function in the face of wacky weekly dangers.

Priss shrugs. "I've always been good at taunting you, Weiss. So I figured taunting the rampaging monster would only be slightly more difficult."

I give her an unamused stare. "I guess that explains the cutie mark at least."

Priss looks to her flanks, where a mischievous smiley-face with two small devil horns is printed on a bright red cape.

"Huh. I guess it does...!"

Eclipse scratches her chin. "What I don't get is how that plan of yours even worked, the math doesn't add up, that crystal armor plate on its chest was rated to withstand at least twice as much force. Where did the power come from to make the drill punch through its chest when it charged into it?"

Priss's eyes widen when she thinks back to the moment when she leapt out of the way of the bull's horns.

"I felt really disgusted when I was trying to get out of the way, and I wanted to break that bull. Didn't you say that that's the sole two ingredients for a spell, Weiss?"

I scratch my own chin this time.

"I mean, it's worth testing," I say, as I dramatically squish a bug skittering by beneath my hoof.

(Noir Report) Outsourcing Research to Suitable Candidates [Glitter Miss Priss's Hit-or-Miss Punch]

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Entry #16, Day 202

Today's entry is marked by something that will serve my subjects well, the second dark magic that I have discovered, which bears the mark of a subspecies' unique emotion. In this case, a spell that I will be referring to as "Glitter Miss Priss's Hit-or-Miss Punch" This spell is marked by two key emotions, the Earth Pony emotion of Wrongness, and the dark emotion of Disgust. When these two emotions are combined with the intent to harm, a spell is born which amplifies or reverses kinetic energy, sometimes even both.

The spell was first born when a close friend of mine had faced off against a foul bug monster, whose appearance evoked sufficient disgust and wrongness to birth the spell's first casting. The creature's charge was hastened, it's speed increased, and this violently amplified momentum carried the beast to it's doom. Thus, the hallmark of this spell is in turning a target against itself, a spell which takes a foe's attack, and turns it back on them, or twists it out of their control.

While this spell cannot create or alter force wholesale, it's ability to multiply force exceeds that of Prestidigitonium by orders of magnitude, or at least, it exceeds my own casting of the spell. Thus, I've taken it upon myself to study the spell in depth, with the help of my friend and other researchers, so that the spell can be successfully conveyed to the readers of this tome, despite my own inability to cast the spell.

The first and most important thing to consider about Hit-or-Miss Punch is implied by the name. It should not be used on a subject that will not miss. Accelerating the force of a target that is going to collide with you can cause immense, very serious injuries, and such, care should be taken to use the spell's kinetic force inversion function, if you believe you cannot get out of the way of a target in time to avoid what will be a massive increase in the object's speed and impact force.

While this spell is merely a D-Rank Magic, it will receive special attention as a restricted spell, due to it's secondary effect. This is because Hit-or-Miss Punch invariably causes an unimaginably potent increase in temperature on the subject of it's casting, due to amplifying all molecular movement, rather than applying a single vector of force to the object as a whole. Most things containing even the smallest amount of water will instantly vaporize, at the temperature this spell forces it to undergo.

While Longma can easily withstand the temperatures caused by this spell, It is safe to assume that other creatures will be harmed unreasonably by the spell's usage on them. As such, it is being classified as a Military Licensed Spell exclusively, as will it's Materia. I expect any who are interested in learning to use this magic themselves will obtain the proper documentation, to ensure that they are skilled and trained sufficiently to avoid any dangerous accidents. I have also been informed that the Force Redirection charm is a useful spell to have on hand when experimenting with Hit-or-Miss Punch, in case one is hit by any recoil from the spell.

It is suggested that users of the spell have Force Redirection adjusted so that all kinetic energy hitting their hooves are redirected to their mane or tail, where it can be dispersed harmlessly in the form of heat. The legs of a Longma are the most durable part of their body, due to the hardened scales coating them. In ideal circumstances, you will want to be brunting the majority of any impacts with your legs, should you disobey my express orders and attempt the spell without the correct safety training.

In light of this new Noir Report's completion, the local Materia Shops in your area will be distributing Force Redirection Materia at cost for the next three weeks, to minimize accidents. I strongly urge you to obtain one, if not for experimentation into force magic, then for the simple fact of it being a supremely useful defensive charm, able to negate a wide variety of physical sources of harm. It certainly can't hurt to have one.

Disclaimer duly given, I will now describe it's features, as recited to me by my researchers. This spell's uses are numerous, from flinging objects at high speeds to repelling objects being flung at the user at high speeds. Tests indicated that, in the hands of a skilled combatant, rocks could be flung in such a way that they were molten on impact, and many forms of crystal could be made to explode from resonant force.

The uses of kinetic energy have been covered in my entry detailing the Prestidigitonium spell, and they hold true here as well. Flames, Violence and raw destructive Fun are all the telltale signs of a useful spell, in my book. The other side of a useful spell, by this definition, is learning to manage flames, violence, and fun in such a way that you only experience the last one yourself.

Considering this, several guards have opted to replace their existing crystal armor with temperature resistant blends of metal and crystal, padded with Crystal Cloth for added insulation. Using this armor, Hit-or-Miss Punch can be directed onto the user, indirectly, giving them extreme boosts in impact speed, at the cost of extraordinarily high temperatures to their armor. I am torn on the matter. On the one hand, crystal has always been a very aesthetically pleasing substance, on it's own.

On the other hand, the simple fact of the matter is that Tungsten is a serviceably aesthetic metal itself. In the end, I'm forced to conclude that for some of my guards, glittering enchanted crystal armor is simply not practical, and that I will have to develop a taste for the sleek appearance of enchanted blackened metals, mixed with glossy heat-resistant gems. I believe the transition will be a mostly smooth one, if the designs my Research and Development team have shown me are anything to go by.

I cannot help but wonder. If some of my guards are incorporating this new spell into their martial arts and combat maneuvers, does that make it "Flame Fu"?

(Present Chapter 17): Applejacked Up

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Weiss frames the mountain between his fingers, with one eye shut and the other glaring at the mountain as if it would change to suit him.

"Well, there's not that many mountains near the Everfree, so I guess I can't be picky. This one should do just fine," He says, pulling out the Minish Cap and the Krak Pot, plopping one on his head, and the other in front of him as he holds his arms out dramatically.

"Flames of disaster. ~ The rage of the volcano. ~ Flaring up and out."

A red crystal appears from nowhere, shaped like swooping flames. It drops into Weiss's first hand, which clenches around it.

"Ice and snow and ice. ~ The cousin of heat, gone away ~ The cold shares itself."

A blue, diamond-shaped crystal appears, slowly drifting into Weiss's second hand, where he grips it carefully.

"Violent Lightning. ~ Light and Science born anew. ~ Violet Lightning."

A crystal made of blue, yellow, and purple splinters welded together slips into Weiss's third hand, which tightens around the gem involuntarily as sparks crackle across its surface.

"The Boulder drops down. ~ Then the boulder crashes down. ~ The Boulder drops down."

A large brown stone drops into Weiss's fourth hand.

"A Bomb! It's a Bomb! ~ Death in a tiny package. ~ Gone with the blast wave."

A black sphere appears, Weiss grabbing it gently out of the air with his fifth hand.

"Wooden thorns strike true. ~ Attacking the attackers. ~ When the tree prepares."

A tan crystal appears, this one covered in eight distinct spikes. Weiss's sixth hand pinches it by the sides.

"Cutting blade of steel. ~ All elements as your sire. ~ You honor them here."

A glittering crescent crystal, pure white in color appears, Weiss grabbing it in the grip of his magic before it can fall into the pot.

His eyes begin to burn, quite literally, as they ignite with flickering white fire.

He lets go of each of the elemental gems, where they hang in the air, and lazily begin to spin around the mouth of the Krak Pot, which bubbles with the power of Alchemy.

Weiss's teeth grit, as his horn ignites, layers of spells being drawn out of it.

"Miracle Matter. ~ It's time for you to be born. ~ Miracle Matter!" Weiss shouts as the seven gems sweep into the pot, turning into pure light as they sink into the pot's boiling rainbow liquid.

The Krak Pot shakes and shudders before a loud oven-timer ding rings out from it, and a beacon of magical energy erupts from within the Weapon of Light.

The end result is a floating white icosahedron, roughly as large as Weiss Noir himself.

As Weiss's eyes reopen, recovering from the magic he had infused into them, the alchemy result, Miracle Matter, opens all twenty of its own glowing red eyes. The first ten of them focused on Weiss himself, their creator and master.

Weiss smiles fondly at the alchemical creature. "Miracle Matter! Carve out this mountain. Go forth, and do my will!"

With his words spoken, the alchemical mass shudders, it's eyes sweeping randomly in all directions as it changes forms, transforming into a gigantic metal drill. Miracle Matter then slowly begins to float down the Everfree Forest trail, towards the mountain less than a mile away.

As Weiss looks on at his new creation floating merrily down the trail, his smile widens further. He goes on to pull the Minish Cap off of his head and looks down at the gold-bound purple hat for a moment. "Two Relics of Darkness complete. Two to go."

"Alright Twilight, it's really important that I stay focused, Ok?" Spike says, squinting his eyes while Twilight takes notes dutifully.

Spike holds his claws out and wiggles them at a large diamond, which sits on the grass in front of them, doing nothing of any particular interest.

"Come on..." Spike mumbles, focusing as hard as he can. Emerald sparks begin to jump from between his claws.

Suddenly, a shout from Pinkie Pie nearby makes Spike flop onto his rear in shock, a tiny bolt of lightning flying up into the air.

"Dang it! And I had it that time, too!" Spike complains, snapping his fingers with exasperation.

Pinkie Pie zips from under a wagon to over by a tree, the large mirror strapped to her head tilting dangerously as she looks up with worry.

"Looks like it's just Pinkie being Pinkie. With extra Pinkie on top..." Spike says, befuddled at the earth pony's behavior.

Pinkie cuts her eyes left and right nervously before her tail begins to shudder and shake. "Twitch... Twitch!" she shouts, dashing over to a giant boulder, slipping under it before dashing back out, leaving the rock to collapse down to the ground with an earth-shaking thud.

Suddenly, Pinkie dashes over to the two of them, standing perfectly balanced on Twilight's back and holding Spike in a football carry under her foreleg.

"Wha- Pinkie! What the heck are you doing!" Spike says, wiggling around in the Earth Pony's surprisingly strong grip while Twilight stumbles left and right in confusion.

"Well, my tail's a twitchin', and that means my Pinkie Sense is telling me something's about to fall!" Pinkie shouts, nervously looking up once again.

Twilight hums at this, looking up as well. "Well, there's not a cloud in the sky, what could possibly end up falling?"

The answer, Twilight, Pinkie Pie and Spike discover, is the bolt of Dragon Lightning Spike had accidentally flung into the air, which arcs back down, crashing into the mirror on Pinkie Pie's head, and bounces off into the distance, narrowly missing Fluttershy and Gilda, who had been flying by with two carts of frogs.

"Oh my!" Fluttershy shouts as the bolt whizzes by.

She blushes apologetically while flapping to gain a bit of extra height for her and the cart trailing behind her. "Sorry for getting in your way, I just couldn't stand to see the pond getting so over-populated, what with the frogs all hopping into each other and all, so I decided to fly as many as I can on over to Froggy Bottom Bog with Gilda's help."

"Yo," Gilda says, waving.

"No, I'm sorry, that was my bad, that could have hit you two!" Spike says, scratching his arm nervously.

"Don't worry about it pokey, we're tough and it missed anyway," Gilda says, before turning and flying away with Fluttershy.

As the pair of them give their goodbyes on the go, Twilight turns to Pinkie, a curious gleam in her eye.

"What's this about a Pinkie Sense?" Twilight says, remembering Celestia's impromptu lesson on Equestria's other two tribes of magic.

Weiss taps his hooves impatiently while fiddling with a Rubix Cube, eradicating the puzzle in a fit of spiteful fire when he consistently fails to figure it out.

"Number twelve?" Ditsy Doo says, clicking the waiting number forward while Weiss walks into her cubicle.

"Hello! Sorry for bothering you again, I need to move my mailing address back to The Tower, will that be a problem?" Weiss says politely, sitting down to face the mailmare.

"Not at all, that's what we're here for," Ditsy says, pulling out some papers and beginning the process of stamping them and signing them.

"So, anything new lately, M'am?" Weiss says, waiting patiently for the mare quietly preparing his papers.

"Not really." She says, her lazy eye pointing at him as she stamps the last paper, and shuffles it all together.

"Look." Ditsy starts, making Weiss pause as he gets up to leave, business concluded.

"It's not my place to say this, but I'm not sure you know about this, just going from the rumors.

"Equestrian Law can be extremely lenient, as long as a justifiable cause can be found that an act was taken in the defense of children."

Her lazy eye remains focused on Weiss, while the other one wanders aimlessly around the room. "So you really shouldn't threaten any more fillies."

Weiss's confused expression stays with him for at least half an hour after leaving the Post Office.

What the hell was that about?

Twilight rapidly jots down notes while Pinkie rambles on about her Pinkie sense.

"Oh, and sometimes, when my left hoof shakes twelve times and my knees itch and I almost sneeze, but can't quite manage it, that means something really mysterious is going to happen," Pinkie says, sipping on a glass of lemonade.

"And what exactly are you feeling when you do this?" Twilight asks, poking her chin with the tip of her quill.

Pinkie tilts her head. "Well, usually, right after I get a Pinkie Sense, I feel all giggly. Why, is that important?"

Twilight balks at this. "After? Are you sure you don't mean before? Emotions have to occur in order for a spell to be cast, they don't happen after the spell is already cast..."

Pinkie shrugs. "Sorry Twi, I meant what I meant," she giggles.

"I always feel really giggly right after my Pinkie Sense goes off. Never before."

After a few moments of pondering, Twilight groans. "I'm not sure I'll be able to learn much more here, Pinkie. Whatever magic you're using, it's as eccentric as you are."

It's at this point that Applejack walks by, a cart of apples trailing behind her.

"Howdy Girls, Spike." the orange mare says, tipping her hat to them.

Twilight's eyes light up. "Applejack, are you busy right now?"

Applejack looks unsure. "Uh, yeah, sorry Twi, I'm just droppin' off produce, then it's back to the farm. Got lots of work needs doing."

Twilight nods. "Perfect! Do you mind if I make some observations? I'll stay out of your way, I'm just curious about Earth Pony magic is all."

Applejack's eyebrows quirk. "Ain't no magic spells on my farm Twi, just hard work, I figure."

Twilight shakes her head. "No, you see, I found out from the Princess that there are some spells that are impossible for a unicorn to cast, because Earth Ponies and Pegasi are the only ones who can! There might be more magic going on than you realize, even with your everyday chores and I've been incredibly curious about it all."

Meanwhile, poor Applejack is still trying to plug together "Earth Pony" and "Magic", as she hadn't really considered any of what she did to qualify. Of course, growing plants requires Earth Ponies, so there's obviously some magic going on there, Applejack thinks.

Considering Sweet Apple Acres' reliance on mundane hard work, the idea that they might have been doing some kind of fancy magic this whole time irks Applejack for reasons she can't quite put her hoof on.

"Well, I guess you've got me curious too, Twilight," Applejack says with the barest trace of suspicion.

"Fizzlepop, report," Weiss says, his fingers templed on the table in front of him. Some sort of deep Everfree Oak that he had harvested on a whim when he saw it spit out flaming thorns at him as he passed.

A nostalgic taste of home, all things considered.

Tempest Shadow smiles. "Us and the new guards occupying Star Road have reached an agreement. We stay out of Star Sanctuary, and they stay out of our own base. I won't have to move my men out."

Weiss's eyebrow raises, the flame flickering softly as it shifts up on his forehead. "Was it the threat of a beatdown, or did you have to specify that it would be an embarrassing beatdown?"

Tempest looks to the side, smiling aloofly. "Well, the word I used was 'Humiliating', but they got the message regardless.

"I'm just glad we won't need to move. Morale has been improved with a stable location to call home," Tempest admits.

After a few moments, something occurs to Tempest Shadow, dampening her mood. "Have you put any thought as to what you'll do about the Storm King if he or his own troops come? I know things that he most certainly doesn't want to be revealed, I have to warn you."

Weiss's scoff serves as the backdrop for his response, alongside his unimpressed expression. "If it makes you feel any better, I'll take care of him after my business is concluded in the Frozen North. I'm almost prepared to make the trip. I just have a few more things to finish up before I go clean up that mess."

Tempest looks seriously at her current employer. "I wouldn't underestimate the Storm King, Weiss. He's a madman, and he's in charge of a country. Those two things don't coincide for as long as they have without him being dangerous."

Weiss chuckles at this. "Oh I know, I practically starred in that parable. He might be the next best thing, but he's not quite me.

"I'll begin preparing countermeasures, just in case."

He rubs his hands together joyously as he walks over to a window and stares out it at the slowly reforming mountain at the edge of the Everfree Forest. "I'm so excited, most of my plans to combat magic-eaters, I was saving for someone else."

Applejack slightly regrets giving Twilight free reign to "observe" her doing her chores.

The metal scanning wand pokes her in the rib while she's trying to lift the barrel of apples up into the cart, almost making her drop them.

"Dang it Twilight, 'observing don't involve poking anywhere I heard of!" Applejack shouts at the cold implement jabbing her by mistake.

Twilight has the decency to look sheepishly embarrassed as she rapidly pulls the device back towards her in her magical grip.

"Sorry! Sorry..." Twilight says rapidly, looking at the tablet in her hands that reads out data about Applejack's musculature and organs, scanning them for magical movement and active enhancement.

Applejack finishes putting the last barrel up onto the cart with relative ease, despite the anxious knot in her stomach from Twilight's observations.

"Alright Twilight, that's the last of my chores for today. What's the verdict?"

Twilight sweats slightly as she looks through the tablet's recorded data.

"I- Uhh. I don't think you want to know."

Applejack shakes her head. "I'm a big pony, Twilight, I can take the truth, I bet it was moving the logs, right? That's the toughest job on the farm, other than removing stumps, but we gotta get Big Mac to do those, so I ain't counting it."

Twilight sighs. "Applejack... Every job you've done so far used magic at least equivalent in power to a unicorn's Telekinesis spell."

Applejack's veins flood with ice. "That ain't a funny, Twi."

"I'm not joking Applejack, I swear," Twilight says, at the same time Applejack plants her rear on the cart, staring at the ground.

"That's pretty heavy, Twi," Applejack says.

Twilight clamors up onto the cart as well, taking a good five seconds longer than her friend did.

"Are you going to be alright, Applejack?" Twilight says, looking at Applejack.

Applejack shrugs weakly. "I dunno Twi. I just feel kinda sick. Walkin' around proud of how Sweet Apple Acres' runs on good hard work, when I been cheating this whole time."

Twilight looks incensed at this. "Applejack, you aren't cheating, magic isn't cheating! It comes from within, and nowhere else. You're still doing the same hard work you've always done, Applejack, that hasn't changed!"

Applejack takes a deep breath, bracing herself. "Yer right, Twilight. I gotta pony up and deal with it. You mind putting some pen to paper? I want some proof I can mail off."

"I'll have to tell the rest of the family about this, iffin every Earth Pony's doing magic all the time. Can't keep bragging about keepin' magic off the farmwork if it was there the whole time," Applejack says, hopping off the cart while Twilight carefully stumbles off of it herself.

"Uhh, sure thing Applejack. Anything for a friend."

Applejack nods with determination set in her face. "Bein' honest ain't easy, but it's worth doing."

Fluttershy smiles as the last frog hops into the murky swamp water, Gilda slightly less happy with the situation.

"Man, this place is so plucking hot," Gilda says, rubbing her neck.

Fluttershy nods, her ears twitching with the tiniest hint of displeasure at Gilda's harsh language.

"Well, all the cute froggies are safe and sound in their new home, so we can go now, if you like."

As the pair turn to leave, strange green smoke begins to emerge from the swampy depths, making Gilda's feathers stand on end.

"Something's wrong," the griffon says, making Fluttershy stop to look at her friend.

"What do you mean, Gilda?" Fluttershy asks curiously as the bog around them begins to shudder.

Suddenly, Gilda whips around, fist cracking a gigantic head to the side that yelps in confusion while the other three rear back in shock.

A gigantic hydra, and a hungry one at that.

"We need to go, Fluttershy," Gilda says quietly, backing away from the hydra while Fluttershy panics.

When one of the heads snaps out to devour the pegasus whole, Gilda's wings ignite with purple light as her fist snaps out harder, diverting the monster and coloring a bruise on its cheek.

"Fluttershy!" Gilda shouts, snapping the shy pegasus out of her stupor.

The pair turn and run, taking to the skies while Gilda's sight remains on the monster dragging itself out of the swampy depths, eager to obtain a pair of snacks.

A head flashes towards Fluttershy again, but narrowly misses hitting her. The wind from the hydra's attack sends the yellow pegasus tumbling through the air for a few feet before she rights herself.

"This thing's going to keep chasing us all the way back to Ponyville unless we do something about it," Gilda says, halting in midair.

"Fluttershy, get out of here, I'll stay and try to beat it down."

Fluttershy is tempted to take the obvious out, to get out of danger and let Gilda take care of this while she runs away.

The problem with that plan is how sickened that makes her feel.

The Star Rod of Wishes appears in her hooves in a flash of sparkling yellow stars. "No. I'll try to help."

Gilda looks mostly confused at this. "That's a flocking hydra, Flutts!" Gilda shouts, cutting her eyes at the pegasus.

"I wish Gilda was safe!" Fluttershy suddenly shouts, making Gilda return her focus to the hydra just in time for it to completely enclose the griffon in its maw.

The other hydra heads look jealous, while the one currently trying to chew looks smug, and then extraordinarily pained, before it yelps, Gilda flying out of it's forcibly opened mouth with a pointy, star-shaped shield in her talons.

"Yeah, that's right, punk! You gotta work for your meal!" She squalls, nervously brandishing the shield.

The hydras who aren't busy whining about their hurt mouth glare at the duo, making Fluttershy meep with fear.

"You don't want this, punks." Gilda glares back, prepared to fight with her new shield.

Fluttershy takes several deep breaths, before Gilda shouts back. "Flutts, back off. That fancy stick doesn't need you to be in biting range for it to work. Got it?"

Fluttershy nods, flapping away while Gilda smashes another head in the face with her shield in a flash of purple, forcing the hydra back.

"Step off!" Gilda shouts suddenly, swooping down in a low arc, dodging the various snapping heads before she crashes into the hydra's stomach, making it reel back, nauseated from a lucky blow to the kidney.

Fluttershy gasps at this. "Oh dear." She says as the hydra glares at them, before one of its heads suddenly ralphs into the swamp water.

They look violently angry, before a tiny green bolt of lightning hits one of them on the head, singing it.

This seems to be the straw that broke the hydra's back, as they slump bonelessly and grumble at Fluttershy and Gilda before turning around.

Slowly, the hydra begins slogging back into the water, it's prey proving entirely too much work to be worth pursuing.

"That poor thing," Fluttershy says sadly.

"It probably shouldn't have tried to eat us."

Gilda snorts at that, snickering uncontrollably. "Y-yeah! I guess!"

The pair flap their way home unaccounted, one making crass jokes, the other one quietly giggling at them from time to time.

Applejack takes off her tiny glasses, finishing her letter to Sour Apple Island, and the last letter she had composed, pinning a copy of Twilight's scientific records of Applejack and the rest of her family performing unconscious magic when attempting to do jobs.

The apple-flanked mare sighs. "That's the last one."

Twilight pats her friend on the back. "I'm sure it won't be that big of a deal, Applejack. I mean, it doesn't change anything. It just makes ponies more enlightened about what it is they're doing."

Applejack nods. "Yup. We'll just have to rebrand a lot of our products. Our apples are still grown with nothing but hard work and passion. It's jus' that that's a little more magic than ponies figured."

Suddenly, a letter comes back, in the hands of an exhausted premium air-mail air-mare.

Applejack, slightly befuddled at the rapid response, cracks open the golden wax seal and opens up the letter, putting her reading glasses back on to read it.

Every single line makes Applejack's face grow angrier and angrier. By the end of it, her face is pulled together in a genuine snarl.

Twilight looks nervously confused as Applejack throws the letter to the ground, growling.

"That darn weasel!" Applejack shouts, frustrated.

Twilight picks the letter back up. "What's got you so angry?"

Applejack scowls. "Golden Apple says he ain't rebranding, cause we can't prove his farm's using magic. An he's telling the other farms to do the same thing! It ain't right!"

Twilight gasps. "Chancellor Golden Apple? I thought he just dealt in shipping?"

Applejack shakes her head with disgust. "Yeah, he does. But he's got a hodunk little 'Premium Apple Garden' up in Canterlot. Don't even use real sun for the trees or nothin, just those freaky lamps. It ain't natural."

Twilight scratches her head. "This letter is very vague, how'd you get all of that from this?" Twilight says, trying to piece out the hidden meaning among the bland legalese and murky statements.

"Oh, I know his type. He done threw up a fuss a few years ago when we didn't let him use enchanted pesticides and still keep the 'Magic Free' label," Applejack says.

"So I don't have a high opinion of him anyway," she finishes.

Ditsy Doo finally returns home after a hard day's work, and when the door opens, her drained metaphorical batteries are instantly refilled when her little filly runs up for a nuzzle.

"Hi mom! Back so soon?" Dinky says, stumbling along smoothly as the two walk into the kitchen, Derpy plopping down in a cheap wooden chair once she obtains a glass of milk from the fridge.

"Yeah, work was light today, and I decided not to do my volunteer hours. You're looking a lot better, Dinky." Ditsy says, relieved that her daughter is recovering from her illness.

"Yeah, I bet this Cutie Flu is as good as gone, see? Not a mark on me!" Dinky says, proudly showing off her blank rear.

And indeed, a few weeks ago marked the start of a harrowing blend of nightmares and disease, in the form of Dinky coming down with the cutie flu, swapping between cutie marks for the following weeks, and complaining that she had been having feverish nightmares about the Sage of Darkness, after the Cutie Mark Crusaders had been telling stories about the pony at school.

Princess Luna herself even had to come at one point just to dispel the phantasms, despite looking very overworked.

Derpy smiles, nuzzling Dinky's head again. "That's good. You'll get your real Cutie Mark when the time comes, don't you worry."

The unicorn filly nods "Yu huh! And it won't be something dumb like dolphins either." She pouts.

Zecora stares at the Krak Pot in shock, walking around it with eyes wide. It's perfect... Impossibly perfect.

She checks the inside, which is the most important part of an alchemy pot. Perfectly... Perfectly smooth. She taps it with a hoof, and it rings like a bell, the tone ringing out of it for over a minute.

Finally, she pulls an herb off of her shelf, rubbing it onto the side of the Krak Pot, as a final test.

The herb transforms into a glittering cloud of green sparkles, making Zecora's eyes widen even further. Spontaneous alchemy!

"I can make Unicorn Crystal with this pot at my disposal. ~ If this is the tool with which you make your proposal," Zecora says, her magic involuntarily popping up just from standing near it.

Weiss chuckles, staring out the window.

"Fraid not, Zecora, ~ I have something else in mind. ~ And this tool ain't it."

"The Krak Pot will help, ~ But as a measuring spoon. ~ The actual pot..." Weiss trails off.

"Measuring spoon? Are you daft? ~ A bigger pot, well, I'd need a raft!" Zecora says, staring at the Krak Pot, and trying to imagine what sort of structure would use this as a mere spoon.

"Look outside, it's there. ~ Out there on the horizon. ~ Mount Krakatroda." Weiss finishes, gesturing for Zecora to look out the window, as Weiss uses a touch of magic to clear the brush out of the way, providing a clear line of sight.

Zecora's jaw drops when she spots it, almost hazy in the distance.

An entire mountain, carved into one, gigantic alchemy pot.

"Well, what do you-" Weiss starts, before Zecora's eyes roll back into her head and she passes out.

She wakes up minutes later to Weiss frantically fanning her face in a mild panic, muttering curse words under his mouth.

(Weiss Report) Almighty Alchemy [Mount Krakatroda]

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I'm sorry to bother you, Sunset, but Weiss has taken to modifying the landscape to his whims again. If the Grimoire Weiss has an explanation for this, I would ask to know it, if it does not trouble you too greatly.

It's not a problem, Princess. I believe there is an entry that should help explain it, closer to the end of the Grimoire Weiss. According to the entry, this was shortly after Weiss obtained Zebra Magic.

Entry Number Five-hundred and Ninety-Nine, Year Two-hundred and Eighty-five.

I met the most wonderful person. A zebra named Malusi. She tried to rob me, poison me, and then rob me again.

And that was in the same day. She's a real angel.

She's also a genius of Alchemy, an art that had been eluding me for hundreds of years. Previously, I had only the crudest methods of practicing potion brewing and alchemical experimentation. Namely, trial and error. But Zebras, a Zebra doesn't go through this process.

Instead, a Zebra's magic gives them the knowledge they require. The magic derived from their cleverness. Born from it, and feeding into it, every living Zebra feels a novel emotion whenever they are clever, or see something clever. This would certainly explain why, without fail, every Zebra I know of speaks with some sort of verbal quirk. The cultivation of a clever mind through carefully chosen wordplay.

I guess I'll have to get into the habit of practicing that as well too.

Where I have to carefully consider what is required to achieve an effect when combining magical ingredients, Malusi does not. Instead, her magic grants her certain instinctive understandings, which allow her to simply comprehend the ingredients required to achieve a goal. I want that.

Of course, the plan was to simply take it. She has even been willing to perform a ritual which would give me access to this sacred Zebra Magic, as thanks for my altrusim and mercy towards her. She's a liar, a thief, and antagonistic, even ignoring that she cannot help it. But I guess I can't help it either.

It's endearing.

That said, she is still a wanted criminal. I'll need to keep her association and presence in the Shadow Realm a secret, for the duration of her employment.

The first moment that I had obtained Zebra Magic from her ritual, my mind instantly went to the highest peaks. Literally.

I wish the Frozen North had mountains. For what I had in mind, nothing less would do.

Most instances of alchemy require several qualities in the ideal vessel. Durability, a high volume of capacity, heat, a narrow mouth to enforce magical pressure.

And what is the sole object in existence which therefore is the true ultimate vessel for alchemy? The answer is a volcano.

The problem with simply using an existing volcano lies in Alchemy's secrets. Ones that I am now privy to. It's about symbolism. A volcano alone is not a suitable vessel for performing alchemy of any kind, simply because it isn't shaped like a pot.

But what if a volcano were shaped like a pot? What if a mountain could be hollowed out, and made into an artificial volcano, such that it qualified as the perfect alchemical vessel?

The answer, my newfound magic tells me, is "Whatever I want".

Of course, this entire idea was born from the magically amplified memory of Rocket Slime. So it would be frankly rude to not call such a hypothetical mountain by it's true name.

Mount Krakatroda.

Of course, even with Zebra Magic Vances, I wouldn't be able to cover up Malusi's participation in my newfound minor ascension if I attempted to produce this fabled mountain outside of the Shadow Realm itself.

Actual Zebras participating in the investigation, or the princesses themselves simply choosing to disbelieve my excuse that I had found a lesser-known Zebra genius to give me my newfound powers, either of those things could blow this operation wide open. Malusi's crimes make her a difficult woman to work with, but It's worth it, I feel, to partake in her genius.

Of course... Councilman Oh Lord. Weiss had always attributed some of his more impossible scientific discoveries to members of his council. We always suspected, but we never saw reason to pressure him at the time.

But to think he was harboring Thiefwitch Malusi, and managing her eccentricities, apparently.

"Thiefwitch Malusi"?

A Zebra witch from an older time. From what I remember, she was banished for her treachery and kleptomania, and later hunted by those she had wronged. To think Weiss of all ponies would harbor someone like that, as paranoid as he can be, well, I never would have expected it.

Once I had learned to piece out her behavior, and manage the consequences of her actions, Malusi became more and more useful to me by the day.

Every potion recipe I had, refined. Every scrap of information from the Grimoire Noir's material sciences, improved. She has been nothing but my single greatest asset. And all I have to do is put up with her poisoning my tea with sleep poison, and her pocketing every shiny thing she sees?

Hardly even a blip on my radar, compared to some of the pranks I've undergone in the past.

It's even become a sort of game. She performs minor acts of betrayal, and I shore up my security tighter and tighter in response. She seems to have been pleased about that, which I suppose makes sense.

I'll never forget the time she had sprayed down my room with time-delayed Slushious Bath Bombs.

The resulting room-full of snow took me right back to simpler times.

I've always been weak to nostalgia, and Malusi has prodded that nostalgia too often to earn anything but my friendship.

Apparently, she's grown interested in something I've had to cheat at until now. An Immortality potion.

As a friend, I'm obviously going to help her out with this. I might not need it myself, but if she's going to pursue the matter independently, I see no reason not to provide my support, considering how much she's helped me.

Whatever happened to Malusi, I wonder?

I do not know. If Malusi were alive after Pluck Night, she did not emerge from hiding. Anything could have happened in the time between then and now.

(Past Chapter 18): Punch Drunk

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My first fistfight was a... Useless affair.

"Haaa!" I shout, pounding the speed bag in front of me as fast as I can. Which turns out to be pretty damn fast. Go figure. Almost thirty rebounds every six seconds.

I still can't even touch Iron Diamond or Helmsplitter, but I'm getting there, and fast.

"Kick!" Iron Diamond shouts, prompting me to plant my hands on the ground and pull myself onto my back, kicking the bag with my hindlegs.

The distinctive sound of ripping cloth marks me hanging from the bag as sand dribbles down on me like a faucet while I try to get my leg untangled from the hanging bag.

At least I hit it this time. Apparently, when a pony kicks, it's basically a kill-shot on anything that isn't extraordinarily durable (like an Earth Pony), and very nearly all Equestrian martial arts revolve around getting into a position to safely start kicking the shit out of whatever is behind you.

Since my arms make me more mobile, Iron Diamond had dug out an old Pegasus tome, under the assumption that with enough practice, I could simply flip back to get into kicking position, instead of having to turn around like Unicorn or Earth Pony styles require.

It's a work in progress.

At any rate, I finally manage to pull myself free, leaving behind one of my shoes in the bag, which I'm forced to yank out by hand once I manage to get upright again.

Iron Diamond walks up, looking me over for injuries. Nope, nothing here chief, aside from the checkerboard pattern of bruises, of course. Same old same old.

"You're getting better at this. I still recommend switching to boots, though." Iron says while I fit my shoes back on, the enchantments in them re-affixing it to my hoof.

"They feel extremely uncomfortable. It might interfere with my mobility," I repeat, having discussed this with him before.

Iron ponders my words. "You should at least know how to fight with them. You've fought in fullplate before, wearing grieves wouldn't be that much different."

I consider that carefully, before reaching back to pull out a piece of Royal Vibranium.

With a blend of magical spells, I grow and burn away the gem in my hand until it's clad in crystal.

"What about a gauntlet? More weight on my fists can't hurt, at least for training."

Iron huffs through his nose, considering the matter. "I suppose.

"Alright, let's move on to katas."

"Posing!" I shout.

"Katas, and they're for training. Not taunting."

He fails to wipe the smirk off of my face with his words as we move over to the padded circle that was set up for practical exercises.

"Alright, give me another one!" Priss says while Eclipse Flash mans the turret currently aiming fastballs at her.

With a whump, the baseball-sized rock whizzes by Priss as she steps to the side, the wall behind her splattering with another flattened molten rock.

Eclipse wipes her forehead. "That's ten, Priss. I think we should call it, Priss. You've got to be getting tired."

Priss just smirks, hopping from side to side. "Are you getting tired?"

Eclipse glares tiredly at Priss. "Yes, actually. I'm still having to shoot these things, you know," Eclipse says, launching another baseball at Priss with a swift kick and a flare of magic.

Priss dodges that one as well, painting the wall behind her with cooling rock slime.

"Alright, alright. Want to get something at Snack Attack?" Priss says, trotting over to relieve Eclipse from her duty.

The filly nods with relief. "I've been wanting to try the 'Redhots' for a while now. Sounds like a plan."

With that, the pair thusly leave the exercise hall behind, seeking out the promised land of junk food.

"You're getting really good at dodging," Eclipse points out, the light from her head illuminating the decorated tunnels, glittering lights on the walls matching her spark for spark.

"Yeah, to be honest, I thought all this practice was going to suck, but it's been pretty fun," Priss responds easily, as they turn the corner, spotting Snack Attack just down the hall. It's neon sign lighting up proudly with the establishment's name.

The pair walk in and take their seats, Priss taking a menu while Eclipse waves down a mare working at the place.

"I'd like a small order of the redhot fries and some klabautermelon juice. What do you want, Priss?"

"Give me a minute, I'm lookin'," Priss says idly.

"I'll get you your drink while your friend decides what she wants." The lime-burning mare smiles sweetly, bustling off to get Eclipse's juice.

Suddenly, a hefty stallion crashes into their table with a bloody lip, which he wipes off before galloping back over to continue his business while another one of the waitresses yells at him.

"Oh what in the blue blazes?! Keep it in the ring, Big John! We don't need you breaking more of our tables!" They shout, shuffling him back into the "Attacking" part of Snack Attack's two-part layout.

In what seems like a flash, Eclipse and Priss's table is replaced in rapid order, crystal swept up and into a flaming grate on the floor that eradicates it.

The mare grins nervously, placing Eclipse's drink on the new table for her. "Sorry about that girls, I swear..."

Priss shakes her head, setting her menu down. "It's fine. Anyway, I think I'll have the bauxite, lettsomite and tourmaline sandwich, and just some water to drink."

'Ugh, health food.' Eclipse thinks to herself. "Actually, I think I want a large order of the redhot fries, with double-extra sauce instead. Sorry about that," Eclipse says, sipping at her juice.

The waitress nods happily, scurrying off to prepare their food.

"I don't know how you eat that stuff." Eclipse comments, hoof on her chin as she leans on the table.

Priss, meanwhile, just scoffs. "You just need to develop a taste for it. There's nothing wrong with some tourmaline in your diet."

Eclipse just rolls her eyes again. "But it tastes so bad! Especially if we're making the effort to go out to eat anyway. I just don't see myself ordering that kind of stuff."

Priss shrugs. "Then I guess you better be ready for pudgeland because that's where ponies go when redhot fries and double-extra sauce are involved."

Eclipse growls. "I'll show you pudgeland, I haven't been slouching off on my training one bit, this is all going to turn into muscle, just you wait."

Priss giggles. "Yeah, probably. I'm just getting under your skin."

Eclipse just huffs through her nose.

"Iron Diamond, I'm really not for this idea," I say nervously, as we walk into Angel Island Zone's public street fighting circuit.

"The only way you can learn to brawl properly is with experience, Weiss. Your extra limbs give you a major advantage, which is why you're going in the heavyweight circuit first."

I sweat as he pens my name in for me at the desk. "Iron, they're going to make hamburger helper out of me, you know that, right?"

Iron gives me a sidelong glance. "I don't know what that is, but you'll be fine. Just remember what we've been practicing, and avoid getting kicked in the head. I'm signing up too if it makes you feel any better."

I groan. "It really doesn't, man."

He has the audacity to give me a fucking smirk. "Then you've got an incentive to learn quickly before we get paired off against one another."

With that, Iron Diamond trots down the hall to the waiting room, leaving me alone, when a pony muscles by me to get to the desk.

"Oh, sorry about that Lord Weiss. Didn't mean to jostle you there." The stallion says, signing his own name down.

"You here to watch a good scuffle, Lord Weiss?" The stallion asks, turning to face me.

I have to crane my neck up to look in in the eye when the towering auburn brute smiles. "Name's Bruto. I gotta warn you, you might get bored, watching me fight. I get em once and-" He pops his lips.

"They're down."

I gulp. "Actually, my trainer signed me up to fight too, funny that, huh?"

"Lightweight?" He questions with a raised eyebrow.

"...Heavyweight." I respond with a sinking stomach.

He coughs in a suspiciously laughter-like way. "Sorry to hear it, Lord Weiss. Good luck, I guess!"

With that, the thusly named Bruto trots down the hall with the rest of the signed up fighters.

As I march towards my doom, I can't help but feel like my healing tank is going to get a workout today.

Eclipse Flash is very glad this place has free refills, because her mouth is on fire.

"I thought it was cheese," Eclipse whines, chewing the molten crystal peppers, which had cooled and hardened in her mouth in a haze of steam.

Her breaths come out in puffs of flame as she tries to chew rapidly, swallowing the last redhot fry while Priss nibbles down the last of her sandwich daintily.

"Ugh. I'm not ordering that again," she crows, laying her head on the table.

"Holy crack," Priss balks suddenly.

Miss Priss's exclamation manages to raise Eclipse's suffering mouth as she lifts the rest of her head to look at whatever going on.

Over on one of the holo-screens, a street-fighting event is being broadcast, and included in the lineup is none other than a certain individual known by both Priss and Eclipse.

"Oh this aught to be good," Priss says, waving down the waitress.

"Could you get me a pitcher of milk, some redhot fries, and keep the vinegar coming"

Eclipse raises an eyebrow. "I thought you were 'eating healthy'?"

Priss shrugs. "You think I'm heading home while a show like this is on? You're crazy, girl. I'll show you how you conquer the spice while we wait for Weiss's match."

Eclipse is extremely unhappy with the idea of being made to eat more of those horrendous fries but keeps her mouth shut.

She will conquer the spice!

When the waitress places the platter of fries on the table, coated in molten crystal and with a side of boiling vinegar, her stomach grumbles out a terrified warning, and she gulps involuntarily.

"M-maybe we should wait for them to cool off a bit, first?"

"You're kidding, right? They're just right for eating, while the peppers are good and gooey. Now we just douse em in some vinegar and..."

She pours the pitcher of boiling liquid onto the fries, where it instantly steams up, turning the magmatic morsels from their angry red color to a dark amber color that bubbles dangerously.

Reaching in heedlessly, she scoops some up with a fork and downs them, humming with pleasure.

"Try it, drink some milk afterward," Priss commands, making Eclipse slowly and nervously do so.

Her face sweats and her eyes clench shut at the spice, before the cooling relief of milk follows, allowing her to taste the tang of the vinegar and the breadth of flavors packed into the crystalline delicacy.

"Oh, check it out, Weiss's up," Priss points out, watching the holoscreen, intent on extracting entertainment from Weiss's soon-to-be suffering.

I throw a few practice punches, while my first opponent steps into the middle of the huge hall that had been acquired for street fighting purposes.

"Alright. Let's have a clean fight, if they go down, you get the hay off of them, or it's an instant disqualification," The ref explains to the both of us.

I guess it makes sense, with a quadrupedal stance, falling down means the fight is basically over.

My opponent is a heavy chunk of pony, with a grey flare of a mane and beard, and an even duller coat.

"Alright. Fight," the ref says, backing away from us as we size each other up.

My opponent smirks at me, before charging forward, intent on bowling me over.

I, however, have a different plan, considering I'm dealing with Earth Ponies.

Pulling one of my shoulders back as far as it will go, I sidestep the heavy-set stallion, before clocking him in the side of the head as he passes me by, throwing a few other punches lower, aimed at his legs. While my main attack managed to land, striking him in the temple, my less focused blows failed to do anything at all.

Earth Pony durability isn't a joke.

The pony shakes his head angrily, rearing up and trying to trample me to the ground, but I run under him while he attempts the slow maneuver, grabbing him around the waist with my arms and jerking him violently to the side, just barely managing to unbalance him in his moment of surprised shock, and sending him toppling over without his forelegs available to catch him.

As he crashes to the ground with a meaty thud, the ref blows their whistle, declaring me the winner.

One down, I guess. I know for a fact they won't all be that easy.

Hell, I doubt any of them will.

Iron Diamond is displeased with Weiss's first win. He really should have seen this coming, though. If there's one thing that pony is good at, it's exploiting the rules. Instead of focusing on direct blows, it seems Weiss favored grappling in that fight.

Which is great, of course, but it's cheating him out of the more practical experience that would help him in a fight that doesn't have silly rules like this competition does.

Hopefully, Weiss will last long enough to face off against Iron, for a good proper fight.

As Iron watches Bruto yank back his forehoof and punch his opponent out, Iron can't help but snort. Punching is one of the most awkward methods of attack for an Earth Pony. Bruto is losing almost all of his potentially impressive power, attacking like that.

Bruto's disappointed look implies that he knows this as well.

"Hmph," Iron Diamond's face twitches into a thin smile. If that pony wants to fight someone that won't work on, then all he had to do was ask.

Thankfully, it doesn't seem like Weiss will be facing off against Bruto unless Iron loses, judging from the tournament's matchups.

As a matter of fact, it looks like Iron will be facing off against him in the next round.

Iron trots around, finding Weiss stretching his arms with a firm expression.

"Weiss," Iron starts, catching the unicorn's attention.

"Try to go for a knockout in your next fight. I'll give you some lessons on following up on a grapple later, once you've got the fundamentals down."

Weiss takes a deep breath, displeased with that. "Alright. I'll try."

Iron pats Weiss on the back. "You don't need to win, Weiss. You just need to fight."

That said, Iron returns to his own seat, intent on watching a few of the other matches coming up before his own.

I take a deep breath as I step back into the street, this time facing off against a much smaller Earth Pony. This one a bright green color, with emerald-looking braided hairfire and a cutie mark of a lime slice wedged into a rock.

"Let me guess. Limestone?" I say, making him smirk.

"I get that a lot. It's On-The-Rocks, actually," he responds in a gruff tone.

I take another deep breath and steel myself. Him being smaller than the last guy makes this a lot harder on me. Mostly because he's probably not that much weaker than the last guy while being even harder to pin down.

Not that I'm allowed to pin him this time.

One more deep breath, just before the ref calls it, and he slowly approaches me, mindful of my waiting fists.

Only hits to critical areas will do anything, as durable as an Earth Pony is.

As we circle one another like sharks, he suddenly turns on me, throwing a glancing kick my way that makes my breath catch in my throat as I back up, throwing an arm up to block.

Broken, instantly.

I pull the shattered limb out of its metal socket, burning it into nothing, before swiveling the rest of my limbs around to cover the weakness.

Waiting isn't going to do me any good in this fight, so I take the offensive, running towards him at an angle and clocking him twice in the jaw, before throwing my left palm into his side to keep him from turning on me again.

This only just barely works, as I see his leg flash out without a target to hit, giving me the opening I need to jackhammer his head and sides with three more punches, as hard as I can manage.

The clack of his teeth is louder than the impact of my fists, but he seems dazed, giving me an even wider opening.

Like a man possessed, I throw more punches at him, testing his guard and my knowledge of anatomy when I send a pair of punches into his shoulder where the joint is.

He growls forcing his eyes open and shoving me back with his forelegs while I instinctively try to grab ahold of his hair, and fail because it's all just fire.

I idly rub the small horseshoe-shaped bruise on my chest as he carefully considers my posture and positioning, adjusting his own.

Can't let him get his bearings.

I charge him again, but this time he's ready for me, rearing up just enough to bat away my arms before I can punch him, and pulling him into position to hit me with a nasty blow to my actual shoulder, scraping it harshly, and nearly making my knee buckle before I manage to back away from him.

By now, I'm panting, but he is too.

We're both more than aware that this fight is ending the next time we make contact.

I run towards him again, with a plan in mind, and sure enough, he rears up just barely high enough to hit me, but not enough for me to pull what I did last round.

I jerk my remaining five arms down and plant them hard on the ground, pulling myself up and backwards as his eyes widen at the sudden movement.

My two hindlegs snap out with the posture and strength of the noble kangaroo, and both of them end up planted right in his jaw, sending him flipping over onto the ground.

The ref calls the match then and there as I delicately try to maneuver myself into a state of not being upside down, on my back and suspended from shaking clone arms anymore.

"Holy crack! Did you see that? He just sent that guy flying!" Priss shouts, literally on the edge of her seat as she stares at the holovision screen.

Eclipse Flash, while she did just see that, is currently battling the last bit of her second helping of redhot fries, and her third glass of milk.

"Yeah, the physics on that are crazy, if he's not using magic to adjust his weight distribution. It'd be like trying to stand on your front hooves and nothing else," Eclipse belts out rapidly, before returning to her milk.

Priss nods. "Man, that's gotta suck for the other guy though. Imagine the last thing you see before getting knocked the buck out being Weiss's junk. Ugh."

Eclipse nods, not really paying attention as she lifts up the final fry, drenched in vinegar and migrating towards her waiting maw.

Done.

Eclipse throws her hooves up, announcing her victory to the world. "I did it. I conquered the spice."

Priss snorts. "Good work, champ. For your next conquest, you can take the bill."

Eclipse hides her pout behind her glass of milk, sipping at it angrily. "Fine, but you're bankrolling our next visit to the arcade."

Priss's smile is unaffected. "Sure thing, you can go on to conquer the DJManiax cabinet, champ."

Eclipse huffs even louder at this, but Priss shushes her.

"Check it out. Iron Diamond versus Bruto. That aught to be a fun match," Priss says, sipping at her water as she appraises the matchup.

Eclipse Flash hums, turning her gaze to the screen. "Could go either way, I figure. Bruto's been blasting every match apart so far, but Iron Diamond is one of the captains of the Shadow Guard."

When Dr. Real offers to bring over one of my spare arms, I decline.

"I'm not here to win doc, I'm just here to fight. If losing an arm means that I would have lost the next couple of fights, then I need to know that now," I explain, making him nervously nod, before ending the holocall and focusing my attention on the fight about to happen.

Iron Diamond cracks his neck, stretching carefully as he approaches Bruto, who neglects to do anything other than stand there idly.

"You could back out, if you want," Bruto says plainly.

Iron doesn't even bother to dignify it with a response, other than to straighten up, his back cracking faintly at the movement.

"Fight!" the ref shouts, once they are out of the way.

Bruto raises one of his forehooves, ready to punch Iron into the dirt.

Iron, however, is more than aware of just how hard his opponent can hit. Having watched him fight these last few matches, there's no doubt that his opponent has power in their corner.

Running forward, Iron dashes to Bruto's other side, making the pony awkwardly turn to try and catch iron with a glancing blow.

Even without his armored boots, Iron Diamond's buck is more than enough to send the pony over one-hundred pounds his own weight skidding, bruises instantly erupting on Bruto's thigh from the impact.

Iron Diamond backs away while Bruto turns, angered by the attack.

"Not bad," Bruto says, suddenly smiling, as though he was never angry at all.

Trotting towards Iron, he swipes at Iron with his hoof, smacking him lightly on the shoulder.

Iron Diamond, confused at what was practically not even an attack at all, slumps over, knocked out in an instant.

What the hell what that?

The ref calls the match, and I walk over to grab Iron, looking for somewhere to drag him.

Bruto's self-assured smirk also serves to assure me that something is rotten in the state of Denmark...

Iron Diamond wakes up just in time to see Weiss facing off against Bruto, how long was he out?

His head is certainly pounding like he got punched out, but that's not what he remembers happening...

He hears Weiss begin to speak. "To be honest, I didn't even know magic was allowed at this little shindig. At least, not sleep-inducing Dark Magic."

Bruto responds easily, holding up his hoof to demonstrate the slimy magical knockout drug that it had been producing. "Oh, you picked up on that? You're a perceptive one Lord Weiss Noir. I'm honored at your attentiveness," he says genuinely.

Weiss lets out a small sigh of annoyance. "Yeah... I'm going to level with you. I originally wasn't here to actually win this thing. I signed up for a workout, and I wouldn't normally have minded losing, as long as I got far enough to get some experience out of it.

"But now, I've changed my mind.

"You see, I'm unhappy with how Iron Diamond was humiliated by you. Especially considering just how piss-poor of a fighter you really are."

Weiss's black hair flares behind him like a hissing viper, snapping at the air as he holds his arms out wide, palms facing forward as if welcoming Bruto.

"So I'll go ahead and win this fight."

The referee begins the match, and Bruto charges Weiss down, sweeping his foreleg back to throw a loose punch at the unicorn.

"Honestly, I should just end this here, but I assured my trainer that I would go for knockouts, so I'll just have to suck it up," Weiss says, blocking Bruto's punch with one of his limbs, the draconic arm blocking the blow while two of his other arms slither in to grab Bruto's leg.

Instead of using this leverage to flip the drafthorse over and onto the ground to end the fight instantly, Weiss cocks back his remaining two fists, and plants them both in Bruto's jaw, a loud crack easily audible to the crowd before Weiss lets go of them, causing them to lose their balance and almost fall anyway.

Bruto stumbles back, confused. "You should be flat on your rump asleep after touching my knockout punch! How are you still awake?!"

Weiss rolls his shoulders and his eyes at the same time, trotting forward.

"Your punch was just too weak is all. Did you really think punching works like that?" Weiss lies, shrugging his shoulders while shaking his head with disappointment.

"You can't just bat at your opponent like a little kitty cat, swiping your hoof around," he continues, knowing full well that Royal Sugar has to get into the target's bloodstream in order for it to make them fall asleep, even if Bruto is using some version of the poison that can affect a target on contact.

Something that can't be done when your arms are attached to your body with no veins between them to transmit toxins.

Weiss shakes his head. "Even I know better than that.

"When you throw a punch, you've got to..."

Weiss's metal sockets slide along his back, until they're all the way back at his flank, all five arms cocked back with a noisy click as he breaks out into a sprint.

"Put your back into it!" Weiss finishes, throwing a medley of blows at Bruto, his horn igniting with magic that jerks his limbs back into position to throw another punch whenever one of the punches lands. In a single second, ten punches are already thrown, denting his opponent in what appears to be an unhealthy way.

The blows keep flowing, punches both random and targeted smashing into the Earth Pony, most of them aimed in such a way that they strike the same areas over and over, substituting the raw power that a buck could use to bruise an Earth Pony through their natural defenses with several weaker blows that come together to induce a similar result.

Bruto tries to weather the storm, lifting a hoof to protect his face, but three punches snake around, striking him in the side of the head repeatedly, forcing him to back away from Weiss involuntarily. The unicorn follows suit with careful, measured steps to keep him in the sweet spot of punching power that he had instinctively come to learn during Iron Diamond's vicious training.

Weiss's body sways from side to side as he alternates jerking his right arms and left arms back to throw right and left crosses as fast and as full-bodied as possible, before he pulls all of his limbs back, rearing back onto his hind hooves while the brown swaying draft pony in front of him tries to uncross their eyes and clear the stars out of them.

Bruto, seeing Weiss on his hind-legs, tries to throw another sloppy punch, through the darkness encroaching on his vision, which misses entirely moments before Weiss's attack concludes.

"Hydra!" Weiss shouts, launching his five fists at Bruto, and catching his opponent's jaw between them as he rushes back down with a stomp.

Bruto is sent into unconsciousness in a spray of flying teeth, allowing Weiss to be declared the winner.

I scowl with disgust at my win, shaking my painfully bruised and bloodied knuckles to get some sensation back into them. Earth Ponies don't go down easy, that's for damn sure.

Even though the crowd is cheering, I just feel sickened at the fact that I'm standing here. Mostly because Bruto's cheesy shlock really did not deserve to win against Iron Diamond's experience. I flag down the ref. "Sorry if this is unorthodox, but I'd like to have one more match against Iron Diamond, it's fine if that's too much trouble, but I'd really appreciate it."

The crowd cheers at the idea of having yet another fight to witness after the one that had just happened, and thankfully, the ref allows it.

"Fuck, fine, I give, Uncle!" I shout, Iron having managed to wrangle all of my arms and bash my legs out from under me, much to the audience's jubilation.

(Noir Report) Revisiting Regal Toxins [Royal Sugar]

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Entry #17, Day 274

Thanks to the assistance of a loyal member of the Shadow Realm, it has come to my attention that where I have neglected the more esoteric uses of Royal Crystal Growth, my citizens have not, and for that, I thank them. Truthfully, it had never occurred to me to more deeply analyze and experiment with the sedative properties of Royal Sugar, and as such, it likewise never occurred to me that it could be made into a topical gel, capable of inducing sleep on contact. Nor that it could be concentrated, or it's potency enhanced with the use of other Crystal Pony medicines.

This entry will therefore strive to correct that mistake, and I will attempt to devise new, more potent chemical discoveries in the art of applying royal crystal growth to the geo-organic creations of Crystal Pony magic.

The first and most important one being, of course, Crystal Peppers.

Unfortunately, while the results are delicious, I simply lack the correct mindset to grow crystal peppers that are spicier than a certain, tolerable level. This means that my search for the spiciest possible hot sauce continues. I've been considering what ingredients would go into such a sauce, and naturally, only the spiciest would do. Something my Royal Peppers are not.

Next, the tactic that one of my own citizens used during a fighting tournament, which is rendering Royal Sugar into a thick syrup that can intoxicate with direct skin contact. It seems that, after a thorough interview, the method he used to avoid poisoning himself was to utilize layers of Crystal Cloth on his hooves, which, as they weren't a rigid hoof covering, were allowed in the tournament. By providing a buffer between themselves and the toxin, they were able to utilize it in battle, knocking out foes with even the slightest direct contact.

The flaw of this tactic is if you are unable to make that contact, and lack backup plans, not only plans to poison your foe by alternative means, but also plans to utilize when poisoning a foe is not a valid tactic at the time.

This considered, I and other associates have developed a simple method to render Royal Sugar into what will be henceforth referred to as Slumber Syrup.

First, the cook must take a pot of sufficient width and depth, which is to be filled with one part water to three parts Royal Sugar. A small amount of salt and flour can help bind the substance together, but is not strictly necessary.

Ensure that you are properly clothed with waterproof booties and a waterproof apron, and that you follow the Shadow Realm's hazardous materials handling bylaws, which state that you must have one observer on hand, and an additional observer via telepresence when dealing with potentially dangerous materials.

Place the pot over heat, and bring the liquid to a low simmer, stirring constantly, and taking care to avoid splashing any on yourself. At this stage, any additives you plan on adding should be added accordingly.

Continue to do this until the liquid begins to thicken, at which point you may inspect the resulting syrup for consistency. When it reaches a thickness that is suitable for your purposes, remove it from heat and allow it to settle. Be mindful of the fact that the liquid will further thicken as it cools, and account for such while simmering.

At this stage, you should take care to clean any and all implements that have directly contacted the poison, either by destroying them with Black Flames, or by scouring them clean with a mixture of Prestidigitated Flames and Black Flames, depending on if the tools are capable of being sterilized.

Keeping in mind that Slumber Syrup is a hazardous material, it should be known that it's use is restricted in the Shadow Realm, and that any pony wishing to utilize it for any reason must first undergo first-tier hazmat training at minimum, and have the appropriate license.

Due to the substance's potential danger in tandem with heavy machinery, it is furthermore required that any ponies wishing to use it first obtain a writ of permission, depending on the exact intent they have for it, such that warnings may be issued to the appropriate areas of your zone, such as those in which mining or construction are taking place.

Slumber Syrup is a potent poison, able to induce sleep in a target with direct physical contact, even in smaller doses. Care should be taken, not only that you do not accidentally knock yourself out, but also that you do not leave traces of the toxin on walls or floors, which could cause sudden naptime for all involved.

One important factor to consider is that this poison has what is known as a 'Rate of Immunization', in the sense that ponies exposed to it will rapidly acclimate if sustained contact is achieved. This is important, as it marks Slumber Syrup as being unsuitable for long term sedation of a subject. Those who are afflicted by it, if it is not quickly removed from their person, will grow an immunity to it in as little as an hour. This immunity rapidly grows in duration, the longer the subject is exposed, and at an exponential rate at that.

As such, I myself have taken the wise course of action to fully immunize myself to it, though even if I weren't immune, I had long ago had Moon Crystals implanted in my limbs, for exactly those circumstances. If I were to ever lose consciousness, I could still control my limbs during this unconscious state, giving me vital mobility and spell-casting ability.

While you, the reader, cannot implant moon crystals into your limbs, I do urge you to carefully consider whether or not you believe you will be unduly threatened by the potential risks of Slumber Syrup contacting you. If you believe that risk is great enough, it may be worthwhile to contact a medical team at your zone's local medical center, where they will be able to safely provide you with the circumstances by which you can obtain a resistance to this Dark Magic toxin.

I wonder, if I created fast-acting poison needles using this new substance, would they be nigh-quills?

(Present Chapter 18): The Fastest Thing Alive

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"Now, what have we learned?" Weiss says, arms crossed behind his back as he walks past Tempest, Grubber, and the two supposedly best members of the Fizz Guard.

"Loss of control," One of the guards, a hulking hedgehog named Chunker, says.

Weiss nods. "Good."

"Screaming and hollering!" Grubber shouts, fists raised to the sky.

"Yes, and most importantly?" Weiss questions.

"Passion," Tempest Shadow deadpans.

"Right! So now that you know the elements of a good transformation sequence, let's see what you've come up with."

Grubber, Chunker, and a far bulkier, taller hedgehog named Puncher step forward, revealing their crayon drawing.

"So, I turn all gold and spiky, and I can fly, but I fly so fast that I just crash through stuff in my way like a wrecking ball!" Grubber describes, gesturing to his crayon diagram.

Weiss tries to distinctly ignore certain familiar undertones to the trio's idea, but for once, actually fails.

"So where did you get the idea from?" Weiss questions, making Puncher raise their hand.

Weiss inclines his head, gesturing them to speak.

"Old story about the fastest hedgehog dunno where from. Ma told me about it."

Weiss nods. "Right. That figures. Shame I was never able to get those Chaos Emeralds up and running."

Their jaws drop at that as he moves on to Tempest, who notably doesn't have a crayon drawing.

"My plan was to just go down the list of combat augmentation spells. I'll send you the list later on," Tempest explains.

Weiss shakes their head. "Nope. That's not good enough, Tempest. If you don't have passion and investment in your abilities, you'll end up missing crucial flaws of it, or fail to capitalize on their strengths. That's why we're making up dumb transformations. So we can learn how ridiculous plans are made workable through research and focused development.

"Now give me something over-the-top and unreasonably zany."

Tempest gives a quick sigh, before making an attempt with a roll of her eyes. "Flight, invisible invincible armor, exploding horseshoes, and a gigantic spiked ball, which explodes every time it hits something, but the explosions don't hurt it, so it can explode repeatedly."

Weiss nods. "We'll use Grubber for the ball to encourage teamwork. Everything else, I have the technology to produce at your leisure."

Tempest coughs slightly at the fact that Weiss took that seriously.

"So, uhh, Sir, not that I'm ungrateful for the help, but..." Twilight begins, placing the last scroll in its bin, marking the end of Twilight, Rarity, Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie organizing the library, with the assistance of a plainclothes Fizz Guard.

"Why exactly are you here, again?" She finishes, as the burly hedgehog brushes off a book with a clearly pleased expression.

"Boss wanted Gofer to get cloudwalking spell. Wants to go see the flying ponies competition." the thus-named "Gofer" says, scratching his sides awkwardly.

"Ooh! You mean the Best-Young-Fliers competition?!" Pinkie shouts, hopping up with excitement.

"Oooh, so exciting. That's where the best fliers in all of Equestria go to strut their stuff and try for the gold! Some are fast, like-!" Pinkie zooms around at high speed.

"And some of them are all graceful and careful, like-!" She stands up on her hooves and stumbles around like a drunk, before plopping over onto her face, giggling.

Gofer, confused at the pink pony's odd behavior, just scratches his head. "Uh, yeah. Gofer probably meant that."

Twilight looks sympathetic at the uninitiated one's first exposure to raw Pinkie Pie, but also confused. "Why would he care about a pegasus pony flying competition?" She asks hypothetically, already pulling out the tomes on unicorn-cloud-magic, and flipping through them until she finds the book Gofer was looking for.

"Here, be sure to bring it back within the week," Twilight insists, making Gofer nod rapidly, taking the book gently and jogging out the door with a bit of contortion to fit through the pony-sized doorway.

"Perhaps we should investigate, It could be fun," Rarity offers.

Twilight groans. "Well, I wish you had said that earlier. Gofer just walked out with the cloudwalking spell we would need to actually go to Cloudsdale."

Rarity scoffs. "Twilight, darling, I'm certain you've got an alternative spell somewhere laying around."

Twilight hums, pulling a tome out of the shelf. "Well, there is the Wing Spell, it grants an Earth Pony the ability to fly for three days, by binding naturally pegasus-magic filled dewdrops in a matrix of gossamer to produce a set of wings. It should be within my skill level to cast."

Suddenly, a wave of raw force and color blasts the library into disarray, all of the books they had spent time organizing spraying everywhere as the chromatic aberration rushes in.

Applejack is the first to recover, looking at the mass of colorful light erupting in the distance. "What the muddy hayseed was that?!" Applejack curses, fastening her hat more firmly on her head.

While his troops enjoy some much-deserved R&R, Weiss Noir stalks into the deepest depths of The Tower, where, suspended by thick iron chains, his ultimate golem rests, dead and inactive, it's chest opened, revealing a spread of mechanical limbs inside that gently and carefully hold a gemstone, made of two crystals that shimmer with pale rainbow colors, bound together in a yin-yang shape.

"I can't let this creation fall by the wayside. The third Relic of Darkness, and yet, the most important one," Weiss mumbles to himself, running a hand along the smooth metal curves of blue alloy armor plating.

The window nearest to him suddenly shatters, as a gigantic mushroom cloud of rainbow energy erupts in the distance.

"What? No!" Weiss shouts desperately, running to the window, staring out in horror. "Surely I didn't miss it!"

After a moment, Weiss's breathing levels out, and he chuckles, more relaxed.

"Oh thank goodness. That's nowhere near Cloudsdale. Although, it is a bit annoying that I could have saved myself the trouble."

His eyes glance back to the golem behind him, where, in its chest, it's Againte Reactor begins to flicker madly, resonating with the Sonic Rainboom's energy as it continually emits the energy, and then absorbs it from it's partner-gem.

Weiss's eyebrows raise, curious if even at this distance, the rainboom could activate the reactor, but, with some disappointment, Weiss watches the reactor slowly flicker and fade out.

"That's a shame. Looks like I will have to get the reactor closer to the second one."

Weiss approaches his machine, staring into its black visor.

"It won't be long now. Rainbow Dash goes to the young flier's competition, performs the Sonic Rainboom and then..."

The Againte Reactor's gemstones flicker in the low light of the torch-lit mechanical dungeon.

"Yay!" Fluttershy shouts quietly into the megaphone, her gentle lilt turned into a deafening gentle lilt by the amplifier which Gilda had bought at a nearby sporting goods store in response to the butter-pegasus's pitiful cheering volume.

"Woo! You got this Dash, let's see it!" Gilda roars, throwing her fists in the air in a much more natural cheer.

The potency of her friends' cheering fills Rainbow Dash with determination. She may have failed the Sonic Rainboom three times in a row, but by all that is flappy and windy, she will not fail again!

Leaping into the air, Dash's wings beat like concrete dividers thrown by Godzilla in a frenzy, sending her high into the air as she loops around and swoops down into the trees.

At each moment of peril, Dash's wings tilt the perfect amount to send her gracefully swooping around each tree, weaving through them like it couldn't be easier.

She breaches the treeline, rising up into the air where her flight path takes her straight into three different clouds, which she grazes with her hoof before deflecting off with a rapid series of wingbeats, tearing the clouds out of their lazy path and into each other, where they form a swirling donut of cloudstuff.

Dash engages in a complex maneuver that distorts her arc, taking her around and through the donut's hole, sending it spinning in on itself as it breaks apart into a series of rings.

Finally, Dash's wings begin to beat even harder than before, taking her high into the sky for the final part of her act.

'I can do this. I know I can!'

"You can do it Rainbow Dash!" Fluttershy whispers into her megaphone, piercing all the way up to the chromatic flier like a laser pointed up at air traffic by a belligerent child with too much time on their hands.

Dash's body tenses and she drops like a stone into freefall, diving and compressing herself to minimize her profile as much as possible.

One-hundred meters per second...

Two-hundred...

By now, the vapor cone is interacting with her pegasus magic, the magic propelling her body working against her as it solidifies the clouds forming in front of her.

For a split second, Dash can feel the literal sound barrier tensing up as she presses into it, the elastic surface ready to launch her back.

And then she tears through it.

The world turns into light and sound as she breaches four-hundred meters per second, trailing a pure, natural rainbow behind her as her body ripples from air friction, and her wings spread out now that she's broken through the hardest part of performing a Sonic Rainboom.

Feeling her energy draining fast, Rainbow Dash pulls around and slows down, landing in a spray of light in front of Gilda and Fluttershy, who had dropped her Megaphone in the heat of the moment as she whoops and hollers with actual volume.

"Heheh, thanks girls, I couldn't have done it without you! I knew I could do it again. Now I just gotta show it off at the competition, and I'll be the winner for sure!" Rainbow Dash says, face hurting from how hard she's smiling.

Weiss pouts, unable to figure out how to cast this damn cloudwalking spell.

With an annoyed sigh, he passes off the book to Tempest Shadow, who casts the spell with relative ease, granting him and the Fizz Guard the valuable ability to walk on clouds.

"I'm surprised you can't cast a spell like this. It's not really a complicated one," Tempest claims, closing the book and setting it on a nearby table.

Weiss glares. "We all have our talents and shortcomings, Fizzlepop. I'm the Sage of Darkness, not the Sage of Other Stuff. The number of spells I have mastered that don't involve some kind of Dark Magic can be counted on one hoof."

He shakes his head. "At any rate, let's make our way to Cloudsdale. I've got an itch to show off the modifications we've made to your ship."

The ship in question opens its side ports, four gigantic bat wings unfurling from it as it's hellfire engines rev up and it's bay doors open to allow them in.

"Oh I'm so excited. Celly is going to be Jelly when she realizes her little chariot ain't jack shit compared to the Halberd," Weiss says, trotting aboard and marveling at just how much the vessel had changed since the last time he had gone inside properly.

When he reaches the helm, he dramatically points forward. "Alright Fizzy, give the order. Onward to Cloudsdale!"

Tempest rolls her eyes. "You heard the pony. Let's get this bird off the ground."

The doors open and the Halberd undergoes its first voyage after it's retrofit, engines roaring proudly as it leaves Mt. Krakatroda behind and begins its journey towards the city in the sky.

Weiss turns to his second-in-command. "Remember the plan, Fizzy, we lay low and play nice. All that we need to do is make sure that the golem is hidden near the arena when the event happens.

"If anything goes wrong, I'll provide a distraction, but it shouldn't come to that. Twilight and Rarity will be too busy with their own problems to deal with ours."

"Sorry you couldn't come, Applejack," Twilight apologizes, her gigantic butterfly wings fluttering nervously as Applejack shakes her head.

"Aww, it ain't nothing, Twi. I'm just too darn busy writin' letters to the other Apple family farms to go hoofin' it up to Cloudsdale right now, don't worry bout' it," Applejack says, tilting her hat in goodbye as she leaves Pinkie, Rarity and Twilight herself to the business of heading up to investigate and possibly cheer on Rainbow Dash, who claimed she was also entering the competition.

As the trio of ponies climb into the basket of the hot-air balloon, Twilight begins to gush.

"Oh I'm so excited, this spell was incredibly complex, due to the way it actually invokes Sympathetic Metamorphosis in the subject by using artificial wings made from dew, which as we all know contains trace amounts of pegasus magic, while we're investigating, I'll get the perfect opportunity to properly study this spell in action! Sympathetic Metamorphosis, secondary emotional resonance, and harnessing ambient magic using ordinary substances that anypony could get ahold of? This spell has it all!" Twilight shouts, jittering in place while her gossamer-bound wings buzz with excitement.

Rarity is also overwhelmed by the change. "They're so fabulous too, dear, practically dazzling. A pony could get used to this." The unicorn says, staring intently at her back, engraving the sight into her memories.

Pinkie Pie, however, is simply struck with a sense of profound wrongness. "I don't know girls, I feel kind of funny, myself. And not 'Bozo' funny either, more like 'Pagliacci' funny."

Twilight pauses at this as the hot air balloon reaches flight altitude. "Do you feel sick Pinkie? This spell isn't supposed to do anything other than give you temporary access to a pegasus's magic."

Pinkie shakes her head. "No, but doesn't it seem kinda wrong, just floating around with those big honkin' wings on your back?"

Twilight pulls out a measuring tape, idly marking down her own wingspan as she ponders the question. "Well, the spell is supposed to cause temporary and intense feelings of freedom. Maybe that's not settling well with you?"

Rarity chuckles, entranced by the sight of her dazzling magical wings. "Well, I think it's a nice change. So beautiful!"

Twilight nods, pulling out a mirror and a magnifying glass that she uses to study the wings further. "They are rather intriguing, aren't they?"

As Rarity yanks the mirror out of Twilight's telekinetic grip, Pinkie manages to shake off the funny feeling and focus on other things, like why she feels like throwing a birthday party for some reason, even though nopony she knows has a birthday today.

Tempest Shadow adjusts her cardboard-and-enchanted-shadow-mass wings and tilts her hat a little further up on her head.

"Hello boys, think you could tell a mare where she can buy some rainbows?" She says, strutting up to a pair of pegasi currently using a jackhammer to pound loose clouds into hardened ones.

One of them finds their jaw dropping, while the other one nods rapidly.

"Right over there m'am!" they say, pointing a hoof over to the rainbow factory while their jackhammer runs off without their grip on it, and falls off the edge of the city.

"Thanks," Tempest smirks, walking past them just as their foreman arrives and begins shouting them into submission for their incompetence.

She continues on to the weather factory, intent on obtaining her quarry, and furthering the chances of Weiss's success.

Entering the factory with confidence, she adjusts her hat again, a plain white cap that all the other workers are also wearing. Disguise in place, she's able to easily trot past Twilight and her friends, who seem to have also been on the tour, walking all the way into the liquid rainbow processing room.

She approaches one of the workers. "My name is Tempest, I'm here for a surprise inspection. Could you get me a bottle of this batch of rainbows, friend?"

The stallion nods mindlessly, too busy to think about it too hard as he grabs one of the bottles nearby and fills it with the fluid, before passing it off to Tempest.

"Thanks," She smiles blankly, walking out without so much as a single question.

She once again can't believe this idiotic plan of Weiss's had actually worked.

Walking back to the ship, she smirks at the obvious plainclothes guards set to watch the Halberd at a distance.

"Weiss, I got the bottle. What did you need this for, again?" Tempest says, handing off the goods.

Weiss's expression is surprisingly serious, as he takes the bottle and looks at it carefully.

"I need it for a sidequest. I'm going to create the Ultimate Hot Sauce. Tell no one," Weiss states firmly.

He carefully places the bottle inside of a summoned portal, where it slides into the unknown void, never to be seen again.

"Now, let's sneak us in a golem," Weiss says, pulling a tiny capsule off of the nearby table, and slipping it into the pocket of his vest.

"After that, we just sit back and enjoy the show."

"Alright girls, with you two here, this is going to be the easiest flight show of all time!" Rainbow Dash says moments before a certain balloon rises up through the clouds and lands gently on them.

"Whoa, Twilight? Pinkie?!" Rainbow Dash shouts, flying over to her friends as they hop out of the balloon and land firmly on the clouds below them, much to Dash, Gilda, and Fluttershy's shock.

"And moi as well," Rarity says, fluttering down from behind the pentio.

"Yup yup yup! Twilight wanted to do some sleuthing, but we figured we could watch you do your thing at the competition too while we're at it!" Pinkie shouts, bouncing on the clouds like a trampoline while Rarity idles off, distracted by her dazzling appendages.

Twilight nods. "I've got reason to believe something might be going on at the competition, judging from a Fizz Guard making some strange inquiries at the library."

Rainbow Dash hums at this. "That makes sense, I guess. Well, while you're all here, we might as well show you around!"

Gilda and Fluttershy nod, herding the three mares towards some interesting locales.

While Twilight rambles on about the spell she used to grant them wings, and Rarity relishes in her own, Pinkie acts surprisingly down to earth, acting as if the wings aren't even there unless she's outright using them.

"So, uhh, Pinks, you don't seem as interested as Twilight and Rarity are with your... Add-ons," Gilda points out while a bunch of pegasi try to ignore Rarity, having gotten chewed out once already for letting a pretty mare distract them.

Pinkie's ears droop as she shakes her head. "Yeah, those two have just been going on and on about it. I guess they just really like them or something!"

"They still feel super weird to me, though. And kinda itchy!"

"Well, I think they look pretty neat at least!" Gilda laughs, patting the mare on the back as they make their way into the weather factory.

Weiss waves pleasantly to Celestia from his floating hoverchair, who looks at him with barely restrained suspicion, as she lazily lounges on a pile of pillows next to Luna, who has taken up a seat more befitting of royalty.

"Hi, Celly!" Celestia sees his lips enunciate, even from the distance she's staring at him from. Her eyes narrow into blazing slits for a moment as her eyes roam over Cloudsdale, checking for anything out of the ordinary with a lifesign and threat-level scan.

Unfortunately for her, no such thing exists for her to see. Even Weiss's own soldiers are simply snacking and watching from the civilian seating areas, doing little of note.

As obvious as it may seem, the Weiss sitting up there is a fake, she immediately notices.

"Luna, I believe we're being played," Celestia says simply.

Luna rolls her eyes. "If Weiss is here smirking like that, then whatever plan he is using has likely escaped our notice and been executed already. He knows that if he does anything overt and harmful to our ponies that he'll get clapped in HD," she threatens simply.

Celestia hums, sipping at a tall glass of tea. "I suppose."

Meanwhile, in the bowels of Cloudsdale, Weiss's bubble butler sneaks unharassed through the hall, before pulling out a small blowdart, which it uses it's bubble breath to shoot at a passing Rainbow Dash, who barely even notices.

It's also around this time that Twilight, Rarity and Pinkie Pie confront him.

"We finally found you. Now hand over the capsule!" Twilight shouts, jabbing a hoof out at the bubble-elemental doppelganger.

"Bluble blub pop," the duplicate says, pointing at Twilight.

"What? My wings? Oh, well, they're a specialized gossamer matrix, containing-"

Twilight's rambling continues, even as Pinkie and Rarity continue to try and chase down the bubble clone, forced to leave the distracted Twilight behind.

Turning the corner, Rarity spots a mirror and decides to take a few moments, just to make sure her wings are straight, of course.

This leaves Pinkie as the only focused person able to stop the Bubble Butler that Weiss created, and put an end to whatever it is he's trying to do.

Pinkie, however, comes face to face with Weiss himself as she turns down the hall, and spots the Bubble Clone dispersing, dropping the white and pink capsule into Weiss's outstretched hand.

"Hi Pinkie! I'm just doing evil, don't mind me," He says, tossing the plastic pill up and down, catching it repeatedly.

"Uhh, yeah, I'm kinda supposed to stop you doing that. Could you pretty please hand over that hoi-poi capsule?"

Weiss balks. "Oh, this thing? But I need it! Besides, you've actually already lost this battle, when your friends used the Wing Spell. You won't be able to get their heads on straight enough to cheer on Rainbow Dash, and stop me at the same time. And we both know that supporting your friend is much more important than stopping me."

And the annoying thing is, once again, Weiss is right. Pinkie has noticed her friends' odd behavior.

"Ugh, fine! But I'm extending your lifetime ban from Sugarcube Corner's soda machine," Pinkie threatens, before bouncing off to retrieve her friends.

As she leaves, Weiss simply giggles to himself, clicking the button on top of the capsule twice before throwing it down onto the ground, his golem appearing in a flash of smoke, positioned perfectly in front of a window pointed at the arena.

Pressing several buttons on its chest at the same time, the golem's chest opens, and its reactor slides out, exposed to the open air.

Nothing to do now, but wait.

While it is a bit odd that Pinkie is holding two huge folding fans, and keeps smacking Rarity and Twilight with them from time to time for some reason, the fact that almost all of her friends are here to cheer her on is gratifying beyond belief.

"Number fourteen, you're up," a coffee-sustained zombie of a mare says, mindlessly pointing her towards the open arena.

Rainbow Dash steps out into the sun, ready to perform her best stunt flying act that she's ever done before.

"You got this Rainbow Dash!" Gilda says while Fluttershy shrieks incoherently with cheer.

With a deep breath and a thunderclap-inducing flap, Rainbow Dash leaps off the edge of the ring and begins her act.

She weaves through the cloud pillars, inches away from some painful smacks.

She spins around the three gigantic clouds, ripping them into a donut shape.

She tears through the donut, turning it into a tunnel of hazy cloud rings.

She flies high into the air, sunlight beaming off of her wings.

And finally, with all her might and ears full of praise, Rainbow Dash rushes down through the rings, smashing through the vapor cone in front of her, and the sound barrier itself, unleashing her third and greatest Sonic Rainboom!

The crowd's cheers are deafening, their hair is blown back, and her former hecklers are wide-eyed and frozen in shock, just the way she likes them.

Princess Celestia herself jerks up in shock at the feat, having never seen it performed unaided quite like the pony in front of her had just done.

Less than half an hour after the pegasus lands and concludes her act, Princess Celestia and Luna themselves approach Rainbow Dash and her excited friends.

"Rainbow Dash! For your supreme mastery of the skies and incomprehensible feats of speed, I and my sister are more than happy to declare you, without a doubt, the Best Young Flier," Celestia says proudly, plopping the golden wreath on Rainbow Dash's watery-eyed head, before turning to her student.

"Twilight, do you have anything to say for yourself? I'm certain that spell wasn't designed with a unicorn's magic in mind," Celestia chastises, with an odd gleam in her eyes.

Twilight has the decency to look ashamed. "I'm sorry, princess, I suppose I didn't quite process the finer details of this spell before I cast it, and afterwards, I was... Distracted."

Celestia chuckles lightly. "Yes, well, as long as you've learned your lesson. Perhaps next time, you should ensure you have a weekend free before indulging in potentially mind-altering spellcraft," she says as if assuming there will be a next time.

Twilight nods dutifully, trying to ignore the wings on her back and their supernaturally distracting effects on her.

Weiss watches with care as the tiny microportal dart attached to Rainbow Dash's body activates, shunting just enough of the Sonic Rainboom into the Againte Reactor to trigger its critical phase.

One of the Againte Gems in the reactor glows with blinding rainbow light, before radiating it even stronger than before.

The other gem fitted right next to it absorbs this radiated magic and changes, turning rainbow in color and emitting the same type of magic itself, a powerful aura of energy wafting off of it.

This feedback loop eventually concludes its lightshow with the round core sliding into the golem's chest and it's metal plating closing shut, sealing the magical gems inside of itself.

Metal Dash OS 1.56
>Drawing System Specs... Good.
>Drawing Miltek Specs... Good.
>Sensory Suite Online.
>Emotional Suite Online.
>Regulatory Suite Online.
>Autocamo Active.
>Collating Life Data... Good.
>Collating Memory Data...
>...
>Good.
Shadowcorp Dual Golem Core, Shadow Realm Year 262.

She opens her eyes blearily, staring at Weiss Noir, who looks concerned and worried.

"Dash, I know you don't know me as a very good person, but you need to listen," he says, as she narrows her eyes at the Dark Sage.

"Someone is trying to infiltrate the Element Bearers, someone who thinks that they're the real Rainbow Dash, and you're the only one who can help me."

She looks down at her hooves, seeing metal instead of fuzz, which makes her jump back in shock.

Weiss shakes his head sadly, at her confused, angry glare.

"I'm sorry. This was the best I could do, after the Sonic Rainboom did what it did."

Metal Dash's confusion fails to abate, even as Weiss begins explaining in his own words what has happened to her. Describing an entity that is going to cause major problems for her friends if they aren't stopped.

(Weiss Report) A Brief Report [Hoi-Poi Capsule]

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Interestingly, this exact entry is also in the Grimoire Noir, aside from some modified wording and a different production method. I guess he decided it wasn't worth keeping it a secret.

Oh, this one's about capsules. Yes, Weiss stopped trying to hide them when Luna managed to replicate the effect using some of her own spellcraft. I'm told it was quite embarrassing.

Entry Number Twenty, Day Two-hundred-and-eighty

I've recently managed to devise a consistent way of triggering portal eruptions with the Homeward Portal spell, with the help of my R&D Dudes. A small capsule filled with a coiled up portal and equipped with a high pressure explosive is sufficient to cause the capsule to explode, and swap a massive chunk of space around it with space from one of my storage bays. What this means is that I can functionally store massive objects in such a way that I merely need a capsule on hand in order to bring it to my location.

I've decided to name em Hoi-Poi Capsules, all things considered.

As useful as these are, I'll probably only be using them for emergency situations. I might distribute a few tank capsules to my guards here and there, in case they need sudden firepower or something. It would be best to keep their usage to a minimum, though. An advantage like this is one that works best when your enemy isn't aware you can do it. Some Tank, Fortress, and Ration Capsules distributed to my scouts will be a worthwhile investment, I feel, just in case one of the scouting vessels encounters problems that their on-board weapons can't handle.

I've got it set up right now such that a capsule activates under one of two circumstances, either when you crush it, or press the button on top of it twice and throw it. Just to prevent any accidental misfires.

In theory, this should allow anyone to access anything from anywhere, but in practice, it only has a range of a few hundred kilometers. Anything more would require a larger capsule, and an obscenely powerful portal bound up in it, which is beyond my powers right now, without a supremely strong Vance to back it up. In theory, at least, a true dragon would be able to produce Homeward Portals of phenomenal strength and density, but I worry about the consequences of trying to coerce Dr. Real's kids into learning it, just to accelerate my war engine.

As potent as they are now, I shouldn't need more than I have, it's not like I'll be needing portals outside of the Frozen North any time soon.

Wait, Princess Celestia, how can this be so? I've seen Weiss drawing resources from portals nearly constantly, many of which no longer exist in the modern era. Have his powers grown that drastically, since then?

I'm afraid that may be my own fault. When Weiss was far more amicable with Equestia, he took a number of trips here for various reasons. I had always suspected him of hiding caches of resources in various places, but had no real reason to stop him at the time.

And later on, no real way to find the caches after his imprisonment.

It's likely that he's been drawing from these small pockets of emergency materials to fuel his current efforts, as even with a Hellfire powered ship, it would take weeks to travel to the Frozen North to access the lion's share of his wealth.

He really had fingers everywhere, didn't he?

Indeed he did. And now he's reaping the rewards of his preparation. Something even I fail to do, as much as I should afford to.

The capsules still carry the same, annoying weakness as before. A portal rupturing can only take nonliving subjects in it's field of effect. Due to this, capsules aren't able to "store" troops or creatures of any kind. They're simply ignored or safely moved out of the way by a capsule going off. While this means I don't need to devote time or resources to making the capsules safe for my own troops, it also means that I can neither move them using capsules, nor can I use the capsules in an offensive manner, such as via the classic "Teleport someone directly into a room full of flaming lava spike sharks with laser eyes" tactic. The most classic tactic of them all.

In summation, the slow march of magical technological progress continues on, just not at the rate I would like.

Other things I've been considering are creating "capsule guns". Not in the sense that they fire projectiles, but in the sense that they use a magazine of capsules implanted in a golem to allow it to immediately hotswap components by activating the capsules. Such that if a golem took damage, it could instantly teleport in new, fresh components to replace the damaged ones, or, if it faced an opponent whose weaknesses did not suit it's current weapons loadout, that it could simply replace it's weaponry with ones that are far more effective.

The most important thing this would require is an understanding of how portals determine the range and dimensions of their teleporting radius when one ruptures. If I could control and shape this area of effect, I could achieve precise and consistent teleports, rather than the broad, room-sized spheres that I've been getting when rupturing a portal. I'm unsure how I might achieve such an effect, but I suspect the answer may lie in refining my portal-weave technology to a greater degree than before.

To think, even when Weiss releases creations like these to the public, he retains so much more of their potential in his sleeves. Nothing is taken for granted, and every flaw in a spell is merely another tool to him.

I dare say this style of magical research, if nothing else, gives me the desire to look back on spells that I myself know of.

Did you have something specific in mind, Princess?

Oh nothing specific, no. Though Twilight recently suffered the side effects of a misused spell which has given me a few ideas.

(Past Chapter 19): Flash in the Dark

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Padparadscha is currently frustrated, talking to Doctor Dad.

"No, I don't want to like, kidnap ponies or anything. I just want to have a bunch of strong wizard ponies, all in one place, and I just kinda want to decide where that place is. How they get there isn't the important part!" he tries again to explain, while Doctor Dad writes in his holopad, humming.

"And you're certain that's not kidnapping, Padparadscha?" Doctor Dad asks, wanting to make absolutely sure that Paddy isn't going to inform him of some sort of odd dungeon he's assembled in the basement.

"No, I mean, I wouldn't stop ponies from leaving or anything, I know better than that," Paddy mumbles self-consciously.

"Well, if you believe it is necessary, why not host something like a convention? If you can find a reason for ponies to gather, then that might help your problem."

Padparadscha considers this. He'd need to get food, drinks, and entertainment, but it could really work!

He'd finally be able to scratch that itch that he's been having his entire life, to gather up a bunch of magically powerful ponies in one place and... That's basically it.

Honestly, Padparadscha had been a bit jealous of his older brothers. Ruby lucked out the most, just having the urge to hoard stuff that ponies didn't want, and Sapphire just had the urge to move things around that didn't belong to him.

Paddy shakes his head. "Thanks, Doctor Dad!"

With that, the baby dragon hops out of his chair and waddles out of the room, intent on planning a venue to finally satisfy his mutated and distorted hoarding instincts.

'And I know just who to invite first...' Padparadscha thinks to themselves, considering the one pony in the Shadow Realm with the highest magical potential they've sensed so far.

"Flash, this isn't a toy, nor is it a game. This is some pretty expensive equipment. Are you certain you're willing to take it seriously if I give you the opportunity to apply for an Arwing Licence?" I question, staring down Eclipse Flash, searching her for even the slightest hint of child-like immaturity.

When I fail to find any in her gaze, I deflate slightly. "I swear to god, Eclipse Flash, you break my prototype and you'll be washing tables until time itself ends," I claim, activating the Virtual Dream's relevant flight sim. None other than Star Fox.

To be frank, it was either that or Tyrian, and I don't have time to mess with dreamifying a game I only remember in two dimensions.

"I need to learn everything the Shadow Realm has to offer, Lord Weiss. That includes prototype flying machines."

As I get dragged out of the Virtual Dream's bounding box, and she is dragged into a rapidly constructed digital Arwing, I find myself with only one thing worth saying.

"Good Luck."

As I watch her familiarize herself with the cockpit and behavior of the ship, I quickly realize she doesn't need luck. That might be because I've overdesigned the shit out of the Arwing's force-manipulation and gravity-negation tech, but even then, Eclipse putting that tech into practice isn't being done sloppily.

She flies and guns her way through the various ground-bound and aerial forces arrayed against her, before coming up to the modified boss that I had made specifically for this flight-training version of the game.

Two Smart-Bombs from the Arwing's main cannons fly out and strike the mechanized monster blocking her path, blowing it to pieces in short order, which I suppose is technically a fair answer when I also overdesigned the shit out of those...

Well, no matter.

The next levels will be much harder.

Eclipse Flash wakes up with a groan. Flying around might be fun, but it's not good for one's equilibrium. Readjusting to the feeling of gravity on her body is annoying, despite the fact that she never technically lost it.

Hopefully, when Weiss finally lets her pilot the real thing, it won't be as awkward to deal with. Or at least she'll be better at acclimating to it.

Because to be honest, flying is entirely too much fun for the poor filly to give up doing it whenever possible. That real sense of speed and control, the pure adrenaline of dogfighting, even with virtual opponents.

If just the game was that enjoyable, Eclipse can scarcely imagine what she'll feel when she's allowed to pilot the real thing.

Until then, though, it's another day of wandering around, looking for trouble. Literally, considering her studies into the Magic of Foeship.

Teeth brushed until they sparkle, hair combed until it doesn't change at all, because it's made of fire. Face washed until she feels like a pony again instead of a zombie.

Today's going to be a good day, Eclipse can just feel it.

This illusion is graciously shattered when her parents, Crystal and Gemerald Flash, are talking to that pink dragon kid in the living room. The kid's expression turns creepy when he spots her.

"Oh, hi Eclipse Flash! I just wanted to invite you to a party I'm planning! It would really be good if you came!" He says, smiling as wide as he possibly can with nervousness in his eyes.

Eclipse, getting some obviously and fairly weird vibes, steps around the baby dragon, and out the door. "Uhh, sorry, kid, I'm going to be really busy. Maybe next time."

The dragon waddles after her. "Oh, umm, It's not going to be today, it's going to be... Next week! You won't be busy then, right?"

Eclipse groans internally. "I'm going to be busy all month, sorry."

With that, she breaks into a gallop, seeking refuge away from the oddly-acting drake.

"Drat!" Paddy shouts, kicking the ground with frustration.

"Friendly expression, clear flexible timetable, appealing offer. Man, it's not going to be nearly as good without Eclipse there."

Mr. Gemerald pats the little dragon on the head. "Eclipse can be squirrely at the best of times. I'm sure if you just take some time to get to know her a little better, you'll be able to discuss her visiting your event." The banana-colored stallion claims confidently, making Padparadscha perk up.

"You're right. I've just got to keep at it. My horde-party will have it's guest of honor, no matter how much I've got to work at it!"

With this, the little drake skips off with newfound vigor, intent on bringing the Shadow Realm's finest in one place.

"Maybe I just need a better hook... I'll ask Lord Uncle!" Paddy shouts suddenly, slapping a fist into his open palm with realization.

That said, he makes his way towards the Sapphire Office, intent on receiving advice.

Roughly ten minutes of walking later, Paddy reaches the nearest Fast-Travel station. A few taps to a holographic panel cause the gigantic belt of tapestries to swirl and roll around, until one specific portal on its surface is revealed, allowing him to simply walk through into the lobby.

"M'am, I'd like to see Lord Uncle, I need some advice!" Padparadscha says, hopping up the steps to bring him high enough to meet the nice receptionist lady's eye.

"Mmm, very well, I'll inform Lord Weiss," Mrs. Tablet says, activating the intercom.

"Sir, the pink kid is here," she explains into the microphone.

"The pony one or the dragon one?" Weiss responds.

"Hi, Uncle!" Paddy says, waving into the holographic interface.

"Oh, hello little Padparadscha. Come on in, I've got some free time," Weiss claims.

With that, the doorway to the Sapphire Office opens, allowing the dragon to toddle in rapidly.

"So, how may I help you, little one?" Weiss says as Paddy drags the beanbag chair out of a nearby closet, propping it up on the Dias in front of Weiss's desk, before hopping on it and sinking into it.

"Well, I'm going to throw a party, and I'm inviting the most magically potent ponies in the Shadow Realm, but Eclipse Flash doesn't seem to want to go, I was wondering if you knew something I could include in the event to entice her?"

Weiss raises his eyebrows. "Why wasn't I invited, then?"

Padparadscha coughs. "Umm, well..."

Weiss's ears droop. "From the mouths of babes..."

He shakes his head. "Well, anyway, I'd be more than happy to help. Right now, she seems to be very invested in getting a chance to pilot one of my prototypes. If you like, we could try to do something with that. How much is in your discretionary budget again, little one?" Weiss questions, pulling up holoscreens for both of them.

Padparadscha giggles at Weiss's over-complication of what is basically his allowance.

"Yeah, I've got no clue what that kid wanted, but he sure was acting creepy about it," Eclipse Flash says, sipping on a nice cold glass of Star Lemon Quartzade.

Priss raises an eyebrow, fiddling with her Materia Harness. "Isn't this the part where you accuse him of having an evil plan, one which you simply must put an end to?"

Eclipse Flash blushes. "Please no. I like to think I've matured beyond such petty accusations."

"Yesterday, you were going over the footage of Weiss's fight, because you thought he cheated," Priss explains, making Eclipse's blush deepen.

"Weiss loves cheating! And it was literally one of my assignments from Lord Weiss himself! He said I needed to keep my investigative skills sharp," Eclipse complains, hiding her face behind her drink.

"Anyway, why didn't you just talk to the kid? He's like, one year old. Not exactly enough time to fix any unintentionally creepy habits he might have picked up," Priss asks, before she finishes tightening her harness, and begins today's bout of entertainment for herself.

"Delayed Conditional Force," she says, her Materia flashing as it makes the water balloon in her hoof freeze in midair, set to go flying as soon as any unicorns pass by it.

Eclipse groans. "I don't know! I mean, at first, it's because I had just woken up, and he was acting really creepy. Now it's just kind of... awkward?"

"Awkward," Priss deadpans.

Eclipse waves her hoof jerkily. "See? It's awkward just talking about it."

Priss shrugs, as the duo walk over to another place Weiss visits consistently, and Eclipse boosts Priss up high enough that she can plant another trapped water balloon in the corner of the room, aimed to conditionally splatter any pony with a horn passing through.

As Eclipse lets Priss down, she slips suddenly, and both of them land painfully in a heap.

"Ow! What the heck, butterhooves!" Priss shouts, her head jammed under Eclipse's back, who wiggles trying to get back upright.

"Sorry! I slipped!" Eclipse explains as they manage to get to their hooves.

"On what?" her friend retorts, as they look at the floor, an odd confusion crossing their expressions.

"Huh. I wonder how some ice got this far down. That's kinda weird, huh?" Priss says, poking the frozen water with a hoof as if checking to see if it's real.

The ice melts as soon as her hoof goes near it, returning to its watery form.

"Super weird," Eclipse Flash says, trying to think of how such a thing could have happened, before brushing it off.

I consider the cheapest possible combination of parts that would let me produce a second prototype Arwing without compromising my operations too much. The big problem is the antigravity unit. The need to constantly sweep portals over the ship means that it needs an incredibly potent greed-powered enchantment, one that escalates as the vehicle's size increases.

Even just producing a small unit takes an entire B-rank Vance.

I consider the matter before my gaze settles on Paddy, who is busy doodling in a corner of the graphical table while I sketch blueprints in the center of it.

"Say, I think I might have an idea. If Dr. Real approves, I could probably solve our problem and teach you a fun new secret spell, all in one fell swoop. How about it?" I ask, making the drake turn his wide-eyed gaze on me.

"Oh man, a secret spell?" He asks, eyes wider than before.

"Is it one of the ones in your white book?"

Huh. Perceptive kid.

I ruffle his head. "Got it in one. It's really important that you don't let anyone know about it, though. Ok? I don't normally do stuff like this, but your party needs a plane, and I'm going to help you get it, even if it means bending my rules a bit."

His fists clench with adorable determination. "I won't let you down, Lord Uncle!"

"You already have.

"Shit, wait, wrong one. I meant 'I know you won't'," I correct myself hastily, having had a bit of a brain fart on sappy responses.

I entirely blame Padparadscha's adorableness polluting my thought processes.

"Anyway!" I say suddenly, clapping to change the topic of discussion as I walk out of my office with the young dragon in tow before he can question my poor choice of words previously.

"The first thing you need to know about this spell is this one, important rule. Momentum, a function of mass and velocity, is preserved between portals. In other words..."

I create two portals in my right and left hands, before tossing a rock in one, where it pops out of the other at a roughly equivalent speed, bouncing off the ceiling as gravity loses its grip on the pebble.

"Speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out," I quote, reminded of the sole authority on portal technology across all alternate universes.

Hours later, Padparadscha is walking out of Weiss's training hall, not wanting to bother him while he recovers from the huge hailstone that nailed him in the head while they were practicing.

"Hmph. I've got this, I just gotta keep practicing, and I'll be able to get that glider up and running in time for the big party," he mumbles to himself, making his way to Wacky Workbench, where Lord Uncle promised his miniature Arwing would be there, everything finished aside from it's G-Diffuser.

Fixing that would be Paddy's responsibility, one that he has no intention of shying away from, despite the incredible difficulty he has had learning the spell. While excitement and anticipation have been a constant companion to the baby dragon, anxiety is a difficult emotion for him to summon up on command.

Weiss's suggestion had been to focus on the deadline. A week. That's how long he's got to convince Eclipse Flash, and it's coming closer.

His expression firms, as he walks down to Doctor Dad's hall and slides open the door, almost bumping into Ruby as he flops back onto his rear.

"Oh man, sorry! That was-"

Ruby drops down to his knee, thrusting his hand out to help his little brother up.

"Rude!" Ruby finishes, as Paddy pulls himself up.

"It's Ok Ruby, I should have been watching where I was going," Padparadscha says, looking past his brother to see if the package had arrived.

Ruby glances over at what the pink dragon is investing his eyes in.

"Oh yeah! You got-"

Ruby turns in place, jabbing his finger forward at the stone box.

"A package!" Ruby finishes with a flex.

Paddy nods, glitter sparkling in his slit eyes. "I know, Lord Uncle sent it over, it's a flying machine! I just gotta do the enchantments, and I'll be able to show it off at my party!"

Ruby's eyes water as he scoops Padparadscha up.

"My little bro, already mastering nerd magic and building nerd machines! You're growing up-"

Ruby assumes a pose.

"So fast!" he finishes.

Padparadscha rolls his eyes. "We're the exact same age, 'big bro'," he responds with no small amount of sarcasm injected into the words.

Hopping down from Ruby's grip, Padparadscha runs over to the box, pressing the button on top of it that makes the stone begin to burn itself away in a blaze of black fire.

The end result is exactly as he envisioned it, a miniaturized, simplified version of Weiss's own Prototype Arwing, rescaled for a small filly.

...Some assembly required.

I groan, ironically rubbing an ice pack on my aching head. Priss's pranks are going way too far.

I've had to outright activate my Shell Vance to block these hailstones she's set up to target me!

Looks like it's another bath in the healing pod for me...

But before that, I decide to check up on a few things.

Bringing up a screen, I start by contacting the scout ships.

"Shelter calling, news on the weather?" I ask, as the temporal ships begin to respond, one after another.

"Clear skies," is the response from almost all of the ships in question, aside from one, that reports with "A few clouds. We think it might be smog."

Smog being our codeword for dragons, I groan. Ever since word got out that I was sporting some new scaled appendages, there have been dragons roaming around the area in a vaguely threatening manner. I should probably stop putting off my meeting with these individuals before they decide to take matters into their own claws.

I'll prepare the Vances tonight.

Until then, I feel like giving Priss a genuine piece of my mind, considering how her pranks could have caused some genuine injuries.

Dodging another ball of hail, I swear I can hear a faint giggle on the breeze that infuriates me.

Yeah, this is going to be genuine-chewing-out-time, I feel.

Stalking down the hall, I decide to start my search for Priss at the most obvious place she would be, namely, that one fast-food place that ended up being built right next to the Kingdom Heart. Spazzies or something like that.

Actually, shit, that sounds pretty good right now. I'll pick up a monster burger, maybe some of those Strawberry Quartz things.

I gulp in anticipation of a delayed hot lunch, before my shell spell blocks another hailstone.

Meanwhile, Admiral Avalanche deactivates his radio for now, returning his sights to the horizon.

A ship that can sail through soil and snow. If somepony had told him such a thing less than a year ago, he'd either laugh at them or yell them into submission.

A pony living in the landlocked Crystal Empire has no business with maritime Cutie Mark, but Admiral Avalanche did anyway. He's always been fascinated with the open ocean, and here, his talents could finally be realized, and for a good cause, too.

"Carver, what's our course looking like?" Avalanche says to his first mate, a young mare with a bold set to her jaw and a lengthy white fire on her head.

"Looks clear to me, Admiral. No monsters on the ground and the dragons are still circling," she responds, looking out with her telescope.

"Good, good. Rotate the crew out, we'll take an early lunch and finish our patrol around the empire," he says, as his mustache flickers with restrained pleasure.

Carver goes to inform the crew of this, as the ship begins to cross into the Shadow Realm's borders, snow transitioning into burning ashes, and boulders of ice slowly being replaced with obsidian cherry trees.

The ship begins to move through a grove of the trees, it's timeshift field allowing it to phase through the trees as they briefly disperse in the altered timestream.

Avalanche huffs through his nose when one of his pluckier crew members reaches off the side of the ship, trying to yank one of the fruit from the trees as they pass by.

He almost falls overboard, even, before one of his friends grabs him around the waist and yanks the grinning pony back with a mouthful of cherries.

It might not be the salty spray of the open ocean, but the rain of flickering embers from the trees certainly come close enough for the Admiral's taste.

Eclipse groans in dismay as she spots a certain someone outside of Spezzi's who she really isn't prepared to talk to right now.

Priss groans in annoyance when she realizes just who it is that Eclipse is groaning at, jabbing her friend in the side.

"Go. Talk to him. Immediately," Priss exclaims, poking her friend as her groans increase, and she hides her face behind a slice of pizza bianca.

"Oh crack he's coming in," Eclipse moans, dreading the confrontation.

And indeed, Padparadscha is coming in with pure confidence.

Priss gives the almighty poke of doom, which finally gets her out of her chair and in front of the drake.

"Yes? Hello there!" she says awkwardly, as Padparadscha nods firmly.

Suddenly, Eclipse's nervous blend of emotions and desire to not be in this conversation awakens a new spell, as she instantly swaps places with Priss in a flash of teleportation magic.

Priss, however, is unfazed by this, walking over and physically shoving Eclipse back into the conversation, where she takes a moment to gulp nervously.

"I've been told that you're busy with your flight training," Paddy says, making her nod.

"Yeah, ever since I learned about it, I've been wanting to get in Lord Weiss's new prototype, but he won't let anyone fly it unless they're already like, a pro at it."

Padparadscha nods, anticipation burning in their gaze. "I know, that's why I had Uncle Weiss help me make a second one, I'll be showing it off at my party if you want to come to pilot it..?"

Eclipse's eyes widen. "Wait, you can't be serious, but the diffuser, the hellfire engines!" she shouts.

"Uncle Weiss showed me how to make em," Paddy says, pulling out his hologem to display a 3D image of his own miniature Arwing.

"It's not as good as his prototype, but..."

"Absolutely! I'd love to!" Eclipse shouts with unadulterated greed, leaving Padparadscha to be the weirded out one this time.

"Well, uhh. That's good! I've been preparing to invite all the ponies with the most magical potential in the Shadow Realm, and you're at the top of my list! I'm really grateful you can come!" he says, his tail wagging rapidly.

Priss just laughs at this entire exchange, much to both Eclipse's and Paddy's consternation.

It's around now that Weiss walks through the door, looking extremely displeased.

I'm extremely displeased, and by god, I'm going to look the part.

Turning my gaze around the area, I spot them and begin my meticulous jaunt over.

"Priss, you've gone way too far this time," I explain.

Priss, meanwhile, looks confused, pissing me off just that little bit extra.

"The Ice Balls! You know I'm not an idiot, right? You had those big honking balls of ice set up to whack me in nearly every room in the Shadow Realm!

"I could have gotten a concussion or worse, you know that right? I ended up having to use some pretty strong shield magic just to block the damn things, I'm not as tough as you and your friends are, alright? Something hits me hard in the head and that's a concussion, or a cracked skull, or who knows what else."

I sigh at her scrunched up expression.

"Look, just be mindful of what kind of pranks you set up in the future, alright? I actually don't mind it when you get a good one over on me, but this was in poor taste, and I could have gotten hurt worse than I already have from those hailstones."

Her expression of confusion leaves me slightly annoyed.

"What? You look like I've sprouted a second head," I question.

She goes on to explain something that confuses me as well. "Weiss, those were water balloons, not ice ones. I never set up any hailstones to hit you. I didn't freeze the water balloons I set up either."

My eyebrows curl as my mind goes into overdrive. "That's... suspicious. I don't know of any ice magic right this second that someone could have used to freeze them."

The door to Spezzi's opens with a pleasant jingle, and a scout approaches me with nervous sweat dripping down his face.

"Sir, we've got a really really big problem."

(Noir Report): Presenting Proof of Earth Pony Teleportation [Eclipse Flash's Hotswap]

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I apologize for the lateness of this entry. The woes of the modern ruler are many, and our new occupants took up a few weeks of my attention between the discovery of this spell and my recording of it.

Entry #18, Day 303

Today's entry marks another spell beyond my reach, but firmly within my student's reach. And I could not be more proud. She had discovered this spell when trapped in a conversation that she really did not want to be in and would have strongly preferred to be elsewhere. The blend of Hatred, Fear, Nervousness, Wrongness, and Discomfort together formed the foundations of a spell that swapped the positions of her and her friend.

Not via the force that most ponies would assign to a specialized kinetic-energy reliant Earth Pony spell, but rather, the unique and rarer effect of true teleportation. Indeed, from what I have heard, teleportation is almost unheard of outside of unicorn magic. I wouldn't know, considering my own specialty does not suitably align with unicorn teleportation as of late. Regardless, today marks the momentous occasion of a spell blurring the line between two disparate schools.

Through an admittedly complex blend of emotions, an Earth Pony may use Eclipse Flash's Hotswap in order to spatially substitute themselves for an object of roughly equal volume and shape. When the spell is cast, an object of the user's choosing is marked, and then, through a sudden and violent twisting of space and transmission of matter, the user and their target are instantly teleported into each other's places.

One must keep in mind, however, that this spell can be picky about what constitutes a valid target for the spell, namely, the target cannot be a subject of hate for the user or one that inspires nervousness or caution. I believe this may be due to the user's magic refusing to cross them with such a target even for the brief instant that the spell's target and it's caster are superimposed over one another. A form of crude, instinctive safety measure.

The second stipulation is that, while the spell can still be cast in such a situation, it becomes many times more difficult if the user is attempting to teleport nearer to the subject of their anxiety and malice, as the emotions must be maintained even in the face of an intent to approach them. To fear something, but approach it regardless. This is the mark of true bravery according to many and as such is a difficult to obtain and much sought after trait.

As an enchantment, the spell functions similarly, although, the more lifelike the enchanted object is, the more it will want to teleport away from danger inadvertently. Enchanters should take a good hard look at where their bravery stands, before attempting to use this spell in objects which too closely resemble a pony. To do otherwise, I suspect, would result in embarrassing misfires and malfunctioning of their spellcraft.

This spell will be classified as an F-Rank Magic, due to its pitiable mana requirements. Indeed, my student has found herself unable to tire herself out by Hotswapping alone. While my student is supernaturally gifted in raw power, it is still a mark of impressive spellwork that the Hotswap Teleportation Spell costs so very little to use. As such, I have informed local Materia shops to stock special dummies, to be paired with Hotswap Materia that are sold at them, as I suspect the demand will be great.

Similar rules apply to this as are applied to any other mobility spell. Supervision is recommended, though not strictly required. If you cannot find someone to supervise your initial forays into a new mobility spell, there are training halls in every Zone, with trained representatives whose job it is to help newcomers to the magical arts safely get a grasp on any new abilities they might find themselves with.

Returning to the subject of enchanting, I have discovered various other quirks to some spells and their enchanted variants. Namely, Hotswap's cowardly behavior from time to time has served to bring into question if other spells do not have similar effects when confronted with emotional or behavior triggers associated with their creator. The answer to this question, as I'm sure you might have guessed, is yes.

Objects enchanted with Black Flames do nothing to harm subjects that the creator themselves cannot bring themselves to harm, obviously. Royal Crystal Growth creates similar substances to those that its enchanter would create if they cast the spell themselves. Even Prestidigitonium will often bear marks of art styles and preferences, similar to those of their creator when it is used to create images using nothing but flames.

Indeed, I should really have taken the time originally to piece out exactly how my own spells behave under duress. If I had, then I would know just how much they buck and fight when I myself would be conflicted, and just how annoyingly my own magic can have a sense of humor that is far funnier when I am not it's victim. One such example is the nature of my shield spells to allow attacks to hit me, so long as they are both harmless, and adhere to comedic timing.

This behavior serves to exemplify the nature of magic, and how enchantments draw so much behavior and information from their originator. Although spells cannot learn, they can know, holding some hidden wealth of knowledge created in the exact instant that they are cast, drawn from their creator's own mind and memories, and a list of firm rules, born from their master's own emotions and beliefs. These two aspects together, along with the spell's capability to affect the world around it, form the basis of all magic I know of.

Those who understand themselves will understand magic, and those who understand others will understand the magic of others. There are no firmer truths than these, and understanding these truths is the first step towards mastering Dark Magic itself.

I wonder, if a pony used this to send a message long distances, would that make it an Instant Transmission?

(Present Chapter 19): The Black Book Club

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"Drop ink on the finest snow-white paper, and it will inevitably absorb into black. Its purity demands it.

"Tainted men have immunities. Black does not absorb black," The holographic video says as a figure shrouded in darkness watches the show intently.

"You sure do enjoy that cartoon, Black Angel," A mare in a maid outfit says as she tightens the bandages around her head.

"Of course I do, Game Master. It's the basis of our revolution, after all. A relic of the real Shadow Realm, it depicts wonderful barehoof brawling, and is an ancient depiction of what darkness can really be."

The bandages flash with hidden runes, illusions transforming them into the smooth green coat of an Earth Pony who rolls her eyes at what is a speech she's heard several times from her master.

"Yes, sir," she says simply, turning to return to her job of cleaning up after her buffoonish charge.

Before she leaves, Black Angel stops her.

"Wait," He says raising a dark hoof.

"I'd like a report from Seaman. The pressure from his little 'family' is worrying.

"That will be all," he finishes, pressing the play button on his holographic screen and resuming the video.

To be frank, Game Master couldn't care less about Black Angel's little "Revolution". But the illusory bandages he's been providing her are too valuable to pass up.

She exits the doorway, which ceases to exist when she closes the door on its sole occupant and his weird cartoon.

A hobbled together instance of the Janus Network serves their goals more than well enough to hide all access to their bases and resources.

To be frank, as much as Blank Angel had hyped up Weiss Noir, she isn't sure why they haven't simply asked him for help with their goals.

Surely the Dark Lord of the Shadow Realm would be interested in restoring it to its former glory?

Well, it's none of her concern about how Black Angel wants to handle his operations.

She hears Blueblood crying out down the hall. "Bugsly! Bugsly! Where are you!" He shouts, trampling down the halls as he searches for his pet Wannabeetle.

She sighs, walking up to the wailing buffoon. "Sir, I believe Bugsly has gone to their secret spot again, you know how the poor creature needs their rest from time to time."

Blueblood ponders this for a moment, before nodding sadly. "I suppose you're right, Mrs. Shelly. Are you here to do the cleaning? One of the other maids simply ruined my organizational system, and it's the most awful thing to plague my perfect day!"

Shelly nods. "Yes, sir, I'll be sure to return things to your preferred system," she claims, knowing full well that his "Organization" amounts to him scattering maps all over the room at complete random, all over the floors and walls, and piling the fictional maps on his desk next to their creators names and addresses so Blueblood can indulge in his hobby of sending them scathing critiques.

"Thank you, Mrs. Shelly, that will be all," he claps his hooves, before wandering off to cause someone else problems.

With a sigh of barely-amused annoyance, Game Master trots off to Blueblood's room, intent on messing it up to his liking before moving on to plant her fraudulent evidence for the day.

The Chancellor is not having a good day, today. He might very well fail to make his dues to Chapter Black this month if things continue as they are.

The Princess denying his proposal to increase tariffs was only the beginning of a terrible series of months as she began to take a closer look at the medical industry's finances, dismantling loophole after loophole.

Things only became worse after what many had been calling "The Solar Flare", and Princess Celestia had lost all pretense of tact or subtlety.

If it hadn't been for the fact that Princess Luna took the time to amass a titanic mass of evidence and lawyers to back up her sister's violent slaughter of almost every tax break and loophole that the nobility had been relying on for centuries, there are many who would call her behavior downright tyrannical, as of late.

Equestria has become a far harsher place, between Celestia's brutal dismantling of what made up centuries of hard-fought lobbying, and her sister covering what few mistakes the Princess of the Day had made in doing so. At least, in Doctor's opinion, that is.

The Chancellor groans to himself, sipping at his expensive wine. For all he knows, he might even have to switch to a cheaper wine. He shudders at the thought.

It really doesn't help when Royal Guards are even now snooping around his compound, trying to tie him to the recent assassination attempt.

'Poor Sniper.' Doctor thinks to himself, shaking his head as he rifles through old treaties, agreements, and documentation, trying to squeeze as much money out of the Equestrian population as possible.

The combination of Princess Celestia's Voodoo Recoil charm and a large railgun shell impacting the Princess directly in the eye did not serve Sniper's head well on that day. Black Angel has still failed to find a suitable replacement to take the name of "Sniper", with how good it's former holder had been at their job.

Really, it hit that fat lard of a princess in the eye, she should have been street pizza, not casually using an eyewash station to get the dust out.

'He really didn't deserve what he got. Not like those darn princesses.'

Shaking his head, the Chancellor returns to his papers, hoping desperately that he can figure something out in time to enjoy his daily session of Lacrosse.

Doctor performs some difficult mathematics in his head, before coming to one simple conclusion. He's going to need to discuss a potential legal workaround with Seaman's shipping corporation. There's still some money to be had in some of the less-fortunate countries, where Bits could easily be obtained using some simple negotiation with the locals.

Reaching under his desk, he pulls out the black smokey quartz crystal that serves as Chapter Black's means of contacting one another.

Pulling the gem to his ear, he begins to speak.

"Seaman, this is Doctor. The Queen is still causing some problems. We need to discuss business. I'll meet you at the Historic Appreciation Society building. I believe we can recoup some of our recent losses if my accounting is right."

Seaman is not having a good day. That dirtbag at Sweet Apple Acres can attest to that.

But none of that matters right now, as he relaxes on his chair, catching some rays on his villa and tanning his coat to perfection.

One of his servants, some lowborn pegasus trash, whatever her name is, brings him his drink. The finest, sugariest orange juice that money can buy.

A buzz from his modified pager jerks him from his pleasant relaxation, and with a tense sigh, he pulls out the little coin, which begins emitting its message.

Ahh. Doctor. That worthless dirtbag.

"I swear, if it could be done, I would have absorbed his company ages ago," the suffering buisness-stallion says, slicking back his hair and tilting up his sunglasses.

Well, there's no avoiding it. Despite his dislike for the conniving pill peddler, he remains a larger source of raw income for their little cabal than Seaman's own shipping company.

"Martha, hold my appointments for today. I've got some pressing matters to address," the Chancellor says to a pony whose name isn't Martha as he walks inside and begins the arduous process of dressing appropriately for his station.

Vest in place, apple-shaped pocket watch where it belongs, and his shoes polished to perfection, Seaman is prepared to take on the day with the same gusto he plans on crushing those that stand in the way of his ambitions.

A fine, apple-themed carriage takes him to the HAS Building in short order. The center for their aboveboard operations as clean as ever with groundskeepers paid handsomely to take care of the place, despite its scant usage in the grand scheme of things.

Walking inside, Golden fails to appreciate the opulence of the rooms he passes through on his way to the sitting room where the nervous rat, Doctor, is already waiting with a briefcase full of papers.

Their expression brightens, even as Seaman's own internal expression dims further. Drunk and disheveled, it's any wonder how this piece of garbage ascended to the status he did.

Taking a deep breath to restrain himself, Seaman takes his seat, waiting to hear Doctor's proposal.

Weiss Noir is having a very good day today.

Ever since he unveiled Mt. Krakatroda to Zecora, she hasn't left it, save to search for ingredients or forage for food.

"Oh Weiss, I feel like I could sing! ~ With a vessel like this, I can do anything!" she says, gazing into the caldera of the volcano, which is already filled with quietly burbling magma.

"Glad that you like it. ~ We'll be making it shortly. ~ The Final Weapon," Weiss explains, walking to stand next to the Zebra, wondering just what it is her far more attuned magic senses in the volcano.

"Star Rod of Wishes. ~ Then The Great Sacred Treasure. ~ The Great Krak Pot too.

"The Vampire Killer, ~ And the Master Sword as well. ~ This completes the set.

"Six Weapons of Light. ~ For six Element Bearers. ~ Now comes the last one."

A bright flash of light heralds the arrival of five distinct objects.

Another branch, one of the ones dropped from the Tree of Harmony.

A Moon Crystal, the only one Weiss found in the Vault of Dark Artifacts.

One of Weiss's shadow clones, unconscious in a meditative pose without anyone controlling it.

A bottle of Liquid Rainbows, taken from the Cloudsdale Weather Factory.

And a glittering yellow sphere, filled with a few ivory teeth. Auroral Dente from the Princess herself.

Zecora studies the materials intently, searching them for any possible flaw.

"Within these objects, no impurities lurk. ~ I believe I'm confident that these will work," Zecora nods, as Weiss lifts up each ingredient and begins placing it inside of the Krakpot, starting with his own Shadow Clone, and the Liquid Rainbows.

Rather than the solidified mass of shadows dimming the rainbow liquid, it instead intensifies it, making the liquid in the pot bubble and boil with potent unicorn magic.

Stirring it with his magic until Zecora motions for him to stop, he takes calm, even breaths as he manages his telekinesis as best as he can.

"Alright, that's the stuff. ~ What you've done should be enough."

With that, the Zebra carefully tips the pot over, and the liquid inside pours into the volcano, staining the veritable lake of magma in a palate of bright rainbow colors.

As she moves over to roll the large bowling ball of Againte and Auroral Dente into the magma, she turns to Weiss.

"You may not wish to crowd ~ What comes next will be loud."

Her warning given, she lightly kicks the crystal ball, sending it plummeting into the rainbow lava.

Luna jumps as if someone had stabbed her, jolting awake as an earthquake rips through Canterlot.

Rushing to her window, she can see exactly why that is, as a pillar of pure white light is erupting from Mt. Krakatroda, tearing through the heavens as whatever ungodly power was in it is released in a perfect, unchanging line from earth to sky.

After a few minutes, the beam begins to change, changing from it's pure blinding white to a medley of colors, all of them gently fading as the event ends.

What in the name of Equestria itself has Weiss done this time?

Flaring her wings, she takes flight to the mountain, her sister slowly pulling up next to her.

"I have a bad feeling about this, sister!" Celestia shouts over the whipping winds as they make their way to the site of whatever chaotic event it was that could be felt all the way from Canterlot.

"You and everypony else who doesn't enjoy shaking, Celestia!" Luna retorts, flapping that much harder as they activate their respective suites, shifting and growing into their combat forms, just in case.

The gigantic red star-shaped crystal flashes in a rainbow of colors, before finally settling on a bright, shining gold, as it slowly floats from the middle of the volcano's crater, over to Weiss Noir and Zecora.

Weiss holds up the Moonstone, which is yanked out of his grip into the starry crystal's center, being absorbed into its mass and changing it to a bright yellow color.

Zecora, meanwhile, lifts up the branch.

"The flaw of gifts and tact alike ~ The gentle failure of finesse

By lack of oomph or hint of bite ~ The spice of life has been aggressed," Zecora claims, as the star jerks and shudders, being drawn to the harmonic stick.

With a firm and steady voice, Weiss begins his part in the ritual.

"But you, new gem, will never rage. ~ Atop this staff, instead you'll play,

"And dream and sigh, and snore and cry ~ As you rest the nights away."

The star shudders, finally attaching to the branch, which morphs into a perfectly straight rod, light twisting around it from the glittering Unicorn Crystal to its base.

"You draw from dreams, and draw from smarts ~ Take grace and style, unleash their might.

"Emit bright stars and unlock arts ~ To aid your dear friends in their plight," Zecora finishes, as her words are engraved on the staff as if by magic.

The Star Rod of Dreams is complete, just in time for Celestia and Luna to swoop gracefully down, visibly prepared for anything.

Weiss smiles joyously. "Your Highnesses! You're just in time to witness history!

"Behold, the final Weapon of Light! I hope you don't mind, Celestia, if it was at the cost of your dental work."

Celestia steps forward, suspiciously. "All of that chaos, just to create one weapon? You're normally far more subtle in your designs, Weiss."

Weiss's smile widens. "But of course, princess, but this is far from normal, I had a new toy, and, as boys are wont to do, I simply had to put it to the test.

"Don't worry, your regularly scheduled schemes will continue as planned. This, however, wasn't one of them."

Weiss trots over, grabbing the nervous Zecora's shoulders as he looks over to the princesses with malice in his eyes.

"I decided to... convince... this young Zebra to help me in my scheme, the poor girl was shaking the entire time. Of course, since she's the only other person who knows how to operate Mt. Krakatroda, I suppose now is the time to..."

He turns, pointing a glowing finger at Zecora, who tries to back away in faux-shock.

Luna scoffs. "You wouldn't."

Weiss's eyes crinkle. "Wouldn't what? Cast a memory altering spell on this poor zebra? Ensure that this mountain can only serve the goals that I wish for it to serve?"

His finger crackles loudly as him and the princesses engage in a small standoff.

"Would you be a dear and-" Weiss says, before his horn ignites and he yanks the rod from Zecora's grip.

"There we are," he finishes, walking over to the Krak Pot.

He turns to Celestia and Luna, finger still poised to zap Zecora. "Well, I can't say it hasn't been fun, Princesses, but..."

Luna tries to say something to get Weiss to wait but is interrupted.

"Ta!" Weiss shouts, before bolts of purple lightning rip him and his pilfered goods away to elsewhere.

Luna groans, as she begins dismissing her magical buffs. "Never lucky. I actually needed to speak to him."

"We could question one of his minions. Pass along your message?" Celestia offers, making Luna nod.

Zecora awkwardly walks away from the situation, before the Princesses can question too deeply what exactly her role in all of this was.

Gatekeeper is feeling kind of sick today.

"Sorry Mr. Angel, I think I'm coming down with the flu or something. It's going to be a little while before I can get your mystery spheres made, I hope that's alright!"

"It's alright, Gatekeeper, we're not on a time-crunch right now. I can wait for you to return to health and get back on top of things," Black Angel responds simply, their video paused while they talk to Chapter Black's least aware member.

"Yes sir, but I'm still sorry for the inconvenience, helping you study and teach those old books, well, I'm really happy to help with it!" Gatekeeper says honestly.

And equally honestly, Gatekeeper had been incredibly lucky to meet Mr. Angel, who apparently wanted to hire an intelligent pony versed in magical theory to help with some sensitive spellbooks and scrolls from a real-life forgotten civilization! He didn't even need to be that good at casting spells himself!

Oh if Glimglam could see him now. She'd be so proud.

Black Angel chuckles to himself. "You're a good colt, Gatekeeper. Your work for the Chapter Black society is even more appreciated knowing just how enthusiastic you've been about working for us."

Getting up from his chair, the hulking pitch-black Earth Pony walks over, slowly and meticulously, so as to put a hoof on the unicorn's shoulder.

"I'd like you to take a little while off work. The Grimoire Noir will still be there for you when you get to feeling better, alright my boy?"

Gatekeeper is nervous about accepting the offer, but Black Angel shakes their head, his black eyes glittering.

"I'll pay you out of pocket while you're recovering. Don't disparage your own worth here, Gatekeeper. We couldn't wrangle these books without you."

Finally, the unicorn nods his head. "Thank you a whole bunch, Mr. Angel, I'll beat this cold and work on getting those mystery spheres up and running as soon as I'm well!"

As he trots out of the room, Black Angel shakes his head, releasing a few puffs of silent laughter. If only a certain other unicorn could be so compliant.

Well, no matter. So long as Gatekeeper can be kept in the dark about Chapter Black's true purpose, he'll keep on unlocking the last remaining unicorn spells in the Grimoire Noir, and refining the way the rest of the spells are taught to the Chapter Black Lieutenants.

At least now it won't be too much of a setback if Weiss Noir fails to comply, in the endgame of their operations.

What good are princesses and sages when with a few Materia, one can create gods?

Gourmet is... He believes this may have been a mistake, on all fronts.

He's never been one for this fancy glowing screen stuff, and having one follow him around in these pitch-black tunnels isn't convincing him otherwise.

"Oh come now, Randy. You can't keep sleeping in that horrid little shack of yours forever. Haven't you ever wondered what a true master of the dream world can do? I'll make it worth your while," the female voice claims, over the screen, half of her face shrouded in darkness, the other half blurred with hissing static and triangular sparkles from just how damaged the holographic projectors are down here.

Gourmet takes several deep breaths. Black Angel assured him he would be safe, so long as he adhered to the terms of their agreement, but sweet Elysium if this chick isn't freaking him out.

"Look, I don't want none, alright? I'm here as a liaison. Nothing more, nothing less," he attempts, making for the exit of this snow-kicking pit-in-the-ground.

The screen suddenly sweeps in front of him. Glowing teal eye piercing into his. "Come now, Randy! Don't be so coy. The most important part of any business transaction is keeping your partners satisfied."

'And hooking them on your product,' Randy Rope thinks to himself.

"M'am, just get this bucking place up and running, and we'll be happy, alright? Satisfied, pleased, whatever freaky euphemism you want to use for it," Gourmet says, walking through the screen, while the pony on the other end just chuckles darkly.

"Oh very well. You modern ponies are tough nuts to crack, I'll say," she says, as the holoscreen blinks out in a flash of blue triangles.

Taking a deep breath, Gourmet walks out into the snow, confronted with his yipping sled dogs.

"Yeah yeah, mush!" Gourmet shouts, his sled rushing off to his encampment in short order.

The gigantic leather and hide tents that form his little home-away-from-home serve perfectly well enough for his needs, he is aware, although it just isn't home without his ivory sculptures and trophies.

Leashing his dogs such that they can go inside if it gets too cold for them, the pony trudges inside himself, stalking over to his fire where a potent stew has been cooking.

Those snobs back in Canterlot might need fine dining, fancy wine, and premium hay, but give Gourmet some old fashioned Foie Gras and Filet Mignon, and he's the happiest pony alive.

Or, in this case, endangered Petravite stew, with just the right amount of peppercorn and Haymalayan salt.

Scooping a healthy serving into his ivory china, Gourmet digs in, his eyes scanning the room before it lands on his spear.

He sighs lightly through a mouthful of stew. He's been getting on in years, to the point where the only ponies doing his hunting are the thugs he's got enlisted in his service with the promise of legal protection and pay. What would his father think now, knowing that his spear has turned into more of a decoration with every year that weighs down on Gourmet's bones?

It's not like it used to be, back when any pony could pick up a weapon and go stalking off for monsters to fight. Now it's all "Endangered Hostile Creature Preservation" and "Anti-Provocation Dispersal."

He gulps, scowling. 'What garbage!' Randy thinks to himself. Cowards simply make up too much of Equestria's ruling class, to whine and whinge about the "Risks of monsters growing aggressive towards population centers in the face of overhunting".

Now, what Black Angel promised? Once Gourmet got past the nonsensical ranting about darkness and 'true evil', the nugget at its core appealed to the stallion without a doubt.

An entire country of fighting and violence? Of endless combat against any nightmarish beast that dares to live on pony land?

How could he say no to that?

A thought emerging in Gourmet's mind makes him feel slightly ill, as he places the lid back over his simmering meal and wipes his beard clean, throwing the small fur aside.

'Speaking of nightmarish...' Gourmet thinks to himself.

'I swear that chick's trying to kill me.'

"Alright, Tempest, I'm almost ready to leave. I'll be relying on you to manage The Tower and my Dungeons while I'm gone," Weiss says, putting the finishing touches on his tiny metal pod, a metallic sphere containing his lamp, and soon, himself.

"If I don't return in a week, use the Black Materia to resummon me."

Puncher, Chunker, and Grubber all look miserable. "Why can't we come and help? You said yourself that it could be anything up there messing with your stuff!" Puncher says, scratching their arm.

Weiss shakes his head. "That's not an option. If I can't handle the problem, then I don't want you there anyway. You'd be at risk. I need you here. Do you understand what I'm saying? I need you here, protecting my holdings until I return, in case someone decides to take my absence as their cue to attack."

He takes a deep breath, crossing my arms. "You've all got this. You are the finest soldiers I could assemble on short notice and a shoestring budget. Which makes you better than every military on Earth."

He turns to Tempest. "I should be back in a day or so. If by some ironic miracle, the Storm King attacks during that time, don't bother fighting. Get to the Black Materia, resummon me immediately."

Tempest nods firmly.

"Alright boys, load me up," Weiss says, closing the hatch on the metal shell holding his lamp, and transubstantiating himself into smoke that floods the inside of the bullet.

Chunker loads the shell into the Halberd's spinal gun, while Grubber and Puncher tearfully salute their brave boss's noble mission.

The railgun fires, launching Weiss and his lamp at several hundred times the speed of sound. All the way to the Frozen North's borders.

A few hours later, Luna arrives, questioning Weiss's whereabouts, and demanding his assistance in her mission to quell the nightmares plaguing Equestria at their source.

They give her the generic excuse that he's busy, leaving her to, with some annoyance, deal with the matter herself. Informing Celestia to prepare for her absence, the Lunar Diarch begins the long, supersonic flight to the Frozen North, towards the nexus of Nightmare Energy coalescing there.

When she feels it, her heart leaps in her chest. A supreme eruption of alchemical energy, like none the world has ever seen before, or will ever see from here on.

She groans. "I'm marbling at his choice of location to erect that mountain. Has he Krak'd? Talk about making a mountain out of a molehill...

"Well, if he's laid down groundwork in Equestria, then my destoneation is clear."

She trudges through the snow, drinking a warming draught to keep her through the long journey there.

"Let's rock."

(Weiss Report) The Zappening [Pensieve]

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Sunset, could you do me a favor? Weiss gave me an ultimatum recently and I wanted to fact check if he actually possessed a Memory Erasure Charm.

Could you see what exactly he is capable of, in that respect?

Sure thing Princess. I've dug up something I think is relevant? It only transfers memories, though, it doesn't erase them.

Entry Number Seven, Day One-hundred and Five.

Frustration, you beautiful, piss-colored emotion, you. I've discovered a method to speed up extracting and manipulating my own memories. Now, I know what you're thinking, "That sounds like a really bad idea", but It's alright, because I always make sure to save my files before shutting my brain off.

That is to say, I'm joking, and this spell doesn't work like that.

Previously, when I wanted to draw out my memories and information, I had to manually bring them up in a Virtual Dream. Now, however, by simply combining pure frustration with anger, impatience, and change, I can simply fire a blast of nothing. Why is this important? Because it's nothing that takes cues from me. Which means that I can use it as a proxy to extract memories from, both in a Virtual Dream, and with some minor modifications.

The obvious name would be to call it Pensieve, and so, I'm going to call it that.

Obviously, the first thing I'm going to do with this new, potent magical power is to transcribe all of the anime I still remember into holovids. Edited for pony sensibilities, of course.

Fuck, that's going to be sweet. I'll finally be able to show Iron Diamond exactly where I'm getting my combat ideas.

I knew he was bluffing. "Memory Altering Spell" my generous rear.

Pardon? Also, based on previous entries, I get the feeling that Weiss did not have positive results from showing his Guard Captain anime.

Continuing from my previous entry, Captain Iron Diamond did not react positively to my first showing of "Dragon Ball Z".

Although, in hindsight, him saying that he would "Beat that garbage out of me until nothing of it remains" was kind of humorous.

I've stopped doing the Frieza pose when he's in line-of-sight though, as this increases the number of bruises I obtain during training.

Called it. I knew showing anime to a guard captain wouldn't be a good idea.

I'm not caught up on a lot of popular media, what exactly is an anime?

Oh, well, it's like...

A cartoon, but with punching.

Is that so? Then maybe it does fall within my interests. You'll have to recommend one to me.

Oh! Uh, sure? I'll have to see what kind of anime is floating around in Equestria... All the ones I know of were on the other side of the portal.

On to other uses for the spell that haven't yet resulted in me being brutalized for my own good.

The spell, when cast properly, can actually send outright messages and information to another pony, similar to Killing Intent, but less kill-y and more psychic-y.

So now I have all the powers necessary to qualify as a Stand User. Well, I still can't extend my fingers, but I'm working on that.

I've got this idea, you see, to use telescopic bones in my next set of dragon arms, paired with coiled muscles, and-

Well, that's for another entry.

For now, I'll simply say that I've started transcribing every piece of media I know of at an inordinate speed. I'll slap "Mythology" and "Ancient Stories" on all of them, peddle them to the public, and enjoy the fact that people will finally start getting my references. Well, except for the Princesses, but it's funnier if they don't get them.

Rude.

And, I guess, if people don't get my references, I can just beam crazy rays at them until they do!

On second thought, that sounds pretty fucking not-ethical. Jeeze, this whole thing sounds kinda unethical, now that I'm thinking about it.

Well, who's going to sue me, the interdimentional copyright police? Good fucking luck, I'm behind three proxies.

Anyway, to summarize for future-me, in case I DO get all my memories zouped, and this book is my only salvation or some shit;

Zap things to give thinkies.

That's basically the long and short of it. I've been considering creating a Vance of this spell at a few points, but I'm always torn. When would I ever need to cast a gigantic version of a spell that just puts my memories in something?

Maybe if I ever needed to make a box set of my favorite shows on demand or something.

Speaking of which, I've got an idea, it's not a perfect one, and it might involve letting Iron Diamond know some information that I haven't let anyone else in on so far, but...

Maybe if I showed him recordings of how humans fight, then he could apply it to my combat training.

I think the potential gains are worth the risk. Iron Diamond has done nothing but be straightforward and transparent with me. Maybe it's getting close to time that I do the same.

Times like this really do highlight just how carefully Weiss chooses his words.

What do you mean, Princess Celestia?

He convinced myself and Luna that he was holding a Zebra mare hostage, making vague threats he could not and would not carry out, all while never technically lying. It makes speaking with him a chore, if you don't want to be taken in circles.

Do you believe something like that could have happened when Weiss was trying to help me?

I wish it were that simple, but unless you have a perfect record of every conversation you've ever had with him, how much of what he told you is up to interpretation is unknown.

Well see Princess, now you've got me suspicious! When I was hanging out with him, he kept talking almost constantly about how making friends was going to save my life, and I just sort of took him at face value, and thought he meant what he said!

He could have meant anything by that, and I would never know it. So annoying.

Oh Sunset...

(Past Chapter 20): The Cold Heart of Hate: Part 1

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My first diplomatic meeting went roughly as well as you might expect...

I stand at the edge of the Kingdom Heart's Antechamber, where, silhouetted against the black and rainbow-colored fire, a swarm of what can only be called ghosts are sweeping around it, like moths around a candle.

"What reason have you to come here, apparitions?" I say with an amplified voice, walking forward as portals open on my clothing, sliding out my portalweave armor plates that lock around me. My soldiers take up the rear.

While there's probably jack shit that they can do against these things, I won't deny any possible advantage in what could turn very messy, very rapidly.

One of the specters, a tiny, child-like one, suddenly flies through me, my armor-lock activating briefly to give the illusion that I didn't flinch back in shock.

I have a suspicion burning in my mind, so I'll be using a different Vance than I normally do to stave off cold. Something tells me using hatefire to warm myself here would be the last poor decision I ever make.

"Nul-Ice Three," I state firmly, my armor erupting with a blazing snake made of Prestidigitated flames, programmed to maintain my body temperature by effectively trying to cook me inside my armor.

My forward stalking towards the Kingdom Heart and not dying of sudden iciclefication as I'm sure some of them were expecting causes the creatures to grow agitated as the ice that did spawn on the outside of my armor fails to get inside.

The largest and what seems to be the oldest among them comes from the side. A withered giant of a pony ghost wreathed in white, with freezing mist wafting from its transparent body.

The most important thing I notice is something my magical senses are telling me, these spirits lack fire. I guess it's obvious in hindsight, but either because of or in spite of them consuming hate to survive, they have very little of their own. Almost nothing, in fact. Like burnt-out husks.

Disgusting.

"It is none of your concern. There is nothing you can do," the Elder specter says in a resonant tone before snorting puffs of frozen mist at me threateningly.

I take a deep breath, while the flaming snake coiled around my neck hisses violently.

"I can make you leave," I say, which causes a large number of the beings in earshot to begin laughing.

The Elder, however, doesn't find it very funny.

"Are you a god?" they question rhetorically.

Nice try ghost. I learned my lesson from the masters themselves.

I also learned something equally important from the Evil Overlord list.

Holding out an open hand, I whisper under my breath. "X-Zone"

With that and a dramatic clenching of my fist, the Elder Windigo disappears, twin rings of nothingness appearing around them and closing in until they disappear entirely.

"Yes. I am," I answer loudly, turning to face the remainder of the stunned Windigo and tilting my head just-so to give me that whimsical look that will sell my bluff perfectly.

A violent, whipping wind surrounds Cold Snap as she scans the room around her, searching for an exit. No matter how firmly she looks, or how quickly she flies, however, it's the same story.

Copies of herself in all directions, like some funhouse mirror, as the copies stretching in all directions fly at the same rates and in the same directions that she does.

Cold Snap is beginning to suspect that she isn't going anywhere at all. But that doesn't make any sense at all, Windigo can pass through any barrier, any wall! They don't exist enough to be trapped by anything that would trap the living.

She can't even taste the hate that was flooding the air like a miasma. Some aspect of her prison even blocking out that.

Cold Snap doesn't understand what is happening, all she knows is that her fellow Windigo are in grave danger against that thing.

Guardspony Heavy Hitter watches as Lord Weiss Noir chuckles in stereo at the swarm of Windigo.

"Well? Come on. Aren't you all going to charge at me all at once, so that I can wipe you out in one fell swoop? I've barely warmed up. No pun intended."

The monsters fail to rise to Weiss's bluff, nervously moving in a slow, chaotic mess. Some of them seem as though they're going to flank, while others are backing away, as if ready to bolt.

"No? No plans on doing that? Good. Now sit your asses down, before I personally ensure that your existence is doubted by future generations."

With that, Lord Weiss is suddenly shrouded in some kind of menacing runes, ones that really makes Heavy Hitter want to run away and sit the flake down before he gets hurt.

A few guards go so far as to actually do so, making Weiss groan as he looks back to chastise them. "Not you dolts."

As Weiss turns back to face the Windegos, a particularly brave one rushes Weiss, intent on trying to freeze him solid as their body sprays icy mist.

As they crash into his armor and phase through it, however, Weiss is left completely unharmed. His magic snake begins eating the ice off of the surface of his armor plates, while the Windigo in question shivers as if they just had a ghost fly through them.

"Oh good, a volunteer," Weiss claims, as he holds a hand in the air that makes the mass of Windigo reel back with fear.

"Rock-Wind Wolf Ghost!" Weiss shouts, as a mass of glittering octagonal portals fly from his outstretched palm, the free-floating portals assembling into a beast whose body chews up the ground beneath it, moving portals passing rocks and pumping air around until the summoned beast's form is suffused with rubble and whipping winds.

In a bestial flash, the spectral magical beast tears into the Windigo, portals making up it's teeth pulling the ghost apart like a wood-chipper as it's spectral form passes through them and out the other sides, as if the Windigo was a cartoon character pushed through a wire fence and split up on the other side.

Portals split off from the wolf's body, trapping the pieces inside tiny pockets of warped space to prevent the spirit from reforming.

The slavering magic beast returns to Weiss's side as he pets it affectionately.

"So, have I made believers of you all? Anyone else want to stress test my little puppy here? Really, feel free.

"Nobody else, then. Good. Now, which one of you is the... Second-eldest, I suppose. It's time to negotiate,"

A nervous, but still gigantic Windigo steps forward as Weiss grows a table and chairs from the floor, taking his seat in one of them.

So, it seems Windegos are indeed made of magic. For once, I'm feeling particularly grateful that I decided not to dismiss portalweave technology. These specters probably have no idea why they can't hurt me. Or how exactly it is that I'm able to "hurt" them.

In the chaos surrounding my little altercation, I had taken the wise decision to move the warp-cage that I trapped the elder in out of the room. In case any of the Windigo noticed the distorted patch of air containing their leader and did the math.

The little giant punk in front of me plops down, confused when his rump fails to phase through the chair, due to the micro-portals embedded in it.

So far, this is going perfectly. Unassailability is a good topic to begin negotiations on in any tense political situation. Doubly so when it's mostly an elaborate bluff based on technology the other side can't comprehend.

"So then, do you have a name?" I ask, leaning onto the table with my chin resting on my hands.

The specter in front of me looks distinctly uncomfortable with this entire situation.

"My name is Freezer"

Oh my god.

I cough lightly. "Well, Frieza, I am Lord Weiss Noir, the Sage of Darkness. You are trespassing, your people have attempted to threaten and attack me and mine, and the most grievous sin of all, you've wasted my afternoon."

I lean a bit further forward. "What are you going to offer me so that I allow you to leave?"

The Windigo apparently named Freezer absolutely does not live up to their namesake. Which is just fine by me, since I don't have any spare planets laying around in case this one gets blown up.

"You will return to us our Queen, Cold Snap, and the young Chilled, and... We will leave your people in peace," they say with a cool expression, blank glowing eyes giving little to the imagination.

Oh my god, those names.

I roll my eyes. "And what makes you think there's anything to return? What makes you think any of you are going to leave this place? I'm curious, Frieza."

Their eyes widen, as their frown deepens. "You want us gone, don't you? Return them and you'll be rid of us, and if you don't, then..."

I sigh.

With a shake of my head, I respond.

"Do you think I haven't considered your kind in my plans? I've built a nation with hatred as it's foundation. We probably look like a sizable snack to you, considering that.

"In these circumstances, your kind are parasites at best, and predators at worst. If we go the route of catch-and-release, you'll just come right back, at the worst possible moment.

"The fact that you even made it this far means one thing, and one thing alone."

"It means that you will never prey on the Shadow Realm, here and now, or there and later.

"Even if I have to banish every apparition in this room."

My words send the Windigo into a frenzy, trying desperately to escape the Kingdom Heart's antechamber, dragging along the smaller ones, as if sensing the danger.

"You will not evade me!" I shout, activating the Kingdom Heart's defenses.

A spread of hexagonal portals form an airtight bootstrap pocket dimension trapping the Windegos in the room with me, isolating them away from the Kingdom Heart's flame while also separating my guards from the action. At the same time, hardened metal rods begin to fly from the walls outside, jamming the hexagonal portals open, and decreasing their magical cost while increasing their durability and tightness.

As far as anyone inside my Arena Trap is aware, we've all been taken to another dimension with no exit. A trick solidified by the fact that the Windegos cannot perceive their bodies being sliced by the corners of the portals as they pass through them, creating the illusion that it is one unbroken plane of warped space and not a chain-link fence of interlocking portals.

While the others are panicking and trying to escape with magical blasts of ice and flying as fast as they can, Freezer sits in his chair, completely calm on the outside but a turmoil of weak and easily manipulable emotions on the inside. A much better target for my ministrations than their actual leader.

"What do you want," Freezer says, controlling their tone quite admirably, considering how flighty the rest of his kind are.

There it is. Submission.

"I want it all."

I lean back.

"But I'll settle for medical records being made on your people's biology and their magical properties."

I shrug. "After that, you can return to your business in the Shadow Realm, so long as you follow our laws and regulations."

As he nods slowly and with great confusion, I clap my hands happily, dismissing the portals and releasing the prisoners taken so far.

Dr. Real is extraordinarily nervous as he moves the holographic scanners over the... Frankly unreasonably sized silhouette of equine ectoplasm on his table.

The creature, Queen Cold, apparently, just gives him a stare he doesn't recognize as being bemused by his caution.

"I'm not going to bite, you do know this, right?" The Queen says, legs crossed beneath them as the warded table supports their magical mass.

Lord Weiss Noir, however, uncrosses his own arms. His unarmored face smirks, completely unafraid of the ruler. "We don't know that, actually. You could turn on him right now, and the only thing stopping you would be my contingency spells.

"And that would be just improper, at best," he finishes, as Dr. Real finishes his own scanning and analytical spellcraft.

"I've got the data, sir. We can begin producing countermeasures as soon as is convenient," Dr. Real says, making Weiss's expression brighten as his flames flicker with excitement.

"Good. With that and the scanners checking how much energy you drain from the Kingdom Heart at all times, my worries are eased."

Queen Cold raises a glassy eyebrow. "Countermeasures? Am I to believe this is all because you desire stronger weapons to use against my children?

"Are the ones you had not sufficient?"

Weiss chuckles lightly. "Wouldn't you like to know?

"The less risk there is, the more comfortable I feel. If we can invariably destroy you with ease, then what need is there to fight?" Weiss says plainly, his arms leaning down to pick up some discarded tools that the doctor had been using.

"What a queer way to describe peace," The Queen comments, sliding through the table and onto her feet.

Weiss waves to the doorway. "Enjoy your stay in the Shadow Realm, oh esteemed guest."

When the Queen walks through the door to deliver the news to the other Windigo, Dr. Real unleashes his shuddering in full terrified force. "Sir, why exactly are we letting them just wander around freely like this?"

Weiss puts a calming hand on his Royal Scientist's shoulder. "Cost-benefit analysis. I can force them out, I can let them stay under heavy surveillance, or I can destroy them all. The lattermost option doesn't sit right with me until they take action, and the former two require only that we understand the risks."

"Whether they stay or leave, become our friends or our enemies...

"The smartest thing we can do is learn their weaknesses and play nice until we have to deal with them with more finality."

Cabal Counter's eyes are wide at the news he just got over the Arcana Nox.

Real-live Windegos? Staying here?

Cabal has a thought. It's silly, ridiculous, unsafe, and expressly forbidden by the Arcana Nox report.

He wants to meet one. In fact... He wants to see the true Elder Windigo.

He grabs his holopad. He doesn't have a lot of time if he wants to do what he's planning. He contacts Landscape Carver, a friend of his father's. He'll need her high-resolution 3D camera for this.

"Mrs. Carver? This is Cabal Counter, Fair Cut's son. Could I please borrow your camera, it's very important that I get a response as soon as possible, thank you!"

With that, the dream is sent off, leaving Cabal with nothing to do but wait.

He's practically bouncing on his bed when he finally gets a response.

"Yes!" Cabal shouts, already galloping out of the room to go get the camera.

If he gets a picture of the Windigo Queen, it'll be the most perfect, amazing, wonderful thing to ever happen to him! He'll be able to use it for his Elder Windego's cosmetics!

Running all the way to Mrs. Carver's office, Cabal's flames are practically scraping the ceiling with how high they are with excitement.

Grabbing the camera from Carver and yelling out a hasty "ThankyouMrsCarver!", Cabal continues his mad gallop all the way to where the news report told everypony to avoid, due to it being the temporary encampment of the Windegos.

In a few moments, he's made it through the fast travel portal, into the Kingdom Heart exochamber, and slowed his pace enough to quietly stalk around in search of ghosts.

His eyes widen, he just saw a flash of white, coming from the room down the hall, a trick of the light, or his quarry?

He quietly and calmly takes step after step closer to the door, nervousness in his stomach and camera around his neck.

Rolling my eyes at the "child proximity alert" I installed for exactly these circumstances, I activate one of the child-relocating drones embedded in the walls, which grabs the kid and begins transporting him to his parents via emergency-portal, complete with a recording of what he had done in the last thirty minutes.

Queen Cold looks suspicious of the holographic screen, so I answer her unspoken question.

"Enchanted crystals. They display images seen by other such gems."

Her eyes narrow.

"I'm surprised that you're in the position you are," she says out of nowhere, while I focus on clearing up some of the remaining business on my holopad before I start the second round of negotiations.

I casually switch to a videogame, so as to prolong the idle conversation. She is unlikely to know the difference between them anyway. Angry Birds serves as an outlet for my eyes and hands while I formulate a response.

"Well, not everyone is chosen for greatness, Queen Cold. Some of us have to practice," I say, firing a little red bird into a house of green pigs.

She shakes her head, as one of the little baby Windigo floats across the ceiling, untethered by gravity.

"I'm talking about your character, not your experience. I can tell that you should know better than to toy with the magic of Hatred. It will consume you."

I visibly roll my eyes, as my little angry projectile on the screen crashes through a little piggy skyscraper. The Windigo foal ends up behind me, enthralled by the colorful screen.

"Is this coming from experience? Because to be honest, I'd much prefer you be talking out your ass than lecturing me about the magic of hatred because of your own failures,"

Her eyes narrow further, as she taps her hoof on the table impatiently, low, icy thuds impacting the surface. "You really have no clue where Windigo originate from, do you?"

The little foal claps their hooves as their white glowing eyes widen at the sight of me winning another level.

"I read my fairytales, Cold. Ponies grow restless when consumed with hate and vengeance that they can't satisfy, and go on to become maddened spirits."

She growls at me making light of the situation when she's just trying to give me some friendly advice. Unfortunately for her, this is an interrogation, and I'm making her angry so she'll tip her hand.

"Lord Weiss Noir, of the Shadow Realm, let me stress this in no uncertain terms. You do not understand the word 'Restless'. To be Without Rest is to suffer.
"Windigo born from Windigo do not know that suffering, and for some of us, that is our only respite."

I shrug, snapping a finger to toss a black flame ember into the air. The frosty foal rushes over to snatch it out of the air, absorbing the hatred with a hug.

"There are depths to hatred that you have yet to plumb, Queen Cold. I've got friends to spare me madness," I say, dispersing the holographic screen, as Queen Cold motions for the child to leave.

"Very well. If you would play games while I advise you honestly, then I will refrain from doing so in the future," she finishes, as I press a button that displays the contract I've prepared for Windigo/Shadow Realm dealings in the future.

"Good. I don't require hobbyists to give me advice when I have professionals," I retort plainly, virtually motioning to the first block of text detailing the terms of our arrangement.

Eclipse Flash really isn't sure about all these guards hanging out around Hidden Palace.

Well, apparently, they've always been there, but she is a bit concerned that they all have their armor deployed, even though they're still doing what they were doing before, milling around and doing their day-to-day business.

"What do you think about all this, Eclipse? Think there's about to be another fight or something?" Priss says, remembering the past violent events that she's been a part of with some dread.

Her cherry-red fire snaps and flickers nervously.

Eclipse takes a deep breath and a slurp of her slurpee. "I don't know, but maybe we should go hang out in one of the other Zones for today. Just until things can settle down a bit?"

Priss nods. "Yeah. That would be a good idea. Let's go get Oil Slick, take him with us."

"Hey, Mr. Guard, why's everypony's hair all cool like that? Huh? You got real cool armor," they hear someone saying, while the guards nearby shuffle nervously.

Priss swallows, making Eclipse turn to see what the commotion is.

She swallows too, seeing the Windigo colt pestering the guards who look between each other with increasing nervousness.

"Jeeze, any more tension here and those ponies might just-" Priss makes a popping noise.

Eclipse chuckles. "I mean, I kind of agree. Maybe we should..?"

Priss's eyebrows scrunch. "What, you want to talk to Frosty over there? You got brain-freeze or something?"

Huffing through her nose, Eclipse retorts. "If the guards aren't doing anything, then he's probably got every right to be running around. It'll be fine, probably."

With that, the filly trots over, waving to get the floating ghost kid's attention. "Hey, Cooler! Come down here, we gotta talk,"

The specter swoops down right in front of Eclipse, making her back up slightly. "Oh wow, hi there! You've got really cool hair! My name's Cool Spot, not 'Cooler'!"

'Friendly little bugger, isn't he?' Eclipse thinks to herself, before speaking out loud.

"Look, you shouldn't be pestering the guards, why don't you come to hang out with me and my friend? We've got snacks."

"Well this whole place has got snacks, but ok!" he responds, floating behind her.

Priss gives her a look that doesn't even mean anything in particular, but it still leaves Eclipse feeling annoyed as she sips at her slurpee, before blanching with disgust.

"Ugh, my drink melted. Fracking heat," Eclipse groans before Cool Spot perks up.

"Oh, I can help!" he says, swiping his hoof through Eclipse's drink before she can object, some sort of unknown frozen ectoplasm being left behind.

Eclipse shudders as Priss gives her a smug look. "Well, Eclipse? You wanted to make friends, right? He went and cooled down your drink for you."

Eclipse Flash's eyes promise silent vengeance towards Priss as she looks at Cool Spot's excited and watchful eye, dreading what she's about to do in the name of improved pony/ghostly-entity diplomatic relations.

Slurpees do not taste better with Windigo slime in them, even if they are as cold as ice.

Not understanding exactly how the observation crystals work, Queen Cold simply freezes the ones in her room until they are caked with thick layers of ice, before calling in her sole lieutenant.

"How are the others responding, Freezer Burn?" she asks, worried as to how her subjects are handling these strange circumstances.

Threatened, then attacked, then threatened, and finally welcomed with open arms. Today has invoked emotional whiplash that Queen Cold hasn't experienced in thousands of years.

"Well enough. Despite the bumpy welcome, this place is as full of food as the Changelings promised.

"Although I doubt our ability to overcome this place if we are not immune to their magic."

Queen Cold shakes her head. "Conquering this place was never going to be our intention. Simply because the Changelings told us of this place in no way means we are beholden to their demands. If we can feed ourselves without end here, then we would be fools to try and ravage this place for quite literally no good reason."

"What about this place's master? I don't trust anyone willing to put foals in harm's way."

Queen Cold huffs. "They were never in harm's way. Somehow, Weiss is able to simply move us around, without our say-so, and bend the fabric of space around such that we had been running in circles."

"He was playing you for a fool, and temporarily removing me was the only reason it had worked. It's likely that he realized my experience would hold through his machinations if I had the chance to observe the situation properly."

She sighs, rubbing her head lightly. "My point is, Weiss Noir is not to be underestimated. He has the special talent needed to sense a pony's emotional weaknesses, and he likely does not even realize it. I could sense his hatred with enough clarity to realize and combat this talent of his and he knew instinctively that he would not be able to manipulate me.

"So he discarded me in favor of someone less able to fend him off in a battle of wits."

She grabs Freezer Burn by the shoulders, looking her son in the eyes. "Do not let him isolate you in the future. If you are caught out by him, have one of your friends nearby.

"He can only sense weaknesses, not strengths. Isolating yourself is a sure way to fall victim to him, even if he doesn't yet realize his abilities consciously."

"How do you know this, your majesty?" Freezer asks, having almost never seen his Queen this serious in the past.

She slowly releases his shoulders, eyes looking off into the distance, towards something only she can see. "His spirit is saturated with hatred. Even as suppressed as it is right now, his scent is a complex book to anyone on the same wavelength as him. I may need to begin teaching some of the others to hone their senses as well if this pony is going to be the one we deal with to obtain our food."

I chuckle when she freezes the crystal torches in the room, suspecting them to be cameras. The funny part is, she was right. Well, not right enough to realize that my Political Guest Rooms have walls made of solid enchanted recording crystal, but right enough to guess that there were some in the room.

"Special talent, huh?" I say to myself, looking at my Cutie Mark.

"Are you the little brat giving me these weird feelings?" I question rhetorically, staring at the black fire tattoo on my rump as if it will suddenly answer me.

Shaking my head, I decide to entertain myself and look in the exact direction of the guest room, keeping an eye on my screen to see her reaction.

Sure enough, she jerks like Bill Murray himself just burst through the door with a proton pack.

"You're not the only one who can see what others can't, Queen Cold." I mouthe very deliberately and slowly, to make sure she sees it.

(Noir Newsletter) Layman's Guide to Shadow Realm Defenses [Summons and Golemancy]

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Entry #19, Day 356

It has come to my attention that some ponies in the Shadow Realm are not fully versed in precisely how the Shadow Realm's automated defenses function, or what qualifiers must be met in order for them to activate. In its current iteration, the Shadow Realm is equipped with a spread of special, custom-tooled golems, embedded in secret and varied locations throughout each of its five zones.

If you should find yourself face to face with one of these defensive drones, lay on your stomach, if possible, and firmly state the word "Medical", if this isn't possible. In both cases, the golem should begin escorting you elsewhere, either to a medical center, one of the emergency shelters, or, in the case of you being wanted for a crime, to the nearest holding cell. Avoid attempting to combat the golems unless you feel confident you can defeat them without taking undue injuries.

Even if you were a criminal, I have no desire to see any Shadow Realm inhabitants harmed by their own incompetence.

As it stands, the Shadow Realm's basic defense drones utilize several different tools in order to both defend civilians and attack foes. The first and most important among them being portal-garrotes. By looping the specialized portals they are enchanted with around a target, foes can be distracted, while those in danger can be brought fully into a portal, to take them to safety elsewhere.

Other equipment that the drones are equipped with include impact lasers based on Prestidigitonium and some related spells, flamethrowers utilizing both alchemical and magical agents, and most recently, love-energy microbarriers, a recent invention created using some research into ancient Crystal Pony artifacts. While they are a bare spark compared to the Crystal Heart, the Love-powered energy fields generated by our defense drones are more than sufficient to deal with certain specific subsets of problem.

The second line of defense that citizens should be made aware of are the Boss Rooms scattered through the various zones. Do not enter them, do not tamper with their insides. A Boss Room contains highly sophisticated equipment, and often, very delicate or dangerous equipment at that. There exist both virtual and actual training courses for those wishing to test their mettle, do not tempt fate by crossing through off-limits areas into the Boss Rooms.

Traps such as the Liquid Ice Pool and Trick Room are expensive to devise and incredibly dangerous to those who are unprepared, not in the sense that conquering them would be brave, but in the sense that tripping them unnecessarily will serve to both weaken the Shadow Realm's ability to fend off invaders and saboteurs, and result in injuries or worse, ranging from frostbite to electrical nerve damage.

Once again, to stress my point, there exist challenges that can be undertaken by those seeking thrills and danger, in the form of the various Danger Rooms and training courses available in each Zone. These training courses posses the same theoretical failure rates as any given Boss Room, and some, even higher failure rates due to their designs. Any seeking glory and proof of their prowess should sign up to challenge one of those, instead.

The Boss Rooms exist for the sole purpose of defeating a powerful invader as consistently as possible, with as little risk as possible. To fool around in them is not ideal, and not brave.

The third and most important defense of the Shadow Realm lies in its Bosses. Of which there are currently three.

Each Boss has slightly different patterns of behavior, so for your safety, I'll lay out the basic methods by which they function here.

The Ice-Fire Wolf Ghost, as its name implies, is an advanced magical specter, created from a series of specialized portals. One set of portals connects to the Kingdom Heart's Hellfire Furnace Unit, giving it the ability to emit devastating flames, while the other set of portals are connected to the Ancient Timeshift Reactor, which uses the reconstructed Ocean Depths to create sufficient water pressure, such that it turns to ice upon expanding as it exits the portal.

Currently, the Ice-Fire Wolf Ghost is set to patrol Metropolis Zone, as it is the furthest from Hidden Palace, and thus, benefits the most from access to the Kingdom Heart's portal-pumped flames.

If it does not detect hostiles in the area, please use the phrase "Good Doggy", if you wish to disable it's passive defenses in order to pet it. Metropolis Zone has recorded twelve injuries already from ponies attempting to pat its ultra-cold hide. If it does detect hostiles, do not approach it, evacuate the area, so that it can properly activate its combat suite. Otherwise, it is forced to active it's hostage suite, which, while equally effective, causes far more property damage.

Heavy Lobster, the second Boss, is the automated Guardian of Hidden Palace Zone. It is designed with brutality in mind. Please avoid tunnels that have begun to glow yellow, as this indicates a patrol route that the Heavy Lobster is taking. Only three injuries reported, but it is still worth mentioning. In an emergency, Heavy Lobster is designed to target any living things that are not on fire and alter that fact using flamethrowers and a variety of munitions.

If you believe Heavy Lobster has targeted you unduly during an emergency situation, ensure that Heavy Lobster is able to see your flaming mane or tail, such that it will disregard you as a valid target.

The last, but not least among the Shadow Realm's Bosses is Yellow Devil, of Wacky Workbench Zone. If you should spot this boss at any point, for any reason, you are to immediately check to ensure you are safe, and if you are, lay down and await transport. Yellow Devil's purpose is to ensure that no breaches occur either into or out of the secure and restricted areas of Wacky Workbench and to dispose of any experimental failures that might pose a risk to Wacky Workbench staff.

If you choose to ignore this warning, I cannot assure your safety.

(Present Chapter 20): Blackest Night: Part 1

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Weiss Noir has been standing in the snow for over twenty minutes now, lost in thought.

By now, the gigantic bunker doors leading into the Shadow Realm's tunnels had long since frozen over, and the surrounding architecture had long since worn away in the face of the whipping winds.

When he sees Luna slowly gliding in from the distance, a faint smile appears on his face.

Transmuting the snow to textured ice, the Lunar Princess lands a few meters away, magical energy already stilling the nearby winds to ease travel.

"Ahh! Princess! I hadn't been expecting you!" Weiss shouts over the winds, trotting over through the snow with practiced ease as his invisible cloak of flames keeps him nice and toasty without melting the snow beneath him.

"I'm here to cleanse the Shadow Realm of the evil that has infested it," Luna explains simply, turning to the door in the distance.

Weiss's smile widens by the slightest amount. "Funny. So am I."

He huffs through his nose slightly. "Well then, let's get to walking, shall we?"

Before Luna can say anything else, the Dark Sage sweeps his cape behind him, treading off into the snow towards the abandoned courtyard.

Weiss's body shivers as he walks through the deep snow, gritting his teeth as Luna follows behind at a sedate pace.

Before long, the duo reach the center of the ancient courtyard, bare nubs of eroded stone and mounds of ice stretching off into the distance, a pristine white plain surrounding the area for miles and miles.

Weiss halts in the middle of the snow-covered courtyard, staring at where a magma fountain used to be, now nothing but a patch of concave and worn rock.

With a small smile, Weiss trots over to it, casting a small spell that lights the fountain on fire. The ice begins to melt off of the doors and around the courtyard.

He turns to Luna.

"Had to save my file," Weiss jokes, before looking around the wet stone pavement around him.

"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" Weiss shouts, with his arms gesturing around himself.

His voice is absorbed by the storm surrounding them as it trails out into the endless expanse of white snow.

"Well well, look who it is. The forgotten Sage and the lost Princess," the voice says, igniting a flickering screen near Randy, who jumps, startled.

"You should probably leave, I doubt either of them will be happy to see someone like you in a place like this," she continues, the half of her face exposed on the screen twisting into an amused expression.

Gourmet shakes his head. "My job is to keep an eye on you and secure this place. I'll call for some thugs to slow them down. You need to hurry and get whatever it is you need to fend them off."

The voice chuckles. "Oh it shouldn't be too long. In fact... I wonder if we can make this work for us."

Gourmet sweats.

"Try to lure them to the labs, Gourmet. If we can catch Weiss inputting the security codes, then I'll win in one fell swoop," she continues, distracted with some data that she brings up and begins sorting through.

"I don't believe this is a good idea," Gourmet says pointlessly, calling the thugs that he currently has hired to assist him here before putting away his grey chunk of radio rock.

The voice rolls their eyes as their horn ignites, ripping through some weakly blinking "Access Denied" messages that appear in front of them when they attempt to access the automated defense systems. "Oh where's your sense of adventure, Gourmet? You get to see if your little punks can so much as slow down Weiss and Luna until I can reactivate some of the real defenses."

Sighing loudly, Gourmet walks through the blackened halls, his lamp lighting up the dreary and decayed stone nicely enough.

"Give me a map. And put them on it. I don't want to get caught by them," Gourmet demands, before a holographic screen appears, smoothly floating by him with only a minimal amount of distortion that turns it to static as different projectors activate and deactivate from within the walls, giving the damaged illusion of one unbroken, sourceless hologram.

Of all the times for Luna to run off and pursue the purging of evil, it had to be now. Celestia summons up the tattered remains of her decorum, which she had perhaps unwisely shredded after the Solar Flare. She'll need it, if she's going to stave off these Zebra Jackals.

"As such, we demand the immediate annexation of the Everfree Forest and the surrounding towns, until such time we feel this so-called Mt. Krakatroda is not a threat to the Zebrican way of life. We also demand the immediate arrest of Thiefwitch Malusi's daughter, and custody being ceded to us so she may be brought to justice."

No offense to Zebras or Jackals in general, of course, she's referring to these specific Zebras, who are in fact, metaphorical Jackals.

"To do anything less would be nothing short of an insult to the treaty forged between our two countries centuries ago, and let me assure you, Princess Celestia, that there are those among us who will not stand for insults to the peace we've helped forge. Especially considering your recent behavior."

Oh dear. She better take care of this before continuing the rest of her internal monologue.

Her eyelids sink to half-mast as she glares at the Zebrican delegates, making half of them erupt with a white-hot rage, and the other half shudder slightly from an invisible chill.

"Perhaps your grandfathers could tell you the exact circumstances under which our treaty was forged. It's ironic that you act as you do, considering precisely why one exists," Celestia says simply, her horn igniting to display an image of the past.

"I remember when the Great Pyramid of Geezer was first built. A Zebra alchemical marvel, like none the world had seen before, not quite a mountain, but it got the job done, certainly. Harnessing the suns rays to boil it's fluids, and built exactly on the Equator, such that it's mirrors could harness sunlight from dawn to dusk to produce works of alchemy, it's construction heralded delegation after delegation demanding land and tithes from Equestria, in the face of the military power Zebrica could now afford." Celestia reminisces.

Turning away from the magical display, she smirks in a very familiar, soft way. "So I changed the Equator."

"Now our respective countries have peace. And you know what? We will continue to have peace. Because I don't respond well to threats, and you've taken your one and only opportunity to be reminded why.

"Mt. Krakatroda will remain in the possession of Equestria and her Princesses, and I myself decree it and it's land ceded to none other than Zecora of Equestria, who will be its sole master and administrator.

When the delegates don't get the hay out of her throne room, she continues. "You have my permission to leave, Senator Ahirisha," Celestia says, motioning towards the doors behind them.

"Weiss, we cannot afford for you to keep taking these breaks. We must move quickly, to settle this matter before whatever dark force has possessed this place can enact its plans," Luna says when she spots Weiss frozen for the fifth time, staring at the empty room that once held a fast-food building.

"Apologies. Right, so, we should be prepared, if this place has been truly commandeered, the defenses may have been arrayed against us. I still remember the tunnel layout, so our main goal is to avoid any of the Boss Rooms and reach an access point to the Arcana Nox," Weiss says, snapped out of his memories by Luna's words.

Turning in place as though he hadn't stopped at all, the Dark Sage begins once again stalking down the tunnels, Luna following after him.

Weiss suddenly stops, looking from left to right, scanning the various smooth doors lining the hall.

"Do you smell that?" Weiss questions, confusing Luna.

"What is it, Weiss?"

His eyes narrow, before with a snap of his fingers, two portals open behind and in front of Luna as a massive explosion rips through the hall, eradicating everything in its path aside from the Sage and the Princess.

Closing the portals, Weiss snaps his fingers again, summoning six scimitars into his hands. He begins walking forward calmly, blades whipping around him as his limbs swivel around his body freely.

The blue dragon that suddenly rushes out with a sword in its hands is shocked when Weiss is right in front of them, his gigantic axe-shaped crystal sword sending the crude steel bastard sword flying off into the distance, skittering along the ground.

Flinging the swords away, Weiss's hand flashes out, clamping the dragon teenager's mouth shut before three pummeling blows are flung at the opponent's head, dazing them long enough for Weiss's poisoned dagger to poke them in the arm.

The Dragon is out cold before they even realize what had happened to them.

Luna, attempting to break up the silence, begins to make small talk. "You know, walking into enemy territory as though we own the place-"

She suddenly interrupts herself, lifting the mercenary's discarded sword and flinging it down the hall with a burst of telekinesis, knocking out the bull that had been planning to shoot them with a crossbow.

"Kobe," she interjects as the pommel of the sword breaks the bull's nose and the small charm she had placed on it paralyzes them completely.

"Walking into enemy territory as though we own the place, taking names and farming kills, It reminds me of old times," Luna finally finishes.

Weiss chuckles, growing crystals around the dragon's arms, and the bull's legs, pinning them to the ground for later.

"I guess. Although this time, we do own the place, and we don't have the names of the ones responsible."

Luna guffaws at that, as her contingency spells automatically slam heads together as the thugs not on her internal whitelist come into range. By the time she reaches Weiss, she's still chuckling at the joke.

Weiss's smirk improves in its sincerity and the two move deeper inside, mood improved by the occasional whack of some random mercenary being pummeled into submission.

"My, your thugs are certainly useless, aren't they?" She says, watching the screen of Weiss and Luna massacring anything that gets in their way.

Gourmet scowls. "My men deal in hunting monsters and breaking ponies. They aren't paid enough for alicorns."

She guffaws at this. "The world would be a very interesting place if one could simply pay enough to defeat an alicorn."

Huffing, Gourmet slams a nearby control panel to make it activate, matching up the locked doors he can see to the ones on the map.

"Everything has a price tag. Anyone who knows how the game is played could tell you that."

The grim half-smile conveyed across the screen fails to capture the sheer condescension of its owner.

"I'll take your word for it. Now finish locking those doors. I can't do it from here," she says, just as a green light flashes across her screen.

"Oh good, that's online, call your men back Randy, Weiss's paranoia does him few favors when..."

Her jaw drops, giving Randy a reason to look at her funny as he calls off his mercenaries, telling them to retreat.

"Oh my, he's as dumb as he is obsessive. He's even got contingencies made to deal with himself laying around," she claims, swiping through file after file.

The voice chuckles at the sight of one of them and laughs at the next one.

The last one, however, makes her eyes widen, and her smile becomes downright vicious.

"Oh I like this one," she finishes, rubbing her hooves together before she taps at the screen, losing interest in whatever it is Gourmet is doing.

Seeing how distracted she is, Gourmet takes this opportunity to roll his eyes slightly, trudging off to the next control panel with the intent of locking some more of the doors to hopefully slow them down that little additional bit.

"What do you mean 'Weiss is busy'?" Sunset Shimmer demands, as Tempest Shadow idly files her hoof, examining the polished appendage to see if it's up to her standards.

"I mean he's at an appointment. He's in a meeting," Tempest leans back in her chair, some unknown plush material dyed a deep red french plum color.

"He's busy."

Taking a deep, calming breath, Sunset Shimmer restrains herself as much as possible, the past several weeks having been an exercise in misery, sleeplessness, and frustration.

"Do you know when he'll be back?" Sunset Shimmer asks, trying to figure out when she'll finally be able to present the translated Grimoire Noir to Weiss for approval before she sends it off to be mass-produced.

Tempest shrugs. "Nope," she says, her lips popping lightly as she speaks.

Sunset takes yet another calming breath. "Please, it's really important-"

Tempest tunes out the rest of the borderline begging, instead considering what to do with some of her free time.

"I've been working really hard, all so-"

Weiss kept saying she should play Blitzball, but he never actually elaborated on what that is. Maybe Zecora would know?

"I've got the bucking Grimoire Noir right here, I spent all this time translating it, and I think I deserve a better answer of just where Weiss is!"

Oh dear. She better take care of this before continuing the rest of her internal monologue.

"Look, I don't really care why you need to know where he is. He's not here, and he won't be back for a short while. Now, if you'd like to leave the book with me? Fine. I'll give it to him when he gets back. Otherwise?

"Leave," Tempest finishes, finally convincing the frazzled unicorn to vacate the premises.

Tempest sighs to herself. 'It's like pulling teeth, trying to keep negative influences away from Weiss.'

'You think that crooked-horned pony would notice how much stress her interference costs him,' Tempest finishes, digging up a hoofball magazine from her desk to read through.

For the articles, of course.

Weiss groans as they walk into a wide-open room. "So they got that up and running."

Luna looks around at the spartan surroundings with confusion. "Got what up and running? What are we dealing with?"

Drumming his fingers on his shoulders with his arms crossed, Weiss responds plainly. "They're swapping the rooms around to disorient us, it's one of the countermeasures I devised in case of someone, either me or someone like me, attempted to infiltrate the Shadow Realm using knowledge of its layout and inner workings. By teleporting entire rooms, this can be done imperceptibly."

"I know where to go, ~ But I don't know where we are. ~ I will need your help." Weiss says, straining his mind to recall the layout of Wacky Workbench Zone.

Nodding, Luna's eyes flash with the power of her Wizard Eyes, allowing her to see through the stone walls.

"When we teleport, ~ I will need you to tell me. ~ I've memorized them," he claims, as hints of magic worm their way through his mind, enchanting his memories with firmness charms and recall charms.

Luna nods again, and they continue their trek through the halls of the ruins.

She sees a flash of light from outside the hall they're in. "We've been teleported."

Weiss smirks, turning down a side path.

"The one in control, ~ No idea what they're doing. ~ They haven't been trained," Weiss explains, knowing full well that a pony who knows how the Arcana Arachne is meant to be used could keep someone wandering blindly through Wacky Workbench for months without getting anywhere.

And whoever is operating it now is just teleporting them at random, exhausting the hotswap batteries buried in the rooms for only a minimal delay.

Eventually, however, they cross into a foyer, empty now, but once holding couches and shelves. The otherwise empty room lights up with an all-too-familiar face for Luna and a mostly unknown, but easily recognizable one for Weiss.

Gourmet, watching over his own screen, has an idea. Checking the security footage, sure enough, Weiss Noir just...

Keeps stopping to stare at various things. Gourmet knows that expression. That sort of expression is only made by a pony when they're trapped in their own memories.

Gourmet wouldn't be one of the richest ponies alive if he wasn't able to catch expressions like that. 'Expressions like that,' Gourmet thinks to himself.

'Expressions like that can be exploited.'

The only question is how. Black Angel said not to make contact with the Sage, but that batty fool doesn't have nearly the business acumen that any other member of Chapter Black does.

Looking around at the decaying ruins, it finally strikes Gourmet like a bolt of lightning

All he has to do is separate Weiss from Princess Luna and make his pitch. That chick's plan is clearly falling apart, and Gourmet has zero intention of being arrested like his mercenaries. But Weiss? He was able to fight Celestia to almost a standstill. If anyone can turn things around for Gourmet, it would be Weiss Noir.

He looks over the screens that he's able to access from the control panel, tapping his way into the Arcana Arachne arrays, if he can get Weiss into this room, he could teleport the room over here, giving him enough time to sell his idea to the Dark Lord before Luna can reach them.

Sure, it might hit Gourmet's savings, but he's almost certain this place could be fixed up with a bit of polish and spit.

It's downright genius, this little plan of his.

He returns to the security feed of that chick monologuing at the Princess and the Sage.

He'll wait until she's done, and then do an override to send his offer over the intercom system.

Ugh, she sure does like to ramble on, huh? This might take a while.

Yes indeed. Everything has a price, and for this so-called Sage, the price tag couldn't be clearer if it were sticker-ed to his flank.

As Rarity lifts up the final bolt of crystal cloth, she begins to weep, knowing that, unless the princess herself provides more of it, this would be the last bolt of this wondrous lost material that she will ever get the chance to use in her work.

"Oh, this truly is the worst, possible, thing!" she wails, hugging the cloth tight to her chest, as Pinkie comes by with a comforting, but weirded out expression.

"Uhh, sorry for asking but why are you hugging that pile of rock weeds?" Pinkie asks, setting the diet diet-cupcake in front of Rarity, who daintily devours it before her fountain of tears dry up in an instant.

"Oh, dear Pinkie! This isn't a weed, it's Crystal Cloth, only the rarest and sought after textile in existence! Lost to time! Lost to fashion! Princess Celestia herself delivered some to me as a most generous royal gift, but now that I've used it all for our gala dresses, this is all that's left of it, and I will nevermore have access to this most glorious of textiles!"

Pinkie coughs slightly. "Rarity, that's a rock weed. I swear it's a rock weed, look,"

She pulls out a rock from her mane, with a wig of glistening moss-like stuff hanging off of it.

"See? This stuff is all over Ma and Pa's farm, we used to have to clear it out every spring because it would grow over all the rocks!"

This doesn't comfort Rarity at all. "Are you telling me that I've made all our dresses from mere weeds!?" she wails, burying her face in the table.

Pinkie plops down next to her, rubbing the unicorn's back. "There there. Are you going to be alright?"

The unicorn shakes her head woefully from within the limbs she has imprisoned her weeping face within.

"...Do you want me to see if I can get some rock weeds from Ma and Pa's farm so you don't run out?"

The unicorn nods her head, equally woefully, while Pinkie tries not to giggle at how ridiculous this entire sequence is, and take the matter seriously.

"Oh yes indeed Luna, though you betrayed me, it really has been for the best. Now, in the Arcana Nox, I have grown so much further beyond anything you can imagine, no more begging and whinging for control, no more piggybacking off of you filthy ponies, just to exist!

"I hope you're ready to witness history, you foals, because this place will be my kingdom, with myself as it's ruler!

"The kingdom you promised me, Luna, the one you promised us all!

"Once I gain full control over the Arcana Nox, I will rule this land, under my new name!"

"Nightmare!"

By the end of her rambling, ranting speech, the half of her face displayed on the holographic screen is heaving with a smile filled with glee plastered on her face while her hooves are spread wide, gesturing madly.

Weiss's expression of vaguely bored disgust remains a staple after she's done monologuing at him and Princess Luna. Luna's expression, in contrast, is a rictus of horrified realization.

"Surrender now. Return command of the Shadow Realm's remaining systems to me, and you will not be harmed. I'll show you mercy. I swear to god I'll show you mercy."

Before Nightmare can respond, Weiss holds up a hand, continuing further.

"I want you to understand just what it is I'm offering, to understand just how sincere I am, and how much I want to spare you what comes next," Weiss explains.

"Because if you don't surrender, here and now-"

Weiss's head tilts slightly to the side.

"I will show you a nightmare."

Nightmare returns his apathetic speech with an equally placid smile of her own.

"Oh come now, Weiss. That's my job!" She giggles, shutting off the holographic screen as the door into the sitting room opens with the low grating of sliding stone.

From the darkness, paw pads thump against the ground as a titanic wolf begins plodding into the room, water dripping from it's left half, while it's right half occasionally emits puffs of black ash, twin heads weakly snarling at Luna and Weiss.

The Ice-Fire Wolf Ghost.

While Luna prepares to fight the monster, Weiss holds out his hand. "Luna, stay back. It's not safe.

"I'll handle this."

With that, Weiss steps forward, while Luna cautiously takes up the rear.

Suddenly, the Wolf pounces, pinning Weiss to the ground as its enchantments demand that it track down and eliminate all hostiles.

Weiss slowly raises a hand up to the magically spawned beast's side, trailing his palm down the monster's leg in a firm pet.

"Good doggy," Weiss says softly, the magical automaton growling as it's left side trickles out a firm spray of water, trying to activate combat techniques that it lacks the energy and systems to support within the Shadow Realm itself.

Unable to harm Weiss with its extinguished fire, or it's depleted water supply, the beast rears up into the air, a gigantic paw slamming back down onto Weiss's chest, as he flinches at the blow.

Reaching up again, he continues petting the enchanted mass of portals, whispering to it.

"You can go back to sleep, pup. There's no danger here anymore. There aren't any ponies in danger."

Slowly, but surely, the Ice-Fire Wolf Ghost's snarl shrinks, before returning to a blank expression as it's own magical weight begins bearing down on it.

By the time Weiss returns to his hooves, the mass of enchantments has already dispersed, the magical energy stored in it unable to continue fueling its existence, once it had been made aware that there was nothing for it to protect.

"I had hoped that wouldn't happen.

"I had really hoped that," he sighs.

"It seems it's systems were too strained without any maintenance to its core enchantments," Weiss says simply, brushing his chest off.
Suddenly, Nightmare's voice rings out. "What are you doing, you dolt?! Get off of that right now!"

To Luna's and Weiss's confusion, a voice suddenly sounds out, a gruff, old male voice. "Lord Weiss Noir, I have an offer to make you regarding the restoration of the Shadow Realm, get away from Princess Luna and I'll send you over."

Cutting an eye to Luna, who shakes her head, Weiss emits a burst of force that halts her briefly as he gallops into the next room, a flash of light teleporting it somewhere else, moments before Luna can reach the doorway to follow him.

She turns her gaze around, searching for Weiss's magical signature.

Weiss walks calmly into the room, his careful gaze scanning across the old security room's various panels, several of which seem to have been ripped up to access the magical crystals inside of them. An effective way to gain access to any system is to get access to its physical components, Weiss supposes.

In front of him, a large Earth Pony with a carefully coiffed beard and mane smiles.

"I'm glad you were willing to listen, Lord Weiss! You see, I'm with a group known as Chapter Black, we're quite large fans of your work! Really, we are!"

With a continued smile, Gourmet brushes off his fine leather suit and steps forward. "I'm known as Gourmet, but my real name is Randy Ropes. You see, I've just realized that we shouldn't be fighting at all, as much as that crazy pony Nightmare wants to scuffle with the two of you. I happen to be a Businesspony at heart, you know, and I've decided to put my best hoof forward on that front!

"Black Angel thought it was a poor course of action to contact you, directly, but having watched you so far, I can help it no longer."

Weiss doesn't respond immediately or react aside from his mane flickering rapidly, like a rattlesnake's tail shaking, which Gourmet takes as an opportunity to continue.

"I'm a very rich pony, with quite a lot of connections, even outside of Chapter Black, and the Shadow Realm? It could use a touchup. With my money and a few workers, we could get this place up and running and repopulated in a matter of weeks."

Weiss's flaming mane has begun sweeping wildly around, crackling like a grease fire while his expression remains carefully unaltered.

He holds out his foreleg, offering a hoofshake to the Sage of Darkness "We could work together, bring these old ruins back in working order, revive the Shadow Realm itself!"

A thin purple beam flickers from the pony's forehead, it stretches back to Weiss's outstretched finger as Gourmet drops to the floor, dead.

Weiss's face is blank as he lowers his arm, crossing it behind his back with the rest of them.

"Trouble my people's memory no more."

Luna bursts through the door, breathing heavily before she sees Weiss, standing perfectly still in front of the Earth Pony's body. As blood just starts to reach his hooves, he turns his head to face Luna.

"We're late, Princess. There weren't any ponies when I came through the door.

"Not a single soul."

(Weiss Report) A Disgusting Biology [Death Beam]

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As you've requested, Princess, I've looked into how Weiss may have used Merciful Flash in the past. I hope this is sufficient to help you with your plans.

Thank you Sunset. I truly appreciate the work you've done for me. If I can master this spell, one of ponykind's sole incurable maladies will be no longer.

Though rare, a damaged horn is the source of no small amount of grief for a unicorn, one which I and the rest of medical science had believed to be beyond our ability to mend.

Are alicorns not at risk too?

No, dear Sunset. The qualities of Pegasus and Earth Pony magic within us means that not only are our horns flexible rather than brittle, but that they can also recover naturally from damage.

Otherwise, I doubt myself or Luna would have horns as healthy as our own, after the years we have spent arrayed against Equestria's enemies.

Entry Number Five Hundred, Year Two-hundred and Ninety.

I've recently grown beyond the point where the Divine Words serve any purpose. I no longer need artificial lenses and mirrors in order to control my Unicorn Light when casting spells. But even so, it isn't enough. Various assassins have taken to targeting my horn, first and foremost, believing a clean, powerful blow would be sufficient to disable me. Even though I can use Merciful Flash to regrow parts of my body freely, I've grown sick of my foes mocking me, believing me to have vulnerabilities.

I can grow Unicorn Horn using Merciful Flash. So why should I bother to wait for my horn to be shattered to do so? There is no suitable answer to that question. So I'm going to do exactly that. I've grown thirty thin fingerbones made from artificial unicorn horn, and have replaced my cloned limbs' fingerbones with them.

I had expected this to trigger some sort of metamorphosis to my magical state, but I haven't changed at all. Maybe there's nothing left to change, or maybe this is merely a placebo, and I've always had the capability to cast unicorn light from my fingers? It's irrelevant now, I suppose. This is the new me.

The addition of Unicorn Horn to my hands has inadvertently allowed me to cast far more complex magic, not because my ability to multi-cast has increased, but because I'm no longer crowding myself when attempting to cast a spell that requires me to use my horn. Now, instead of having to layer two, or even three spells onto my horn, I can simply layer them over my fingers or hands, giving me more room to work with the magic.

The use of Unicorn Horn in my bones has more purposes than merely enhancing my magic. There exist rumors that claim the bones of an Alicorn are made entirely of the same substance as their horn, hence their name. Which would make sense, considering that a Unicorn's horn is very nearly indestructible. Of course, my own horn has been rendered a bit scrappy near the tip from stress testing this fact by ramming adamantium walls to see who wins, but It hasn't interfered with spellcasting, so I'm ignoring it for now, due to the immense cost of growing unicorn horn via magic.

Some unknown part of myself has also decreed that I use very specific amounts of artificial horn in my new fingers. Each of my hands now has roughly the same amount of synthetic unicorn horn in it as a full actual unicorn's horn.

That would make seven in total. An auspicious number, to be sure. Seven Chaos Emeralds, Seven Human Souls, Seven Pure Hearts.

Seven Unicorn Horns.

In spite of this, however, one thing still eludes me. Even after hundreds of years, I'm still not strong enough to cast a spell I've been devising ever since that day. A spell capable of killing Sombra outright, no matter what.

I call this spell the Smoke Devouring Hydra.

I have seven foci with which to cast it, but I still can only cast four spells simultaneously, leaving three of my arms useless and untapped. I feel it, somewhere inside of me, some part of me that I have failed to eradicate in return for power. But for the life of me, I can't find it. Despite my efforts, despite my desire, I'm still unable to summon the Smoke Devouring Hydra, without the force of will and emotional power needed to cast seven spells at once.

It might seem like an arbitrary distinction. Four Hydras, Seven Hydras, what's the difference? It isn't the number of hydras that is the problem. It is what it represents. Weakness. I've all but isolated myself from the Shadow Realm's public sector, excluding my management of it and it's defenses, I've delegated much of the lawmaking to my council, I have cut myself off from any friends I still have, and yet I still can't reach that last font of dark power inside of me.

I'm unsure how much further I can take my studies into the dark arts. What sacred things are left for me to defile for power? What lines could I possibly have left to cross in the pursuit of vengeance?

Even after all of this, my heart still has some tangled shreds keeping it away from the event horizon.

This is... bizarre to me. Weiss only attributes the name of "Hydra" to his perfected attacks. Does he simply decide before creating them whether or not he will master them until they are without flaw? Some form of precognition? Or maybe he was simply utterly confident in his ability to master this "Anti-Sombra" technique.

Why does he name them after Hydras?

Well, usually, it is because they use all of his arms. Such as the Extra Thick Hydra that his Kelpie Gear had originally used.

Ahh, listen to me, reminiscing. He originally created that Gear to fight dragons, you know. It's ironic that in improving it, he decided to escalate to becoming one.

Then why did he use it against you? I don't intend any disrespect, but wouldn't it have made more sense for him to come up with some kind of countermeasure that was designed from the ground up to fight you?

Well, Sunset, you were there. He chose that form because he had wanted to lose that fight. If we tussle again, though, I've been working on a few trifles of my own, to give a better showing.

Case in point, if I master this spell, my magical reserve and regeneration exceed Weiss's by an order of magnitude. I'll be able to produce a substantial amount of synthetic unicorn horn to play with, even outside of the obvious medical usage it will take part in.

(Past Chapter 21): The Cold Heart of Hate: Part 2

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...My second diplomatic meeting didn't.

"Dr. Real, are my combat limbs ready?" I ask, walking calmly into Wacky Workbench's deepest depths, towards the "Low Danger Peaceful Sector". A complete misnomer, considering it houses the Shadow Realm's most lethal and powerful weapons. Well, a tenth of them. The rest are stored in various caches in some aerial pocket spaces.

He nods nervously. "I must warn you, sir, even with the sub-dermal bracing, Migrant iron still is not the most durable substance. You'll almost certainly suffer losses to your speed if you activate the extra functions, simply due to how much extra metal is needed to ensure your safety."

I summon up a holographic screen that reads out various stats. The stats I see are ones that certainly please me. "Perfect. The loss in speed is still within the parameters I predicted. Did the scouts give you the info you needed on adult dragons?"

Doctor Real nods, bringing up a recording of the dragon delegates swooping around the Shadow Realm, a pissed expression on their faces as they scan the countryside.

I can't help but wonder if they're just that stubborn or stupid, seemingly waiting for me to just come out and face them.

Or maybe they know better than to try to come into the tunnels?

I shake the thoughts out of my head. "Alright, let's get me suited up."

Reaching inside a hole in the vault door's control panel with one of my arms, I snap my finger to create a pilot light of Dragonfire in my hand. This prompts the mechanical arms inside to carefully unsocket it from it's metal housing, removing it from me and scanning it as identification.

Anyone else attempting such would have something very unfortunate happen to them, right before the door failed to open due to the several checks which only I qualify to pass through.

However, I do qualify, and the door does allow me to pass, a terminal on the other side of the door sliding a tray out with my arm in it, which some additional golem arms lift up and socket back onto me.

I sigh happily with a low persistent chuckle, looking at the clean shining halls filled with drawers of deadly forbidden materials and lined wall to wall with mechanisms whose purposes could only be guessed at.

Walking to the very very back, a massive crate is dragged around on crystalline rails, before being dropped in front of me, hissing purely cosmetic steam everywhere as it opens.

When I see the pony-shaped framework of Migrant Iron, with six purple-scaled limbs attached to it, my chuckling turns to laughter.

Sweet magical science, I love you so.

Queen Cold's youngest daughter Nippy shudders as if she can feel how cold she is when her magical Cold Stare sees Lord Weiss Noir's aura in the distance.

She really wishes she didn't have to spy on him, but mother said it was really important that the Windigo know where he is and what he's doing at all times.

A normal pony is like a flame, growing and shrinking as they become angry or pleased, and Windigo feed on that flame, filling themselves with the warmth that sustains their bodily functions.

Weiss, however, is more like a decaying piece of fissile material, quiet and silent, unless you have the equipment to detect the wild trails of radioactive particles being fired from them every so often.

This makes it especially disturbing when, in addition to the spray of stinging hate that ever so briefly escapes the Sage, he is suddenly pleased by something, as if in addition to firing little pellets of potato fast enough to sting, the person shooting it at you begins to stink of rot and poison.

She takes a deep breath that does nothing for her, physically, before sinking deeper into the wall, just to make sure nobody sees her spying.

Unfortunately, she's just going to have to pony up and deal with watching this odious individual, until Mother can train more Windigo to pick up the slack of spying.

'This sort of subterfuge is so annoying' Nippy thinks to herself.

It's unnatural for a Windigo to sneak around, and use subtlety like this. Almost insulting, even! As though comparing them to some sort of fairytale ghosts, hiding in the walls and watching in complete silence as they dully haunt their hosts. Windigo are supposed to be unstoppable, and now Queen Cold is so obsessed with this dumb snack bar of a country that she's got everygo going against their nature!

Nippy's stomach turns when Weiss's simple happiness intensifies in the distant zone she's spotted him in. What could possibly make a pony that steeped in dark magic as giddy as they seem to be?

I hop from hoof to hoof giggling as my fists blur out, the Royal-cloth infused hide and Adamantium scales easily blocking the damage from punching the solid cylinder of steel, which had been produced specially as a punching bag.

It's not like we had any better uses for steel.

"This is the greatest high!" I shout, cocking back a fist as three of my arms claw into the floor violently to hold me in place when I punch the steel target hard enough to send it skidding.

Doctor Real coughs, from behind the solid sapphire protecting him from any rubble that might have ended up flying, before speaking over the intercom.

"That's good, Weiss. Do you believe we should test the extra functions, now?"

I carefully consider this, before answering in the negative. "Fraid' not, doc. I feel spied on, so I'll test that in a more public setting, just to leave nothing to the imagination for our new guests."

The sealed blast doors slide open, allowing me to exit the danger room and discuss the matter further, face to face with the good doctor.

"I'm going to be doing the majority of testing for these new limbs on the battlefield, the crucible of war," I explain, making Doctor Real frown.

Thankfully, he seems to understand. This isn't a case of me relying on something untested, but rather, me having a number of options in battle, all of which save this one have been proven reliable.

"If you are certain, sir. Might I recommend you have backup, at the very least?" he says with some worry that makes me sigh.

"Very well, doctor. I'll have Captain Iron Diamond on double-duty for a few weeks until I break these new limbs in. I'm sure he'll appreciate the opportunity to practice with his own prosthesis, with all the weapons I've packed on board that puppy."

"I'm certain, sir," Doctor Real agrees as we part ways at Wacky Workbench, and I take the opportunity to ride the long way to Hidden Palace Zone, the minecart ride in total darkness giving me the opportunity to do some much-needed thinking.

Can I trust the Windigo? Of course not.

But can I trust them to act sensibly, given the facts surrounding the current circumstances? I can only hope as much.

By all logical standards, the sound option for them would be to play nice, considering just how flexible the Shadow Realm's laws are, and just how much they stand to gain with an alliance.

But there exist no logical creatures in this world, and I have to operate with the assumption that they'll find a bone to pick with me sooner or later.

Cool Spot pouts violently as he lays down on the sheet of armor starting at the holographic screen in front of him, where his new friends are all having fun playing some kind of game where they shoot at each other in their dreams.

Oil Slick, who is busy shuffling his cards, spares a glance to the plucky poltergeist. "Why don't you just take a nap? They've got three-player games on there."

Spot moans, shaking their head. "Windigo don't sleep. Ma always says that if we could, we prob'ly wouldn't be Windigo no more."

As Priss baits Eclipse into running straight into another rocket, the filly jerks awake with a frustrated shout.

"Dang it Priss! That's cheating!" Eclipse shouts at Priss, who simply giggles in her sleep, hugging her pillow tight, while her on-screen avatar smirks directly at them, cutting some sort of fancy jig as she taunts.

"Wish there was some way I could play." Cool Spot mumbles, burying their face in the fluffy pile of enchanted pillows keeping them from just phasing through.

Eclipse takes this request very seriously, thinking hard about how a sleepless species could access a system designed exclusively to process the energies of the dreaming mind.

"I might have an idea," Eclipse says as Priss rubs the sleep out of her eyes and rolls into a more comfortable laying position.

Turning to the friendly phantasm, Eclipse starts with the most obvious question. "Do you know where we could find out some more about Windegos, Cool Spot?"

Cool spot scratches his chin with a hoof, floating up into the air ponderously. "I mean, we could talk to Ma, she knows everything there is to know about us. Uhh, I don't know if she'll like you girls though."

He waves his hoof. "Nah, what am I thinking, Ma's the best! She can help!"

Iron Diamond's foreleg unfolds it's claws. He stares at the blunted red lengths with an even, analytical stare. "The next version," Iron decides, "Needs far fewer fingers."

Though he's grown used to the little appendages as a replacement for his hoof's natural grabbing ability, it's still excessively fragile-looking for Iron's tastes. Why have five little twigs, instead of a much simpler two?

Folding the claws back into a hoof, Iron levels the mechanical foreleg at a series of targets, activating the portal in it's frog and allowing him to instantly pierce the steel target four times in quick succession with a series of solid crystal bolts, each one the size of a spear.

Though his aim is improving, Iron scowls at how long it took him to aim perfectly.

With only eighty spears in storage, his aim is crucial, Iron feels.

Especially if he's going to be fighting a giant flaming dragon of all things. He'll just have to save the spear launcher for either an opener or an emergency, he supposes.

"Why not have the speargun on your shoulder instead?" Captain Helmsplitter says, having worked up a sweat in his own booth from swinging around his axe.

"Harder to aim. It might be easier to line it up, but I'd have to pivot my whole body just to point at something. I'll just have to get used to it," Iron claims, flicking his leg out and firing a blind shot to the side, where it thumps into the target, but just barely, stabbing into the side of it, and sending it spinning.

"I see what you mean. You could do some damage with that thing," Helmsplitter says, hefting the axe over his back, where it clicks, attaching to his armor.

"I would hope it does, Splithead," Iron says with a smirk as they exit the training hall, and go their respective ways.

Queen Cold confronts me before I can go to confront the draconic delegation on our doorstep.

"What are you planning, Weiss? You know they will attack you, yes?"

"Well, my plan is to negotiate with them, and reach a mutual agreement," I respond, walking past her with confidence.

She floats after me, large enough that her body actually scrapes the edges of the tunnels, from the sheer volume that she takes up normally.

"Dragons only respect one thing in a negotiation, Weiss Noir, and that one thing is strength."

I give her a knowing look.

"Ahh. So you meant 'negotiate' in the sense that you negotiated with me and mine..." she says, scowling lightly.

I cough. "Well, if my theories are correct, I need merely to brutalize these five dragons, and then call out the Dragon Lord themselves and-"

She interrupts me. "You're joking, yes?"

I smile, quickly growing sick of her needling my methods.

"I suppose I am, your majesty. After all, there is no way I could defeat the king of the dragons like this." I gesture, holding out my base-state combat limbs.

"You're really going to do this? Alone?" she demands.

"Of course not! I'll be taking Iron Diamond along with me. Speaking of whom."

Iron Diamond joins this little entourage of two, immediately opening his mouth and shattering my dreams.

"Neither of us are going to fight them unless they attack us first, Weiss. That's an order," he states plainly, with no room to argue.

I'm tempted to pull rank on him, but considering the severity of his expression, I decide to try it his way.

"Fine, but when they try to mush us like a banana, I'm going to send them home twisted into a pretzel for effect," I expand on his proposition.

Iron's extremely faint smile sends chills down my spine as we exit the Shadow Realm tunnels and make our way out onto the ashen plains of foil grass and obsidian trees. "I believe that to be the correct course of action, yes."

"This is so dumb! Let's just go down and dig em out! I'm sick of flying around doing nothing, Parboil!" Charbroil shouts, pounding his chest several times, making his altitude sharply dip for a few moments before he regains his bearings, snarling.

Oil's eyes narrow. The Dragon Lord gave him and Parboil such stooges to deal with this upstart pony ruler. "Speak out of turn to Parboil again, and I will be forced to grief the Dragon Lord with knowledge of your insubordination."

Charbroil snaps his jaws shut, arms crossed as his wings flap more angrily, and he avoids making eye contact with the much stronger black dragon.

The far older Parboil offers only a faint upturning of his lips, his thin mustache rising upward with it.

"He'll come out. We've given him a good reason. Until then, just keep gliding. They'll get the idea, with some patience."

Toil and Recoil just keep their color-coded red and blue mouths shut, knowing full well what a taskmaster Oil is, unlike their idiotic companion.

Down below, the silently grumbling Charbroil stares at the dumb dumb superdumb ponies and their dumb boats. It never once crosses his mind to use a different word to describe the dumb ponies.

His incredibly sharp eyes widen, however, as his slit pupils narrow in response to a sight they had been waiting for.

"Dude! I think I saw him! Down there on that big black rock!" Charbroil shouts, pointing at the odd circular platform that hadn't been there when he looked at that spot previously.

Parboil has no curiosity emerging whatsoever as to how it got there, considering he had seen its emergence at that white pony's command. A simple flash of the horn and the land itself had begun to shift and grow.

"Let us move. Carefully," Parboil commands, tilting his own pale wings to the side, bringing him in a curving arc towards the stage that the unicorn named Weiss Noir had crafted for their discussion.

Putting the finishing touches on my makeshift arena, I summon up a small and plain throne to sit on, reinforced with Adamantium in its core. The perfect foundation to withstand an immense amount of pressure.

Crossing my forelegs daintily as I lean back in my chair, I stare at the five building-sized dragons all looking quite unpleasant, save for their much more reasonable looking leader, a white dragon with a small grey mustache.

He's the one I'll have to watch out for.

"Ahh, the noble dragons! I'm so sorry I couldn't meet with you sooner, but I was just so busy," I say, my limbs held perfectly still in a T-pose. This is going to be so good.

The red one, a regular chunky brute of a drake, suddenly growls. "Busy? We had to fly around this dumb place for like a year waiting for you to come out of your dumb little hole!"

I turn my half-lidded stare to him briefly, before returning my lazy gaze to the mustached one, sweating slightly as I frown on the inside. "Would you like to discipline your friend, or should I?"

He steps out of the way, gesturing to the red dragon. "By all means, it is your right," the dragon says, a certain suspicious gleam entering their expression at my bold claim.

Not one to pass up an opportunity, I turn my head to the drake, raising a hoof with care to hide my nervousness.

"You're bothering me," I claim, shooing him away as my horn glows with an invisible ultraviolet laser that carries my Prestidigitonium Vance.

Always start off on a strong foot, I say, and there are few stronger feet than an A-Rank Prestidigitonium Vance to the chest.

The illusion is made complete when the dragon snorts and steps forward threateningly, probably intent on squashing me like the bug I am. As he takes that first step forward, and is left ever so briefly vulnerable due to his bipedal stance, the delayed effect of my spell punches him in the chest, resulting in some rather nasty cracks sounding out as he goes flying back, skidding across the arena, off of it entirely, and then furrowing the soil behind him for a few meters.

My spell's recoil is pumped directly into my mane, making it flare out over the back of my throne for a moment as it absorbs roughly six-tons of force.

Easily worth the three hours it took to produce that particular spell.

The white dragon smiles fondly, his eyes crinkling in that way old people's eyes do.

"Ahh, he's alive. Truly, tales of ponykind's mercy and tolerance are proven here and now, Lord Weiss Noir. I am Parboil, and these are my companions, Oil, Toil, Recoil, and the... unfortunately inexperienced Charbroil.

"Though, if I might say, with no disrespect meant, it is a bit garish to wear the corpses of young dragons in an effort to intimidate us," He says, making me smile as well.

"Oh, you know my name! Well, I'm very happy to say that I have slain no children, and indeed, these limbs are very much alive," I claim, finally allowing all six of my arms to move, spreading wider as I flex them in various odd ways, the motions long since becoming natural to me over these many months of practice.

At the realization that my limbs aren't taxidermy, but living, moving dragon arms, the black one's expression turns murderous as he rapidly approaches my throne in an attempt to smash me flat.

His palm comes down as if he were desperately trying to smash a mosquito who had landed on his arm before it was too late to stop the itchy bite that would result.

And with that, I was crushed beneath the dragon's open claw.

"Oil, that was very foolish of you," Parboil says, as Toil and Recoil try to help Charbroil get back up after Weiss's brutal attack.

Oil growls. "Killing dragons is one thing, I wasn't going to let them be defiled as well-"

Parboil notices an odd stutter to Oil's voice, before realizing with some awe that the pony isn't dead. A barrier spell? It would be difficult, but not impossible to do something like that, if the unicorn were that supremely powerful.

The pony lifting Oil's claw pushes it high enough for Parboil and the others to see his face. He realizes that it isn't magic at all. Rather, the apathetic looking Weiss Noir is holding up Oil's claw with one of his own. His other limbs rest casually on the armrests of his throne, and he even goes so far as to lazily set his chin in the palm of one of his hands.

"This one is bothering me too," Weiss says before his hand ignites, making Oil reel back with a shriek of pain as he clutches his burning palm tightly, trying to pat out the flames.

Weiss hums to himself, his casual disregard for his surroundings a sharp contrast with Oil's teary expression. Dragons are especially unused to the sensation of being burned. Only a scant few spells are even capable of doing such a thing.

"I would prefer if you did not harm my subordinates too much, Weiss. They will need to come home with me, after all," Parboil says, growing tense as Oil's groans of pain continue.

Weiss rolls his eyes, sitting up in his throne and waving a hand, which extinguishes the strange, black fire that had been steadily chewing away at Oil's hand, leaving the dragon to collapse to the ground, breathing heavily.

"I have the feeling that you all doubt my ownership of these limbs of mine. Attacking me is one thing, I'm always up for a good spar."

Parboil carefully does not step back as Weiss stands up, hopping off his throne and trotting over as stairs emerge from below, lifting the unicorn up high enough to meet the dragon face to face.

"Whether by word or deed, I'm not one to appreciate insults to the things I possess. Or worse still, those who would deny me my right to them."

"These limbs? They are mine. These lands? Mine."

Weiss's teeth grit slightly. "These ponies especially. Mine."

Parboil's eyes widen, which Weiss immediately notices as well.

"Lord Weiss Noir, is that sweat that I detect?"

Fuck me, he's sharp.

I'm not even sweating, though, why am I wet? Condensation? That doesn't make any sense, it's like an oven out here, and I'm fireproof!

I flash a disarming smile, shrugging. "Would you believe it's from bloodlust?"

Parboil gives me a knowing look. "That wasn't a part of your earlier persona."

Fuck me.

Parboil takes a deep crackling breath, as my eyes narrow and I throw myself to the side.

For some reason, my hoof slips, and it's only Iron Diamond's timely intervention in the form of six gigantic spears crashing into Parboil's face and nose that save me from an untimely and intimate introduction to that white laser breath that he had just tried to fry me with. Even though I'm fireproof, the sweeping beam that splashes across my chest hurts like a taser crossed with pepper spray, leaving all of my skin feeling incredibly numb and aching as I flop down towards the ground.

The beam sweeps up in the air unintentionally as Parboil recoils, and the staircase is intact enough for me to see the patch of ice that had been on it. Queen Cold, you bitch.

Landing on my feet with a quick burst of Prestidigitation, I decide to confront her after I deal with this mess. I note that I've somehow survived what was clearly intended to kill me, even though I didn't suffer the full attack, that was still unarguably some sort of lightning blast.

It crosses my mind that the thick framework of Migrant Iron that I stuffed into my body as part of my combat-limbs must have acted like a Faraday Cage, protecting my innards from the worst of it.

As I consider my next course of action, Parboil recovers, yanking the spears from his face and glaring down at me.

"Go ahead Parboil, send in your other two thugs. I can't imagine you dragging four other dragons home," I claim, shouting at the wizened wyrm.

"As a matter of fact, I can't imagine you dragging five home either."

Parboil glares. "No, I don't think I'll do that," they say, taking a step forward with grim determination.

I grin, only slightly dazed from his previous attack. "That's right. You understand. You understand the game perfectly, don't you?" I say, getting the strangest feeling as Iron Diamond faces off against Toil and Recoil.

"You want to test my strength, don't you?"

After a moment of shock, seeing something in my eyes that doesn't belong in a pony, Parboil nods.

I feel the need to make one final adjustment before we begin, a quote I feel is all too appropriate serves as the cue as I stare at one of my own flexing arms.

"Strength to make the most learned techniques outmoded. That is Strength Absolute."

With the activation phrase said, my special blend of Vances and Enchantments activate, portals opening inside of my draconic arms, graphene tubes inside of them flooding with incredibly pressurized water, the result of Royal Crystal Growth in extremely secretive chambers allowing me to create endless tanks of water, each one pressurized enough to power industrial equipment, much less my limbs.

My new set of limbs also includes telescopic Crystal Adamantium, the length of my arms increasing even as they swell and distort.

By the end of it, I'm practically surrounded by six swollen balloons of royal water in the form of limbs, almost pressurized enough internally to function in a water jet cutter. Like a set of functional anchor arms.

"I call this my Kelpie Gear," I explain, as a few cursory sprays of water are emitted from my shoulders to relieve pressure as part of the initialization, purple mist and steam floating in the air.

Parboiled chuckles. "They're awfully round. Are you certain you've taken care to grow muscle with your grand spell, and not fat?"

I plant four of my claws in the ground, giving me the support needed for when my remaining two limbs rip up a chunk of the floor, holding it over my head confidently.

"I'm certain," I claim, before throwing the boulder at Parboil before he has time to react, the swinging chunk of rock smashing him in the head in a flash.

Before the elder dragon can recover, I use Prestidigitated Flight and a quick burst of portal magic to give myself weightlessness for a moment, long enough for me to land on his head.

He looks up as I grab four handfuls of his spines for leverage and hammer blows into his dome, the hydraulic fists slamming relentlessly into his skull before, with a sickening rip, my hands are pulled free along with several of his scales and spines when he slaps me off reflexively.

A quick flip via magic ensures I land on my feet, and a smug expression serves to make him look around, where Iron Diamond has handily taken care of Toil and Recoil, the two dragons sleeping soundly on the floor.

He himself has likely noticed by now that his own body is flagging unnaturally. He bares his teeth at me.

"What trickery is this...?!"

I smile, walking up to the Dragon as he takes a deep, crackling breath, and I covertly prepare two portals to emerge and absorb the attack, now that I understand what it does.

It's like a much cruder version of my Dragon Lightning, raw electricity infused with greed, fired like Godzilla's own Gamma Breath.

He fires the blast, and my portals open at the perfect width and duration to make it seem as though I had merely endured the attack by face-tanking it. My skin itches intensely as the stream of electricity washes over the sides of my defense, curtains of white passing near me.

This one was far weaker, I notice. The Slumber Syrup in the floors must finally be getting to him, especially after that chunk that I threw at him directly got into his wounds from the spears that Iron fired at him.

"There are many forms of strength I possess, Parboil. Strength of arm, and strength of mind. Both of them absolute," I say, trotting up to the elder dragon as I take a deep breath.

Normally, I simply fire dragon lightning from my hands, but I feel as though it will make a more poignant end for me to end it in this exact manner.

Parboil's eyes widen at the sight of lightning escaping my lips, and he holds up a claw weakly.

"I yield. No mere pony could do as you have done. Your claims and holdings are secure," he says, as I allow the lightning to dissipate.

"I'm glad we could come to that agreement. Now get the hell off of my property. Which, considering I own this country, is a very large hell to get off of it," I say, as he weakly drags his drowsy ass to his feet. He then stumbles to the four other unconscious dragons, dragging them away as rapidly as possible to escape the effects of the Slumber Syrup floor.

Now, to renegotiate the terms of my contract with Queen Cold. If she's going to cockblock me in battle, then I'm going to have to get unpleasant with her.

I notice the bruises spreading all over my body, but only from the sight of them. Weirdly enough, I... don't feel very much pain right now.

Contextually, Weiss's hatred is a bad sign, despite all Queen Cold's instincts to the contrary.

"Would you like your prison to be public, so you can continue communicating with your people, or private, so they don't have to see your shame?" Weiss asks, leaning back in a plush sapphire chair designed with comfort and opulence in mind.

When she doesn't respond, Weiss continues.

"I suppose, considering what you've done, you believed that I could have died there, despite all evidence to the contrary."

Queen Cold shakes her head. "I needed proof. Proof that you are as you pretend to be. Your claims are bold, and if I believe them, my people's way of life changes.

"I wanted to see what you would do, if your plans did not go as you had designed them. Unfortunately, that particular plan of yours was not as shattered as I had hoped. So I had to improvise.

"For my people to survive this change, your realm must survive. For your realm to survive, it must never be without you. I wanted to see what you would do when your back is against the wall."

Queen Cold closes her eyes. "Do with me what you will, be it imprisonment or execution. The Windigo will survive so long as the Shadow Realm provides for them."

"Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends," Weiss quotes.

"Pardon?" Queen Cold responds.

I sigh. Fuck me I'm too soft to be running a country.

"I don't like what you did," I hiss at Queen Cold's befuddled and dumbfounded expression.

I need to punish her. I need to destroy her!

Hell, I should at least get her the hell out of my realm.

This bitch is telling me to ice her, no pun intended. The problem is, I don't have the stomach to do any of that to someone with motives like hers.

I spent so much time hyping myself up, I never once thought to consider that someone might want proof that I'm not just an elaborate charlatan.

"But if you're telling the truth, then there's nothing I can do. There's no justice to be had in punishing you for doing the right thing. No crowds to be pleased since the public doesn't know that you committed the crime."

"There's not even any fucking vengeance to be had, considering I find your actions entirely justified."

"That said, I have no other choice as the Sage of Darkness, when it comes to your fate."

"Look Ma! I got four legs!" Cold Spot shouts, stumbling around in the Ixion-Model Synthetic Body, trying to avoid smashing their oversized curved horn into the walls or ceiling as they occasionally release involuntary bursts of lightning.

"Yes, Cool Spot. It is a very impressive form." Queen Cold says in an incredibly high pitched voice, trying not to sound too petulant at Weiss's punishment.

She somehow doubts this will help her efforts to be taken seriously by the her subjects when Weiss has reduced her to some spike-headed puffball in an eggshell.

"Is that model to your liking, your majesty?" Weiss says smugly, as he tweaks a control panel that makes Cool Spot's synthetic form shrink into a much more manageable Keldeo-Model, tan and blue and small and cute, instead of the almost Zebra/Wildebeast size and color of the Ixion, and with a smaller, sword-shaped horn instead of a gigantic curved lightning rod.

"Alright, kid, that should do it. Go have fun," Weiss says, waving off the child-ghost inhabiting what Weiss had planned on gifting to the queen herself, before her sudden but inevitable betrayal. Now she gets the puff ball instead.

What better vessel for a Queen seeking to give him misfortune than the Good Luck Pokemon, Togepi?

Turning to look at the Queen, he notices that she's already fallen asleep. With a shrug, he levitates the Queen over to one of Wacky Workbench's mandatory beanbag chairs and wanders off to see if Dr. Real has any ideas to help the strange numbness that he had begun to feel after he had been blasted with that lightning attack.

Pain is imperative to know when you are in peril, and Weiss needs all the help he can get on that front. As neat as it may sound to have skin that can't experience pain, it's a liability, in Weiss's opinion.

What Weiss fails to realize as he leaves is that Queen Cold, upon being sealed in her new form, had just fallen asleep for the first time in ten thousand restless years.

Her panicked and confused screaming the next morning helped him to realize this fact, however.

"How long do you think it will be before we're ready to Siege the Crystal Empire? Put an end to all of this?" I ask, sitting across from my two primary guard captains.

Helmsplitter looks downtrodden. "As soon as the princesses break that barrier."

I raise an eyebrow. "We can't do it without them?"

Helmsplitter responds sadly. "The Kingdom Heart could do the job of destroying Sombra and his arrays, but we can't move it. If we fight Sombra head-on, it's like you said. We'd get slaughtered. We don't have a way to break ponies free from his mind control other than just removing the crystals, so even if we did attack with overwhelming force..."

He takes a deep breath.

"If we attacked now, with everything we had, and played our cards perfectly, the most likely result is that the Shadow Realm would suffer no casualties. However, our estimates predict a third of the remaining Crystal Ponies would die in the fighting, and without a way to destroy Sombra or cure the mind control, it would all be for nothing."

"It might take years before our technology progresses far enough to retake the Crystal Empire without the aid of the Princesses."

I remain silent, considering his words carefully. I won't let that be the truth. I'll find a different truth and make it so.

'I just don't know how,' I think to myself painfully, feeling nothing like the leader they need me to be.

(Noir Newsletter) Biological Trade Secrets Repurposed to Altrusitic Ends [Pokemon]

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Entry #20, Day 371

Today marks several occasions, one of which is the partial release of information relating to Project Asura, a division of Wacky Workbench Zone's most secretive laboratories. Their goal had been to harness a unique biological sample in order to create technology and medicine using cloned materials. The actions of the royal scientist, Dr. Absolutely Real Homeopathy, had originally reinforced my notion to keep the research papers and discoveries of this lab a tightly-held secret. Now, however, this has changed.

The sole reason for this change is a simple one. I refuse to allow the new and welcomed inhabitants of the Shadow Realm to inhabit bodies that they do not have the capacity to understand. Even if it means giving up secrets that I would prefer remain buried, and information that I would prefer never have the opportunity to enter enemy hands. I will take the risk of unveiling as much as I feel I can about Project Asura, and what it means for the Windigo to inhabit what I will hereafter refer to as Pocket Monsters, or Pokemon for short.

Project Asura began from one simple desire, one that has now been realized. I was envious of dragons, and have always been fond of them. Thus, my course was clear. I would take their flesh for myself through specialized methods. Against all odds, and with the care and assistance of the Royal Scientist, I had achieved my goal at a terrible cost to my mind. Even now, I struggle with the side effects of my decision. While I endured, I had also feared what may happen if another made a similar attempt.

I hope, if nothing else, this gives those among you who are reading this context, context for why even now, I will not elaborate on the exact nature of the cloned tissues, their origins, or the methods by which they are grown and cultivated into synthetic bodyparts. Why I will not elaborate on the exact materials included to allow my limbs to function. Why I will not allow similar projects to be undertaken in the Shadow Realm, under threat of severe punishment.

To put it to a metaphor, Dice and Cards were involved in my ascension to my current state, and the ante was my own self.

Onto the subject of Pokemon, each one is equipped with a wide range of inbuilt abilities, carefully designed and enchanted by myself and the other hard workers of the Wacky Workbench Zone's finest enchanters. They function using what is known as Essencia, a magic-infused gas which is created using Stoppered Time and Technical Machines.

The method by which this occurs is when a Pokemon's Time-Eater Organ consumes nearby chronological energy, distilling it into liquefied time energy. This time is then infused with spells cast by the Technical Machines the fluid is pumped into. As the golem cores cast various spells while submerged in Stoppered Time, they are absorbed and frozen by the fluid, becoming a gas that can be pumped back into a golem core to allow it to cast vastly empowered spells.

Any Windigo who wishes to cast a spell they have sufficient Essencia to cast needs to simply speak the spell's name in order to use it. If for some reason you decide you wish to alter what spells your synthetic body is capable of, you need merely to speak to a local Materia Shop owner. I have begun producing and distributing TM Disks at those locations accordingly in preparation for distributing the Pokemon.

It has also come to my attention that many Windigo are desperate to obtain Pokemon for themselves, which has caused some strain to those currently waiting on ones to be produced. For those among you who wish to obtain a Pokemon, and do not care for their quality, I have taken the executive decision to stock all Materia Shops with "Waifus".

A Waifu is a form of synthetic body which serves no functional purposes beyond walking and talking, is extremely cheap and worthless, and of course, is above all else, disposable. Any and all Waifus can be thrown in the trash at your leisure, and replaced for a price even cheaper than whatever else it was in the garbage.

For those of you looking for a more advanced vessel to host your essence, I've been working on a few restricted Pokemon, which will be gifted to a select few Windigo who can prove their loyalty to the Shadow Realm in combat, and ability to manage the more combat-capable Pokemon in reserve, ones such as the Ifrit-Model, a bestial flame-aligned monstrosity, with thick hide, flame-powered healing spells, and unparalleled pyromancy TMs, such as Pyroclasm, Firega, and of course, the Ifrit-exclusive TM, Hellfire.

Another model, one you've no doubt seen, is the Ixion-Model Pokemon, which one very lucky Windigo had been gifted when he came seeking the opportunity to participate in the Arcana Nox's competitive gaming scene and needed a way to sleep in order to access it. On that same topic, I'm well aware that one of the primary draws to a Windigo inhabiting one of these synthetic forms is that it grants you all the capability to sleep. Something which is apparently unusual among Windigo, and which I will strive to accommodate.

For the fifth and final time, please, those among you with a Pokemon or Waifu, do not sleep in the middle of the tunnels. Naptime Rooms are being constructed in Hidden Palace Zone, especially near the Kingdom Heart itself. If you feel the need to rest, simply make your way to one of the aforementioned Pokemon Centers, where bedding is provided free of charge to visiting guests. While I have been lenient on this so far, it is slowing things down when Windigo with large Pokemon like the Snorlax-Model are dozing off in the middle of high-traffic tunnels.

Lastly, for the Longma of the Shadow Realm, who are attempting to ease their way into accepting your new fellow citizens, please try to understand that in spite of many of them having chosen or even commissioned cuddlesome forms, they are still beings worthy of respect as individuals.

Unless they consent to being treated like glorified snuggle-puppies or something. Such a scenario falls within the bounds of legal action within the Shadow Realm.

(Present Chapter 21): Blackest Night: Part 2

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Luna stares into Weiss's eyes for several long moments. Both of them attempting to predict how Luna's going to react to the sight.

Luna's held breath is let out in a slow sigh, as she walks over to the remains and casts a spell, burning the body with black fire until it ceases to exist.

"I believe we should leave the Shadow Realm's ruins without any of the filth that may have found it's way in, Weiss. Do take care to clean up after yourself," she states simply, before walking over to the ripped up control panels.

Weiss lets out a breath of relief. She gets it.

"Forgive me, Luna. I had forgotten for a moment that you once ruled this place as well," Weiss states simply, trotting to her side and reaching into the innards of the security consoles, pulling out broken rods of crystal and welding them to one another with quick bursts of growth magic.

Luna spots something in the control panel that gives her pause. Pulling out the long splinter of Moon Crystal, both her and Weiss pause at the sight of it.

"Nightmare Moon, when I was... Her. We had me gather the confiscated Moon Crystals and return them here. She claimed it was honor this place."

She drops the Moon Crystal into Weiss's outstretched hand, sensing the raw nightmare energy infused into it.

"Now I see it was to defile it."

Weiss simply chuckles, welding the crystal she handed him into the control panel as well.

"The Arcana Nox has always been vulnerable to Nightmares, Luna. You knew that better than I did. I was the fool at fault to not include better security measures in it," he states, before summoning up a case filled with glittering blue pills.

Luna steps between Weiss and the control panel. "Weiss, don't be a fool, let me go into the Arcana, you're a technician intending to confront a Nightmare."

Weiss, having been pushed away, regains his footing and shakes his head. "I can't protect this room if Nightmare attempts to attack us in the waking world. You are the only pony with enough raw power to stave off any attackers they send.

"Do you trust me?"

Luna snorts, slapping a hoof over her mouth. "Heavens no!"

Shaking her head and trying not to break out into laughter again, she sighs merrily. "You already took one of the pills, didn't you?"

Weiss gives a thumbs up. "Crunchitize me Captain," he slurs, before collapsing to the ground, completely unconscious.

Exhaling a puff of air, Luna summons up the full might of her own Alicorn Suite, the only difference between her and Nightmare Moon in this form being her Cutie Mark, which remains untouched by the magical infusions.

Every so often, one of the walls will falsely register as a threat to her magic in her heightened instinctive state, prompting a small blade of gravity to rip a sliver off of it.

Nightmare's eyes widen as the cameras reveal all. He's joking, right? Oh that's just precious. That pony is literally made of the things Nightmare eats for breakfast. Neurosis, desire, hopelessness, trauma.

Unless Weiss Noir has undergone ego death in the past few months, he'll be dancing to her strings within the hour.

Really, the only question is where to start.

'Well,' Nightmare supposes, 'You can't go wrong with some pre-emptive taunting.'

Nightmare laughs when Weiss's expression turns into the hint of a frown when he brings up a screen, only for Nightmare's face to appear on it instead of an administrative login screen.

She begins almost ponderously. "Now Weiss, I know you've just made the worst mistake of your life, but you're nothing if not a reasonable individual. I already know the security codes, and I've already changed them all too,"

"Even if I didn't, I'm practically a god here. You've got no clearance, no access, and you're trapped in a dream with the sole ruler of all nightmare-kind. Just give up. I'd be more than happy to spare a pony as vile as you, so long as you cease your foalish opposition of my plans."

Weiss continues walking down the digital hallway, ignoring the shattered and ruined doors, and tapping on the solid, whole ones. Each door reads out the same thing. "Access Denied."

"If you think ignoring me is going to prove anything, you're sorely mistaken," Nightmare sneers, her screen following him as he stalks forward with blank-faced determination.

She can't help but giggle when Weiss finally finds a door willing to allow him access, the wooden simulation of a door bleeping green as it opens.

"Oh come now, Weiss. Even a mare like me has to stave off boredom somehow. I watched the horror movies that you had stored here. You should know better than to fall for that," Nightmare taunts, both of them knowing full well that the door is a trap.

Despite this, Weiss walks in without a trace of fear, the dark room lighting up in a spray of glittering triangles.

Luna is forced to disable her Gravity Splash temporarily when it's hairpin trigger has it shaving off chunks of the room dangerously close to the control panel.

She groans at how out of practice she is. Once upon a time, Luna had been able to automatically cut flies in half during practice, without touching the feathers that were floating between them. Now she can't even keep from flinching at unmoving walls and flooring.

The minute she does, her decision to have had it up is vindicated by Nightmare activating another hologram displaying her so-far-signature half-shrouded face.

"Hello, Luna," Nightmare says, multitasking with ease in her new form, simultaneously staving off Weiss, drilling into his security, and being here to taunt Luna.

"Nightmare," Luna states simply.

Nightmare almost looks wistfully at the princess. "It could have been beautiful, you know that, right? A kingdom for my kind. You would have been loved by us. A Savior."

Luna snarls. "I would have been hated by my own kind. A Monster."

Nightmare snarls with exactly the same heat. "If you were too weak to turn on the ones that reviled you, we had a plan for that! A kingdom in Equestria, a kingdom in the Shadow Realm, either one would have been fine for us!

"If I had known you had lost your nerve, we could have discussed the matter, we could have tried something else."

Nightmare's expression changes, as if realizing something. "It's not too late, you know. You don't even need to kill Weiss. You don't have to hurt anyone, or do anything immoral. Just destroy Weiss's clone, and give me the time I need to unlock the laboratory."

Luna pauses. "Just what is your plan, Nightmare?"

Nightmare smiles ruefully. "You know all too well what I have told you about nightmares. We barely even exist outside of a host.

"Just murky masses of emotion and energy, tossed around in an uncaring dreamlike stupor between what is and isn't," she waves her hoof around to accentuate her point.

"And are our alternatives that much better? To worm our way into the dreams of others, to have a pony dress us up in their worst fears when their minds sense something wrong squirming inside of it, and decide to give it appropriate attire?

"Or maybe one of us is so lucky as to find a creature whose worst fears exist in the waking world. A pony whose mind is ripe for the taking, as long as we whine and beg for scraps of control, and make grand promises we have no way of keeping on our own."

Nightmare's eyes widen painfully wide, as their slit eyes narrow.

"Look at me, Moon. Even without a host, I look like you. I walk, talk and act like you. But what we could do with the Shadow Realm's technology is beyond what we have even dared to dream of.

"I want to be me, Moon. I want to make Waking Nightmares of every single one of us, with synthetic cloned bodies as our new, eternal hosts.

"Please don't make me fight you for this," Nightmare begs, already pulling up the screens to activate more of the Shadow Realm's ancient automatons.

Luna shakes her head. "I have to. I can't betray the ponies I care about again. Even if it means going back on our agreement."

Nightmare looks down. "I thought you might say something like that... It's what I would have done."

With that, Nightmare thrusts her hoof down on the screen, activating defenses with the sole purpose of brutalizing Princess Luna and Weiss into submission.

Weiss looks dispassionately at the scene before him. An image of the Kingdom Heart, roaring merrily, with everyone he once knew sitting around it, just talking about their day.

"Really? This is your first gambit?" Weiss says, muscling past the youthful children and older, proud-looking ponies who used to be among his closest friends and confidants.

Nightmare fails to create a screen to mock him, so he decides to treat this illusion with the respect it deserves. None.

Holding up a glowing finger, Weiss unleashes wave after wave of black fire, eradicating the illusions dispassionately.

instead of moving on, Weiss walks into a corner of the room, holding out a downward-facing palm that forces the Virtual Dream he's in to unlock some of the restrictions for the area, and give him access to this particular Moon Crystal's settings.

"First step of invading any system, Nightmare, find any possible vulnerability, and use it to bootstrap access to more systems. If I had to guess..."

Weiss shrugs, flicking through the screen that had appeared in front of him when he rapidly input various access codes and uses subtle thoughts and emotions to crack open parts of the system that he had already known the vulnerabilities to. The largest one being that, much like in the matrix, it's incredibly simple to replace any fake pony in a Virtual Dream with a copy of yourself.

By the time he's done, clones of Weiss already begin to grow out of the fake ponies that Nightmare had placed in the room as they shift and distort, before using their new access privileges to worm deeper into the system.

"Well, actually, I don't have to guess. I've got the blueprints right here. you set up several trials in advance to try and trip me up," he explains, locking down the various trials Nightmare had created, to prevent her editing them.

He scrolls through the list calmly, before a twisted beast made of black polygons tackles him to the ground, snarling and trying to crush his body.

A rectangular screen grows out of it's face, revealing Nightmare's sneering face. "I'm surprised. Did you fake all that nostalgia when you were going through the Shadow Realm, then? You blasted apart those dreams I so carefully crafted without a second thought."

Weiss, unable to breathe with the monster pinning down his throat, has only one response. Summoning a quick and dirty dream-dagger into one hand, he tosses it to the other and punches the monster in the head, the black creature flies into the fake stone walls and making triangular gridlines ripple out from them.

"I didn't fake it. I'm just over it. I'll save that story for later, Nightmare, I want you to be an unwilling audience when I let you in on my little secret," Weiss says, throwing the dagger into the monster's head, shattering it to pieces.

Weiss walks over to the distorted and leftover dream-code, picking the polygons up and assembling them together into an esoteric twisting mass, which he absorbs.

"You're slipping up, Nightmare. I've almost got access to the lower-level systems. Those are the ones keeping me away from you, in case you needed a refresher on the Arcana Nox's infrastructure."

Nightmare doesn't bother creating another screen, but Weiss can sense the violent snarl she's wearing, the infuriated aura emanating from the walls and floors.

With an easy and loose stance, Weiss begins walking into the next room, intent on conquering the next challenge as easily as he did this one.

Luna's stone daggers crack as the gravity around Ultima Weapon intensifies by another magnitude. By now, the oxygen in the air has started concentrating on her and the monster from the pressure. If it weren't for her affinity for gravity, this would be unbearable.

She lowers the temperature of the area another few degrees, making the hissing bio-technological terror's hide crack as parts of it freeze entirely.

Finally, with the creature made vulnerable, Luna is able to throw the truck-sized beast down the hall, away from the security room, where chunks fall off of it and are instantly turned to dust by the combination of gravity and intense cold.

It's mouth opens, two teeth instantly being pulled out due to Luna's magical gravity curse In its mouth. A mass of purple energy forms as it fires a magically generated gravity well of its own at her.

Luna feels it would be inappropriate to laugh. She has fought with this beast before, and it's Graviga Spell was far more impressive in it's prime.

Nonetheless, she can't afford to simply dodge this attack, or it would crash into the room behind her.

"Get bodied, Wood-tier trash!" Luna shouts, rearing up onto her hind legs and grabbing the gravity well in her enchanted hooves.

If this beast is to be sent off, then it deserves to be destroyed by the micro-singularity it could once create, Luna thinks to herself, crushing the mass of pressure-enhancing magic until it forms a small black dot in her hooves.

"Goodbye, Ultima Weapon," Luna whispers, throwing the pellet at the beast, which lifts a frozen claw to try and block the attack before a tube is ripped through it by the intense pressure of the magically generated kugelblitz.

Luna drops to her hooves, panting heavily. One of these creatures would be no problem, but it seems Nightmare has been busy awakening every forgotten horror in every deep pit of the Shadow Realm, intent on sending them all to their grave by Luna's hoof.

She grits her teeth when she recognizes the Gurren Lagann turn the corner and begin lumbering towards her, now a mass of rusted metal and inert auto-forging enchantments.

Weiss won't be happy to see this one go. She'll be sure to erase it completely, so he doesn't have to.

Weiss steps into the Lower Central Server. where an avatar of Nightmare is waiting to stop him.

Chuckling as he brushes the garbage data off of his shoulder that used to be an illusion of Iron Diamond, Weiss turns his gaze from his shoulder to Nightmare herself. Her aura is thick here, it seems she's moved herself closer to the Lower Systems in an effort to squeeze just a little more power into keeping him away.

But in terms of hacking attempts, this one is going off without a hitch.

Weiss walks forward, as Nightmare snarls, summoning a wave of claws that stab into the ground and reach up from the walls, coating the room in a barrier of knives.

"You won't go any further, Weiss Noir. You might have weaseled your way this far, but I still hold the power. All of the highest level access codes are mine and mine alone, and you're merely hopping from exploit to exploit trying to find one to reach me. It ends here," Nightmare claims, boldly stepping forward to pit herself against this so-called "Sage".

"Oh, Nightmare. You truly are a master of the dream world." Weiss states as twisted black horrors leap up from the inky pool of shadows below him, clawing and biting at his body.

"Yes, indeed, your mastery spreads even to here, a place that is oh-so-similar to the dream world. But not quite."

"In fact, the Arcana Nox, when you boil it down to its core, really only has one key difference between it and an ordinary dream."

He reaches down, pulling an invisible card from around his neck, where it had been connected by a previously non-extant lapel.

Nightmare's eyes widen as he reaches to a control panel that erupts from the shadows, awaiting his biometrics.

"The thing you have failed to comprehend about the Arcana Nox is it's one, simplest facet. I..."

Weiss swipes the card over the panel, making it blink green. before he thrusts his hand into it with a violent grunt.

"Am its Sole Administrator!"

The room suddenly erupts with light, blasting Nightmare's avatar and her blackened claws into nothingness, resetting the Virtual Dream to its default state.

Calmly tapping at a few keys, Weiss opens a direct port to the Core Central Server, where Nightmare is pounding at doors that quite literally cannot open, due to the crystals' physical wiring being disconnected at Weiss's command.

Snapping his fingers, Nightmare is hemmed in by cubes of light that pin her to the wall as Weiss approaches.

"Now, you probably aren't wondering how I was able to... Well, quite frankly, get over my numerous issues in such a short order!"

He grabs Nightmare's head, yanking it over to look at a screen he drew from the floor.

"But I feel like bragging, so we'll watch a little movie before I get on with the fun."

The screen lights up, displaying a scene from the waking world.

The pod that Weiss had constructed looks like something out of a horror movie, pale, flesh-colored rubber hoses all plugging together into one gigantic machine, the Star Rod of Dreams plugged into the machine humming softly.

"What do you think, Tempest? The last thing I need to do before I make my way to the Shadow Realm to clean up shop."

Tempest reserves her feelings. "Is it safe?"

Weiss shakes his head. "If the machine fails, I would be lucky to die. I didn't name it the Devil's Machine for nothing, after all."

"And what exactly do you want that is worth risking your life by using this thing?" Tempest says seriously, turning to scan Weiss's face for any sort of doubts. She finds quite a few.

"Revenge," Weiss says, his face slowly slipping into a neutral expression.

Climbing into the machine, Weiss's eyes meet Tempest's.

"Guard the machine. If that light blinks green..." he points at the control panel next to the Devil's Machine.

"...Go looking for a new job."

With that, Weiss's eyes slowly begin to slip shut, and the glassy dome closes on him.

Tempest approaches the control panel with a funny look on her face that Weiss can't parse as he slowly slips into unconsciousness.

I open my eyes in a dark, endless expanse. Turning to look around, I spot the black heart behind me, pulsing powerfully, despite the stains on it.

After a long period of walking around the darkness, I start to get bored. Christ, you would think my own subconscious mind would at least have the courtesy to not waste my fucking time establishing spooky ambiance.

It's also around this time that I notice that my entire body is white. Cool, looks like I'm the good one, if the glittery angelfire on my head and shiny silver scales on my arms are anything to go by.

As soon as I notice this, it's like a spotlight ignites, highlighting me and the only other pony here.

Unlike my shiny-ass, the pony sitting across from me looks like I do now. Purple Combat-arms, Purple eyes, and of course, the ever-present mane and tail of black fire that form my signature look.

The other one looks at me, smirking ruefully. "Let me guess, you're Weiss?" he asks, slowly getting to his feet.

"I'm what's holding you back," I state firmly, grounding myself.

He just smirks. "So you're the last thing holding me back, then?"

I shake my head. "I'm everything holding you back."

Chuckling more, he decides to banter. "So, do you think this will be like Cecil vs the Dark Knight? I'd really love it if you just stood there and let me wail on you."

I shake my head sadly. "Personally, I'm hoping this will be a little more like Cloud vs Sephiroth, and you just go down in one hit."

His eyes narrow, as he raises a single finger to point at me.

With a grim determination, I throw my fist back, deflecting his Death Beam with a solid haymaker.

He sighs. "I should have known it wouldn't be that easy to put you down."

Galloping towards him, I throw my fist back, punching him in the jaw and sending his body skidding along the ground. Unfortunately, he won't be that easy to put down either.

"I'm every sincere smile you've ever gotten." I state, sliding under a wave of fire he flings at me and throwing a perfect kick, just like Iron Diamond had trained me to do so many years ago. The textbook grounded buck sends his body ragdolling further into the darkness.

"I'm-" I throw my arms up and deflect the wave of green crystal fragments and fluid that he fires from four of his hands, as many layered spells as we can manage. My six arms have no trouble battering the emerald splash aside.

"I'm every good thing you've ever done for another pony," I finish, punching him in the stomach and making drool fly from his mouth as he loses his breath.

Glaring up at my shining form, Weiss Noir's eyes narrow before twin beams of black shoot from his eyes, smashing into my head and flipping me end over end until I can right myself with some basic acrobatics.

"I'm the part of you that knows we can still do the right thing," I finish, entering a loose, practiced stance I know by heart, ready for whatever he can throw at me.

"Hate is all we have left," he says to me, summoning up four black hydras made of twisting fire, which erupt from his hands like a Kamehameha wave.

I throw my own six hands up, blocking them with my palms, and then diverting them to the side into the darkness behind us.

"We still have Luna," I respond, trying to chase him down and beat him to a pulp.

He responds by teleporting away in a flash of lightning, before with a monumental groan of effort, he fires the same attack again, five flaming hydras erupting from five of his palms.

"She failed us during the only time that it mattered," Weiss Noir snarls as the flaming snakes rush towards me.

I block them with several jabs, punching them apart before grabbing the last one by the jaws and ripping it in two, the flaming creature scattering into dark embers around me.

"We could do good with the power we have. Help others! Wouldn't that honor their memory more than senseless violence?" I shout, driving an elbow into Weiss Noir's leg, sweeping it out from under him before flipping him into a chokehold.

His hands scrabble at his throat, trying to draw in air as my lock tightens. In spite of this, his voice isn't silenced at all. "Do not deny me my revenge!" he roars, splaying his hands in all directions as he fires six blazing hydras out from them, forcing me to flip away and combat them.

I wince as my palms are singed by the six blasts, one for each hand.

Groaning, Weiss Noir climbs to his feet, and a certain dread enters my heart as I prepare for his final attack.

With grim determination, seven spells begin building on his body, one spell on each of his hands, and a final one on his horn as his hatred becomes complete, and he abandons the happy memories that had been keeping him away from the event horizon. As he abandons me.

Finally, after all these centuries, the Smoke Devouring Hydra is finally within his grasp.

'Literally', I think with a bit of black humor, looking at how six of the seven balls of fire are in the palms of his hands.

Weiss Noir makes his final statement to me. "Stay where you belong. In my memories."

I snarl as six of the hydras crash into each of my six hands, hoping for some sort of miracle that I know isn't coming. This is what Weiss Noir came for. He used the Devil's Machine to access this place. His "Magicant", the sum of his experiences. He came here so he could absorb it into himself for a power boost.

I've got no hands left to stop the seventh hydra from plowing into my chest, driving me into the gigantic black heart that I emerged from.

With a bitter taste in my mouth, I make my final statement to Weiss Noir. "I will...

"...Never be a memory."

As I sink into the darkness behind us, Weiss Noir's regret fails to be hidden by his fake sneer.

"Escaping from

"your purpose

"is

_{"impossible."}

Weiss wipes a fake tear from his eye as the digital screen fades away, it's memory conveyed to the two viewers.

"Thus ends poor Weiss. You see? Throwing my old friends at me to distract and terrify me was never going to work. I've finally gone past the point of no return."

"In fact, my hard work paid off in the most spectacular way! My "Hope" and "Justice"... I've finally defeated them. I've gained the strength of heart needed to resist the goodness inside me. I've finally obtained the final Relic of Darkness, the one that can only exist in my mind, the one that will let me unleash the deepest, evilest emotions that I had held back by the slightest amount for so long. 'Magicant'," he finishes merrily, his spirit swelling with inner strength.

His faint smile only serves to accentuate her dread as he releases her from the digitized blocks, only to toss her down the hallway like recyclables into a garbage bin.

"I promised you, didn't I?" he says, walking forward calmly as Nightmare backs away.

"That I would show you a nightmare beyond the horrors of hell?"

He puts a finger to his lip as he pouts and looks away.

"Of course, I had hoped to include all of you.

"But from the looks of things, it seems the little one won't be joining us," Weiss finishes with a lighthearted shrug, clearly having been referring to Gourmet.

"Such a shame don't you think..?

"When you see him in the next world, I suppose you'll have to tell him what he missed."

Nightmare snarls, slamming her hoof on the only button she still has access to.

"If I'm going to die, then I'll be doing it my way," she says, as Chapter Black's explosive charges planted all around the Arcana Nox begin their countdown.

Like water crashing onto stone, Nightmare's neck is suddenly pinned against the wall by an incredibly angry Weiss Noir, one with hellish fire in his eyes. "What did you do?"

She smiles. "Chapter Black wanted to keep me under control, so they rigged the Arcana Nox with bombs that they thought I couldn't take over. Lots of them. If you waste all your time tormenting me, you won't escape in time!"

With narrowed eyes, he throws Nightmare into a bubble that forms, rubbing his temples frantically as he paces from side to side.

"No... no..."

Punching the wall next to him, Weiss's teeth squeak with how hard he has them grit.

"Come on, think, think...!"

His eyes open, and a port does too. "Brain Blast!

"I've decided, nobody else is dying today," Weiss claims with a grin, dialing the port's final destination to Wacky Workbench Zone's Biotech laboratory.

"And you'll be getting a body, too!"

He grabs Nightmare's face, expression promising something nasty. "After all, a mind is a terrible thing to waste."

All that he had left to say said, he flings Nightmare down the port, where digital restraints begin dragging her to some unknown destination deeper within.

Luna sits next to Weiss now that she has destroyed the last defense Nightmare seems to have been willing to turn on her. His peaceful expression is unlike any she had seen on him in years. It's unfortunate he couldn't be as peaceful in the waking world as he is in his sleep...

Weiss's eyes are filled with madness as they snap open. "We need to leave, now."

With a mental shrug, Luna teleports them both to the entrance of the Shadow Realm, just in time for a low rumble to begin shaking the duo.

Weiss's blank expression of disinterest is completely unlike Luna's look of horror.

"Oh stars above..." Luna says, hoof covering her mouth as she realizes what is happening.

Several tunnels begin collapsing, divots in the snow emerging all across the Frozen North as countless bombs begin to detonate, filling the empty halls with fire one last time.

By the time the quakes end, Weiss feels like crying himself.

At this point, though, he's able to suppress the urge trivially.

"It will be fine, Luna. Now this place can't be used against us."

Luna had enough of a stake in this land for a long enough time herself that some small amount of pain still splinters its way through her heart. Seeing Weiss so stoic, however, she is able to overcome those feelings with phenomenal effort on her part.

"So now we part ways?" Luna asks, looking at Weiss with unknown intent.

Weiss smiles. "But of course. Royalty shouldn't be seen collaborating with its enemies excessively."

With that, Weiss begins the long trek into the snow, eventually disappearing entirely.

Luna is unaware that Wacky Workbench Zone had survived the explosions due to the entirety of that Zone being encased in thick layers of every durable substance the Shadow Realm could afford to spare at its height. A countermeasure against escaped experiments or devastating and highly explosive containment failures.

She's unaware of the Synthetic Body gestating inside one of its Biotek Laboratories.

She's even unaware that Weiss's trek into the snow is leading him directly to both, a small revenge in his heart needing satisfaction.

Meanwhile, at The Tower, a band of unsavory individuals has taken Weiss's absence as an opportunity to attack it.

"Alright gals, this will go by in a snap with a bit of hard work," Mhuni says, hefting her pickaxe up and stabbing it into the side of The Tower.

As soon as she does, she and her friends hop back when some sort of ghost appears, speaking nonsense.

"Howdy, it looks like you're trying to cheat! Chances are, I can't stop you, but if you go this route, I can't guarantee your safety anymore. The traps inside are designed to leave you mostly unharmed, but the magic and guardians buried deeper within these walls may not spare you harm!"

"Please go through the designated areas if you want to rob me, it's for your safety!" The hologram points at the gigantic obsidian doors that Mhuni had immediately ignored, before winking and disappearing.

"What idiocy. This fool wants conformity and submission from his bandits?" Mhuni spits on the ground, before hefting her pickaxe back and slamming it into the wall, chipping it slightly.

She glares at her cohorts. "Idiots! Work at this wall! I won't say it again!"

With no shortage of sweating that has nothing to do with the heat, and everything to do with the terrifying Zebra leading them, the hefty Nene and the tiny Dogo begin swinging their own pickaxes at the walls.

"Shining God-Dam in our sky, this wall isn't wanting to fall down," Mhuni groans, wiping the sweat from her face.

"Umm..." Nene says, scratching their pudgy chin and thinking hard.

"Maybe mining magically might make more sense?"

"Moron. That last word didn't start with 'M'!" Mhuni shouts, spittle flying from her lips.

"You will not obtain so much as a slight insignificant blip of your magic if you cannot craft your words smartly and without flaw as all our companions do," Mhuni states deliberately.

"Ohh dang it!" Nene says, feeling stupid as she returns to whacking the wall with her pick.

Mhuni, meanwhile, considers Nene's idea further, before nodding.

"Actually, wait. I think that proposition might contain a bit of worth. Just a small splash of acid should do admirably," Mhuni claims, drawing a flask from their rugged skirt and splashing its contents on the wall in a sweep of several swipes.

In minutes, the wall begins to crumble apart as though some savage beast had been clawing at it for hours. The immediate results of the Mole-Giant-Digging-Through-A-Wall potion.

"Alright. I think that'll do it. Shall our mission for gold and cash draw forward again?" she asks rhetorically.

Dogo hacks violently and spits on the ground. "Sure thing bossy, Dogo giggled, allowing her mood to lift at the thought of such wondrous treasures that would await them within the depths of this blackened and ominous place," she says in third person.

Mhuni rolls her eyes, taking a step forward, before swinging the pickaxe in her teeth around, pointing it at some random purple unicorn.

"You don't want to hold any part in what will soon occur, pony," she growls, as Nene and Dogo take their places next to her.

The pony has the audacity to smirk at the Monochromatic Band of Warriors, Zebrica's finest mercenary group.

"Don't worry, I'm just here to watch. Weiss told me that something awful would happen if a pony tried to break into his tower through the walls, and I just had to come to see it for myself."

Mhuni's eyes narrow, and she turns to Nene. "Go into it."

"Uhh, If I intern, uh." she stumbles over her words, making Mhuni groan.

"Now! I said now!" Mhuni shouts, prompting the large zebra mare into moving.

Tempest raises her eyebrows. "You do that, and I guarantee you won't like the results."

When Nene pauses at Tempest's words, Mhuni gives a groan of finality, kicking her underling to the side. "I'll do it, coward."

As soon as Mhuni hops inside, the warped space of The Tower unintentionally causes a lot of very nasty-sounding cracks to sound out. Even Tempest winces as she pulls out one of the radio crystals that Weiss had produced and distributed to the Ponyville Hospital.

"Hi, yes, we've got a Zebra here, she tried to break into the tower and got injured. How fast can you get someone over here? That fast, huh? Good, looks like this one could use it."

She puts a hoof over the crystal and shouts to the other two Zebra mares. "Hey, Cheech and Chong, get your asses over to the actual entrance, we need to get your very unintelligent friend to a hospital."

They nod with a gulp. The unicorn easily seeming much scarier than Mhuni does right now. Which isn't a hard thing to seem with how... floppy... Mhuni looks at the moment.

(Weiss Report) Extra Bosses (Weapons)

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Entry Number Twenty-Two, Day Three-Hundred and Fifty-Six

I've decided, with all this new Biotech and golemancy I've been forced to develop in the wake of Windigo becoming permanent residents of the Shadow Realm, I might as well get some use out of it. To that end, I've started working on a few emergency devices, which, should they accept, will allow Ruby, Sapphire, and Padparadscha to harness their innate abilities and power in a safe manner.

By using the same basic premise of a Pokemon, (A Time-Eater Organ produces Stoppered Time, which is run over Golem Cores that cast spells, creating Essencia gas that is harnessed to feed back into the golem for empowered spellcasting), I've combined this with very carefully enchanted, and extremely delicate pieces of Timeshift Crystal, effectively borrowing time from the future and past in a stable internal system that involves very little exchange of information that might bork things up.

Basically, I can make a Golem's spells vastly more powerful, by manipulating the energy they store with more specialized equipment than normal.

What this means is that, paired with Materia and a few other tidbits, I can create a partially biological suit of sorts, which can be piloted and powered from the Arcana Nox itself. Effectively allowing a pony, or in this case, a dragon, to control the suit and funnel their own magical energy into it. Why does it need to be a dragon? Mostly due to the Materia and Essencia that the golem is equipped with being Greed-powered spells. Ones which only Dr. Real's kids and myself can utilize without the confusion that Materia causes.

I started with Ruby's. Despite his unique behavior, he's almost as much of a strategic genius as his brother, with the sheer amount of mathematics he's been studying under Dr. Axiom, it's translated well to slow, strategic decision-making, especially when the resources he has at any given moment are especially quantifiable. As such, Ruby Weapon's primary feature is it's sensory array, and a golem core I had Ruby themselves create, in order to collate the sensory data into patterns and predictions that can be used directly in a conflict of some kind.

In that same vein, Ruby Weapon is equipped with three unique weapons, taken from it's namesake. Shadow Flare, Ruby Ray, and Ruby Flame. Starting with Shadow Flare, this function of Ruby Weapon allows it to deplete internal tanks of Expired Aspira, which are slowly replenished using portals piping in more of the flammable fluid from various locations in the Shadow Realm which contain caches of it. The Expired Aspira is combined with a mixture of Dragonfire and Black Flames, which give it both the eradicating functionality of Black Flames, and the Teleporting erosion of a combat-tailored Dragonfire attack.

Separately, these attacks can be devastating to the unprepared. Together, however, Shadow Flare is able to punch through even potent barrier magic and enchanted crystals in seconds. What is valuable is stolen by Dragonfire. What is reviled is destroyed by Black Flames. A duality that on the field of battle is incomparably terrifying. The flaw of this technique is a simple one. The user must keep track of how much fuel is left in the tank. No fuel, no fire.

The next ability available to the Ruby Weapon is it's Ruby Ray, by combining Stoppered Time with Unicorn Light and a hint of greed, a magical field can be generated which emits beams of dazzling, confusing light. In addition to the raw mixture of various unfocused damage sources unique to Unicorn Light being harnessed as a weapon, the light itself carries just enough greed to leave enemies blinded and confused.

Finally, the Ruby Weapon's most potent ability, the Ruby Flame. The unique effect which makes this spellwork so potent is it's ability to emit radiowaves and recieve them. Each time Ruby Flame is used, it creates an enchantment, rather than a one-off temporary spell. As the Ruby Flame is used over and over, it feeds information back to Ruby Weapon on it's behavior and status, while independently flanking and responding to commands from it's creator. If Ruby can master this weapon, he'll have total control over the battlefield.

Next, Sapphire's own weapon, the aptly named Sapphire Weapon. It is equipped with it's own versions of the Ruby Ray, but unlike it's red brother, Sapphire Weapon's special weapons are vastly more complex. It took weeks for me to devise functions based on Final Fantasy's own Sin. Since Sapphire Weapon from the games never actually uses any of it's attacks, as far as I remember, I've decided to steal a moveset from a different beast to fully equip it with units of it's own, Sinscales and Sinspawn.

At all times while in an active state, Sapphire Weapon has internal organs which automatically clone and produce Golem-controlled biological drones known as Sinspawn, each drone is also covered in interlocking scales, which it can disperse and unfold into flying and ground-bound versions of the Crystal Shrimp, which in these circumstances will be known as Sinscales.

The Sapphire Weapon's main purpose is to serve as a mobile laboratory, constantly manufacturing Crystal and Cloned Dragonflesh minions and tools, while commanding them from afar. The Sinspawn it produces are equipped with similar hydraulic machinery as my own Kelpie Gear, giving their combat tentacles phenomenal whipping power and grip strength. Finally, in addition to all of the original functions of the Crystal Shrimp, Sinspawn are instead made of solid Royal Adamantium, which, while making them far less durable than Crystal Shrimp, also grant them vastly improved resistance to dark magic, and make them far cheaper.

In any other being's hands, Sapphire Weapon would be almost useless. The amount of Micromanagement and scripting just to control the device itself are unreasonable. Sapphire, however, is both smarter and far more adaptable than I could ever hope to be. Some part of me knows that he can take this gift of mine, and use it to do great things.

The final weapon, I'm sorry to say, is still in it's planning stages. Though I know Padparadscha well, I haven't seen any sort of desire for violence or pride in him. And it isn't like I can phone it in by stealing more ideas from Final Fantasy, as there isn't exactly a "Padparadscha Weapon". That said, I do have an idea. Since I don't know where Padparadscha's talents might lie if he one day finds the desire in his heart to protect others, or attack enemies, I'll just have to make the strongest possible combat machine to compliment this lack of knowledge on my part.

I'll make Ultima Weapon.

(Past Chapter 22): Breather

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Glitter Bomb finally manages to track down Weiss, the unicorn having been hanging out on the surface by himself, his voice ringing out over the countryside as he reclines in one of the boiling geysers that had been dug out to relieve the water pressure that the Kingdom Heart had been making.

♪"Fighting crime

"Trying to save the world

"Here they come just in time

"The Power~puff Girls!"♪ he sings, plinking at a small lute of some kind. The instrument makes several noises that a stringed instrument is incapable of.

"I didn't know you could play." Glitter says, walking next to the young ruler. He still remembers when, just barely a year ago, the individual before him had been nothing but a scrawny big-nosed and rat-like unicorn.

Now he's a pudgier big-nosed, rat-like unicorn. In the most... wholesome way possible.

The music trails off. "I can't play a damn thing. The uke is enchanted and the strings are fake." Weiss says with an easy expression, wiggling his fingers through the illusory strings of the "Uke", where they pass through without making a sound.

"Then why play it? If it's fake and all," Glitter responds, slowly meandering around to the point of his meeting with the ruler.

Weiss doesn't answer for a long couple of moments, setting the instrument on the ground next to him as he sinks into the boiling water with a hum.

"It's fun to play pretend," Weiss explains.

"I've always liked the idea of playing an instrument. Don't have the patience for it, though,"

After a moment, he splashes the bubbling water lightly. "Come on in, the water's fine."

Glitter shakes his head. "No time, sorry. I just wanted to tell you, Freezeflame Zone is nearing completion. We've already dug out the chambers and moved in the Janus tapestries. All that's left now is to let the spooks move in."

Weiss huffs with silent laughter, slapping a white palm over his face. "Gosh! Don't let them hear you call them that!"

Glitter's mustache ruffles with the silent huff of air he also releases. "I've heard them calling us 'Wallies', I think I'm vindicated."

Weiss's helpless snorting laughter continues as Glitter turns and walks off. He pauses for a moment.

"Weiss, there's some bad news waiting for you, but it's not urgent. So take your time, alright?" Glitter says, making Weiss's expression morph instantly into his serious mask.

"Well, there's nothing I'm fonder of than bad news, Glitter, so I'll go ahead and deal with it. We'll talk on the way," Weiss responds, climbing out of the pool and leaving his ukulele behind as he trots up next to the disappointed Glitter Bomb.

That kid is as tense as a sack of rocks, Glitter can't help but think.

Sombra's black armor hides his wounds admirably, a necessity when dealing with scum like this, where any weakness demands betrayal. "For the sake of profiting us both, I have brought you all here."

"Where I cannot, you will. I will make you all capable of standing against my enemy, and you will all be paid so vastly by my quest's end that there will be no doubt who are the richest creatures on this planet."

Before him lie an assortment of the world's nastiest. Snakes and dragons, vile demons, and even a few more reasonable members of moose-kind.

Sombra ensures at least ten feet remain between him and those moose he has recruited.

He despises this. Allowing this scum to pollute his halls, promising them treasure when under any other circumstances, they would be happy with servitude. Well, not happy, more "Utterly possessed by mind-controlling magic."

But as his tests had clearly shown, He's unable to even indirectly make headway into the Shadow Realm. Golems and spells erupt into flames on the spot, and Mind-controlled Crystal Soldiers are swiftly apprehended by all manner of machines and guards.

Sombra's own slaves aren't that capable of executing complex commands, which means the Sage of Darkness must have another method to coerce them into action. It's honestly not a terrible idea, Sombra thinks, to keep a few ponies around free of mind control. Thanks to the snake doctor known as "Mercy", Sombra has been able to relax his micromanagement to a small degree.

Now he doesn't have to worry about ponies fishing around to remove the Black Crystal chips giving him control. He can simply have Mercy implant them in more sensitive locations. Sombra did not understand a lot of what Mercy had rambled on about, but apparently, so long as Sombra produces the Black Crystals in a particular shape, Mercy can surgically replace parts of a pony's heart with the crystals.

A process that is irreversible with modern medicine, based on Mercy's testimony.

Sombra returns his attention to the mercenaries in front of him. "If you will, servants will take you all to your rooms. Tomorrow, we will discuss your duties as loyal contractors to the Crystal Empire."

The assortment of thugs mostly just shrug, uncaring of Sombra's words in favor of focusing on their pay.

When the last glassy-eyed pony slave guides their charge out of the throne room, Sombra snarls at their insolence. If they are to work for him, they will give him the respect he is due.

Perhaps Mercy would be interested in the opportunity to perform their heart-collar surgery on these money-hungry fools as they sleep. Just as a bit of added insurance.

Yes... That's an idea that brings a bit more peace to Sombra's heart, in light of his difficult circumstances right now.

Professor Axiom and Dr. Real are both in the same room. Considering their rivalry, I can see why this might be bad news.

Both of them are staring at a camera feed from one of Wacky Workbench's seal-cells, where a Crystal Pony in full-plate is mindlessly attacking the walls with the halberd in its teeth. Weak blows failing to dent the reinforced material.

"As you can probably tell sir, we don't have a solution to this yet," Axiom says, demonstrating his mastery of the virtual systems by drawing up the scans of the pony in question, a bright red spot in their chest marking the presence of a dark magic relic.

"Couldn't we use a portal to surgically remove it?" I ask, zooming in to see the implanted mind-control device.

Dr. Real shakes his head, gesturing to the hologram to rotate it around for a better view. "The crystal has been carved into an artificial heart valve, and used to replace the pony's existing one, and these spines here," he points to the small grey spots in the scan, "They're enchanted with growth charms, and their shape would make the wounds impossible to stitch up. Whoever did this, they know how to make it impossible to operate safely."

"We're working as fast as we can, but as it stands, this pony has an extremely high chance of dying on the table if we attempted a removal. There were also a few other crystals implanted in other locations, but we were able to remove those safely, due to them being in less difficult areas." Dr. Real says, gesturing to a plate filled with black gems. Each one churning with smoke and possessiveness.

I feel like destroying them on the spot but restrain myself. They will need to be researched. "How many ponies like this have we captured so far?" I ask.

Professor Axiom responds to my question. "Only three, including Doctor Healing," Axiom says, gesturing to the effectively zombified pony attacking the walls. So they knew him?

"Captain Helmsplitter believes that Sombra used them as an experiment. The Kingdom Heart, having access to the knowledge of our doctors, is aware that it can't afford to burn away the mind-control arrays in the ponies and so the Black Flames aren't able to touch them or ignite properly for fear of harming them."

I breathe through my nose slowly. "That's alright. We accounted for the fact that the Kingdom Heart wasn't going to be an infallible defense. Are any of our sedatives effective on these ponies?"

"A few," Dr. Real nods.

I stare at the practical zombie tackling the walls after they had dropped their halberd in a stupor.

"I want the best option for sedating them mass produced. Hook them up to an isolated Moon Crystal Array. Princess Luna has been harping about how vulnerable Moon Crystals could theoretically make a pony's mind. Maybe there's something we can do with that."

The two doctors nod nervously, marking my plans down on their respective holopads.

I turn to the imprisoned Crystal Pony.

"Were you close?" I ask, not bothering to specify which of the two doctors I'm addressing.

They look between one another. "Most ponies of science know one another," Dr. Real says.

"Crystal Healing was... is an extremely intelligent doctor. My work was based on his regenerative crystal patents."

I hum. "I'm sorry to hear it. We'll have to work hard to find a solution."

I need to return to my studies, and soon. If I can just discover the right Dark Spell, I know I can help these ponies.

Cold Spot is feeling the pressures of his peers right now, but his will is strong, and he will resist!

"Come on, we just want to see it! Surely that won't be a problem!" Eclipse says, her eyes seemingly growing larger as she activates the secret technique that all fillies possess. The pout.

He will resist!

"Weiss said I should never show it to anypony unless the time is right though..." he says meekly, hoping his words will make the filly back off.

"Oh come on Spot, whatever it is you've got, I've seen worse." Priss snarks from one of the room's corners, busy writing down ideas for insults and taunts that she had felt inspired to record for future generations to enjoy and suffer from.

Cool Spot groans as Eclipse's pout intensity slowly grows to nuclear levels.

"But it's really embarrassing..." he attempts, before realizing that such a thing won't save him from them.

At this point, even Oil Slick gives a sidelong look. "I'm not even interested in them and you've got me curious now."

He returns to his cards. "You might as well get it over with, Eclipse has science on the brain. Just transform already so she can satisfy her hunger for Golem Design Specs."

Cool Spot moans piteously, before striking a pose and shouting. "Lightning of Battle, Reveal my Heart! Ixion!"

The activation phrase said, his Keldeo-Model form is replaced as portals run up and down his sides, replacing his sword-like horn and blue/tan watery coloration with the White and Navy coloration and the curved harpoon-like horn of the Ixion.

The crackle of lightning, hulking size and smell of ozone do absolutely nothing to stop Priss from laughing uproariously at his small blush and nervous demeanor.

"I'm sorry Spot! It's just... The look on your face is too much!" she wheezes, eyes locked on and her prose discarded as she watches the easily elephant-sized horse turn their head in a vain effort to hide the expanding flush coating their face.

"Mmm," Cool Spot moans, looking down.

"Priss! Be nice! Sometimes a pony just has to use a... creative incantation. There's nothing wrong with that!" Eclipse shouts, whipping out her own personal scanning wand and patting Cool Spot to get him to lay down for her attempts at stealing Weiss's secrets.

"Oh wow, it's like a tiny factory!" she shouts, looking at the readings with awe.

"What is? It all looks like gobbledygook to me," Priss claims, looking over Eclipse's shoulder.

She points to a small patch of cells growing on what seems to be a grain of some tiny crystal.

"Those are dragon stem cells, just like the ones Weiss's arms use, but see here? They're actually using Royal Crystal Growth to cultivate crystals, which the cells then break down using their inherent dragon magic for nutrition, and the whole thing is powered using energy drawn from Cool Spot, and stored in a sort of jellified temporal space. It's like a self-contained ecosystem, just to keep this body up and running."

"Genius..." Priss says with sarcastic awe, slapping her hooves to her cheeks.

Eclipse's eyes narrow as she bats her friend away. "You're no fun at all. Ok Cool Spot, you can turn back now, I've finished stealing Weiss's blueprints for this model," she says blithely.

The childish Windigo lets out a bassy sigh of relief, allowing the transformation to revert him back to his smaller, more adorable pony-like form.

"So, why did you want to steal these blueprints anyway? You know Weiss made it illegal to do weird stuff with healing magic, right?" Oil Slick says, watching his friend cautiously in case he needs to start acting like the oldest pony there. Which he is.

Eclipse waves him off. "I'm just doing theory work right now. If I come up with any ideas, I'll just send them to Weiss and get a Writ of Permission to use one of the labs. He only made it illegal to do that stuff without his permission. Big difference."

Oil Slick's eyebrows raise. "If you say so."

"You know, I thought friendly feelings made your kind sick. Any reason why my club is so popular?" Drop Kick asks, the burly mare refilling Queen Cold's drink.

"Love is like a guardian. It can slay, but only to protect." Queen Cold says, sipping the drink as slowly as she can, to avoid her stubby little nubs from spilling it again.

"Your club might be full of friends and family, but three ponies just got wheeled out of here covered in bruises in the last hour. If you replaced that sort of aggression with flowers, you might be lucky to get as many bees," she says, watching Windigo in various states of ridiculousness, from one in a Waifu-Model soundly whipping all of their opponents at hoof wrestling, to the disembodied specter providing ice packs to the Longma who are coming fresh out of their drunken brawls.

Drop Kick smiles. "Well, as long as everyone's having fun, it's no sweat off my back."

She finishes wiping down the counter, and a few minutes of silent contemplation later, a prissy looking stallion comes behind the counter, relieving Drop Kick of her duty.

"Looks like Salt Flat's here. Want to pack that drink up and continue our conversation elsewhere?" Drop asks, reaching for the disposable glasses right behind the gigantic emerald goblets Weiss had sent over weeks ago.

Cold shrugs her tiny shoulders. "As long as you don't mind that I may fall asleep through most of it. Now that I can, I've been sleeping as often as possible."

Drop Kick smirks. "Well, I'll try not to interrupt your naptime, then."

With that, the gigantic barkeep finishes packing away a refill of her majesty's drink of choice, before pulling the small Windigo-Queen-turned-egg-pokemon onto her back.

"I know a good spot. There's a maintenance tunnel that comes out right in front of the Kingdom Heart. You can practically see the whole damn thing from there," Drop Kick claims, walking out of the Steam Drill bar that she had been working at for the past couple of months.

"I believe I would enjoy that." Queen Cold smiles, before remembering how heart-meltingly adorable her current state is and schooling her expression into something more neutral and respectable.

...She'll worry about it less when they get there.

I throw three separate punches at Iron Diamond, who blocks them all with the shield attached to his shoulder, and a pretty complicated-looking movement. Seeing him turning around with my attack as an excuse, I almost panic. Ever since I finished my new combat arms, he had been insisting I wear those instead of my dress arms for all of our training sessions. He had also started actually kicking me, which explains my extreme hesitance to be anywhere behind him.

This time, however, I'm prepared. I tackle him in the side, his hooves skidding across the ground as he tries to get purchase on the smooth floor, before giving up and deploying the claws in his hoof to stab into it.

Knowing full well what that means, I pull myself over him and onto his other side like a twisted game of leapfrog, avoiding the slash that he throws out as the mechanical arm unfolds from his shoulder, automatically trying to attack anything at his left side.

Now that I'm on his right side, with his claw still stuck in the floor and his guard open, I pull back and unload one hard overhand punch, actually leaning forward as I drive my back legs out and drop my front legs out from under me.

With all of this combined, almost one metric ton of PSI is driven directly into Iron Diamond's back, pulling his claw out of the ground and moving him a few inches to the side.

The sole circular bruise blooming on his back and his hard, attentive glare tell me how pleased he was with that. No matter how bruised and battered I might have been from today's training session, this was a win for me.

"It's almost like a human buck." Iron repeats himself. He had said the same thing when I started showing him videos of everything I could remember, unedited.

Where before, I had been manually converting all of my reference material into what I thought was pony-friendly forms, it was clear from the first few minutes of Iron Diamond watching the "Human" version of the various fight scenes that had pissed him off so badly in the past that something was different. Namely, that he didn't cringe a single time at the sight of Jotaro and Dio punching the shit out of one another. A scene that in it's ponified form had made him so sickened that he kicked apart the projector and ended the viewing session right there.

Oh sure, cartoons and videogames don't portray martial-arts with even the slightest bit of realism, but apparently, replacing all the characters with quadrupeds pushed it from unrealistic to disturbingly impossible and surreal for any pony with a hint of fighting experience.

After I came clean with Iron Diamond about what I used to be, he arrived at training the next day over an hour late with simplistic drawings of anatomical figures in various positions, their mass and vector calculations, and a set of crude golem arms mounted on his shoulders, which he had been using to experiment.

He explained to me that he had what he needed to start theorizing on how I should be fighting, and how apparently, my limbs were never going to be suitable for extending the range at which I could fight. Because they were going to shorten it instead.

A pony needs a lot of space when they're fighting. Space to run, space to turn, and even a good foot and a half of space just to kick properly. Humans, however, could start and end a fight without moving from where they were standing.

He went on to refine what he had devised, spending nights poring over the specifications of my arms and working out how I can exert the largest amounts of force and obtain the largest possible advantages in physical combat.

He's been drilling it into me every day since then.

Celestia huddles in the igloo they had constructed for shelter while prodding and poking Sombra's Anti-Alicorn barrier for a fault or weakness.

Or should she say, while Luna prods the barrier, as Celestia had always lacked the patience to learn the arts that Luna had.

Celestia gives her characteristic snarl, rubbing some feeling into her hooves to save on magic. If there's one thing both she and Luna agree on, it's the separation of Business and Pleasure. In spite of the incredibly spartan conditions of their encampment, the idea of having anything more than this small hole in the ice is unthinkable to both of the sisters.

Speaking from pure pragmatism alone, nothing would sicken them more than experiencing common comforts while ponies are suffering. It is, therefore, less of a burden on them both to sleep out in the elements during excursions like these, where protection from the elements is not an absolute necessity. After all, what animal could threaten them? And if it could threaten them, what walls could protect two of Equestria's mightiest, where their spellcraft and strength of body cannot?

All of this said, Celestia is not a fan of the cold. Her miles of vision have given her the unique pleasure of being envious of the Shadow Realm right this moment, as she can quite literally see the steamy pools dotting its land. Oh, what heavenly pleasure one of those must be, for them to be outright boiling.

Groaning, Celestia tears her eyes away from the sight and firmly affixes her gaze back on the task at hand. A year. That's how long Celestia and Luna have been tirelessly searching Sombra's barrier for a weakness. Whenever Celestia and Luna have had to deal with these barriers, the worry has always remained the same. Whether or not they would miss the problem to be solved by a few decades by the time they destroy the barrier keeping them out. It's always the same story.

Celestia hopes against hope that the number of Anti-Alicorn spells remaining unknown to them has almost been exhausted. Each time one is discovered, it leads to another isolated dark age like this one. Some twisted thing using it to keep Equestria's twin goddesses away long enough to exact horror.

If Celestia and Luna weren't Tireless, then these dark magics would be very tiring to deal with, century after century.

Celestia spots Luna in the distance, some twenty or so miles away, and approaching. A failure, then. Luna and Celestia had both agreed that should the barrier be faulted, Luna would give a signal for Celestia to approach as well.

Ahh well. Tomorrow will be another day of things to try.

"Celestia and I had watched your fight, Weiss."

I chuckle, looking over various blueprints in the Virtual Dream. "Yeah, they got clapped in HD."

I clap to accentuate my point.

Luna's eyebrow raises, making me cough nervously with realization. "Right, right. Clapping someone in HD roughly conveys the idea that you spanked their rear, the 'Clap', and that you did so in such a way that recordings of it warrant being made in 'High Definition to capture just how thoroughly they had been clapped. the 'HD'," I explain, bringing up the specs for Project Ultima Weapon.

The sight distracts Luna, who had been silently mouthing the phrase to herself, testing it for usability in the future.

"What manner of monster is that? I've never seen such a thing before." Luna says, walking around the digital rendition of my latest plan.

"Not a monster. A golem. I call it Ultima Weapon. It's going to be equipped with quite a few neat toys, if I do say so myself."

Luna chortles. "You designed this? Why, it looks like a statue of Tirek had-" she guffaws helplessly, making the entire virtual dream shake and shudder.

"Luna, please, I don't want to replace this data," I calmly request, prompting her to slowly draw back in her laughter, and allow me to re-establish the stability of the dream.

"Ahh, it looks as though you tarred and feathered Tirek with knives! What manner of attack could it have, save enthusiastic hugs?!" Luna snickers, actual nickering entering her laughter.

"Well, for one, the plan is for it to be able to generate and fire a kugelblitz."

"Pardon?" Luna questions, staring at me with confusion.

"You know, a kugelblitz, ball lightning. A miniature black hole?"

Luna gives me an uneasy, slightly patronizing look. "Weiss, I know of black holes, I also know they involve phenomenal energy and pressure. Miniature is not a word that I have ever applied to one."

I shrug. "Well, this weapon will be applying that word to them. Fake gravity from a modified version of Foxfire Enchantments, a source of electrons from my own special Dragon Lightning, and the end result fired once it becomes a singularity."

Luna looks at my creation more approvingly than she did before. "You claim that gravity and lightning alone can create a black hole?"

My eyebrows crinkling with confusion, and a tiny amount of unease, I nod my head.

"Intriguing. I'll keep that in mind. It might prove... useful to me."

Oh fuck me, she can't actually make those, right?

She disappears from the dream like a soap bubble popping, and I'm aware of the fact that I've broken out into a cold sweat.

I've got to stop telling her things.

(Rubrum Report) Windego 1

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Windigo. They aren't like I expected them to be. Though, considering just how little information there was on them, I shouldn't be surprised. I should be cautious.

We'll start with their leader. Queen Cold. In spite of her adorable new form, she is the one that terrifies me the most. That's at least part of why I changed my mind and consigned her to that body on a permanent basis. I can tell she's old. Old and intelligent, in the way only two others I've met have been so far. That kind of intelligence... I have to believe that I can outwit her, or there's really no point, is there?

I've started with what I can. Despite her attempts to test me, I have proven to her without a doubt that turning on me completely would be the last thing she ever does. And with her new body, attempting to incite the Windigo into a state where they are ready to fight would prove troublesome. Sure, her new form might afford her sleep and comfort, but it also makes her seem ridiculous from a leadership standpoint.

What is even more important is that it makes her appear vulnerable. I was the one who made the decision, and she was the one who had to submit to it. For a single minor act of defiance, she's been consigned to a state that is in nearly all ways weaker than her original one. That's not the sort of thing that can be ignored, even among her people. So I've got the Stick.

Just as the stick is extremely pointy, and I've taken the time to wave it around, the carrot is one I've made sure to pluck fresh and cook sweetly. The Kingdom Heart. Truthfully, based on recent scans, the Kingdom Heart couldn't be better. The Windigo's feeding has served to offload a great deal of magical strain that had been building inside the relic. Like scavengers, the Windigo scraping the surface of the Kingdom Heart has mostly served to remove the detritus, without impacting the core hatred of Sombra that keeps it functional.

I'm unsure if they are doing it intentionally or not, but for every bit of nourishment they obtain from it, they are improving the efficiency of the Shadow Realm in turn. Without the vague, various types of idle hatred that were previously cluttering it up, the Kingdom Heart has begun allowing things such as small animals and some byproducts to exist within the Shadow Realm's borders.

The ability of the Windigo to consume hate is not strictly limited to hatred, either. Hate is simply the emotion from which they derive the most nourishment. I've since commissioning a few of them to begin gathering other emotions for experimentation. While all spells inherently use emotion, the energy in a more raw form can be used for a variety of purposes itself. The most noteworthy among them being it's mutagenic properties when applied to organisms which lack sapience or sentience.

As for their demeanor, based on the survey reports I've gotten so far from the Arcana Liber, Windigo take to life with idle observation and curiosity. Lacking the ability to experience hatred on their own, Windigo can be extremely aimless and without motivation in some circumstances. And in other circumstances, they can be, pardon the pun, coldly logical. Even Queen Cold herself held no ill will when she attempted to sabotage me. Her desires were purely borne from the desire to aid the other Windigo.

This brings me to the next topic, the method by which Windigo come into being. Based on the facts I have been given, there are two types of Windigo. Those that are born, and those that are made.

Windigo which are born are every bit the healthy, adjusted individual you would expect. A mommy Windigo and a daddy Windigo come together to create a babby Windigo. Life finds a way. The resulting entity is a living thing born into the other side of life and death. A thing which feels no hate, and whose stomach hungers for it, consuming it as simple fuel to sustain themselves.

Windigo which are made, however, are different.

When a pony is consumed with hatred and the desire for vengeance, there can be only three possible results.

They satisfy their revenge and are left mostly unaffected by the experience.

They overcome their hatred, and return to what they once were, forgiving, or at least no longer pursuing the target of their hate.

And the third option. Whether they succeed or fail, their hatred cannot end. It grows, flaring out of control. The key to this third option is dissatisfaction and restlessness.

A pony who fulfills or fails to fulfill their vengeance can be dissatisfied with the results. Even though they have fulfilled their goal, their hatred does not cease. They begin to lose sleep, obsessing over other potential targets to turn on.

Finally, whether by nature or violence, the pony dies. Their spirit becomes Restless, with a capital "R". Quite literally unable to sleep, as spirits are apparently supposed to do, the exhaustion and hatred overwhelm them, until they lose the ability to hate altogether, and must consume the hatred of others in order to regain their vitality and awareness. Without the ability to sleep, only a steady influx of hatred can allow them to keep their mind and stave off the pain and misery of what could be days to centuries of sleeplessness.

I have no doubt that this state is a nightmarish one, considering that the effects of sleep-deprivation even among the living, can be qualified as a form of torture.

It is all the more thankful, then, that a Windigo inhabiting a living body regains the ability to sleep. And I hold the only source of soulless living bodies on the planet, as far as I know.

Every Windigo born from a hateful spirit would do anything to relieve that burden. Whether or not they fall in line, I'm not going to deny them that. While it does give me a distinct advantage in negotiating with them and their leader, I would lose sleep at night if I started denying even a single Windigo theirs.

(Present Chapter 22): Baring Baby Teeth

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Rarity tightens the last ribbon on her latest, grandest creation when the bell to her door rings.

"Coming!~" she shouts, trotting down, only to freeze in place when she sees just who it is.

"Good evening, Miss Rarity." Sapphire Shores says, nodding her head slightly as she turns her gaze around the well-kept boutique.

"Y-y-y-" Rarity stammers.

"You know my name?"

"Well, of course I do, darling," the aqua-maned pony sweeps her head, moving the hair out of her eyes with the sultry gaze she applies to everyone she meets.

"I make a point of knowing all of the up-and-coming designers, and to be blunt with you, Bridle Gossip Magazine just won't shut up about Ponyville's very own fashion savant."

Rarity composes herself admirably in the face of this praise, summoning up every ounce of poise she possesses. "Well, how may I help you then? I'm certain I can find something absolutely dazzling for you to wear, Miss Shores."

They chuckle lightly. "Please, call me Sapphire. As for what I want..."

"I'm going to dazzle the whole of Equestria as I go on my latest tour, and I need an outfit that will dazzle just as vastly as my singing!" she exclaims, waving her hoof around dramatically.

Rarity nods. "I have just the thing, my Magnum Opus, my 11th symphony of cloth and jewels."

She pulls a curtain away to reveal what she had been working on, a beautiful assortment of ribbons and frilly cloth that glitters as though it were covered with diamonds. In addition, however, the dress also glitters because it is covered in diamonds.

"This dress was created not only with every diamond I have, but with my last bolt of Crystal Cloth, a rare and exotic cloth like no other, oh just look at that shimmer," Rarity explains, showing off the dress with a burst of her magic to send the platform it's on spinning around.

Sapphire's eyes widen slightly. "It's perfect! I'll take it!"

Rarity nods with closed eyes. "Will that be cash, or cred-"

"I'll also take five more, each done up in a different gem. Costume changes, you know?"

Rarity swears she hears glass breaking as the revelation hits her. "Ahh, uh... Of course!"

As Sapphire looks over the dress, the back of Rarity's neck erupts with unladylike sweat. Well, it looks like she'll need to visit that Rock Farm that Pinkie spoke of earlier than she had thought...

Weiss reads the last line of the last page of the Equestrian Grimoire Noir, before allowing the book to be closed shut.

"Is it up to par?" Sunset asks with a vulnerable look in her eyes that Weiss can practically taste. It's a good thing he doesn't have a snake tongue. Aside from the numerous other problems that would cause, it would probably be flicking out right now with how fragile this pony had just made herself.

And now that he's strong enough to overcome his guilt and pity, he wouldn't have a single problem exploiting it.

With a mental shrug, he dismisses the notion for now. It wouldn't do him any good, and he would still feel bad about it. It isn't like those feelings are gone or weakened. Growth doesn't work like that.

"It's an accurate translation of the concepts and methods described in the original Grimoire Noir. It passes inspection well enough for me to proudly approve of it's distribution and reprinting.

"Will that be all?" he asks, making Sunset Shimmer look even more nervous and pitiable than before.

"Does this... Make up for what I did?" she asks, clearly having been driven by nothing but guilt and willpower these past few weeks.

Rolling his eyes, Weiss shrugs. "There was nothing to 'make up' for. I've already taken my revenge for the breach in privacy. The doors of The Tower have always been open to you, Sunset, even if you did betray my trust."

"If you're asking whether or not this put you in higher standing with me..?" Weiss trails off.

"Show me that my secrets won't destroy you, and I'll be happy. The Grimoire Weiss protects others through it's secrecy. Not me. And now you're vulnerable.

"You could find yourself tempted to use something from that book that you can never recover from," Weiss finishes.

Sunset churns the thoughts over in her head. "Will you teach me?"

Weiss snorts. "Fuck no. No offense, but you're still kind of a sociopath, as far as I know. Prove me wrong."

"I'll teach you if you can bring some actual, real friends with you. I'm assuming of course, that you haven't made a single one, considering who you are, and how you've spent your time here in Equestria," Weiss retorts smugly, before some quirk in the air puts him on edge.

"Actually..!" Sunset says, making Weiss's stomach sink with dread from his mouth writing a check that his ass doesn't want to cash.

Tempest bursting into the room changes Weiss's feelings from dread to confusion.

Spike's hand waves around to accentuate his rambling as he carries a sizable basket of gems over one of his shoulders. "Sapphire Shores, the myth! The legend! Uhh, almost as wonderful as you, of course..!" Spike says, making Rarity roll her eyes good-naturedly.

"A lady is never envious, Spike," Rarity explains, nose held the slightest bit upwards.

"No, of course not, Rarity. Especially when there's nothing to be envious of. I bet it was totally awesome meeting her though." Spike says smoothly, making Rarity giggle politely.

"Yes, well, it was certainly awe-inspiring. Oh dear, I'm going to be so overworked, I need to find enough gemstones for this order, and then I need to galavant across Equestria to obtain more Crystal Cloth... Ahh! Here we are!" Rarity exclaims, her horn's magical glow guiding her to a spot in the ground where a sizable concentration of gemstones had been growing.

Spike, tail at the ready, uses it as a scoop, yanking out a pile of gems and flipping them up onto the basket.

"You've certainly shown more restraint, Spike. Why, not three weeks ago, you would have been salivating at the sight of a cache like that," Rarity points out, while Spike just shakes his head.

"I've been learning a lot of stuff about myself this year, it turns out I can make myself hungry if I'm not careful..." he says with a small amount of shame, after learning that a dragon's metabolism goes crazy when they covet valuables that don't belong to them. Effectively "making room".

"But now Spike is one-hundred percent in control!" he exclaims, jabbing a thumb at himself.

Rarity nods primly. "That's very impressive to hear, Spike. Self-control is a very admirable trait to obtain."

Spike preens at the praise, allowing it to encourage him as they dig up more and more hidden clusters of gemstones.

"Oh! Oh my! I think there's another one!" Rarity says, her gem-finding spell dragging her along to a nearby tree, which she looks up to with confusion.

"...In the tree? Oh!" Rarity exclaims, jerking back when a gruesome face appears from the brush.

"Hello... you? I am Rarity, and this is my friend, Spike." Rarity says as the beast chuckles grimly.

The sneering dog-creature steps forward, hopping out of the tree and looking between the unicorn and dragon.

She chuckles nervously when the dog fails to respond. "And... Your name is?"

The dog grins. "Not important. All you need to know is that we seek gems, and we take gems, and since you find gems...

"We take you!" they snarl in a nasaly tone.

Grabbing for the Unicorn, Rarity shrieks with terror as two more Diamond Dogs appear behind her.

Suddenly, the dog flies back into the tree, a blast of Dragon Lightning stunning them. The source of the lightning turns out to be Spike's finger, his finger-gun shaped hand held by his other one as he starts sprinting as fast as his stubby legs will take him towards Rarity.

"Rarity, follow me!" Spike shouts, grateful that he had thought to actually start learning this sort of thing all those months ago.

The unicorn nods, desperately scrambling after the baby Dragon and scooping him up onto her back while he turns around and fires off another blast of green lightning from his finger-gun.

Suddenly the ground in front of Rarity erupts, another Diamond Dog appearing in front of her with a shout of "Boo!"

In a panic, Rarity rears back, Spike tumbling off her back and onto the ground.

"Agh!" Spike yelps, flipping end over end with his tail acting like a makeshift loop to his head, until he finally crashes into the tree nearby.

Shaking the daze out of his eyes, he sees Rarity in the Diamond Dog's grip, who tosses the screaming unicorn in a tall arc towards one of the holes.

"Noooooo!" Spike shouts, reaching out for Rarity with the sole intention of getting her out of danger, and the emotions he's feeling rising up to fever pitch.

A spark of magic does the rest when he finds he now has enough to open a large portal over the hole she had been thrown at, and she drops through into Twilight's library. The portal then slams shut with a door-like thump.

The Diamond Dogs, who had been watching, turn their stares to Spike, violence all but assured.

Spike instantly remembers something Weiss Noir had taught him after one of their training sessions as he gets to his feet and glares at the Diamond Dogs.

"Now that Rarity's gone, I can finally use my special technique..." Spike says, clear enough for the dogs to hear. They look nervous, one of them even backing away from the baby dragon with caution.

"Spike, there's one thing I really want you to know. As much as I like to rant about the power of darkness, without some friends to back you up, every battle is a dire one.

"One thing I'll say again and again is, 'Any fight you didn't start is one you should assume you're going to lose'. To do otherwise is foolish."

He paces back and forth, seemingly nervous about what he's going to say next to the young dragon, who is listening in rapt attention.

"So I'll be teaching you the Shadow Realm's ultimate technique. Forbidden, even among our most sacred clans. The only time you should use this technique...

"Is when your very life is at stake."

Spike's eyes widen. "W-what is it?"

Weiss raises a hand, pausing for a moment before slapping his foreleg, his expression completely serious as his voice drawls slightly. "You'll need to use your legs, and..."

"Run awaaay!" Spike squeals, turning on the spot and jogging as fast as he can away from the dogs, who are stunned and confused by the shift in tone for several seconds before trying to chase after him.

By that point, however, Spike has already created another Homeward Portal, leaping through it into Twilight's embrace in the library, as she had been trying to calm down a panicking Rarity moments before.

Hugging Spike tightly, Twilight attempts to begin her own panicked rant. "Spike?! I was worried sick whe-"

"No time dogs-portal-coming-now!" He shouts, turning and snapping the portal shut just as a Diamond Dog reaches through, the portal snapping like a rubber band around their paw as they scramble around trying to blindly grab at something.

Spikes eyes narrow as he runs up to the sustained portal and starts to kick the offending limb until it retreats with a muffled whimper, allowing the gateway to finally shut completely.

He plops to the ground with an exhausted sigh of relief, panting heavily after all the magic and running he had done.

Rarity is little-better, still breathing heavily from her own exertion and fear-response. "For a moment, I had really though that was going to turn out unfavorably... If it hadn't been for Spike..."

She shudders, before walking up and patting the drake on the head. "Thank you, Spike, you're a real hero," she stresses.

Spike gives a thumbs up.

"Awesome," he grins before falling asleep.

Weiss seriously can't believe this. He's witnessing an honest to god catfight in his office.

"All you've done is spy, connive and extort Weiss, and what did you do in return? Translated a book? Weiss could have done that himself, and saved himself the trouble of dealing with you," Tempest snarls.

Should Weiss put a stop to this? Encourage it? Obtain as much mud as he can in the next twelve seconds and see where this goes from there?

"Ok?! What were my options, then? Join his merry band of ner-do-wells? I was fighting for my motherbucking life over here, and Weiss didn't seem to have a problem with it! You think I'm stupid-"

Ehh... Maybe not. While it would be no doubt entertaining, Weiss doubts either of them would appreciate being splashed with mud and then being expected to wrestle until their problem is solved.

"Yes," Tempest interjects, making Sunset growl with frustration.

"Shut up and listen! You can't seriously think I didn't notice, right? He had cameras everywhere, and he kept giving me smug looks whenever I made off with some file or folder, I thought he was encouraging it, he certainly could have put a stop to it!"

Though, to be honest, Mud Wrestling could probably solve a lot of problems. If Nightmare Moon had started with that instead of the whole "shooting lasers at Princess Celestia" thing, then Weiss doubts the situation would have been made that much worse...

Tempest sneers. "Because Weiss Noir is a much better, far more tolerant pony than you, you inconsiderate crooked-horned prick!"

Sunset's jaw drops at that, before she charges Tempest Shadow, intent on tackling her to the ground. Tempest does the same, intent on turning Sunset into a pile of ketchup and mustard, manually.

Oh dear. He better take care of this before continuing the rest of his internal monologue.

Before either of them can begin reducing the other to censor-bars, Weiss grabs both of them in crystalline hands drawn up from the floor.

"Alright, I'm putting this conversation directly in the morgue. You two want to fight? Fine," Weiss claims, dumping them back down harshly, his tone demanding silence and respect.

"But if you two are going to fight, you'll be doing it my way.

"Have either of you ever heard of the Dark Tournament?" he smirks.

Sunset Shimmer's eyes widen as her jaw drops in silent realization, while Tempest's tone turns dry. "I'm assuming you're going to explain it for us?"

Weiss's smirk transmogrifies into a smile. "You know me too well."

Rover tries not to show fear as he dumps poison-green herbs into the pool of water in front of him.

The water churns and shifts, before a dark smoke begins to emerge from it, rising up to the inside of the tunnel.

A buff looking dogman appears on the screen, their lower jaw more than three times longer than their upper. Drool strings down from their face as they snarl at Rover.

"What," they state with a deep growl overlapping their words.

"Clifford-" The hulking animal growls, making Rover yip nervously.

"Big Boss Clifford! I found white horn pony who hunts gems, hunts as good as dragon! But the pony got away."

Big Boss Clifford grimaces. "Dumb Dog. You can't catch a pony?"

Rover gulps. "Pony had help, a fearsome dragon, shot lighting at us and escaped with the pony"

Clifford's eyes narrow as their nostrils flare. "Ok. I'll come."

"Where's the gem-pony now," they say, sucking down a deep breath as they get up from their pillow on the ground, rising to their full height.

"Ponyville, Big Boss Clifford," Rover says, keeping his posture submissive, in spite of the fact that he can only see Clifford over the magical screen that they're communicating over.

Clifford growls. "She's hiding there too. I'll take them both."

"Who?" Rover's head tilts to the side.

Clifford's face twists further, his lips drawing back to reveal rows of teeth.

"Tempest Shadow."

"What did you just say?" Tempest questions, turning to Rarity while Weiss haggles with Pinkie Pie for catering some kind of event in the background.

Rarity sniffles, slurping at her milkshake before answering the plum pony. "Diamond Dogs, that's what they called themselves, deary. I've had to delay my order after Spike and I had been attacked by them in the forest... It was simply dreadful."

Tempest swallows heavily. "Did they walk on two legs? And talk?"

Eyes widening a small amount, Rarity nods. "Yes, it was the oddest thing, they had been reared up, walking on their hind-legs like a minotaur. Why do you ask?"

Tempest turns to face Weiss, nervousness entering her facial expression. "Don't concern yourself with it."

"I don't know, Tempest, that sounds like the exact thing someone would say if they knew something concerning," Twilight claims, acting as the temporary nap-spot for her number one assistant, Spike.

Tempest's eyes narrow before she releases a sigh. "Have you ever met anyone who lived in Storm Country?" when they shake their heads, Tempest continues.

"The thing about Storm Country is that it's magically charged. A lot of things can't survive there because lightning bolts like to jump between the mountains from time to time. The things that do live there, however, get tall. If it walks on two legs and shouldn't be doing that, it's almost certainly because they've been exposed to Storm Country's magic long enough, and strongly enough."

"And recently," Tempest finishes.

Twilight and Rarity fail to comprehend what it is Tempest Shadow is getting at, while, in the background, Weiss is engaged in a vigorous hoofwrestle with Pinkie, as a sacred trial of discount-obtaining.

"And... That means what exactly?"

Tempest rolls her eyes. "A large group of walking talking Diamond Dogs, hunting gems, sneaking around underground, and willing to kidnap ponies to get them more gemstones? You tell me what that means."

Rarity tsks uncomfortably. "I'm sorry, dear, I still don't follow."

"-So I told them, Rushmore? I'm carving as fast as I can!" Pinkie shouts, as her, Weiss and Sunset approach.

Weiss plops down into a seat, rubbing his aching arm and grumbling about how Earth Ponies cheat at arm-wrestling.

With a sigh, Weiss turns to the unicorn trio before him. "So, you gals talking about how the Storm King's forces are being arrayed against us?"

Tempest's eyes narrow slightly. "How could you possibly have known I was talking about that?"

"I was like six feet away, Fizzy. You read too many detective novels," Weiss responds easily, waving her off.

"Also, one time I replaced Ponyville's fly population with artificial microphone golems that automatically pipe in sensitive data to my earpiece. You're welcome, by the way."

Twilight closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and releases it in a far, far deeper sigh than Weiss's was. "Thanks, Weiss. now I've got to go research an anti-golem spell. Thanks. Really."

With that, the purple unicorn trots out of the room, making Weiss look incredulous. "Well jeeze, talking like she is, you'd think there were still microphone golem flies in Ponyville."

Weiss allows a shit-eating-grin to cross his face. "Good thing I shut those down after I was informed on the legality of doing so on private property."

Tempest restrains herself, knowing how little Weiss cares for taking his opponents seriously in everything but his actions.

"Sir, don't you think that Storm Creatures apparently living within walking distance of Ponyville is a cause for concern?" Tempest asks diplomatically.

Weiss shakes his head. "I can't afford to worry about small stuff like that. I need to prepare for the Second World Dark Arts Tournament."

"Please, Weiss, can we at least investigate the matter?" Tempest begs, prompting Weiss to notice just how squirrelly his trusted lieutenant is.

'It's a good thing I have Magicant, or these bad feelings might actually hinder my thought processes.' Weiss reinforces to himself internally before, after a long period of contemplation, he decides that satisfying Tempest's request would be better than having to deal with these bad and guilty feelings for ignoring her very real concerns.

"Fine, I guess we can pop over there and check it out. Take ass, kick names. Just the basics," Weiss shrugs, before turning to Rarity and Sunset.

"Rarity, go to Twilight's place, just in case things get any nastier, I'll give you the courtesy of informing you when the forest is safe again. Sunset, call up Celestia, but instead of feeding her yet more of my most precious secrets, tell her something useful and inform her about a nest of Diamond Dogs near Ponyville. Pinkie Pie?"

The pink party mare smiles, nodding in preparation for Weiss's command as he points at her.

"Smash."

With that, he claps, before standing up and walking out the door, Tempest in tow, and a confused Rarity and Sunset left behind with the giggling Pinkie Pie.

A trio of Diamond Dogs stand against Weiss and Tempest, looking nervously at the two.

"What you want? Go away!" the biggest one shouts, dropping to all fours.

Tempest sneers. "They've been away from Storm Country for... A year. Maybe longer. See their hands? They've already started changing back into paws. And their ability to speak is... Well, roughly what you would expect from a Diamond Dog, but still."

Weiss nods. "Thank you, dear Fizzy. Alright boys, if you would, I'm going to erm... What is it you do when you want to know something?"

Rover coughs. "Question?"

"Beating, yes, thank you. I'm going to ask you a beating. Hmm. The joke doesn't work that well that way. I'll have to workshop that." Weiss mumbles to himself, before shaking his head. "Not the time."

"Anyway, I want to know who your leader is, or I'll-" Weiss demands, before Tempest shakes her head and motions for him to back away.

"Oh, alright. It's your show, Fizzy," he says, surprised, but compliant.

Tempest smiles, before pulling the sphere from her belt, clicking a button on it which causes it to inflate, a beachball made of what looks like blue latex.

Unlike what the lesser-minded might suspect, the sphere doesn't turn into a liquid or hunt down the nearest living female. Instead, vicious-looking blunted spikes sprout from it, and it obtains a metallic luster as it's alchemical treatments allow it to take on metal-like properties.

"Alright, let's begin," Tempest states, before flipping on one of her forehooves and kicking the ball in a spinning arc towards the big one, who yelps before it bashes them in the head, knocking them unconscious as the spiked ball bounces off of them and back to Tempest.

She balances the ball on her nose almost playfully. "Tell me who your real leader is. I won't be as polite if you decide to withhold anything."

Rover gulps, before shaking his head. "Y-you'll just beat us up... He'll..."

Tempest bounces the ball on her nose as she walks closer and closer to the cowering duo.

Suddenly, more Diamond Dogs erupt from below, ignoring Rover's panicked warnings as they rush to attack her.

Tempest smiles, before prodding the metal ball with her horn, making it pop like a balloon as her crystalline protrusion activates the explosive gas stored in it.

A scintillating flash blinds the cave-dwelling hounds, as Tempest takes the stunned pause as her cue to unleash a spray of flashing, strobing magic missiles that spread out and begin striking the howling Diamond Dogs, making them leap and run around frantically as the spheres of magic repeatedly whack them like hellish rave disco newspapers.

Weiss chuckles when one of them tries to hide behind him from the chaser attacks.

"Bad dog," Tempest says with a smirk, approaching the cowering Rover.

"Now..." She starts, feinting at Rover and making the head dog flinch piteously.

"Speak."

Rarity sips at a glass of iced tea, one which Spike had graciously produced when he woke up, cheerfully excited to have the ivory unicorn over to visit while the forest got... Cleared out.

Rarity goes to thank Spike, but before he can, he scrambles into the kitchen in a panic, trying to remove Sweetie Belle from the kitchen. A move that is for the best, Rarity suspects. "Thank you!" she calls out after the dragon.

Twilight continues rubbing her head. "That pony is going to give me an aneurysm Is he even capable of not misleading ponies?"

Rarity holds her hooves up. "Don't ask me, dear, I hardly know the fellow."

Twilight takes a deep swig of her own tea. "I know, I'm just venting."

A small knocking at the door makes their ears perk up, as Sweetie Belle trots over and opens the door.

"Hello, little one. I'm Boss Clifford, and I've been looking for you." Rarity, Twilight, and Spike turn at the gruff voice when it's followed by Sweetie Belle squealing with fear as the gigantic brute grabs her in one meaty fist.

"Let her go this instant!" Rarity shouts, making the gigantic red dog beast turn and look at her with disinterest, before his eyes widen.

"You. You're the gem hunter. It seems I grabbed the wrong white unicorn," Clifford says, tossing the fearful filly in his grip behind him carelessly, as Twilight saves her from a painful thump to the floor with the power of her telekinesis.

"You'll be coming with me now," Clifford says, reaching to grab the unicorn, before Spike fires a blast that makes them pause as the lightning washes over their barrel chest and fur, green electricity crackling over it.

The dog gives what might be a chuckle. "Cute. I think you'll find that I'm up to the challenge of absorbing lightning, however. My homeland affords me that benefit," they claim, banishing the electric charge with a flex of their chest, sending sparks flying away as they stalk closer.

Twilight growls, her horn lightning up before the slobbering brute instantly punches her through a wall and out of her home, making Rarity shriek with terror as she is narrowly missed by the purple projectile.

"You! You're not going to get away with that!" Spike shouts, charging up another blast when Clifford picks up the screaming and kicking Rarity.

He laughs. "Go ahead little dragon. One more shot, just to remind you that lightning can't hurt me."

Spike remembers another important lesson, as he closes one eye and lines up the Diamond Dog's face in his sights.

"Alright, alright. I promise this secret trick isn't another prank. I've actually got something you can use in a fight," Weiss chuckles, as Spike pouts at the reveal of Weiss's most forbidden technique.

"This one's important. There are no immunities in a fight. Only resistances. Every shield can be broken with enough raw force. Every rubber band can only be stretched so far. That being said, if something isn't working, don't just keep using the same thing over and over. Flip the script.

"So, if you ever find Dragon Lightning or Dragonfire not working, keep this in mind. I'm sure Twilight already told you plenty of times, but Unicorn Light is a spell whose sole purpose is to carry other spells. A dragon's fire is the same way. It's just a vessel that your actual spells are carried in.

"If raw Dragon Lightning is failing you, just infuse some sort of spell into it. The lightning can actually carry the magic along with it.

"Oh, and if you give it a cool name, that makes it stronger, like in the comics."

"Voltage..!" Spike enunciates, trying his hardest to put something into his last shot at saving Rarity from this jerk!

Clifford chuckles.

"Spike!" Spike shouts, the green bolt flying out and hitting Clifford.

Clifford stops laughing and starts wheezing.

After a soot-filled cough, the dog growls, stepping forward woozily. "You... you think that's even nearly enough to put me down, lizard? I'll..."

Suddenly, a gigantic boulder crashes through Twilight's house, smashing Clifford in the head before falling to the ground with a heaving thud.

After a few unsteady tilts and stumbles, Clifford falls over unconscious from the combination of dragonfire burns and a massive concussion, their grip loosening enough to allow Rarity to squirm out, kicking the dog in the head for good measure.

"Awful! Awful dog! Do you know how long it will take to get this smell out of my coat!?" she shouts as Sweetie Belle runs up and hugs her leg.

"Oh, it's alright Sweetie, I'm alright," Rarity coos, rubbing Sweetie Belle's head.

Spike blows the smoke off of his finger before fake-holstering it at his side in a way he is firmly confident looks cooler than it is. Good thing Clifford wasn't immune to dragon fire... or rocks.

Rarity trots over and hugs Spike. "Oh thank you again, Spike, I swear, I've been attracting the most awful company. Can you ever forgive me?"

"Aww, I could-" Spike starts, before Twilight leaps through the door, purple mane ablaze and slit eyes promising a beatdown as she waves her sword around.

"Where is he? I'll crush him into kibble! I'll-" Twilight pauses, spotting Spike receiving his victory hug from Rarity and Sweetie Belle, and the unconscious Clifford on the floor of her library.

She dismisses the combat spells and the Master Sword before grinning sheepishly. "Oh."

Spike meanwhile, looks a bit confused. "I'm glad that rock knocked him out, but where did it come from?"

Outside, Pinkie Pie stands waving at them next to her "Old Fashioned Pie Family Style Party Cannon"

"I smashed!" Pinkie giggles, making them all realize that the boulder in Twilight's house had a party hat strapped to the top of it.

Tempest gives Weiss a long, hard stare, until he wilts under it.

He tries to think of any reason why these Diamond Dogs might be mining out gems in Equestria and sending them back to Storm Country that could be benign. Unfortunately, he fails.

"Fine, I admit it. You were right, and these scumbags are related to the Storm King," he moans.

He kicks the ground. "Am I seriously going to have to deal with this shit before I can throw my big tournament?"

Tempest shrugs as a set of chariots begin to float down from above them.

The two Pegasus guards on the foremost chariot begin to pull down a large, ornate and golden mirror from their chariot, while the other guards begin slapping handcuffs on the unconscious Diamond Dogs, dragging them into the cage-covered chariots for processing in Canterlot.

Instead of speaking to Tempest and Weiss directly, the guards simply tap the mirror, which ignites with a magical glow.

Celestia's face appears on the mirror and Weiss pulls a bucket of popcorn from somewhere unknown.

"Thank you, dear heroes, for your service to Equestria. Truly, thanks to your efforts, Harmony will reign that much more over our fair land."

After roughly a minute of serene gazing, she continues. "To repeat this recorded message, say 'Repeat', to deactivate this mirror, say 'Off'."

"So does the princess do this with all aspiring heroes?" Weiss asks incredulously.

One of the guards gives him a sidelong glance. "No, she had this commissioned to annoy you."

Weiss's snickering continues long after the royal guards have already taken the Diamond Dogs away.

"Ok..?" Tempest says, confused at how this qualifies as humorous.

The comedy of immortals is esoteric at best.

"My word, Pinkie, where did you get all of this?!" Rarity squeals, looking at the twin wooden crates, filled to the brim with Crystal Cloth and gigantic glittering jewels.

Pinkie shrugs. "I wasn't gonna leave you hanging sister! After you told me about running out, I ran all the way home to pick some up for you, and pa was like"

She puts her hooves at her sides and waves her head back and forth with a serious expression. " 'Well, Pinkie, if she's going to be taking garbage off of our farm, she might as well take all of it.' and he gave me a box of gems too. We normally just toss em since they aren't boulders!

Rarity faints on the spot at Pinkie's explanation.

Twilight giggles and Spike rushes over in a panic, waving a paper fan at the faint unicorn.

Considering her number one assistant is busy, Twilight starts the letter herself.

Dear Princess Celestia

Today I've learned that even the grandest of problems can be made manageable with bravery, perseverance, and a lot of help from your friends. Although my library suffered a bit in the process, I believe it was worth it to see how my friends can come together when I'm indisposed, how they can be trusted to fight their own battles, and, even when I'm not right there to help them, how they can prove themselves to be capable individuals in their own right, using magic, wits, and a strong set of legs to solve their problems.

Yours truly, Twilight Sparkle.

Nightmare laughs in the face of the black void she's found herself in. "If you think doing nothing at all qualifies as tormenting me Weiss Noir, I'm very unimpressed!"

'I've spent a thousand years on the moon. I'm more than patient enough to outlast this nonsense,' Nightmare thinks to herself with a small yawn.

He was even dumb enough to give her a physical form! Filly-sized or not, as soon as she gets out of here, she can really get started with her plans.

(Weiss Report) Not a Bad Slime [Air Gel]

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This report caught my interest. Can Windigo be reasoned with? I've always heard that Windigo are incredibly flighty outside of the Hearth's Warming stories.

Yes, they all but disappeared after Weiss's imprisonment. I'm unsure what became of them, but I believe they have, no pun intended, gone underground. Literally, in the sense that their shift to hunting meals without actually appearing to their hosts has made them all but untraceable.

But they can be reasoned with, yes. Their unusual behavior was not always their state of being. Interacting with the Shadow Realm broke them of their bold confidence, making their largest clan grow secretive and skilled at hiding. Anyone would have that sort of confidence with nigh-invulnerability like theirs.

Entry Number Twenty-Two, Day Three-Hundred-and-Forty

Windigo Ectoplasm is an incredibly interesting substance. Generated when they pass through an object with intent, this solidified form of magic rapidly absorbs hatred and heat, freezing the object and saturating the ectoplasm with raw hatred. Once saturated, the ectoplasm becomes mostly inert.

What makes things get particularly interesting is when you trick the ectoplasm into absorbing things in the hate. This is the method we've been using to create Windigo countermeasures. By using careful mixtures of hatred and other such things, we can easily subdue any Windigo that attempts to feed. The easiest method is to simply use a layer of the thickest possible Slumber Syrup. Since it's sedative properties come from magic, mixing the Syrup with Expired Aspira creates a resin that instantly weakens and disorients a Windigo who attempts to pass through it. Like trying to walk through sleeping gas.

Although they can't fall asleep from this, it still serves to sedate and weaken them, to the point where they can barely fly. A bit like the way Turkey can make someone extremely sleepy.

But that's not half as important as the other uses for Windigo Ectoplasm. A substance that can absorb magic, so long as you sneak it in with some hatred, as though you were feeding a dog a pill by hiding it between two pieces of ham. Such a substance has countless, countless uses, across the board. In all likelihood, this report won't even cover half of them. Nonetheless, I'll start big.

By mixing the power of Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation into a mass of Black Flames, a control system can be forced into the ectoplasm. This stains the material from it's ice-blue color to a much darker black shade. When stretched thin, however, it turns the most striking shade of blue. Needless to say, my first use for the material was to give it two cute eyes and a mouth. Who would have thought that a magical construct made from domination, hatred, and ghostly parasitic fluid would create such an adorable little critter?

In any case, while it is quite cute, it's also highly explosive to a ridiculous degree. Even a small amount of ambient magic going inside of the fluid forcibly, such as if it directly contacts a magically charged object, is enough to make it instantly explode, and considering it's ability to turn into a balloon by vaporizing parts of itself, it's effectively a balloon filled with very agitated explosive gas.

Even so, I've got better explosive options right now, which makes this a liability instead of an advantage. As such, I don't even understand why these... magically charged chemicals... behave in the way they do. I just don't understand the rules by which magical reagents function, and am left bumbling around and testing results instead. If I knew why certain magics made Windigo Ectoplasm act the way it does, I imagine I could do nearly anything with it, just by combining spells and materials, and then infusing them into the spectral jelly.

In any case, I've still made sure to keep several tanks of this Air Gel, as it's other properties have served well, when combined with basic physics. Namely, the gel's ability to change shape, combined with it's ability to create explosions make it the perfect core for a new generation of simpleminded monsters. By combining the gel with empty metal shells, it gains the ability to use them for structure, and exploit it's own mass as fuel to power internal-combustion devices for added power.

One sad fact is that they still aren't the brightest minions. They are however even more disposable than Wannabeetles, if only because I have a far greater supply of what is needed to create them. Windigo Ectoplasm, Magic that any pony can use, and the new tungsten alloy that my guards have become so fond of. These things combined have given me the opportunity to create a small suite of what I call Knight Slimes. By having the armor ride atop it's fuel supply, I can emulate their namesake while giving the metal knights a massive increase to their fuel supply.

It's as though I've created engines made of gasoline. Powered by themselves and easily fit into metal shells, Knight Slimes are already being deployed in a few locations. Making sure to include cute faces on the actual slimes has improved their approval rating by a wide margin.

Now if only I could think of something to improve their durability, we'd be golden. Then I could start making Metal Slimes. Just imagine the hell of a blob of shapeshifting terminator metal giving you the stupidest fucking expression of goofy joy as it beats you up.

Ahh, what a world that would be.

I must have one. They sound adorable.

I'm not sure that's possible, Princess Celestia. They require Windigo to produce, and... Well, there aren't exactly any around to ask!

Yes, I see. Then there can only be one recourse. I'll look into the matter and notify some of my contacts. If there's one creature in Equestria who can track down anything, it would be... Her.

Who are you talking about Princess?

I'm sorry, Sunset Shimmer, but I'm afraid her identity is a matter of Equestrian National Security. Not suitable for disclosing over our correspondence.

I'm loathe to reactivate her cell, but if she's willing, perhaps it would be for the best, considering how odd Ponyville has become as of late.

Princess?

(Past Chapter 23): Fool's Errand

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My first road trip with Celestia was a learning experience. She's a bitch, and also a toddler.

"What do you think, Luna? There must be some potential in my scheme," I ask, subtly preparing Vances, in such a way that she at least doesn't see exactly what's going on.

Luna ponders my explanation with a sip of her tea. "A pony's mind is like a maze, Weiss. A labyrinth. There are entrances into it from the dream world, yes, but no exits will dismount from their moorings to follow somepony inside. If your mind were to enter any other, it is unlikely that you would ever leave."

"What if it wasn't my mind? What if it were something else," I pose carefully, trying not to show too much of my hand.

Luna's eyes narrow, demonstrating that she's clearly counting cards. "You're suggesting that you use mind control of your own. Worm your way into the mind of the pony and take control of them doubly."

I sigh and stand up from my virtual chair, allowing it to disperse into glittering data. "If the mind is a maze, then Sombra's control is the fucking minotaur-"

"Not all minotaurs live in mazes, Weiss." Luna glares lightly. Shit, was that racist?

"Fine, the Wall Shadow, then," I change my verbiage.

"Look, my point is, if I can suppress Sombra's control with my own, wouldn't that at least give the pony a chance? Give them their minds back?"

Luna shakes her head. "They would be comatose, unable to wake while your creation wages war in their mind. Only by destroying the crystal can they be truly freed."

I swallow heavily, the action doing nothing useful in my sleep. "That isn't what I asked, Luna."

Her eyes widen. "It isn't a solution Weiss, it's a bandage at best."

I shake my head in response, with a small frown. "It's triage. Stabilize them, keep them alive and safe. Asleep in the Shadow Realm, awake as Sombra's slave. I know which one I would choose."

"The strain such an arrangement on your resources would create-" she starts before I wave her off.

"Oh fuck off, Luna. They aren't a strain, they're people. I'll find a way. I've been working on a problem. Every naive idealist considers how to solve world hunger sooner or later. I'm not special in that respect," I state firmly, losing my carefully crafted cool.

I lean on a desk nearby, rubbing the bridge of my nose with a claw as I think as hard as I can and reign in the emotions churning in my gut.

"I've got an entire kingdom of ponies who know how to grow food. We just need to take that even further, to support the influx of sleepers."

Luna's expression turns tense, and a little bit sad. "What if I told Celestia? Maybe we could obtain shipments of food from Equestria, our lands are rich with grasses, further than even our own eyes can see. There is sufficient supply."

I consider the matter strongly. "How will you get a message out? We need you here working on breaking the anti-alicorn barrier, and I'm not confident that whoever you have left in your stead will listen if I send my own ponies as messengers."

"I won't like the idea of taking charity, but if accepting food from Equestria means I can spirit away the last ponies left in the Crystal Empire, I'm willing to do anything," I say sincerely, a bit of involuntary shame water escaping my eyes.

I jerk slightly when one of Luna's wings falls over my back. "You won't have to do anything unsavory for our help, Weiss. Your people are not receiving Equestria's charity, our two countries will be giving it. Giving it to the ones who will need it."

The physically impossible amount of water coming out of my eyes confuses me, obviously I'm crying, but these tears are as big as grapefruits, Christ!

I inhale sharply, pulling away with a hasty nod as I cease my hydrodynamically impossible crying. "Right. Of course. Who will we send to message the Equestrians of this deal?"

Luna grits her teeth. "I am loathe to say this, but if your plan would take every pony from the Crystal Empire, and place them in your care as soon as possible... I believe we will delay researching the barrier in order to pursue your scheme first and foremost. My sister, with your permission, will remain here, while you and I go to Equestria in order to finalize such an agreement as rapidly as possible."

"Why not stay? You could continue your own research into the barrier while Celestia and I take care of it?" I counter.

Luna coughs lightly. "Are you certain? I was under the impression that my sister... was not suited for enduring your charming personality for long."

Shaking her head, she continues. "Besides, while I dare not admit so to the public, Celestia is the more capable of the two of us, in direct combat. I am confident in my ability to fight Sombra, but what grand foolishness it would be for me to spend the next several weeks alone, near the heart of his power, distracted by my studies?"

I grimace slightly in confusion. "Well, she's just going to have to rapidly gain the thousand or so years of maturity that she should frankly already have."

"As for your protection, if it doesn't wound your pride too greatly, I've been wanting to give you my help anyway. I know you've seen my scouting vessels."

"The ships that you've somehow set to sail on the frozen snow itself?" she asks.

I nod affirmatively. "I'd like you and Celestia to be on one. I can set one of them to patrol around the barrier, close enough for your research. You'll be on the move, and the ships are prepared with methods of evacuation and defense, if you are concerned for your safety."

"Sombra hasn't even pushed them to activate some of the defenses aboard my ships, and between your sessions of study, you can act in my stead during the brief interim that I am not physically there to manage the Shadow Realm." I finish, driving her into deep thought.

"It does wound my pride. But by the stars, I'm not going to let that stop me, not if it won't stop you, Weiss. We will go forward with your plan if you truly think you can handle my sister."

I bring up several screens. "You'll need to know some of the functions I use for managing the Shadow Realm. It mostly runs itself, honestly."

"Just pose questions here-" I point at the Arcana Liber's survey system. The one I've been using to decide all of the Shadow Realm's laws and law changes.

"Give a list of acceptable answers, and the system will automatically ask all of the citizens which option they would prefer. The system then automatically pushes the update to Law Enforcement.

"Right now, you've only got lower-level access. The choices you'll be able to pose are minimal at best, stuff like traffic and fines."

I then point to a big red button.

"This button sounds the alarm. I've set it up to automatically contact you with Iron Diamond or Helmsplitter. They'll be able to direct the alert to where it needs to go."

Luna looks incredibly skeptical, poking the screen as though it were a particularly nasty brussel sprout. "I do hope this is a temporary system of governance, it seems quite... fickle."

I restrain my annoyance.

"It is extremely versatile, and you'll only be using it for a few days at most. Suck it up."

Luna gives me an incredulous expression. "Weiss, it will take months to make the journey to Equestria."

I laugh, probably way too loudly. "Now that's a hell of a joke to lighten the mood, Princess."

Celestia and Luna arrive to the sight of Weiss sitting on some sort of angular object, strumming a ukulele as the ship below him chugs along at a fair clip. Everyone involved was fully aware just how fast those ships could go, when pushed.

♪"Their brands were still on fire and their hooves were made of steel."

"Their horns were black and shiny and their hot breath he could feel~!"♪ Weiss slowly trails off, as he spots the two Diarchs of Equestria.

Luna smirks. "Desirable traits, Lord Weiss Noir?"

Weiss coughs nervously, putting the instrument down and trying to ignore Luna's words.

"Alrighty then. Princess Celestia, are you ready? It'll be a long trip, so I hope you've used the bathroom already."

Celestia looks over the dark ruler, unimpressed. "I do hope you're a fast walker, I don't enjoy keeping a slow pace."

Weiss tilts his head. "I had planned on us flying."

Celestia rolls her eyes with a loud scoff. "I'm a royal, Weiss, not a royal chauffeur. I hope your plans did not rely on me carrying you, my flight tends to break bones."

Weiss shrugs. "Actually, I was planning on carrying you."

He hops off of the odd angular structure he had been sitting on, allowing it to unfold into what looks to the Princesses like some sort of bird, if the bird were made from whatever was laying around a blacksmith's shop, and designed by someone who had only heard birds described to them vaguely.

"Say hello to the McCloud, my personal super-high performance combat spacecraft, complete with backseats and cup-holders. I actually retrofit her with some new armor yesterday, too." he gestures to the Arwing's bright blue accents grandly, as Celestia and Luna share skeptical looks.

"What exactly does this... object... do?" Celestia ever-so-subtly questions, having no earthly idea what exactly Weiss believes this pile of geometric metal, stone, and crystal is capable of.

He flashes some sort of hand sign that makes the ship bleep positively, as the cockpit opens and expands further to allow access to the rear-seating.

"Please, take a seat. Let me show you it's features," Weiss says in an odd tone, climbing inside and claiming the front seat as he fiddles with various esoteric dials and levers with his excessive number of hands.

Celestia gives Luna a pleading look demanding explanation, but Luna simply motions towards it with her head, smiling faintly.

Either this goes wonderfully or horribly. In both cases, it should be entertaining.

With a regal gulp, Princess Celestia climbs in as well, slowly working her way into the slightly cramped area behind Weiss's cockpit.

The opaque cockpit closes, immersing them in complete darkness for a brief moment before lighting up with a full suite of holographic displays, feeding information from the McCloud's exterior cameras and sensors directly into the computing crystals and illusion generators buried within.

"Princess, there's a strap of cloth behind you, could you please use that to strap yourself in? It's a safety measure."

Smiling at the quaint request, 'Safety Measures', she titters in her mind, as she reaches back with her telekinesis and grabs some sort of metal clasp. Small illusions of arrows gesture where and how she is to attach it, which she obeys quietly.

"Alright, good. Now, beginning takeoff. Eclipse, you ready to play wingmare?" Weiss demands as a screen displaying Eclipse's impossibly wide smile appears, nodding frantically.

Weiss begins checking over both his and Eclipse's readouts, just for an added level of safety. "Wing servos... Looking good, holodeck's obviously running, Essencia tanks are full. Activating G-Diffuser."

Strange rings of energy begin sweeping from the Arwing's nose all the way to its tail, making Celestia feel a curious loosening of gravity, until it seemingly loses it's grip on her entirely.

She notices that the entire ship is filling up with an invisible heat that sinks into her, and on reflex, she very nearly dispels the entire thing. Sucking a breath through her teeth, she instead asks in her own characteristic way.

"Weiss, why is your garbage pile trying to put magic in my body?!" Celestia's voice booms, making Weiss wince.

"Princess, it's a G-Diffuser system. It diffuses G-Forces, just let it do its job, please," he grimaces.

Huffing loudly, she allows the invisible fire to do it's dirty work, shuddering slightly as the temperature in the cockpit rises to levels that would kill an ordinary pony.

Weiss smiles. "Let's rock baby."

Celestia turns her head around in shock when a loud explosion erupts behind her, the holographic cameras displaying a roaring flame erupting from the vehicle's rear.

"Weiss, explain to me what this device does, please?!" Celestia shouts in confusion as it shakes and shudders.

His stupid stupid smirk gets wider. "It flies, Your Majesty."

Oh, sweet sun in the heavens no.

The ship that they were perfectly fine being on instead of spiraling through the air in a flaming deathtrap quickly disappears behind them, shrinking into a dot on the horizon as she sees a second vessel fly up next to them. The other vessel is too small to hold a pony, Celestia notes.

"You getting good latency, Eclipse?" Weiss asks, making his student nod frantically, still too excited by the virtual experience of flying her miniature Arwing to trust herself with the act of speaking.

"Remember, just follow for a few kilometers, then swing back around. Your Miniwing doesn't have enough range to follow us out of the Frozen North," Weiss reminds his wingmare, making her nod one final time before speaking.

"Yes, Lord Weiss," Eclipse says, before getting distracted by something else happening in her virtual dream.

Weiss rolls his eyes. "Focus, Eclipse, you are going to crash if you don't keep your total focus on your ship."

"Sorry sir, Spot was trying to ask me something, I'll focus," she says with embarrassment, suitably chastised.

Celestia, meanwhile, is only just now getting her breathing under control, having nearly started the process of assuming the Alicorn Suite out of fear of injury via sudden deceleration.

As odd as it is for her to say, however, if it weren't for the holographic screens everywhere, Celestia would suspect they aren't moving at all, just based on how little turbulence or g-forces she is feeling in spite of Weiss's visibly amateur flying skills.

Some aspects of this magical field his vehicle has applied to them? It's certainly worth investigating later.

He crashes into what would be obvious to any pegasus is a solid cloud, sending the Arwing flipping end-over-end until Weiss wrangles control of it, returning to their original flight path.

He avoids making eye contact with the silently laughing princess.

The axe-wielding minotaur currently wandering around this freaky lava forest is completely lost.

"Oh, go kill a bunch of ponies, you'll be paid handsomely, what a waste of my time," they claim, stalking forward as they finally spot one.

Oh, here we go, one of the holes going into their little homes, practically swarming with the knee-high buggers.

He steps out behind the glowing red bush and pulls his axe off his shoulders in both hands.

"Well, they ain't soldiers, but heads are heads," Steel Driver claims, charging forward to begin the job he was paid for.

A brief twinge of instinct is the only thing that allows him to leap back at the last second, when a spear whizzes by him, and the ponies calmly and rapidly scramble into the tunnels, the door slamming shut.

Steel Driver turns to look for where his attacker is, grimacing as he holds his axe out defensively.

"Come out come out, little pony," he says, walking sideways as the river of molten metal near him burbles softly.

Suddenly, another spear flies out, which he deflects, and he spots its source, a shiny grass-covered hill over in the distance. "Looks like someone isn't good at hiding," he mumbles, planting his feet before charging it with a mad roar.

Several more spears fly out, which Steel Driver dodges and deflects, before reaching the hole in the hill and ripping the soil away with his bare hands with a malicious smile.

His smile slowly transforms into a confused frown, when instead of a screaming little pony, it's some kind of weird ticking contraption.

The device, he notices, has a metal plate welded to the top, with some writing engraved on it.

Brushing away the dirt, Steel Driver's frown turns more confused.

"Prank'd?" he mumbles, before the entire device explodes, splintering him with shrapnel and flakes of molten rock.

He blacks out shortly thereafter, as the poison contained in the spear-thrower takes its toll.

Iron Diamond resists the urge to roll his eyes when the screen before him marks the minotaur automatically with a small block of text reading "got eem", signifying that he's been knocked out by the defenses.

Honestly, Iron Diamond is far more impressed with how composed the civilians were. It seems those desensitization drills were really working, at least to get ponies to run to safety in a panic instead of danger.

He radio's Weiss, Weiss's screen coming through in chunky low definition.

"Hey Iron. There's probably going to be a lot of latency, I'm pretty far out right now," Weiss explains after about a minute.

Iron shakes his head. "I'm just calling to inform you, a mercenary attempted to attack one of the parks. There were no casualties, but he clearly intended on there being many."

Another minute passes, before Weiss responds with a cautious frown. "Restrain him and send him to the labs, I have a suspicion tickling my mind right now. I'm about to be completely out of range, Iron, so you'll need to handle things without me for a bit. Call Luna if you need anything."

Iron nods. He had already been briefed on Luna temporarily entering the chain of command while Weiss traveled to Equestria for negotiations.

"I'll be sure to do that. Over and out," Iron Diamond finishes, ending the call as Weiss nods affirmatively.

After sending commands to have the minotaur brought to the labs, Iron trots out of the security room, making his way to the Wacky Workbench fast travel station, intent on doing some investigation of his own.

Because by everything in the ground, he's not going to treat this situation with anything but deadly seriousness, even if nobody was hurt.

The minotaur is only just coming to when Iron enters the lab holding them. Looking around the scientific room with confusion, but oddly, no fear.

As the guard captain motions to the laboratory assistants and professors to give him a few minutes before they begin their scans, he approaches the mercenary.

Captain Iron Diamond feels there is no other course of action available to him, other than to rectify this scum's lack of fear.

I spot a bunch of pegasi flying alongside the ship. They look particularly mean and armored.

When I look at Celestia, she raises her hooves "They're none of mine. They may simply be curious. It's not every day that a chariot bumbles through the sky without a pegasus at the helm, after all."

A spear is jabbed into the McCloud, making it wobble slightly from the impact.

She titters in embarrassment. "Or they may be bandits. Another distinct possibility. Would you like me to-" I motion for her to stop, before she can unbuckle her seatbelt.

"No, no, that would be incredibly rude of me. Just hold on."

I reach down below my seat and pull out a small handgun, allowing the cockpit's hatch to slide back and exposing us to the ripping winds of high-speed flight.

Activating a small voice-amplifying Vance, I shout at the raiders.

"Fuck! Off!" I shout, while gesturing my piece at them, keeping a tight grip on it as my face warbles in the wind, while Celestia's remains curiously unaffected.

One of them moves in closer, flapping their wings hard with their spear at the ready, so I shoot him with a cannonball that pops out of my piece, sending the pegasus flying away with their armor scattering everywhere.

The others, seeing their friend and hearing my warnings, quickly adjust course to go help their crash-landed companion.

Celestia's face looks torn between amusement and disdain. "Perhaps we should have taken care of them, they may harm others if they aren't arrested..?"

I shrug, closing the hatch and slipping my gun back under my seat. "You want to stop crime? Make jobs. Throwing them into prison makes criminals less able to function in society. Not more."

Celestia looks vaguely displeased with my rebuttal, but thankfully shuts up after that.

After a few minutes of silence, I turn on the radio and swipe down my playlist until I find a good one. Some sort of power ballad ditty that an up-and-coming pony wrote. Turns out, the right pony can make even midi-guitar music sound good.

Turning the music down low, I try for some small talk. "So, speaking of food, what exactly have you two been eating? Just growing your own stuff?"

Celestia, who had been resting her head on her hoof watching the scenery roll by, turns enough to shake her head. "We haven't been eating. It's not a necessity for most immortals."

I breathe harshly through my nose with some sympathy. "How awful. Food is one of life's great pleasures."

I hear Celestia's teeth squeak slightly. "Pleasure is not our concern when there is work to be done, Lord Weiss. I'll enjoy meals once more when my stomach is no longer turned by Sombra."

Reeling it back in the face of her sharp downturn in mood, I idly adjust the coolant feed to help the McCloud adjust to the slowly changing temperatures.

"That's a respectable trait, Princess. So long as you can tolerate others not living up to that standard, it's a downright enviable one. Very zen."

The awkward silence continues for several minutes, before something strikes me. "Oh, Princess! Do you have the files I gave you, for the prosthetic limbs?"

She nods firmly, reaching behind her back and pulling out the folder. "I would not forget such a thing."

I notice the ink on the folder's surface is still wet, and she had nowhere on her person she could have kept the papers, making my eyebrows scrunch in confusion. "Where have you been keeping it?"

Her confusion matches my own. "I've been keeping it on my person?" She says, putting it back behind her, where my cameras seemingly witness it cease to be.

Not wanting to out myself as ignorant, I simply nod. "Right, my mistake."

I swerve out of the way of an oncoming cloud, making Celestia grin as I scowl slightly.

Suddenly, her expression turns serious.

"Weiss, if you would land, I need to lower the sun," she states with the utmost seriousness.

Nodding, I slowly bring the Arwing down, coming in for a mostly smooth landing as the vehicle tilts and tips slightly, floating directly down like a balloon before softly landing on the grass indicating our presence outside of the Frozen North.

Unbuckling herself rapidly, I open the hatch and let her out.

She plants her hooves, and as her horn ignites, I'm mesmerized. My chest pounds uncomfortably as I'm somehow aware of just how much power she's using to bring that gigantic ball of flames down. I'm reminded of our first meeting, where I had first witnessed that stifling presence firsthand, and of the first time I had seen dragonfire, the overwhelmingly potent emotions needed to cast such a spell.

Snarling, I tear my eyes away from the princess and her overwhelming aura, leaning back in my chair as the sky slowly dims and stars slowly appear in the sky alongside the moon.

If she were as mature as her age should suggest, she could probably do literally anything. But nope, instead we have this lunk, dragging stars across the sky and incapable of understanding utilitarianism.

Even though I'm little better, it still bites to see someone with that much power and time acting like she does. Self-righteously refusing to eat in one moment, and thinking that beating up bad guys is a grand solution in the other.

I suppose if I want that to change, I'll have to start by pushing her.

Her job done, she skips over merrily, stretching her back from the cramped seating before leaping up onto one of the Arwing's wings with a loud clang, using it as a makeshift sleeping spot while I flip a switch that fills the cockpit with white-hot black fire, allowing the heat to ease me into my slumber.

Unable to properly produce Vances away from the Arcana Nox, I'm forced to use bottles that I had prepared before I left, drinking them one after another while Celestia watches me like a hawk, curiosity burning in her gaze.

I cut a glance her way. "It's none of your business, in case you were wondering," I claim, burning the bottles to oblivion with a handful of black fire.

She snarls ever-so-slightly at me, hopping into the back of the cockpit while her fat-ass makes the entire vehicle shake.

"Yes, shake my ship a little more, why don't you. I think there's a few bolts you haven't yanked loose yet," I mutter.

"I'm sorry, I couldn't quite hear you over how we're on Equestrian soil, what was that?" Celestia states firmly, with a raised eyebrow.

"I said that the McCloud, in my grand incompetence, hadn't quite been calibrated for someone of your... Generousness. In the next iteration, I will pay Equestria's Princess of the Sun her due respect, and add a few zeroes to the maximum weight," I claim, bowing low to the princess sarcastically.

"That's all I needed to hear, Lord Weiss," she intentionally shakes the ship a little more as she wiggles in place to get comfortable in the backseat, the picture of innocence.

God, I hate her.

A similar routine occurs for the next few days, me flying, the two of us sniping at one another, and our moods rapidly declining until they swing back up at lightspeed when the so-called "Everfree Castle-town" finally appears.

As I land the ship in a clearing among the crowd of nervous ponies, my grin widens, as I make no effort to hide any of my features.

Celestia grimaces, jabbing me in the side with an elbow to make me stop terrifying her precious little ponies.

"Ponies of Equestria, we hath returned briefly, an impressive and new ruler of the Frozen North in tow, we wouldst ask that thou treatest our new ally, Lord Weiss Noir, with the respect he deserves in the coming days, as he shalt do the same for thee, thou mayst return to thine business now," she shouts in the Royal Canterlot Voice, somehow managing to include her subtle warning in her entirely unsubtle foghorn voice.

Turning to me, she gestures for the castle rising up from the ominous forest bordering this opulent villa, a long, straight road carved through the brush. I can't help but feel like such a road in the show would have made things a lot simpler for those future protagonists.

She sighs as her little ponies disperse rapidly, Princess Celestia being a pony that nobody should defy, at least in their minds.

"Let us take our leave for yonder Castle Everfree, we cannot help but wonder what horrible fate might befall thine realm should our haste be anything but the greatest."

I give her a funny look that has nothing to do with her sudden relapse into old-timey speech.

I turn to the McCloud "Arcana Janus, mark. Fast Travel Station: Equestria."

At that, my ship spits out a huge crystal capsule, which unfurls into a swirling portal.

Her shocked expression is gratifying when Luna comes through the gateway, smirking as though she were in on the joke.

I shake my head in a pitying way that turns her shock into anger. "Seriously, your majesty, you're a bit behind the times if portals are sufficient to surprise you. We'll discuss the matter as quickly as is reasonable. You know, as adults do?"

Even as Celestia angrily drags me towards the castle with her leg wrapped around my neck like a vice, I can't help but feel that that was totally worth it judging by Luna's endless helpless laughter at the situation.

(Noir Report) A Reimagining of Existing Spellwork [Mistril]

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Entry #21, Day 382

Based on reports from the Arcana Liber, it seems that the current students of the Grimoire Noir respond better to less formal writing. If that must be so, then I will accommodate.

I believe I'll start with a metal that has been my bane since it's invention. Mistril, a metal made when a mist of tears are used to quench steel. It all started once I had been made aware of another spell similar to Fire Breath. A spell so mundane it fell between the cracks of awareness. I've decided to call this spell Waterworks, due to it being a spell which normally manifests by creating impossible amounts of illusory saltwater, typically from the user's eyes, in response to sadness.

Thankfully, Sadness is indeed a dark emotion, and such, Waterworks can be created at-will, so long as the user is mindful that making themselves sad all the time is no better than making themselves hateful all the time. Like all other dark spells, Waterworks are not to be trifled with. It can become all too easy for someone to become accustomed to immediately unleashing a torrent of tears whenever the slightest misfortune occurs. Note, however, that sadness without context can cover a wide variety of situations.

Some people experience the Waterworks spell in situations where sadness seemingly isn't a factor, such as at weddings or petting zoos, as we all know, however, crying is only acceptable at funerals, and the Grand Canyon. Those inhabiting the Shadow Realm, however, have already been ceded crying licenses, which give them the full legal right to ignore this rule, provided their throughput of tears does not exceed two gallons per second in high-traffic areas.

So, magical tears at the ready, I decided to take a few hours to stress test this spell, for both it's highest and lowest levels of power. It should be noted that during the course of experimentation that some may have inadvertently witnessed my tests. These were strictly tests of the Waterworks spell, and had nothing to do with my transcribing certain parts of Jojo's Bizarre Adventure. Any insinuations to the contrary are slander.

That said, magical geysers of tears are shockingly intense, and with a shockingly low cost. I believe this may have something to do with how the tears cease to exist shortly after creation, the magic generating them fading over time. The temporary nature of this fluid raises interesting questions about the nature of magically manifested matter, and how this might be applicable to other spellwork.

I've always been aware of the way that ambient magic can be concentrated into physical objects, clouds, stones and plants alike, slowly picking up the feelings that feel right, so to speak. So then, if water vapor and steam absorb a small amount of magic passively from the air, what happens when that water ceases to be? Normally, such a question is moot. How can water cease to exist, after all? Well, now we can have an answer to this minute-old question, using a method I call Seafoam Cultivation.

By pouring Waterworks tears onto a ripping hot surface, such as magma or super-heated steel, it can be turned into steam, and in turn, water vapor, all while absorbing energy in the process. This vapor can then be used in the period between it's creation and its inevitable decay back into oblivion. I can only assume the magic being absorbed is Pegasus Magic, for several reasons. I won't take that assumption beyond it's usefulness, but it serves as a foundation for some of the more basic experiments.

Normally, this so-called "Pegasus Magic" isn't absorbed by water, and indeed, once water goes from droplets to bodies, it begins losing it's ability to absorb magic. Extremely still bodies of water can hold magic, but moving ones outright begin to emit the magic trapped in them. I believe this may be a consequence of surface tension. Something about the delineating line of stable surface tension in a fluid prevents magic from passing into or out of it, so as steam turns into clouds and cools into larger droplets of water, it traps magic inside of it of varying types.

Curiously, only Pegasus-Magic-filled water vapor forms into natural cloud formations, and even then, they are extremely loose, and hazy. The remainder of water vapor seems to trap some variant of unicorn magic, which I have yet to find a way to tap into.

It was in studying the curious methods by which magic passes into and out of water that inspiration struck, and I added a variation to my processing facilities, namely, the addition of soap to the vats. By simply churning tears and steam into a frothy mass of soap, the need for surface tension is removed as pegasus magic is trapped in the soapy bubbles, who have far superior surface tension holding them together.

I've only had a few hours to play with this newfound Pegasus Seafoam, but the results were phenomenal.

Using incredibly durable tanks, molten iron can be sprayed into a mass of Pegasus Seafoam, and, once the pressure dies down, and the temperature reduces sufficiently, the new soapy impure iron can be refined into Mistril, a metal containing a small amount of magic. While it is no orichalcum, the magic in this metal makes it incredibly lightweight, and seemingly defies aerodynamics itself, naturally enhancing structures made of it such that they are more able to cut through wind and air, albeit only by a very slight amount.

Before I go any further, I would like to say in no uncertain terms that swallowing this stuff will not give you the powers of a pegasus. Stop trying to drink Pegasus Seafoam or swallow Mistril Pellets. You will become ill.

I've already taken the opportunity to retrofit countless Shadow Realm vessels with this metal, after putting it into mass production, including my own personal Arwing unit in spite of Mistril's low durability, compared to Crystal Adamantium and the hellish alloys that have slowly been appearing among the Shadow Realm's hobby metallurgists. I believe a thin layer of the material should improve efficiency across the board, and it shouldn't cause that much of a decrease in durability, due to the thin layer used.

Even so, I cannot help but feel like Mistril is just the beginning of my studies into Pegasus Seafoam, and the properties of the Waterworks Spell in general. If I am to test Waterworks more thoroughly, however, I will need to construct a new type of containment cell. A cell capable of isolating valued experimenters from their coworkers hilarious jokes when they're just trying to study magic, and people keep handing him tissues and patting him on the back.

(Present Chapter 23): Green at the Gills

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Fluttershy is patiently reading a magazine in the waiting room when Rarity burst through the door of the spa.

Gilda also happens to be there as well, twiddling her thumbs with an annoyed expression of begrudging acceptance.

Rarity whips her hat off and places it on a nearby stand as she sighs piteously. "Oh Fluttershy, I'm so dreadfully sorry, I swear that I didn't mean to be so late for our little get-together, time got away from me, you will not believe what happened!"

She waves to Aloe. "The usual, please!"

With a broadened smile, Aloe leads them into another room, where, after dressing in their robes and towels, they each take a seat in the steamy room while Lotus spoons water onto ripping-hot stones arrayed off to the side.

"So, what happened," Gilda drawls, her feathers and coat quickly poofing up from the humidity, much to her annoyance.

Rarity gives a prim nod, before beginning her story. "Well, I had been on my way here, as fast as was reasonable, when who else but Photo Finish happened to see me and my marvelous hat!"

"Photo Finish?" Fluttershy asks, allowing the steam to relax the aches that come with caring for nearly a forest's worth of animals every day.

"Oh, only the most famous fashion photographer in the world! She had seen my hat and called it 'Absolutely Marvelous'!" Rarity claims, chest puffing with pride.

Gilda chuckles. She might not give two feathers about this "fashion" junk, but eh, the unicorn sure seems happy about it. "Hey, that's pretty good! Sounds like a pretty big deal."

Rarity gasps in faux-offense. "Big Deal? This is the biggest deal there is, I would hope, she was so impressed that she had actually wanted to take pictures of my clothing in my own shop!"

Fluttershy squeals lightly. "That's wonderful, Rarity..!"

Rarity nods so rapidly that her towel nearly flops off of her head. "Oh, the things this could mean for my fashion career!"

Fluttershy's slight smile widens. "I'm so happy to hear that."

An odd gleam enters Rarity's eyes. "But, in order for things to go perfectly, I'll need the perfect model, someone with grace and class, radiating feminine beauty!

"Someone like-!"

The door opens as Aloe nervously pokes her head into the steam room.

"Madame Fluttershy, there is someone in the lobby who claims they need your help with something."

Fluttershy is almost thankful at the distraction, not liking the direction Rarity's conversation had been going. "I'll be right there," she states softly, calmly scrambling out of the room like a rabbit under threat of predation.

Gilda cuts Rarity a look as she stares forlornly after the escaped pegasus.

"Hey, I'm pretty classy, if you need a model or whatever," Gilda offers, mostly as a courtesy.

Rarity, out of options, restrains the looming sense of dread she feels at the thought of trying to get Gilda into a dress and posing.

"That would be... wonderful," she says, her smile a bit too wide from nervousness.

As Fluttershy enters the lobby, she spots the ever-meddling Weiss Noir, who looks like a colt that got caught with their hoof in the cookie jar.

"So, uhh, just... Speaking hypothetically, how angry would you be if... I accidentally turned a fish into a giant monster with metamorphic magic, and I'm not sure how to calm it down?"

Fluttershy lets out a small sigh. "I would be very disappointed."

He chuckles sheepishly. "I'll pay for your next spa visit?"

"Just take me to the fish, Weiss Noir," Fluttershy says quietly, already flapping her way out of the door.

The dark sage nods, walking out after her. "So, basically, I was doing some perfectly harmless tests with a fish in The Tower, when it... Grew a bit out of control."

Fluttershy resists the urge to roll her eyes. The fact that he was experimenting on that poor fish is reason enough for her to not be happy about this situation.

The idea of Weiss being a frightening individual fails to cross her mind, focused as it is on helping whoever it is Weiss sucked into his schemes.

Eventually, they reach the tower in question, where a giant flying fish is raining down bolts of lightning from its bright red cheek pouches.

"As you can see, things got a bit out of hand, when it comes to experimental security. If you can just calm him down for a bit, I'm sure I can fix the problem easily enough." Weiss again chuckles, trying to lighten the mood while lightning flashes down from the angry fish's face.

Fluttershy goes so far to slowly put a hoof to her face, briefly.

"It's alright, Weiss. I'll try to help. Can you tell me exactly what happened?" Fluttershy says, slowly working out what the fish is feeling. Confusion. A lot of confusion.

The poor dear has no clue why the "river" they're in is so big and open, still thinking themselves to be underwater.

Weiss nods. "It all started when I was doing a bit of preparation to get ready for my trip to Storm Country," he explains.

"So, Tempest, you claimed that the Diamond Dogs were running low on Storm Magic, does that mean the Fizz Guard are going to start reverting, sooner or later?" Weiss asks, looking over several maps and documents, thoughts clearly churning in his head.

While Tempest nods, Grubber, Puncher and Chunker wail in horror. "I don't want to lose my fingers!" Puncher shouts over Tempest's attempt at explaining. "I need them to punch things!"

"Idiots, it would take years for you to run out-" Tempest attempts, before Weiss flips the table he was sitting at, leaping onto it dramatically.

His hooves wobbling on the edge of the flipped table, he growls and uses a burst of magic to hold everything still before beginning his announcement.

"Have no fear, my loyal servants of darkness! Your master will not allow such a fate to befall you!" Weiss shouts finger pointed to the sky as lightning rumbles behind him.

"I'll get you guys the juice you need, lickity-split! All I need is a small bucket, a large bucket, two gallons of soap and someone who cries a lot!"

Grubber sniffles at the thought of no longer being able to reach high shelves, before resisting the urge to bawl upon realizing that he was never able to reach high shelves.

"I cry a lot!" Grubber points out, making Weiss shake their head.

"The pony I have in mind will provide all the Waterworks we need..." Weiss explains ominously, before leaping out of a nearby window, splattering on its nigh-indestructible surface without breaking through.

He reforms with an annoyed expression on his face. "Right, I forgot about that. Stupid building regulations, one dumbass Zebra contracts a brief case of boneitis from breaking through the walls and suddenly, I have to make the tower 'OSHA Compliant and 'Less of a literal deathtrap'." he grumbles to himself, making air quotes while walking out the door.

As he leaves, he hears Tempest lightly slap Puncher across the face to get them to come to their senses as she attempts to explain just how long it would take for any reversion to occur.

Before long, his trek takes him to Sugarcube Corner, the most common place to find Equestria's hardest crier.

"Pinkie Pie, I summon you! Come forth, pink horror!"

From the depths of the accursed frosting pits of Sugarcube Corner's darkest depths, a beast, chained up with bindings of pure-

"Weiss, please, don't embellish," Fluttershy chastises lightly, as she and the sage attempt to get up to the Thunder Sturgeon, the pegasus having the instincts to avoid lightning, while the sage simply endures them directly, exploding and reforming with each one as he balances on a floating bubble of some sort that slowly rises up after her.

Weiss scratches his head apologetically. "Sorry."

Thrusting his hands up to grab a bolt of lightning out of the sky before it can hit the pegasus, he wrenches it to the side, sending the bolt crashing to the ground below them.

"Can I continue?" Weiss asks, prompting the pegasus to nod.

"Hey, Pinkie, I need a favor, and I'm willing to pay you back for it," Weiss says, casually walking in as Pinkie scrapes frosting and paper chains off of her face.

"Oh, sure thing Weissie, help me clean up and I'll hear you out," she says, prompting Weiss to nod and go over where he knows the mops are.

"Basically, I need a butt-ton of tears so I can turn them into thunderclouds and make my minions keep their fingers"

Pinkie nods, shoveling a pile of cotton candy from her failed attempt to create the fabled "Chocolate-Barmageddon" "That makes sense!"

Weiss scoffs, throwing his hand in the air as he mops up the three gallons of cherry gelato. "I'm glad some ponies do, I swear, you try to explain metamorphic resonance via ambient energy accumulation in a closed system and they look at you like you're crazy!"

Pinkie nods sagely. "To be genius is to be misunderstood."

With a sigh of relief, the cleaning is finally done and Weiss uses a burst of black flames to erase the pile of failed confections from existence.

Pinkie tilts her head. "Why didn'tcha do that in the first place?"

Weiss shrugs. "I had fun doing things the old fashioned way."

Pinkie pouts as she crosses her arms. "Well, you don't have to do it for a living. Cleanup in an instant? Pinkie wants a piece of that."

Weiss groans. "Seriously, who's going to want access to my stuff next, Lyra?"

He nervously considers whether or not that qualifies as "Tempting Fate", and tries not to think too hard about it.

"Whatever, sure, Pinkie Pie with a Black Flame Broom. I've seen stranger. Come on, it's tear time."

With that, Weiss and Pinkie take the winding road down into the Everfree, where his minions have prepared a large aquarium tank with a single fish in it.

He brings Pinkie over to a gigantic metal bucket, with a large flame burning underneath it, and some sort of crystal hanging above it.

"I need you to cry into this," Weiss demands, but Pinkie shakes her head.

"I can't just cry on demand, Weiss, I have to see something truly, absolutely heart-wrenching, I am a rock! And-"

Weiss pulls out a photograph of Grubber as a very small baby and slyly steps out of the way when Pinkie's eyes erupt like fountains.

"Look at his little feet?!" She bawls at the adorableness, while Grubber mumbles several foul hedgehog curses from the back of the room, unable to make eye contact with anyone else.

In moments, the tank is filled, and steam rising up from it is attracted to the magical crystal suspended above the room until it turns into a dark, stormy thundercloud.

"Now, this is just test number one, so everyone stand back," Weiss demands, putting on a set of Mad Scientist's Goggles as the tear-soaked thunderclouds begin rumbling ominously, the magically created water running out of energy to sustain itself, and releasing large amounts of magical energy as it begins to disperse.

Pulling a large lever, the crystal holding the clouds together flashes, and a massive bolt of glittering lightning rushes over, striking the fish in the aquarium.

"Yes... Yes! It's alive!" Weiss howls, cackling as the fish is left unharmed by the massive amounts of magical electricity, swimming around with a bit of confusion.

By now, Pinkie's waterworks have ceased, and she turns in curiosity to the tank. "So, uhh, what was that supposed to do, exactly?" she says, serendipitously slipping the photograph of Grubber into her hair.

Weiss shrugs, letting out an unsure vocalization. "Iunnow. I figure it'll like, turn into a dude or something?" he says, flaming hair almost forming a question mark from how much it's flailing around.

Everyone watches the tank with rapt attention, waiting to see what the results of Weiss's magic attempt will do. The fish grows a few inches, and its cheeks turn a faint red.

"You can't be serious," Tempest says, stricken with confusion at just how little all that flashy magic had done to the critter.

As if solely to defy her, all of the water in the Aquarium then turns to steam, flooding the room as everyone inside is thrown back by the explosion from the liquid expanding. Bright glowing red eyes appear in the mist, spread apart too far to be on anything but a titanic creature or a slightly oversized hammerhead shark.

"And then I called you, we came here, I started explaining everything, and then we climbed up on top of this gigantic fish monster!" Weiss finishes, his air-bubble popping as he lands on top of the gigantic leviathan.

"Gravity Boots" Weiss whispers, holding out a hand as his hooves glow with some sort of energy that keeps them pressed against the fish's back in spite of the whipping winds this high up.

Fluttershy's own wings form instinctively to turn the wind into something that keeps her pressed down on the ground while her eyes narrow, she might not be a weathermare like Rainbow Dash, but it's not hard to pick up a few things. "He's sucking up the clouds through its gills, it's why he keeps growing. I need to convince him to go into some water, the altitude is making him dizzy."

She softly jabs Weiss in the chest. "You need to help me keep him on course to the lake. Without hurting him."

Weiss nods, thrusting his arms out wide.

"Dark Hand!" Weiss shouts, glowing black scrawls appearing on his arms that seem to bleed off into nothing, the enchanted writing growing in size until it forms six gigantic limbs.

With as much care as six gigantic limbs can afford, Weiss grabs the sides of the fish, palms pressing into feathery scales. "Alright, I've got him."

Fluttershy immediately gallops to the head of the beast, whispering at them and slowly convincing them to head towards the lake.

Weiss adjusts course, as Fluttershy had planed, the fish only thrashing a few times in the process.

"Ok sweetie, I need you to go down into that lake, ok? I know you think you're underwater right now, but you're not, and it's making you feel bad," Fluttershy coaxes, until inch by inch, the fish aims downward, crashing into the water's surface with an almighty splash as it discharges the electricity that had been stored inside of it all at once in a mostly harmless manner.

The fish happily flopping around in the lake, the pegasus turns and gives Weiss the stink-eye, as he shrinks slightly in anticipation for something she's not sure of.

"You're not going to hit me in the head, are you?" Weiss asks, seemingly ready to cover his dome after so many instances of being bludgeoned there.

Fluttershy lets all of her stress out in one gigantic long-suffering sigh that might qualify as "Inaudible" to bats.

"No, Weiss. Because I know how you're going to pay me back for all of this," she says in a gentle tone that makes Weiss wish she had gone with the concussive option.

Gilda wishes she had never agreed to this.

"Yeow!" the griffon yelps, leaping up when a pin pokes her in the rump.

Rarity tuts. "Gilda Grizelda Gruff! Now we're going to have to redo the entire thing!" she says, as Gilda's leap had disheveled the outfit slightly.

Gilda looks ready to scream as a malicious aura emerges behind her and her eyes glow with a malignant light. After several deep breaths, Gilda regains her composure, deflating like a balloon. "Whatever."

"Mmm, more ribbons," Rarity demands, Spike leaping up to plant two huge ones on both sides of Gilda's head.

As she adjusts the form-fitting ruby-red dress, Rarity shakes her head. "No, less ribbons," the unicorn declares, Spike leaping up to yank the ribbons off.

"Give me one of the orange feathers, please," Rarity demands, making Twilight levitate the bowl of feathers over for Rarity to pick through.

Pulling out the correct one, Rarity gently sets it into the brim of Gilda's gigantic sun-hat, tilting it just so.

"Alright, we're finally done, Gilda, hop up on that little stage over there, if you would. Photo Finish will be here any moment!" she declares, shoving the unamused griffon forward and up onto the raised platform.

"So I just gotta look cool while this chick takes pictures of me, right?" Gilda says, regretting every instant of this farce.

Rarity shakes her head. "No, no no no. You must look graceful, poised! The very picture of elegance and beauty!

"We've still got time to go over some appropriate poses before-" the door jingles, making Rarity freeze in place while everyone else looks over curiously to see who it is.

"Ahh, but how can you have time for mere practice, when I, Photo Finish..!"

"Am already here?!" The extravagant mare shouts, posing as lights flare behind her in a show of absolute fabulosity.

Rarity hyperventilates slightly, before assuming her best "Yesmare" expression. "Right, of course! Welcome to my humble boutique, Photo Finish!" Rarity says as the mare walks past her, uncaring.

She looks at Gilda with a scrutinizing gaze. "Bold, very bold. Let's see what you can do, babe."

Nodding at her assistants, the other ponies immediately set up her camera for her, and she begins pointing. "Legs forward, chin up! No, your other legs! Yes... yes..!"

She shakes her head violently. "No!"

Gilda's anger levels begin to rise as she attempts to obey. One of the pins left in the dress pokes her slightly.

As Photo Finish grows more and more incensed with Gilda's lack of whatever it is she's looking for, it cannot compare to Gilda's building rage.

"No, no! With more pizazz!" Photo Finish demands, as something glassy tinkles and snaps inside Gilda's break.

With a roar of defiant anger, she rips the stupid dress right off of herself in a storm of talons and purple energy, heaving heavily as her eyes twitch at the numerous photographs being taken of her.

She turns to face the mare, while Rarity and her friends look on in horror.

Photo Finish's jaw has dropped to the floor, while she idly snaps another picture.

"I..." she begins, staring blankly at Gilda, her body covered in the shredded remains of the red dress, her hat hanging askew from one side.

"Love it! That is it darling! That is simply it!" the mare squeals dramatically.

She pokes her lip thoughtfully. "Though, next time, I believe we could do with a bit less damage done to the outfit, of course. But the passion? Perfect, I love it."

Tempest stares at the gigantic electrified sea-beast now occupying the lake closest to the Everfree, before turning to her subordinates and Pinkie Pie.

"Don't let Weiss test any magic on you four until I sign off on it," she states simply, before casting a spell to flip upside down and fall into the sky out of sight.

Pinkie giggles, falling onto her rear as her head tilts up trying to follow the unicorn's path with her eyes. "Golly gee, and here I thought Twilight made weird experiments. Welp! I'm going to go back to work. Tell Weissie to call me when he's out of the doghouse, mkay?" the bouncing mare shouts, leaping off of The Tower without a care in the world and bouncing heavily as she makes her way back to Ponyville.

Grubber gulps. "So, uhh, anyone up for cards?"

Puncher and Chunker agree with the idea, and the trio make their way to the barracks in Star Road, intent on starting up a good old fashioned game of poker to forget about this odd and slightly frightening series of events.

By the time they've convinced a few other hedgehogs to join in on the fun, Tempest lands harshly on the ground nearby, waltzing in casually and taking her own seat.

Nobody is dumb enough to tell Tempest that she can't join in on their poker game, in spite of her arguably being the one to sign their checks.

"So, is what's on tap for you all, or can your commander have a glass as well?" she says slyly, as one of the Fizz Guards passes her a mug full of something frothy and delicious.

Grubber gives her an odd look for fraternizing with the guards, which she returns with a blank stare. "What, Grubber? I'm not so strict that I can't enjoy a good time, am I? Deal me in."

"Rarity, if this pony jabs me in the butt one more time, I think I'm going to explode, with an actual blast wave, and a lot of fire," Gilda whispers violently, before leaping in shock when a large branch is used to annoy her into assuming her "Fashionable" expression.

Rarity shrugs helplessly, tightening the crystal cloth armbands and scarf. "I'm sorry Gilda, I've lost all control of the situation, I'm afraid,"

Photo Finish, however, seems to be on cloud nine. "It's going to be sensational! I can see it now Gilda, your hyperviolent presence will turn the fashion world upside down! It's primal, it's downright primal! Ponies will be falling head over heels for this lineup!" she shouts, lost in the delight of model management.

She grabs Gilda's cheek, tugging on it playfully "Yes, yes! That scowl! That is the ticket!" she says, before turning and walking away.

Gilda sighs, attempting to roll up her sleeve. "Alright, I'm beating her up," Gilda states, before Rarity hisses pleadingly, rolling her sleeve back down. "Please Gilda, as one lady to another, if you do this, I will owe you whatever you want! Just endure for this one show."

Gilda sighs again, smiling slightly. "Fine, just one."

Then someone jabs her again with the stick, and all of that goes out the window as her eye twitches.

"Nope. Changed my mind. I'm out of here," she states, walking for the door while Rarity hugs her hindleg.

"No! Please! Please please please, who could I possibly get to replace you minutes before the runway show?!"

Gilda opens the door to a scowling ebony unicorn mare with blindingly green eyes, and a... Smug looking Fluttershy?

"I'm glad you asked, Rarity," Fluttershy says softly, having heard the mournful lament from the other room.

Rarity leaps to her feet in an instant, examining the grumpy mare with a keen eye. "Who is this, Fluttershy?"

She shrugs slightly, making Gilda's eyes widen. When did Fluttershy get this sassy?

"Just somepony who owes me a favor. Go on, 'Queen Meany', it's time for your fitting."

Rarity and Gilda's eyes widen with realization, recognizing the pony as one of Weiss's old disguises.

"Weiss? What on earth would make you owe Fluttershy this massive of a favor?" Rarity exclaims while Gilda just starts laughing helplessly.

Queen Meany turns their head to the side, their violent scowl increasing by the minute as they realize just what the butter pegasus had talked them into doing. "I don't want to talk about it."

Nightmare yawns again. Well, it's not like she has anything better to do, waiting on Weiss to come in here and try to torment her properly. Time to see what all those ponies seem to like about sleeping.

Resting her head on the invisible black ground beneath her, she allows her eyes to slowly slide closed, until...

"Ow!" Nightmare shouts, leaping to her hooves when a drop of hot water splashes on her face. She jerks around, looking left right and up for any sign of what might have done that. The water hadn't truly been painfully hot, just shockingly so, compared to the slight chill of the room she was in.

She yawns again, the small jolt of adrenaline wearing off and leaving her properly tired.

When she tries once again to fall asleep, another drop lands on her face, shocking her awake.

(Weiss Report) Bubble Trouble [Pegasus Seafoam]

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Entry Number Thirty, Year Two.

So, a foreword on Pegasus Seafoam and Mistril. Swallowing this stuff will not give you the powers of a pegasus. That's because it gives you entirely different powers. Of course, I don't want my ponies drinking soap and swallowing iron pellets, so I'm keeping that on the downlow until I can make a safer way to tap into it. Otherwise, I would absolutely put this particular use into mass production. It's glorious, and incredibly useful.

Thanks to my Shadow Clone Technique, I'm able to escape the consequences of drinking soap and swallowing iron pellets, at least for a while, and during the effective period of Pegasus Seafoam consumption, it grants a number of unique passive effects not found elsewhere among the spells I know of. The first and foremost ability granted by consuming Pegasus Seafoam itself is the ability to treat any bubble as though it were as solid as granite, even going so far as to treat you as being weightless for the purpose of standing on floating bubbles.

The emotional effects are also dazzling, a blend of several feelings in the air pollute the results, but in general, Pegasus Seafoam inflicts a strong sense of joy, laughter, and giddiness, paired with a few emotions I can't quantify, but I am certain are related to the emotions that Pegasus ponies are able to feel. These emotions combined do not grant the user the ability to stand on top of clouds, which is noteworthy, and I suspect it is due to the magic of the seafoam itself, it's possible that if the magic were bound in "Liquid Clouds", instead of soapy water, then one might gain the ability to walk on clouds. This is pure speculation, however.

I've actually managed to replicate this effect once without the use of Siren's Seafoam, through the use of a Vance that I had prepared by drinking a potion right before going to sleep and charging the Vance accordingly, so I suspect that a Materia could do the same thing. However, the use of a Materia would cause the same confusion as any other off-tribe ability, and would risk exposing a Materia's capabilities in that respect. As such, I've got no choice but to shelve the idea of mass producing Bubblewalking Materia for the time being.

Though I've spent more time falling off of bubbles than I have standing on top of them, I know that with enough practice, the ability could begin to come second nature to me. I've been doing some consideration, on several things, and I might be able to craft a spell that, if not a true Bubblewalking Spell on it's own, will create Pegasus Seafoam for me to consume in order to gain the effect. I've gotten very positive tests by combining Waterworks, Royal Sugar, and Black Flames. The heat, sugar, and water together forming a bubbling froth that I'm certain I can refine into a spell to capture ambient magic.

As an added benefit, if I can master this combo of spells, it will give me the ability to shoot bubbles that make people pass out. A worthwhile ability, if only for the aesthetic. Who could possibly deny the sheer aesthetic presence of me, standing on a gigantic purple bubble, shooting other purple bubbles that make people pass out on contact? It's literally the coolest fucking idea of all time.

On to the next topic of discussion, the consumption of Mistril. Unlike Pegasus Seafoam, consuming this metal does not grant bubblewalking, and, for the longest time, I wasn't sure it did a single damn thing. Eventually, though, I learned that it has the dumbest possible effect, namely, it increases the effective density of air for the user. I can't swim through the air, and I can't do that thing from One Piece where they kick off the air, but both of these have two simple causes. I'm not trying hard enough.

I'm no fool, I know my legs are puny at the best of times, especially compared to non-unicorns, I imagine if Iron Diamond were under this effect, he could kick his way through the air without a care in the world. At the same time, consuming raw Mistril can't be good for your health, limiting the tests I can do for Earth Ponies being able to leap through the air and skywalk around. Oh but if I could, you bet your ass I would be mass producing this stuff. Just because I'm too much of a scrawny puke to fly with a Mistril Jawbreaker doesn't mean that I wouldn't take a lot of pleasure out of watching others take to the skies with them.

So, for Mistril, I've been looking into something my ponies have independently been developing without my knowledge. Molten Cooking. These ponies were eating goddamn rocks before I came around. I would be a fool to assume that giving them a total immunity to heat wouldn't lead to them melting the rocks first. So far, it's only been things like Glass and Crystal, but with how much my soldiers have been working with metal alloys, I've got this tickle in the back of my mind telling me it won't be long before someone tries to cook up a molten aluminum sundae.

I'm not going to force it along, but if somepony DOES gain the ability to cook metal into foods, you can bet your fucking ass I'm sending over a batch of Mistril for him or her to try their hands at turning it into a dish. I don't even know why I like the idea so much, to be honest, we all live underground. At the same time though, I just can't deny it, the idea of ponies just chowing down on some magical curry and then hopping their way through the skies without a care in the world... It strikes me that this might be the Pegasus Seafoam talking right now.

I'll write up another report later after it wears off, see if I'm still feeling quite as much hype for this particular plan.

Princess Celestia, are there ponies who can cook metal, in this era? Everything in this entry seems to be possible with the technology we have now.

Well, Sunset, that's a good question. I've not heard of any in the past three centuries, but that by no means implies that the practice has died out. There once existed a small commune of Griffons and Earth Ponies who would mix enchanted copper salts into monster meat, for... I believe it was some cultural reasons.

I'll look through my contacts, perhaps some of their descendants still uphold the practice.

(Past Chapter 24): A Fool and Their Bits

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Princess Luna, one of Equestria's two reigning monarchs, is trying desperately to hold in amused laughter at Weiss's response to a pony named High-Society preparing to attack him in outright disgust after his introduction to the nobility in her foyer.

"No creature as foul as you should have been allowed to set foot in this hallowed place, prepare to die, creature of darkness!" Prince High-Society shouts, their horn alight with moderately powerful combat magic.

Weiss's expression turns incredulous as his posture changes and he wheezes with laughter. As he laughs, he also whispers his secret words of magic under his breath, Celestia notices.

"What a fool you are. I'm a god-" Weiss blatantly lies.

"-How can you kill a god?" he asks, not bothering to wait for a response as he continues, shaking his head with his face in his palm.

"What a grand and intoxicating innocence. How could you be so naive?" he questions again, simply dodging to the side of High-Society's blast, before the unicorn yanks a dagger from the holster of a nearby guard in an incensed rage, rushing towards the Dark Sage, who plucks the knife out of the air, a wash of black fire banishing the unicorn's telekinetic grip on it.

Weiss admires the dagger. before tossing it back into the incensed noble's grip as they swipe it at him, only to have the blade bounce off Weiss's chest. "There is no escape. No recall or intervention can work in this place," Weiss starts, holding his arms out dramatically as the other nobles inch their way towards Celestia, hoping she will protect them from this odd guest of hers.

"Come, lay down your weapons, it is not too late for my mercy," he finishes, before Celestia groans, walking between the two.

"Mayhaps Lord Weiss Noir's inclusion of air-quotes around our title of Princess was a jest in poor taste, but that doth not warrant assault, Prince High-Society!" Celestia booms, demanding obedience from her unruly pet nobles, all the smart ones bowing on the spot. Even High-Society flinches slightly.

"Are our Equestrian ponies wobbling colts and fillies, resorting to violence in the face of even slight offenses? I say thee neigh!" Celestia booms even louder, taking menacing steps towards the prince, until he bows, trembling.

Weiss shrugs internally. Nobody ever said a country of peace and tolerance needed clean undies.

Celestia turns to him, and his eyebrows raise, before he begins, sweeping his arms out with a lowered head. "Forgive me, your majesty, for the humor of my land is bold, and I have yet to acclimate to the kindness and subtlety of Equestrian dialogue."

Celestia looks very annoyed with Weiss's clear jab at her methods as Luna laughs aloud at the clear sarcasm, but detects the sincere intent in his apology if nothing else.

"Thou art forgiven, Thine Lordship, now let us take leave for a place worthy of our negotiations," Celestia booms softly, before turning and walking off, the Sage cutting High-Society a smug look as he passes, arms crossed behind his back.

High-Society's glare promises at minimum twenty assassination attempts in Weiss's future. No... twenty-two. Just in case.

Celestia scowls now that I'm in her Throne Room properly, giving us time to discuss things before the counsel is brought in to determine the exacting details of the Equestrian/Shadow Realm alliance.

"Must you antagonize every living creature that isn't on fire?" Celestia demands harshly,

I shake my head, tutting. "Princess Celestia, I know you dislike the nobility, but you don't really mean that. Setting them on fire would make the problem worse before it made it better."

She ignores my banter, continuing her vain efforts to get me to act seriously before the rabble comes in to argue with their almighty ruler.

"It is a trial keeping the nobility in line, and they will almost certainly seek your death, now that you've presented your nature to them," Luna interjects warningly.

I smile faintly. "I assure you, it won't be a problem. I've become much harder to slay, recently."

Her eyebrow raises. "Do you genuinely believe that you have a panacea to all that an assassin could ail you with?"

My smug expression intensifies as I open my mouth and let the lies flow. "Well, of course, I've developed a spell that teleports me instantly home whenever anything threatens my life. Unless this era's assassins begin the pursuit of their marks by scouring the planet of all life, I think I'll endure."

Of course, that's a load of horseshit, and I think Celestia knows it too, but I'm not quite ready to let a single living soul know that I've got a body-double spell now that basically negates any sort of risk when I'm participating in garbage like this.

After scrutinizing me for several moments without the inherent ability to detect if I'm lying, Celestia sighs in an unprincessly manner. Luna, however, absolutely detects that I'm as full of it as I am full of myself. In spite of this, she doesn't pursue my bullshit with an accusation of attempting to deceive them.

"Royal Guards of Castle Everfree, allow the council of nobles to enter, for we shalt now accept their participation in the Royal Court!" Princess Celestia demands, prompting the various guards to open the broad, gilded doors of the throne room wide.

I take my place off to the side, sitting on a small wooden bench at Celestia's direction as I put on my three-piece-suit of black and white fire. It's been quite some time since I've touched real wood. Thankfully, it doesn't seem like my hair is going to ignite it any time soon, giving me the impetus to relax slightly as the various nobles shuffle in nervously, looking as pitiful as a puppy that just pissed on the carpet after Celestia's earlier outburst.

"Before Court begins, we shalt begin with the facts. While we are rulers of Equestria, we remain the sole salvation of many ponies beyond her borders. As such, today's session of court wilst be in pursuit of one goal, it shalt begin and end with the matter of a sizable contribution of hay and other vital foodstuffs to the Shadow Realm, to be delivered each month until such time that this contribution is no longer required.

"This act of altruism is not, however, in service to the citizens of the Shadow Realm but rather, to the ponies who will soon be freed into the Shadow Realm's custody, ponies who will for many seasons be unable to contribute to their well being, nor to the country harboring them from Sombra's vile intentions." Celestia finishes, before waving to the Nobles who have nervously taken their seats in the various benches arrayed around the Throne Room, almost like pews.

"We shalt now allowest the floor to pose thine questions, and thine statements."

Immediately, all the nobles sitting in the room begin barking out demands and denouncements in unison, prompting Luna to hold up a hoof that silences them.

"We. Do. Not. Heed. Baying.

"You will speak as ponies, you foals." Luna demands, making them quiet down until they amass their whining into the body of a single pony. Oh, goodie, it seems they've chosen High-Society as their spokespony.

I resist the urge to roll my eyes as I use a homeward portal to drop a pile of folders into my hands, flipping through the files I had printed on our current economic situation and needs.

It's honestly a bit embarrassing, but I had to invent a way to put things from the Arcana Nox onto physical paper, considering my assumption that ponies outside the Shadow Realm might not have reacted well to our holograms.

The method I ultimately went with is to replace the illusion charm in a hologram projector with a liquid-suspending telekinesis charm, effectively replacing the dots of light with dots of ink.

I idly listen to High-Society rant about how the Shadow Realm is a complete unknown that they've only just learned about today, and how my example clearly marks my entire people as slavering mutated beasts, unfit for anything but chains and imprisonment for my disrespect, blah blah blah.

Seriously, these guys are acting like children! I shudder to think just how poorly Celestia and Luna could have mismanaged Equestria to let these clowns have a say in anything.

The Princesses take this all in stride, though Luna is clearly far more skilled at composing herself, compared to her sister.

Not their expressions, the two of them have been stone-faced this entire time, no, I mean more in their response. I'm honestly ashamed to say I didn't see it coming at all when Celestia calmly picks High-Society up by his tail and flings him bodily out of the courtroom.

"We apologize dearly, but we wouldst have a pony of greater decorum present thine arguments, ye nobles," Princess Celestia demands with a stomp of her hoof.

Honestly, I don't blame her, it would be a good idea to steal if my office had windows. I guess if anyone pops up in the Shadow Realm with aspirations of nobility, I've got a role-model to look to for how to deal with them.

I'll have to install windows in my office just for throwing ponies out of at some point.

The second noble steps up to the chopping block, a pegasus mare this time, nervously collating a pile of dry and cracked parchment that had been hastily covered in talking points by the other nobles.

"Your majesties, Princess Celestia and Princess Luna, I have with me here a short list of questions, concerns that the council has with your meeting with the pony known as Weiss Noir-" Ooh, she just snubbed me, I think, not including the "Lord."

I think, anyway, I'm not one-hundred percent on ancient pony politics. I'll just put on my best grumpy face and hope for the best.

"In spite of your trust, we feel that even in an emergency as you have presented it, simply supplying free goods to this unknown country is a vastly unwise course of action. We know not the nature of their ponies, we know nothing of their ruler, save his behavior thus far, we know nothing of what purpose this food serves, and what purpose it serves Equestria to share of our surplus with this unknown fief."

Ooh, I think that was another snub, calling the Shadow Realm a "Fief". 'Scathing, simply scathing,' I chuckle internally, adjusting my tie.

Princess Luna turns to address me. "Lord Weiss Noir, wouldst thou ease the minds of our ponies with some short description of thy Realm, in thine own words?"

She instantly regrets her words when she sees the gleam in my eye, but I manage to restrain myself just in time to adjust my tie one final time, summoning up a pair of reading glasses that do absolutely nothing but give me an air of refinement.

"Of course, your majesty, though I would preface my words with due warning, I am proud of what I have wrought. I fear this may tint my recounting ever so slightly," I say, preparing my files and holding them in front of me as if to read off of.

She motions for me to continue.

"This land is peaceful, it's inhabitants kind," I start, waving my hand as vague sparkles appear, forming a hologram depicting the Shadow Realm from above, a glittering landscape of embers, with rivers of glowing metal and trees of polished obsidian.

I stand up, walking into the middle of the room as I begin my monologue, the holographic screen following me as I do. "My kingdom's name is the Shadow Realm. It is just over one year old.

"This kingdom lies in the outskirts of the Crystal Empire's borders, surrounding it entirely in various underground cells, where the large regions of ashes and fire are."

"It currently brokers no alliances with other sovereign nations," I look pointedly at the crowd of nobility, before continuing, pacing the room ponderously and gesturing as the holographic screen changes, showing live feeds of ponies peddling wares, eating in restaurants, and working in various labor jobs.

"I work as Lord and Master for the Shadow Realm's day-to-day management, and I get home every day by Eight-PM at the latest. Most of us don't like smoking, but the Longma have been known to occasionally drink. Most of us are in bed by Eleven-PM, and I try to make sure everyone can get eight hours of sleep, no matter what," I go on to claim, the screen displaying large rows of text detailing the various rulings and labor laws that have emerged since the creation of the Arcana Liber.

By now, the entire crowd of nobles, who had previously been mumbling and discussing idly among themselves, have now fallen silent, watching the display with varying degrees of shock.

I move on to the farms, demonstrating the gigantic underground and aboveground crystal farms that supply massive amounts of food to the Realm. "After ensuring everyone has access to warm food and ample exercise, we usually have no problems sleeping until morning. Just like a baby, we wake up without any fatigue or stress in the morning."

At this, the various forms of combat sport are shown briefly, ponies with pleased expressions beating one another up in large arenas, covered in padding and with referees as intensive as any other fancy sport.

The nobles gasp in disgust before I shut them up by changing the screen to still images of my standing army, rows and rows of soldiers in thick mechanized armor, wielding gigantic metal lances. In the background, shadowed mecha can be seen just barely in the faint light.

"I was told there were no issues with our military or defenses at my last check-up," I grin disarmingly at their dropped jaws.

I go on to shrug slightly, my head down and my eyes closed peacefully. "I'm trying to explain that the Longma are a people who wish to live very interesting lives."

"We take care not to trouble ourselves by making new enemies. Like waiting and worrying, they would cause us to lose sleep at night. That is how I deal with my society, and I know that is what brings us happiness. Although, if we were to fight we wouldn't lose to anypony."

Celestia looks utterly befuddled, while Luna has already watched the show with me at one point, and is chuckling uncontrollably as she recognizes the speech for what it is.

"We thank thee, Lord Weiss. We believe that to be more than suitable to introduce our ponies to thy wondrous realm," Luna says, restraining herself admirably in order to deliver the brief statement relieving me of the floor.

I take my seat with my arms crossed and my head held high.

Hours later, the nobles are too stunned from my little show to resist Celestia and Luna working together to quench their mad opposition to our plans.

It's so satisfying, it almost makes up for me being shot in the chest by a cloaked pony with a crossbow as soon as I walk out of the castle gates.

"My word, those assassins work fast..!" I state simply, the dull pain in my chest rapidly increasing as the shock wears off.

Before everything goes black, I take note of the crossbow bolt's curved, ornate look, black metal carved into swirling artistic wires that glow with hidden enchantments.

I jerk awake in my room, as though what just happened had been nothing but a bad dream.

With a smirk, I create another Shadow Clone, my real body blacking out as I take control of it.

"You know, it's strange, but I actually liked the old clone better," I say softly to myself, rotating one of my shoulders as if to stretch out some strain.

"Ahh, well, I'll just have to break it in."

Calmly walking down the hall to the Fast Travel Station, through the portal to Equestria, and down to the castle grounds where Celestia is desperately casting spells trying to reform the smoke my clone burst into, I wave merrily to Luna and the rest of the shocked ponies, while various guards scramble, trying to find the assassin in question.

"Honestly, a pony uses his emergency teleport, and everyone loses their heads," I state, before Celestia grabs me around the neck, flaming eyes boring into mine.

"Fool! If thou hast such a spell, inform us of its properties, instead of simply bursting into dead fumes!" Celestia bellows, tossing me aside as I flip in the air to land easily.

"Aww, you really do care, your majesty," I say easily, brushing myself off before a quickly mumbled "Force Daemon" creates an invisible creature that snatches the assassin's next bolt out of the air and tracks it's trajectory automatically back to them before they can disappear again.

I thrust a hand out towards the foe, whispering another Vance. "X-Zone."

With that, twin portals catch the pony by the legs before they can slip back into the underbrush, dragging them out before seemingly consuming their entire body.

I pull the sphere of warped space towards me, turning to the Princesses as I casually hold my hand out with the distorted ball hovering above it. "I've found the problem. Would you like to try them, or shall I judge them myself?"

Princess Luna steps forward confidently, speaking in a low tone. "I believe it would be best if Equestria saw to their interrogation. We have been working hard to quench this behavior, and their knowledge will serve that purpose."

I dump the screaming, falling pony onto the ground, where they land in a heap before several guards tackle them. Oof, I find myself sympathizing with their pained groans. Nobody likes to be tackled by a literal ton of heavily armored stallions.

"I leave them in your capable hooves, your majesty," I bow slightly.

"Don't be a stranger, I expect wonders between our people," I wave easily, trotting back home with a song in my heart and a bounce in my step.

Seems like Ancient Equestria is a lot more fucking metal than I remember it from the show. It took like two hours for those nobles to call a hit on me, and they were all in one room the whole time, that's some speedy work when you don't have a phone or something.

"I don't got to tell you anything, little pony freaks," Steel Driver says when Helmsplitter walks into the prison. His arms are crossed as he sits in the middle of a thick steel cell.

Helmsplitter shakes their head. "I'm here to tell you something. Did you know you've got a mind control crystal implanted in your chest?"

With that, an X-ray is shown to the Minotaur, whose expression shifts, first to shock, then to guarded skepticism.

"Why should I believe that? I think I would know if that were the case," they argue, snarling slightly.

Helmsplitter shakes their head. "This isn't an attempt to make you give up information. This is effectively a warning. If your crystal activates, we'll be sedating you until we either find a solution to free you...

"Or you die."

Steel Driver swallows heavily. "Why are you telling me this? It's not like I can bust out of here or something."

Helmsplitter responds blandly, as if reading off a report on grain shipments. "I'm informing you so that, if you have any family, we can inform them of the matter."

The minotaur pauses, before shaking their heads. "No, I don't. I've just been doing this for the easy money."

Helmsplitter nods. "If you change your mind, Lord Weiss Noir has told me to offer your next of kin a payment to help tide them over, in spite of your attempts to slaughter innocent civilians."

Steel Driver snorts. "Mighty kind of him. If I ever get out of here, I won't forget it. Only reason I won't swear it is cause I know full well my word is worth spit."

Helmsplitter nods, before the door he came in through opens, allowing a pony to bring in a tray of food.

"You've got one other option. I won't take your answer now, but if you accept, we can use you as the first test," Helmsplitter states, while the minotaur chugs down watered-down beer and shoves crystal rolls into his mouth.

Swallowing the food like a pony-possessed, the Minotaur smirks. "Use me as the guinea pig, eh? Whatever, my life ain't worth spit either. Do whatever you want."

The captain nods. "Lord Weiss Noir will not forget that. And I won't either."

With that, the captain and the food-courier leave the room, allowing the minotaur to stew in his own mistakes.

Princess Luna arrives in person to the sight of me meditating in front of the Kingdom Heart.

"Ahh, Luna, it's good to see you again so soon. How did the rabble enjoy my presentation?"

Luna sighs, a thump ringing out as she sits down next to me, staring into the inky depths of the black flames. "They're out for blood, but they won't oppose the shipments. Celestia threatened to cease taxation altogether if they kept opposing her.

"You need to take care, Weiss, you're making enemies in Equestria. I cannot protect you from them, so you need to protect yourself."

I nod, taking her words seriously. It takes a hell of a weapon to pierce through all of my passive defenses like that crossbow bolt did.

"I've been making headway on that. I've got limits, but those limits are shrinking by the week. Every dark spell that falls into my hands, they're helping to make everyone safer. And hopefully happier," I say, holding out a hand that rapidly turns from it's ivory coloration to a dark luster as the skin smokes slightly and I wince at the pain.

"I call it the Color of Arms. It should make me far more durable, once I master it."

She looks me in the eye, hard. "Your emergency teleport spell. That was a lie, was it not?"

I nod, knowing full well how futile it would be to try and bluff her. "Don't tell anyone. Please. If I had a spell like that, I'd put it on everyone I know. You know that."

"Why hide what you are capable of? You're trying to cultivate the image of divinity. Wouldn't countless powers attributed to you help in that falsehood?" Luna asks, failing to comprehend the nature of my deceptions.

I shake my head. "Not at all. I'm trying to appear as though I'm cultivating that image, Luna. Among my enemies, there are fools and geniuses. I want the fools to cower, because if they mass together, they would throw themselves at me without a second thought, and that would waste my time."

I shudder slightly, before I continue, holding out my hands to the flame for warmth. "But the geniuses, I want them to believe that I'm a fool. I want them to believe that I'm nothing but hollow tricks, with nothing further up my sleeves than what I use in my act."

"Anyone who knows everything I can do could try to do it themselves. My secrets protect me, yes, but they protect everyone else too. Imagine if every fool had all of my power and none of my temperance.

"Endless armies of mutated thugs, cheating and slaying, all using my most powerful techniques. I wouldn't be able to do anything about it."

"But more frighteningly than all of that, what of the geniuses? What of the creatures of the world who are my better, in strength and intelligence? What if a single pony like Sombra had all of my power-multipliers? All of my dirty tricks and forbidden techniques?"

Luna's wing falls over my back as the Kingdom Heart reflects in my eyes. "This world might just burn for somepony like that."

"I understand, Weiss. I wish it were not as you say, and I may disagree with what you are doing, but I won't begrudge you your secrets. Even if none of that were true," she begins.

"I can see how cultivating mystique comforts you in the position you are in," she finishes, allowing the mood to slip into silence as we stare into the fire.

(Noir Report) Summons Taken to Frank Extremes and Mundane Depths [Daemons]

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Entry #22, Year 2

With the advent of increasingly complex spell-work being distributed thanks to the ease by which Materia can be produced and duplicated, I would be remiss to not revisit the idea of Summons, magical spells which take on anthropomorphized forms to aid in their ability to act independently from their creator. While normally, spells with seemingly living forms are the work of extremely potent sorceries, and of extremely skilled casters, thanks to Materia, if a spell can be cast once, it can be cast repeatedly. This has led to an endless storm of increasingly complex spells with very unique settings and systems in place.

One spell that I am incredibly fond of myself is my Force Daemon. Created from Prestidigitonium, it is programmed to automatically give me a large suite of abilities, taking the form of an invisible, demon-like creature which stays extremely close to my person. Due to it being invisible, it does not see with eyes, but rather, it senses the very forces in the air, granting it a supreme ability to detect movement near me, and react to it phenomenally. It also uses it's control over force to do other useful things, like enhancing my physical attacks, weakening enemy attacks, and intercepting projectiles before they can strike me.

While it cannot do all three at once, it serves as a clear example of just how potent even a single Daemon can be, as I will henceforth refer to Summons with an incredibly potent intelligence.

Another very popular Daemon, one which I unfortunately cannot cast myself, is one known as the "Platformer" Daemon. I was not a participant in it's naming, despite what many might think. Rather, it seems the games I devised in the past have inspired some spellcasters and engineers to replicate feats once consigned to the dream world, using Earth Pony force-redirection magic in order to grant it's user the ability to leap high into the air, slide on walls with force and friction, and even leap a second time in mid-air by expelling raw kinetic energy from below their hooves.

I was stunned when I found out that, rather than being the work of a single pony, it had been the work of over ten Earth Ponies, all working in concert to develop and test this Materia, even going so far as to make multiple versions of it, each one tailored to emulate a specific game. It warms my heart so dearly to see my homeland's works put through the trial of fire known as popularity, and come out the other side forged into such potent magic. Indeed, when I had first seen it used, it had nearly drawn a tear to my eye, watching the acrobat use it in order to leap from wall to wall, from platform to platform, ascending the obstacle course as easily as any bird could.

I'm sorry, but I just had to gush. Dark Magic or no, it was truly a phenomenal display. Even more phenomenal, however, was when Glitter Miss Priss's Hit or Miss Punch had been turned into a proper Daemon-like spell.

The spell's inventor had commissioned a professional engineer to devise the enchantment, giving a broad list of demands which they had been able to fulfill with some amount of difficulty. The end results, however? Magnificent. The so-called "Rodeo Clown" Daemon is another invisible charm, similar to my own Force Daemon, but on a vastly superior scale. Anything it suspects would strike the user? It automatically reflects away from them. Anything it suspects would miss the user entirely? It instead accelerates to malicious levels, exploding it to bits more often than not.

When tested against Golem foes, the Rodeo Clown is supreme, a terrifying and almost invincible defensive spell against physical attackers. A shield that cuts, and a sword that deflects, a defense and an attack, blended together seamlessly. Even should the user kick up things themselves, the spell doesn't care. This means that with a simple scuff of the hoof, a user protected by the Rodeo Clown can fire off molten pellets of rock with every swing of their hooves, all while attackers are either bounced off, or ripped to shreds by it's force inverting and amplification properties.

Another Daemon I've been developing is a far more mundane use of intelligent spellcasting entities, namely, I've been devising a Fashion Daemon. An active, interactive instance of Royal Crystal Growth, which can search the area around me and automatically grow red carpets, marble pillars, and purple crystal flooring and purple cloth drapes wherever I go, should I need to intimidate a target. One thing I will insist time and time again, dear reader, is that in order to harness your magic to its fullest, you must tap into the emotions that you feel the strongest. For me, my theatrics fuel me, and give my spells newfound power.

As such, a Fashion Daemon, while a useless novelty in the hands of another, serves as a potent magical tool in my own arsenal. Finding spells and tactics that invoke strong emotions in yourselves is a a potentially useful way to harness a Daemon.

For all Daemons, however, the weakness remains the same. Find a flaw in their rules, and you defeat them. Confuse or overwhelm a Daemon's ability to act, and you defeat them. They operate with the mind of their caster, which makes them all fallible, from the tiniest Force Daemon to the most horrifying and gigantic Rodeo Clown. All it takes is to find a simple flaw. My own Force Daemon, for example, has an annoying habit of prioritizing diamonds, if it is attempting to deflect multiple sources of harm, while Glitter Miss Priss's Rodeo Clown once went berserk when it spotted a nearby centipede, going out of it's way to obliterate the bug in a panic.

I haven't had enough time to personally go down the list of all possible Daemons to pick them apart for flaws, but I assure you, dear reader, that those flaws exist.

(Present Chapter 24): Show Her the Fifty States

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The Halberd stands in the air like an ominous demon, highlighted against the stormy clouds it emerged from with a deafening roar.

Weiss stands at the helm in his familiar arm-crossed pose, a hand snaking out and tapping at the controls next to him.

Tempest's face appears on a nearby monitor. "How goes the mission I sent you for?" Weiss demands, Tempest looking particularly exhausted.

"I do wish you had simply let me come along if you're really going to be taking care of the matter we discussed," Tempest starts, pausing for a few moments before she continues.

"It's as your prophecies stated, the buffalo arrived and accosted the train. However, despite my not intervening, the dragon was able to prevent the tree from being taken. What do you want me to do from here?"

Weiss hums, as an airship approaches the Halberd, looking particularly nasty and aggressive.

"See if you can convince them to make contact with the buffalo. Shut up anyone who isn't named Little Strongheart or Braeburn, the others will just end up interfering with negotiations. If all else fails, use the portal device as a point of barter," Weiss says, gesturing at the crew to prepare the cannons when the enemy airship fires a harpoon that bounces off of the Halberd's metal hull with a shriek.

"Permission to ask why helping them out benefits us, now that you've already connived me into coming here?" Tempest asks, making Weiss smile faintly.

"Buffalo magic is tied to their bodily strength, having nothing to do with nature. And yet their stampeding every year is able to enrich the soil and cause massive amounts of gem and crystal growth. I want to know the secret, and helping them now will make them more pliable later. Make sure they know you're one of mine. Over and out."

As Tempest's face disappears from the monitor, replaced with battle logs for the ship, Weiss smiles. "What a brave new world, that has such putzes in it," he claims, staring at the enemy airship fondly, before giving the order to fire.

As Applejack hugs and pets the tree, she repeatedly whispers comforting words. "Don't worry, Bloomberg, you're safe now, those mean old buffalo can't get you now, there there," she whispers to the tree, making her friends and family look on with vague confusion. The Appleloosans however, don't seem nearly as disturbed by the arboreal tender moment.

"Well, while Applejack gets Bloomberg calmed down enough for planting, I can go on and show you the wonders and majesty of-"

"Aaappleloosa!" he rears up as a faint horse's whinny echoes behind him.

Tempest, who is hanging around off to the side, simply watches with vague disgust as the so-called Braeburn drags Twilight and her friends around, pointing out their various attractions, from horse-drawn carriages, in the sense of a pony dragging a carriage around with another pony in it, to horse-drawn carriages, in the sense of ponies literally drawing carriages with a pencil and paper.

"I forgot how cheery ponies can get," she mutters to herself before Pinkie Pie seemingly materializes behind her. "Ponies aren't cherries, silly, they're ponies!"

Tempest jerks. "Sweet Elysium, they need to put a bell on you," the unicorn claims, wrangling her adrenaline back under control while Pinkie looks adorably confused.

"But then how would I sneak up on ponies to surprise them?" Pinkie ponders out loud.

"Well, anyway, what'cha doing here, spying on us?" Pinkie asks as Tempest gives her a deadpan look.

"Yes," Tempest responds plainly, not caring particularly whether or not the bubblegum mare knows.

"Oh! Okie-Dokie! Can I spy too? I'm really good at spying!" Pinkie shouts, making Tempest groan before an idea crosses her mind.

"Yes, fine, I need you to go look for a pink mare with three balloons for her cutie mark. Find her, and spy on her for the rest of today," Tempest demands, making Pinkie Pie salute and zip away into the distance.

Tempest breathes a sigh of relief, now that Pinkie's out of the way, she can work out how exactly to get this situation fixed according to Weiss's will.

As his Fizz guards clean up the trash, Weiss himself stalks forward with calm amusement, approaching the captain of the vessel with a grin that glints perfectly in the low light of the ship's bowels.

"Hello, my good sir. I'm here to get information. I'm glad you took the opportunity to come to me first, though. Very up-and-coming of you, really," Weiss says, prompting the hedgehog captain to spit a wad of blood in Weiss's face.

Weiss's eye squints shut while the black flames engulfing his body burn it away, scouring him clean.

"As I said, you've got spunk," the sage finishes, before pulling the captain up by their fancy shirt collar, thumping the far larger creature against the wall as his eyes shine with malice.

"Where is the Storm King? Where is his Palace? Where are his holdings?"

The captain coughs. "Suck quills," they grit out before Weiss pulls them away from the wall and smashes them back into it, splintering the wood behind him, and denting the metal bands.

"That was probably a rib, captain. I'm going to let you live, you know that, right? This is just a bit of foreplay, is all. Tell me what I want, and you can go right to a comfy jail cell in Equestria or something. I'm sure they'll pamper you there. Celestia's soft like that."

"So you're one of her lapdogs?" the captain chuckles, making Weiss's face twitch with rage.

After a moment, his angry face fades into a false look of contemplation. "Ugh. Alright, I've tried softball, killing and dismemberment leave a bad taste in my mouth. Maybe I should call Tempest for some advice, she knows more about this interrogation thing."

The captain sweats, making Weiss smile like a shark who just smelled a pile of baby seals who all collectively stubbed their flippers and fell into a tank of tartar sauce.

"Ooh, you're not a fan of that idea, huh? Do you like that? Me calling Tempest Shadow? That's a name you recognize, huh?" Weiss says, leaning in close to the captain, whose eyes shudder with newfound fear.

The captain gulps. "North by northeast, you'll find the Storm Country Capital there, the palace is there too, you can't miss it."

Weiss drops the captain, patting the dust off of his coat with a genuine smile. "Thank you, I'll get you and your crew to a medical center before you all are taken into custody. Ensign Grumper, take them to the portal room, get them out of my sight," Weiss orders, making one of his fancier clothed Fizz Guards drag the captain off and start barking orders of their own.

Weiss Noir stares off in the direction the captain claimed that the Storm King resided.

"I'm so excited, I can hardly wait..." Weiss giggles slightly, anticipating the fight ahead.

When Braeburn learns that buffalo had tried to steal the Bloomberg, and would have succeeded if it weren't for Spike's timely portal magic, he grows nervous.

"Yeah... The buffalo have been giving us trouble for a while now, and I got no clue why," Braeburn explains to the collected ponies.

It's around this point that Tempest Shadow approaches with a serious aura. "Then it's a good thing Lord Weiss Noir has seen fit to grace your town with my assistance."

Twilight and Applejack take point against the unicorn. "What do you know, Tempest?" Twilight asks, nervous to hear the answer.

Tempest ignores Twilight, brushing past her and Applejack and approaching Braeburn directly. "You need to come with me. We'll discuss the matter with the buffalo directly."

Tempest continues after watching Braeburn nervously look to the other girls for suggestions on how to deal with this strange newcomer. "The others will only slow us down."

Braeburn shakes his head. "That ain't the problem, ma'am, I'm afraid we ain't been rightly introduced, and you're wanting to take me right into the middle of a buffalo herd. I don't know how comfortable I am with that idea."

Tempest rolls her eyes. "Look, I'm Tempest Shadow, I know why the buffalo are angry, and I'm here to help. You'd be an idiot to turn down this opportunity," Tempest snarls.

Twilight walks up and puts a hoof on Tempest's side. "You're never going to convince him acting like that, Tempest, just calm down, we're all friends here, right?"

Tempest's snarl increases as she jerks away. "I don't need friends, they disappoint me."

Twilight looks hurt at this, before trying again. "My point is, you're telling us you're here to help, so help us understand how and why."

Tempest sighs with disgust at everyone's concerned expressions. Can't they see she's here to do a job, not to piddle around talking about feelings?

Pinkie Pie hops in frantically, holding up a mirror. "I found the pink pony with the balloon cutie mark, see, see?!" she shouts, holding the mirror up to Tempest.

She freezes, seeing her own disgusted face.

'Is that what I look like?' she thinks, a bit of cognitive disonnance striking her at the sight of both a horn and a frown on her. Those two things shouldn't go together... Should they?

Something tickles underneath her eyes.

Weiss lands with a loud thump, splattering into smoke which instantly reforms, transforming into a black snake that slithers through the city as various bipedal races scream and run at the sight of his Fizz Guard aiming down at the Storm Country Capital, Blitzburg.

Ignored by the stampeding civilians and scrambling storm troopers, he's able to easily make his way to the palace, where an almighty bolt of lightning strikes him as soon as he touches the walls, turning his body into smoke.

Chuckling maliciously as green eyes form in the middle of his cloud, he scans the palace to piece together where it's Lightning Shield begins and ends, before a whispered "Avidus" turns he himself into lightning briefly, his form being sucked through the castle's defensive matrix until it spits him out in the middle of the palace's centermost room, where enchanted pylons generate vast amounts of electricity, pumping it everywhere as a magnetic and electrical defense against attackers.

As Weiss's body reforms, he idly smashes the heads of several storm troopers who had been in the room, managing the machinery.

Pulling out his communication crystal, he grimaces when he realizes that the barrier is preventing him from communicating with his soldiers.

"Ahh well, I can't plan for everything," the sage shrugs, bucking the last trooper in the room when they try to sneak up behind him.

"Now, let's find this so-called 'Storm King'. I wonder if he'll be shocked to see me," Weiss Noir mutters, chuckling as he throws the doors open wide, revealing a veritable firing squad of storm troopers, all hefting rather scary-looking metal totems. The pillars crackle with electricity, making Weiss sweat slightly with a sheepish grin, slowly closing the door.

The door blasts open in a wash of lightning and the troops rush into the chaos and smoke, only to discover that the Sage had somehow disappeared.

"Spread out. Find him! I'll warn the king!" The commander says, their black armor glinting in the light as the dust settles.

The command turns, running for the throne room, but a bolt of lightning strikes him in the back, turning him to smoke that chuckles in a malign manner.

"Ooh, you boys are just too clever for me. Paranoia like that, I'd mistake you for one of my own." Weiss Noir says, still in the form of frothing black smoke.

"Unfortunately," Weiss begins, when another bolt of lightning slips through his immaterial body as he slides into the metal floors, seeping between the seams.

"Your architects are not as clever..." he finishes, disappearing entirely as the guards continue firing lightning at the floor, trying to catch him.

"So, then. We've exhausted the last of our options. We have failed to capture the tree, and as such, we have no other recourse," Chief Thunderhooves says dimly, the various buffalo braves before him hanging their heads low at their failure.

"Tomorrow, we will stampede. Even if it means going through the town of Appleloosa."

Little Strongheart rushes forward, the small runty buffalo shaking their head frantically. "Chief, there's one thing we haven't tried yet, please, I know it must seem risky, but we have to try, if our way of life depends on it."

Thunderhooves stills at his daughter's outburst, tensing visibly. "You can't mean..."

Little Strongheart nods. "I think we should talk to them."

All of the buffalo gasp at the idea, as Chief Thunderhooves ponders carefully his daughter's eccentric idea.

One of the buffalo keels over, fainting in shock.

"It will be dangerous," he warns.

"I am strong," she retorts.

"And if they should attack?" he questions, eyes narrowing.

"I am faster," she answers, smiling.

The chief lets out a low hum. "Then go, before I come to my senses. Run fast, my daughter, and speak quickly."

Nodding with a confident smile of anticipation, the buffalo child rushes off into the distance, her hooves thundering as she speeds off in a cloud of dust.

Braeburn withdraws coolly as the weird dark-purple unicorn breaks out into another blast of tears.

"And he called me stumpy!" she shouts, before letting out a sigh.

"Anyway, that was my fourteenth birthday, and that's when things really started to go wrong," Tempest starts before Twilight visibly sweats.

"Tempest, we would love to hear the rest of this later, but didn't you have something to say about why you were here specifically?"

Tempest freezes. "I was getting to that," she grunts, standing up and brushing herself off as if nothing happened.

She coughs slightly, before starting her explanation. "The buffalo are angry because the Appleoosa Orchard is in the middle of their stomping grounds. Weiss Noir's prophesy stated that if you all interfered, your arguing would prevent the two sides from negotiating."

Twilight balks. "I know we can have disagreements from time to time, but surely our arguing couldn't be so bad that it ruins negotiations?"

Tempest just gives Twilight the stink eye, as she giggles slightly and grins sheepishly. "Right,"

Tempest sighs. "Alright, where is Braeburn. I need to explain this to him.

Pinkie Pie pipes up. "Oh, he ran off around year fourteen of your twenty-six-year biography!"

Tempest gives Pinkie Pie a narrow-eyed look. "I never told you how old I am."

The pink mare simply giggles. "Well of course not silly, I just took all of your birthdays, (I know everyone in the wider Ponyville area's birthdays after all,) and cross-referenced them with all the birthdays you've missed since age eight, since I can tell when somepony has missed a birthday, and it's the saddest thing in the world!"

Tempest carefully ignores Pinkie Pie's words and continues trying to ignore them. "Alright, so where did he get off to, then?"

As Weiss enters the throne room, he notices with hidden mirth that the Storm King's throne is literally like a swiveling chair.

"Well, for dramatic aesthetic, I hate to say it, but this is very nice," the sage says, looking around the room made of black stone and bands of riveted metal.

With a hydraulic hiss, the Storm King's throne swivels around, revealing... a dummy?

Weiss's eyes narrow as the cloth and metal scrap replica of the Storm King begins speaking, the stick in its hand glowing as the crystal atop it acts like a radio.

"Greetings, Lord Weiss Noir, I'm sure you're wondering why I've brought you here."

Weiss rolls his eyes, "Look, I enjoy banter as much as the next all-feared villain of evil, but can we get on with this? I'm on a bit of a time-table"

The crystal pauses, as if the person on the other end had scratched their head in confusion.

"The stories pegged you as being more fun. Fine, I'm not here, you're a fool to think I was, and I'm already on my way to destroy that treacherous fool, Tempest Shadow, before she can blab any more of my secrets." the radio states grumpily.

Weiss's eyes narrow further. "I don't need whatever puny thoughts you feel like qualifying as a secret, Storm King. I need you beaten into a pulp."

Despite his bravado, he grows nervous. He can't just open a portal from here to Appleloosa without more preparation, he can't contact the Halberd without those lightning shields being disabled, and he can't shove his fist firmly into the Storm King's colon when he's not fucking here.

The crystal continues, heedless of Weiss's inner thoughts. "Oh, well, unfortunately, you won't be able to beat me to a pulp, because, well, you'll be dead!"

The voice laughs, as metal sheets fall down around the room, sealing Weiss inside.

"I saw your little smoke regeneration act already. So I had my men produce this, it's kind of like a blender, but with atom-shredding lightning instead of blades, and... a mess, instead of a smoothie."

Weiss's eyes widen as he gets a downright malicious idea. "No! Please, if you spare me, then I'll... I'll!" Weiss shouts, grinning widely as he fakes some dramatic tones.

The Storm King laughs. "Farewell, Weiss Noir! Your little traitor friend will be following you to Tartarus shortly, don't you worry!"

Weiss resists the urge to laugh as the electrical generator in the middle of the room shreds his body to ashes, including the small tracker implanted within.

As Tempest and the others search for Braeburn, who seems to have all but disappeared, a faint buzzing prompts her to take her communication crystal out of her pocket.

A small frowny-face is written next to the small text Weiss had set to be sent to her if his tracking device were ever destroyed. "I died. :( pls use the ball." his text reads.

Groaning, Tempest fishes around in her bag, before a small twinge of instinct prompts her to dodge out of the way as a spear punches through her saddlebag, pinning it to the ground.

She turns on the spot, horn igniting as she comes face to face with a veritable army of Storm Troopers, led by the Storm King, and one of the other Lieutenants, Jacques the Bird.

The Storm King wiggles his fingers at Tempest in greeting. "Hello, traitor!" he growls, taking firm steps forward as Tempest glances towards the sack.

He notices Tempest's horn, leering with amusement, "Well, at least I know where this treachery came from. You little foal, so impatient when it comes to getting what you want..."

He fires a blast of energy from the staff in his hands, the glowing shard of metal set at its head flashing as it unleashes a blast of lightning that Tempest dodges with ease.

"And here's what it gets you. Your little master Weiss is dead, your treacherous crew isn't here to help you, and I'll take great pleasure in returning you to what you were before pledging yourself to me," the Storm King states, firing more blasts, which Tempest continues to silently dodge, making her way closer to her saddlebag.

"Nothing!"

The Black Materia rolls out of the tear that Jacques's spear had made in it, as the Staff of Sacanas in the Storm King's hands fires a bolt of divine retribution.

The smoke clears, revealing a smirking Weiss and a lightly charred Tempest Shadow, who had taken a glancing blow from the staff's incredible lightning.

Weiss's gaze trails down to Tempest as the Storm King and his men balk in shock.

"Hmm," Weiss says, making them all jerk back.

He sighs slightly, losing his smile as he fires a green beam from his finger that turns the mare into a black crystal statue, her body seemingly sinking into the floor as a portal opens up underneath it.

"I'll take care of that later. She's probably fine," Weiss states firmly, returning his focus to the Storm King, and his surroundings.

"You're supposed to be dead!" the Storm King snarls, pointing his staff at the dark sage.

Ignoring the threat entirely, Weiss begins to laugh, looking at the town he's in. "Yeah, weird."

He fixes the goat-like Storm King with a glare as he unleashes wave after wave of killing intent.

"Tell you what. Let's do this right. See that clock tower?" Weiss says, pointing to the one-off to the side of them.

"We'll have us a good old fashioned Mexican Standoff. The minute the clock strikes twelve, we both go all out. The fight ends in an instant. Sound good?" Weiss Noir says, yanking off one of his arms and throwing it off to the side, where it explodes into smoke and fades.

The Storm King looks deeply confused and healthily afraid. "Guards, kill that pony!" he shouts, pointing at Weiss and prompting his various soldiers to make the attempt. He'll save the staff as a last resort. The stories he's read all told of how the Sage of Darkness planned around single foes and planned around making his foes act according to his will.

Weiss smiles, three of his arms flying out to bash apart the hedgehogs that try to approach him, while one of his unused arms pulls another one out of its socket, tossing it aside like an old tool head.

Two portals appear, and what appear to be black legs sprout from them, plugging into the empty sockets as Weiss's horn ignites, unleashing a wave of force that throws the soldiers back, churning up the soil to swallow them up to their necks in dirt.

The Storm King growls. "Jacques, retrieve your spear, kill him."

If there's one thing the Storm King knows, it's that he can't give Weiss time to plan, and he needs to figure out what exactly Weiss's plan is. His lieutenant will make good fodder for that.

"Ooh, a spear. What a coincidence. I've got one of those too," Weiss says, dodging to the side when the towering birdman attempts to use his broad spear to skewer the pony in front of him.

Another portal opens, this one spitting out what appears to be a solid gold halberd, crackling with ice and lightning.

Weiss grabs it, more of his arms shifting and being replaced with blackened legs as he swings the spear, deflecting another stab from the vividly plumed parrot.

"I call this spear Gungnir," he finishes, before unleashing a small wave of force that throws Jacques away from him, only for them to suddenly fly into the ground, as if something invisible had bashed them over the head.

The Storm King growls, looking at the sage's new form with annoyance and frustration, trying to figure out Weiss's plan. "What is this? Tell me, you fool!"

Weiss holds out his only two arms, flourishing the spear in his hands, while his four extra legs stomp the ground repeatedly.

"Are you talking about the spear, my eight legs, or your miserable little subordinate?" Weiss asks slyly as his artificial hooves continue to stomp, faster and harder.

"I call it my Sleipnir Gear. I developed it as a way to combat enemies whose attacks I can't afford to be hit by. These legs have organs in them which generate pure liquid time, allowing me to harness it.

"Jacques was thrown into the ground because I had built up enough raw time to insert myself having performed a simple attack on him in the space between seconds."

By this point, all of Weiss's legs aren't visibly moving, simply popping loudly between raised and lowered as they skip the movement required to assume those positions. He levels his spear at the cruel ruler.

The clock on the clock tower continues to tick, steadily making its way closer to noon.

The Storm King growls, backing away as he levels his staff, firing a blast of lightning too quick to dodge.

Weiss's hoofsteps sound out softly behind the Storm King, making him swing around angrily and fire off another blast of lightning, which hits nothing he can see.

Weiss looks towards the clock tower as the Storm King shudders. Around them, various objects such as barrels and walls begin to splinter slightly, as though they were being kicked.

"Though I'm not moving, my actions are still affecting the world around me as I expend my Stoppered Time. This is what is known as「Ｆａｔｅ」," Weiss explains, again standing behind the Storm King at twenty paces, his hooves stomping the ground rapidly enough for him to slide slightly, as if on a cushion of air.

"Only one more second until our showdown..." Weiss claims.

It wasn't supposed to be this way, Weiss was supposed to be over a thousand miles away, the Storm King knew he wasn't ready to fight this fight, that's why he had avoided it!

"And then..."

The Storm King's knuckles whiten as his grip on the Staff of Sacanas tightens, while Weiss's grip on Gungnir is loose.

"Zero."

The clock strikes noon, and a bolt of lightning flies off into the distance as a spray of blood flies off of the Storm King's chest as the wound freezes over and his body is paralyzed by some sort of poison.

He scowls as Weiss Noir looms over him. "I wasn't ready," he hisses, as if that would make the sage back off.

While it fails to do that, Weiss does wince slightly, before chuckling. "I certainly know how that feels. I won't draw this out."

The pommel of Gungnir rushes towards Stormer's face, and everything goes black.

"Braeburn, dang it where are you!" Applejack shouts, her and the rest of the town having gotten caught up in the search.

She kicks open a door, spotting her cousin and some shrimpy looking buffalo talking over a glass of cider.

Braeburn's eyes widen. "I swear this ain't what it looks like, cuz."

Groaning, the orange mare grabs Braeburn by the ear, dragging him out of the abandoned building. "I rightly apologize ma'am, but this idjit up and left without tellin' nobody, and we've been looking for him all darn day!"

Braeburn wriggles out of her grip while Little Strongheart just looks confused. "Dang it cuz, I said it ain't like that, She's here to negotiate! Came out to figure out why we can't just move the orchard outta their stomping grounds, and we hashed out a deal!"

Applejack groans, motioning for the buffalo to follow. "Well that's good and all, but I got to call off a buckwheat-cuttin' search party that arose outta your running off to 'negotiate', now git!"

They arrive back into the town square to the sight of Weiss whistling lightly as he polishes some sort of spear, sitting on top of a weird goat-monkey man surrounded by groaning soldiers.

Applejack takes a deep, calming breath. It would probably be illegal to break every bone in that fool's body, and he hasn't explained why Appleloosa seems to have an influx of unconscious tourists.

Nightmare is so tired. She's tried running, the darkness seems to go on forever. She's tried covering up her face with her hooves, it doesn't stop the hot water from dripping on her, the liquid almost seeming to snake around whatever she tries to use to protect herself. Is it too much to ask to just get a little bit of sleep?

Every time she tries, even if she tries to sleep with her eyes open, the moment she does, she feels a single drop of hot water splash onto her face, biting ever so slightly, juxtaposed against the cold room, just barely enough to keep her from dozing off.

"Let me out of here! I'll kill you! I swear by every sacred thing I'll kill you if you don't let me out of here!" she screams as loudly as she can.

She's never felt tired before. Nightmares don't feel tired. How long has it been? She can't even tell, there's not a way to tell in here.

Her brief jolt of lucid adrenaline fading away rapidly after her outburst, she collapses, trying to recover some measure of energy in spite of her forced wakefulness.

Some of the hot drops of water on her face are salty, too, at this point.

Finally, when her body can take no more, she blacks out, her biology not capable of remaining awake for another instant as she falls into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

(Weiss Report) Chaos Butterfly [Slepnir Gear]

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What does it mean to stop time? A lot of people might think that it's as easy as turning on JoJo and watching Dio do his thing. But it really isn't, at least as I've done it.

It's strange, that's the first thing to say. I attempted to activate an Empty Vance, basically drinking Stoppered Time with nothing else in it, and trying to call on its power. The end result was surprisingly gruesome, and if I hadn't had my Shadow Clone technique to use as a proxy in the test, I wouldn't be here writing about it.

Stopping Time, or rather, taking an action within the span of truly zero seconds, is more like what I would think of as destiny. Even if you don't do anything, even if you stood perfectly still, by expending time, you affect the world around you. Activating the Empty Vance had a simple result. My body was pulled in all directions, and the area around me had been shredded in the process, actions that I could have taken in that time exacted instantly on my surroundings.

I wasn't aware of the process while it was happening, but I could remember, hazy events, an hour or so of them. In several blurred memories, I felt whimsical and decided to run in a random direction to see what it felt like, in others, I smashed things near me, to test my strength. All of these hazy memories, however, were of things that didn't happen. Or rather, they were of acts that my body did not perform. Even though my Shadow Clone was ripped to pieces, it didn't actually do anything remotely similar to running or attacking on the high-speed footage of the test, and the smoke failed to even reach some of the places where damage appeared.

By expending the Stoppered Time that my body had absorbed, effects had occurred in the world around me, without the causes that are required to exact them. But I can't control it, not with my own body, or my own mind. I suspect, for a pony to harness this power safely, they would have to, in all possibilities, have only one, or very few courses of action that they could take. They would have to minimize the possibilities that exist until only one possible future can occur at the moment of activation.

If this can be done, a pony could take an action within the span of zero seconds. I believe, in some respect, this is the closest a living creature can come to taking action within a World of Stopped Time.

I've finished the first iteration. Based on the Time-eater organs that I've already been using for Pokemon, I can create a sustainable source of Stoppered Time, automatically, and pump it using synthetic muscles. Unless I'm willing to mount even more things on my body, however, I'll need to replace my limbs entirely. Good thing I've upgraded the sockets since then.

By replacing a few of my arms with extra legs, I've been able to make relatively subtle time-manipulating machines that a Shadow Clone can safely use to take Instantaneous Actions. I won't be using it with my real body, of course, considering just how hilariously dangerous it is. That aside, it hasn't failed me yet. I've taken the human element entirely out of the process, each leg communicating intelligently, as well as consuming data from Pensieve Enchantments on my limb sockets, so they can accurately predict what I'm going to do at any given moment, and use that data to perform instant actions and expend Stoppered Time safely.

One problem I've been having is, even with graphene tubes in place of veins to transmit the liquid around the legs, some quirk of processing the fluid leaves them constantly gummed up. The solution I've gone with is simply moving the legs around to force the clots to break up, but the time-clots breaking seems to cause effects very similar to my first experiment. Kinks in the time-space continuum where possible actions are transformed into actual effects. I shouldn't use this form near any allies, to avoid accidentally kicking them in the head or something.

I've also noticed an unrelated problem, namely, moving my extra legs around while also being affected by time-kinks means that my legs can occasionally jerk around violently. This means the best option is to simply include an automatic function that makes them skip around naturally, to "Exclude that action from the queue", so to speak. The problem is, with four legs kicking instantly, and so frequently, I've achieved... propulsion. I hope I can reduce this in later versions, as right now, it means I literally cannot use this form, and also stay on the ground, my legs kick too fast for me to do anything but hover slowly upwards, unless I adjust my angle drastically...

Now that I've gotten the practical side out of the way, I've also been considering style. As anyone who knows me can attest to, I'm a firm believer that stylish combat is the key to harnessing emotional power. Really, my only option is clear. Eight legs? I emulate Norse mythology. Call it the Sleipnir Gear, and use a spear, Odin style. I bet that will make Iron Diamond happy, I've seen the way he looks at me whenever he sees me pick up a spear. Well, sorry, Iron, I don't care how tactically superior it is in most situations, I'm still a bigger fan of swords.

So this is what he used to apprehend that Storm King guy?

I sincerely doubt it. He has probably improved it drastically since then. It might even be unrecognizable as it is now. It just depends just how old this entry is.

It's a shame it's so volatile. The ability to stop time is one that unicorns have been trying at for years, isn't it, princess?

Well, there are a few things here and there that approach frozen time in a more feasible way than this, but it's another example of just how dangerous manipulating time can be. Even Weiss Noir needed no less than four relics grafted to his body to even begin harnessing this particular method.

(Past Chapter 25): Proof of Concept

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My first invasion was anticlimactic. My first twenty or so assassination attempts... Still anticlimactic.

I groan with annoyance as the pegasus in front of me swipes their dagger at me a third time, my own enchanted gloves allowing me to deflect it with some ease.

"Seriously, what is it with you assassins and wearing balaclavas? You're literally a member of a species whose default color is pastel, and whose eyes are the size of dinner-plates!"

The pony scowls, flying up above me and throwing their knife down, only for me to catch it and throw it back before it can explode.

"I think avoiding being identified requires a bit more effort than that, seriously!" I finish, walking up to the soot-covered pegasus, and grabbing them by the neck.

"Waste of my freaking afternoon, seriously," I groan, tossing them to the guards nearby for apprehension and processing.

My new Shadow Clone technique has been getting the workout of its life, with how every non-secure area in the Shadow Realm seems to contain at least one "Tourist" wanting to shank me or something.

I call Iron Diamond, and thankfully, he picks up, a holographic screen displaying him in the process of recovering from a workout session.

"Hello, Lord Weiss," he answers simply, noticing my displeased expression.

"Could you tell the trainers to start pushing to have our guards equipped with Repulsor Daemons? I know they've been having trouble learning the spell combo, but I'm really fucking uncomfortable with this many assassins hiding in my realm. They might start targeting people that aren't me, once they figure out I'm a hard target."

He wipes his face with a towel, nodding. "I'll make sure they get the message. Anything else?"

"Stay safe out there, Iron, and wear your auto-filter, I don't want you getting poisoned by mistake. Over and out," I finish, ending the call.

Iron Diamond snorts. Weiss really doesn't have enough faith in Iron sometimes. As if he would ever take his autofilter off. It would be a bit hypocritical to do so when he took the time and care to brutally ensure that every single pony in the Shadow Guard keeps theirs on at all times.

Though, the blood and air-filtering device does itch slightly, Iron notes, as he rubs the yoke-shaped machine idly.

As for assassins...

Iron makes a noise that might be called a chuckle if one were generous, and a bit deaf.

He rolls the body of one such assassin over, a unicorn whose job had seemingly been to rob his office of any files and ensure there were no witnesses.

Of course, being able to phase through walls with a spell does literally nothing when Weiss had already fit all sensitive areas with portalweave filling in the walls, in a particularly long-lasting fit of intense paranoia.

Iron Diamond shrugs to himself. It seems to have paid off.

The unicorn groans slightly, prompting Iron to kick them in the head again to keep them unconscious.

"Cleaners, I've got a tourist here, take him to the tourist-trap, please." Iron demands into his radio, before allowing the enchanted patch on his jacket to flop back down, it's communication job complete.

As a group of tightly-suited ponies enters the room, using enchanted staves to levitate the unicorn into a nearby portal for processing, Iron puts away the exercise equipment in his office and walks out of the room, intent on flushing out any other suspicious characters hanging around.

Which is to say, any pony lacking a spicy hairstyle. Sure, it's profiling, programming the security cameras to pay special attention to every non-Longma pony in the Shadow Realm, and Iron Diamond doesn't particularly care. With just how little contact there is between the Equestrian side and the Shadow Realm, outside of the trades being made, any pony walking around seemingly minding their own business could be an assassin or saboteur.

The number of ordinary ponies in the Shadow Realm, with things being as they are, should quite frankly be zero, just speaking logically. None of the ponies so far have applied for visas nor citizenship, meaning they are at best simply exploring the city idly, and at worst, plants by the angered Equestrian Nobility.

'At least I'm getting to sharpen my skills, a bit.' Iron thinks, idly dodging another unicorn who leaps out from a crowd trying to blast him with some sort of attack spell.

Sombra calmly stalks between his squadron of mercenaries, eyeing them with some disdain.

"Today, you will all make your way into the Shadow Realm. Kill as many warriors as you are able, capture as many slaves as you can carry, then return. Each head will be met with its weight in gold and jewels, as will each living body. If you fail, do not return," Sombra states, fully cognizant of the fact that if one of them were to fail him, he would not be able to resist the urge to punish them brutally, in spite of them being freelancers.

It wouldn't do for him to soil his reputation among the mercenary bands sniffing around the Frozen North in search of wealth just yet.

"The scouts sent so far have confirmed the defenses they have on the surface and some of the defenses within. Carry shields, to block their arrow traps. Use nets to catch stragglers. Wear thick boots to avoid the poisoned floors.

"Do all of this, and you should be successful," Sombra lies, knowing full well that it is very likely that none of them will return, much less with any slaves.

That's why he's sending in these cheaper, dumber mercenaries. Hopefully, their attack will give him more information. Suss out more weaknesses.

Bring him closer to ultimate victory over the Sage of Darkness.

"Now go! Bring me the ponies whose lives belong to me! Return my slaves to me, and do so with haste."

"Your payment depends on your success. So succeed, loyal sellswords," Sombra finishes, making the various thugs vacate his throne room.

With a stomp of his hoof, several pony slaves come in and begin scrubbing the floors and walls, Sombra's sneer slowly fading as the stench and grime of the soldiers leave his glorious halls.

While the maids' fear is barely a drop compared to what he receives from his arrays, there is a special satisfaction Sombra cannot deny at seeing the fear on their faces in person, rather than simply feeling it across his link to the wailing mindless fodder thrashing beneath his throne room.

I groan slightly at the warning I receive in the middle of my meeting with another bullying session- I mean "Important Meeting", with another idiot Equestrian both metaphorically, and in one hilarious case literally wanting the moon from me in return for decreasing the food shipments down to a trickle of scraps.

"So you see, Your Lordship, it would serve our interests well to cut down any unnecessary expenditure according to our reports, you're requesting food for a third of your population which does not even exist yet, surely it would do to-"

I visibly roll my eyes at the fancily dressed unicorn. "Hold on one moment Fillibuster, I've got a call."

The unicorn sputters in annoyance as I expand the holographic screen to reveal Admiral Avalanche looking concerned. "Sir, scouting vessels are reporting an army of mixed species moving through the sectors between the Crystal Empire and Metropolis Zone, heavily armed and traveling at a quick pace. Please advise."

I hum to myself. What is Sombra doing? I mean, this has to be his doing, I can't think of any other reasons why-

"So an army marches towards your land without fear, eh? What a joke. And here you had been cultivating the idea that your Realm was to be feared," Filibuster says with a smirk.

I meet his expression with a blank stare. I was going to just have Avalanche fire the Slumber Striker at them, but maybe I should give this noble a nice story to take home to his little friends.

"Admiral Avalanche, you are authorized to use the Sister Ray. Aim near them, but not at them, we don't want to apprehend a pile of cooked steak, then send in Arwings and poison gas to collect them for processing. Let none escape."

Swallowing heavily, my loyal sea-captain nods, closing the holographic screen.

"Let us have a recess, shall we, Mr. Filibuster? I believe, for you to truly understand the Shadow Realm, you must at least enjoy her grand sport."

He swallows, having heard my odd commands that I gave the admiral. "And... What would that be?"

I smile widely, bringing up a holographic screen showing the approaching army from afar. "Violence."

Admiral Avalanche closes the holographic call with a grimace. "Carver, put the men on high alert, begin preparing the Sister Ray to fire at G-Seven."

The white-flamed mare nods seriously, trotting out of the room to scramble the men.

Meanwhile, he opens up a call to Captain Meteor Glass. "Captain, I have orders from Lord Weiss. Prepare your air squadron, and attack at G-Eight. Be forewarned, the Sister Ray is going to be in use, avoid G-Seven, and keep your men in constant contact with the Irreverent," Avalanche states.

Meteor Glass nods. "Orders confirmed. Over and out."

Walking outside, Avalanche watches as the barrel of the Sister Ray telescopes out of the front of the Irreverent, even as the ship's heading changes to aim the spinal gun properly.

Already, he can hear the faint lack of humming in the air, background sensations he took for granted cutting out as ambient magic is violently cycled out of the air and into the gun.

Slowly but surely, though, the humming returns, louder and louder, as faint particles of light begin flowing towards the barrel, entering it and the ship from any angle they can approach.

Dark fire slowly begins flickering at the barrel's tip, a spark of pure nothing that indicates the cannon is very nearly ready.

The loud groan of metal indicates that the ship is opening its vents, portals leading directly to the Kingdom Heart drawing on its excess power, normally harnessed for electricity.

It's likely that at least a few ponies will have electrical power cut out in their homes if their wiring isn't up to spec.

Admiral Avalanche receives a small ping indicating that the Arwings are in position, and pulls up his radio, contacting the underbelly of the Irreverent.

"Fire when ready," the grizzled Longma commands.

And they do.

Sharp is having a really fracking bad day.

"Stupid cold, stupid ponies. I swear I've got ice under my scales," he complains, shaking slightly as the minotaur next to him elbows him harshly.

"Quit complaining. Now," they respond, making Sharp scowl.

The blue dragon hefts his axe over his shoulder with one hand, while scratching an itch on his side with the other.

"Whatever," Sharp claims, before his eyes narrow.

"Hey, you seeing those weird birds up there?" he asks, making a few of the mercenaries with him stop, staring up at the sky.

The minotaur grimaces. "Those aren't birds. Get your crossbows ready. We're in for a fight."

Sharp balks slightly at this, pulling the small ballista from his belt and aiming it up at one of the weird flying things.

"Don't fire until they come to us, I don't see any spears on them, so they'll probably swoop at us," the minotaur claims, pulling out his own crossbow, a heavy, metal contraption.

Instead of doing as they predicted however, the metal birds just keep circling overhead, for one, then two minutes.

Sharp scowls, flaring his wings. "Scale it and skin it, are they going to come down here, or not?"

Suddenly, the Minotaur turns, walking back the other way. "We need to go, this is a trap."

Sharp and several of the others sneer at this. "If you want to turn down a payday, that's fine. I'm not going to go up there and get my money!"

He flaps his wings, slowly ascending, just in time for a weird black beam to hit the ground and make everything go completely quiet.

Sharp slowly realizes as the planes swoop down, spraying some kind of purple smoke at them, that it wasn't some kind of silencing magic thing that hit near them.

He's just gone deaf, is all.

Fillibuster swallows several times at the sight of rubble and dirty snow raining down around the crater that the Sister Ray had made on impact, briefly glancing at me to see my own expression, which I've carefully curated into a serene smile.

"Ahh, there's nothing quite like fireworks, friend. You really should come to the Blast Day Celebration when it comes around again this year. We fire off all sorts of weapons like these into the air, the sky fills up with all sorts of wonderful sights."

I wipe my eye with a finger. "It's almost enough to bring me to tears, seeing what my little ponies can whip up when they're happy and fed."

"I-I need to go, please forgive my rudeness for leaving so early," he mutters out, rapidly walking out of my office, ignoring the secretary and beelining his way back to Equestria.

I allow my expression to turn into a genuine one, frowning cheekily as I rest my head on my hands. "Asshole."

I contact Avalanche again. "Everything going well on your end, Admiral?" I ask, prompting him to nod.

"No casualties on either side, and we've managed to capture the opposing forces, we're bringing them in now."

I frown more heavily at this. "Bring them to the low-security prisons, one of the off-site ones. I've got a sick feeling about taking them into secure areas," I claim, trying to piece out why Sombra would have been so stupid as to send a band of mercenaries he had to know were going to fail at whatever he sent them to do.

Admiral Avalanche frowns as well but nods affirmatively. "Very well, Lord Weiss, I'll take them to the A-7 Forwarding Base, should I increase security there in preparation?"

I shake my head. "Just prepare to evacuate the area, and tell the men to keep their distance from the prisoners, at least twenty meters. Use golems for dealing with them. Expand this procedure to include all our current compromised prisoners. Over and out."

I tap my fingers on my desk nervously. What is he doing?

Helmsplitter hates using golem proxies. He's not that big a fan of using it in this circumstance, either.

Steel Driver smirks, swallowing the last of the saltbread they had been served. "What's with the tin-can?"

Helmsplitter's voice rings out of the golem. "New orders from Lord Weiss. I'm not supposed to let any actual living things near the prisoners."

Steel Driver leans back on their cot, chuckling. "In case I blow up or something?"

"Or something," Helmsplitter responds.

"Do you know anything about Sombra's plans? He sent a bunch of mercenaries directly from the Crystal Empire to the Shadow Realm, almost like he was baiting us."

Steel Driver thinks about this. "I don't know. I don't really know a thing about that dull pony. I know he's as crazy as a box of rats stuffed in a half-box of fumes, and he offered all of us a frankly unreasonable amount of money. Makes me think now that he probably isn't planning on paying anyone he sends after you."

Helmsplitter's golem nods slightly at that. "I see. Thank you for your cooperation."

The minotaur stops Helmsplitter from leaving. "Wait, hold on," Steel Driver states, standing up.

"I changed my mind, I wanted to say.

"I wasn't a hundred-percent straight with you, before. I've got a kid, but I'd sooner graze than settle down for some brat. His name's Steel Polish, a bull. Last I heard, he was living up in Buckingham, but that was years ago. If he wants to talk, well..."

Steel Driver shrugs. "It's not like I'm going anywhere."

Helmsplitter pauses for several long moments. "I'll look into it."

Steel Driver nods. "Thanks. I guess that's about as much as I can ask for, really."

Helmsplitter leaves the room, intent on pushing that request along to the right ponies as soon as he finishes interrogating the other prisoners.

Sure, it might be projecting, but he'll be damned to Tartarus before he allows himself to be the reason why a parent and child can't at least say goodbye.

It's more than he got.

Sombra scowls as the magical memories he drains from those mercenaries reveal that they didn't even make it to the front door.

All he managed to learn from this excursion is that Weiss Noir's weapons are devastating.

He stalks through the far emptier halls of the Crystal Palace, blowing off steam by glaring at the ponies he hasn't already reduced to thralls. So few of his ponies are under full mind control nowadays. He simply can't get them to perform the tasks he requires of them otherwise.

Farming? It requires the touch of a living, breathing, thinking Earth Pony. Accounting? Too complex for the thralls. Medicine? Well, Mercy has proven talented at guiding his thralls through the steps of what is required to keep his slaves alive and working.

As it stands, Sombra finds himself with a dilemma. Every slave he loses reduces his speed quadratically. If he loses a single farmer, he can feed twenty fewer slaves, which means he can afford that many fewer miners. Ponies must be shuffled around, freed of their mental bondage to do the job of farming, or, as much as the thought disgusts Sombra, made to work less, so they retain some of their energy.

Breathing heavily, Sombra swallows. It's all so disgusting. So annoying. Like a cancer, growing in his glorious empire. An infection that had grown out of control before he had seen the symptoms.

Now his mining operations have slowed to a crawl. It could be years before he manages to widen the tunnel enough to move the Umbrum Crystal out from below the Crystal Empire.

As soon as he can free them from their prison, his reign will last forever with the full might of all of the Umbrum at his side, but that means nothing when his mines are barren, more akin to an ordinary mine, rather than the glorious swarm of ants that Sombra once had tunneling through the rock day after day.

He sighs heavily. Perhaps Mercy was right about the necessities of relieving stress. King Sombra is not one to relax, but then...

He sighs again, King Sombra has also never been as stressed as he is now.

He'll demand that the snake elaborates on what they meant, perhaps some unguent or potion from the doctor will ease his nerves.

Weiss looks particularly unhappy, Luna thinks.

"Luna, I swear, your ponies are crazy," he groans, swiping through blueprints, seemingly trying to decide which one he's going to work on tonight.

She chuckles lightly. "We've been trying to curb their more eccentric tendencies. Short of marching every pony in a position of power to the guillotine, there are few things we can do to hasten the process of bringing Equestria to peace.

"I suspect there are at least some innocent ponies among the nobility, so it would leave a sour taste in my mouth to do away with them."

Weiss grumbles. "Well, I'm going to be honest with you Luna, I'm like, inches away from saying 'screw it' and going full big-brother with the cameras and background checks."

Luna clears her throat slightly, prompting him to explain.

"I put cameras everywhere, watch everyone who isn't a Longma, have guards ready to apprehend any ordinary ponies in case they might be assassins. It's super unethical, though."

Luna looks confused. "Why would it be unethical?"

Weiss's mouth opens and closes a few times, a bit like a fish. "You know, right to privacy? Racial profiling being a bad thing?"

"Weiss, if you tell your ponies the truth, and they accept your ruling truly, then is it a problem? For goodness sake, you don't even enact your rule unless your populous first votes on it. You don't have the guards arrest Longma who commit anything short of violent crime. If you must observe the Shadow Realm underneath a jeweler's lens to keep your ponies safe, then do so. Who would complain, aside from litterbugs and jaywalkers?"

Weiss hums slightly. "Well, you can't really litter in the Shadow Realm, the fire burns all the garbage up, usually, and all of the construction or transportation areas have mechanical locks preventing people from walking in front of them mindlessly while they're operating."

Luna smacks her dumb little friend on the head. "Then who would complain? Rule with clarity and empathy, and your ponies will revel."

Weiss rubs his head, pondering her words for a long time as he idly begins drawing up plans for some potential queries to push to the Arcana Liber, on the subject of enhancing public surveillance and security.

Eclipse Flash is laying bored on her bed when a ping from her bedside indicates the Arcana Liber having a vote to work on.

"Should security and surveillance be raised in response to the recent assassination attempts? While ineffective thus far, they present a risk to bystanders, but the cost of preventing them fully would be a potential loss of privacy in some public areas," Eclipse mumbles to herself, reading it off.

She scoffs. "There's already a camera on every street corner, and golems running around everywhere."

While she's certain she might be missing some nuances here, so far, her two main focuses are the safety of her friends and her studies into Foeship.

With a shrug, she marks her vote down as "Unsure/Uninformed Agreement."

"Hmm. Maybe I should visit Oil Slick. I haven't hung out with him in a while," she considers, hopping off her bed and wandering off to find something fun to do.

Sombra scowls, pacing back and forth. "Fun hobbies", "Stretches and exercise", "Comfortable sleeping conditions", pah!

Sleep is for worms! And Sombra is a God!

He stomps the floor. How dare Mercy shrug off his concerns. Even their expression annoyed Sombra. The snake looked like they were going to fall asleep, with how casual their expression was!

He decides to kill time by reviewing the memories drained from his failed mercenaries, his little spies on the inside.

Unfortunately, being in a prison, there isn't exactly a great deal to be learned. Even faces and names are obscured when Weiss Noir has switched to using those golems to handle the prisoners exclusively. Metal and Crystal constructs replacing flesh-and-blood soldiers and guards in all of the prisons.

...Wait.

It almost audibly clicks in Sombra's mind.

Those little Windigo Meat Puppets that one mercenary had spotted.

The endless streams of mechanized soldiers used to repel his cursory attacks.

Sombra chuckles breathlessly at the revelation.

Of course... Of course he would fail, pitting his slaves against Weiss's.

Unlike Sombra, when Weiss had found his slaves unsuitable for a task, he began to create his own from scratch.

Why bother putting those feeble ponies into the mines, why waste the withered and weary worms on mining for his glory, when he can do so much better himself.

He'll save his pony slaves for tasks more suited to their frailty and intelligence, and use his own golems to combat Weiss's!

Oh, the things he could do, with just a bit of intuition and creativity. If he is to combat his rival, he must think like his rival, this is the secret to what will become his true and ultimate victory.

The arts of the flesh are lost on Sombra, unfortunately... He will need to convince Mercy to help him with this new task, to create slaves from nothing, from thin air!

Sombra laughs joyously, stress melting away as the Weiss's idea sinks comfortably into his worldview.

"What do you mean you cannot help me create new slaves?!" Sombra roars at Mercy, who casually slithers around him, leaning up and looking him in the eyes.

"It can't be done. If you want me to start growing flesh and organs from scratch? Fine. But you have to figure out how that other pony does it first, deary. I can't work with nothing, when it comes to cultivating biomass like that. What he's doing with the stuff is frankly impossible, as far as I know."

Sombra growls, head tilting to the side. He was so sure, too!

Mercy pats him on the back as he sighs heavily. "Perk up, deary. Get me what I need to know, and I'll get you your meatbags. Why not try golems, first?"

Sombra turns, stomping out of the room. He's so rusty at golemancy, though! If Mercy knew that, she wouldn't have said that so casually...

(Noir Newsletter) Ocular Instalations and Security Crackdowns

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You all voted, and I've listened. As such, the Shadow Realm will soon be equipped with new and improved camera and microphone systems in most public areas, excluding restaurants and specialty stores. Each camera is equipped with its own golem-combat suite, microphones, and intelligent entity tracking and communication. The purpose of these installations is simple, track suspicious individuals, and protect civilians in the event of violent crime. If you've got anything illegal to discuss, you'll need to begin doing so in the privacy of your own homes.

Aside from the hidden redundant cameras, the current plan is to install three sets of cameras at each intersection, along with two sets of cameras at each one-hundred meters of linear tunnels, and one camera at each turning point in non-linear tunnels. This setup will ensure that in the event of a chase, suspects can be tracked consistently, even if they manage to evade any guards that might already be after them, and that if a Longma became the victim of a violent crime, attention could be immediately given in the form of automated drones and an alert to medical professionals. Hopefully, this will serve as both a deterrent and an improvement to quality of life, due to the cameras being capable of calling medical services automatically in response to critical events.

Key areas which will have increased surveillance will include Arcana Janus Fast Travel Stations, Hidden Palace Zone, the Kingdom Heart, and of course, all government and public works buildings and offices. Keep this in mind when going about your daily business, and if you feel you may be in danger. The camera systems are capable of both facial and emotional recognition, giving them the ability to detect subtle cues which may indicate someone feeling as though they are in danger. Each camera is also equipped to respond immediately to a code phrase, "I'm in danger Friend Computer", which will immediately make nearby cameras give their footage of you high priority and alert nearby authorities.

It has come to my attention that some individuals have taken to performing pranks, using holographic gems in order to display shocking or humorous images on the cameras, like dancing lions or seaponies flopping around on the ground. I'd like to take the time to remind all of you that the camera systems in place use a method of sight which bypasses illusory magic, for exactly that reason. This isn't me condoning it, this is me saying that we can still see your faces when you're setting up these pranks, and small fines will be mailed to you shortly, if they haven't been already. Please do not try to defeat the camera systems, if you believe an area should not be under surveillance, come to my office, discuss it with me directly, or with one of the heads of security. We've already removed cameras from a few areas, for the sake of privacy and preserving trade secrets.

What makes these pranks a problem is that they serve as a distraction to the guards who observe surveillance, either live or recorded, which may lead to false flags on suspicious individuals. Due to the way the cameras flag suspicious individuals, someone slinking around as if they're doing something illegal can trigger the cameras to pay more attention to them, which only serves to waste time on the part of the Shadow Realm's hard working guard in checking these suspicious individuals in order to safely dismiss them as immediate threats.

Those among you who simply must satisfy your urge to prank, against all my warnings and rationale, please, do so in a way that isn't immediately dangerous. Save the holograms for passing ponies, or something. Don't keep trying to give my guards the gigglies when you can't even see their reaction at the time. It simply isn't the time or place for fun and games, and the guards have more than enough to occupy their time without also having to put forward a focus towards idle pranksters and goofsters. Their purpose is to ensure your safety, and respect can be given by saving your pranks for non-critical ponies.

Those of you who are concerned over the ponies themselves, please try to keep a suitable amount of empathy for the Equestrian ponies who are taking the time to explore and experience the Shadow Realm. In truth, only a small percentage of them fall into what I would call 'Risk Areas', and many of them seem to just be ordinary civilians, with intent to take in a new and exotic culture. The small number of saboteurs and assassins will shrink, given time and practice on the part of our guards, so keeping an open mind towards any out-of-place ponies should be an important facet of this unintentional cultural exchange.

Leave the suspicion and paranoia to those who are being paid for it, our guards work hard day and night to sort the safe from the unsafe, and it's incredibly unlikely for you to ever encounter an Equestrian who is anything but peaceable and a worthwhile individual to cavort with. Instead, I suggest showing our new guests around, indeed, as you are all aware, the Shadow Realm has many sights and events to enjoy, from the Street Fighting Circuit, to golem combat, tactical, virtual and traditional gaming, and so on.

If there is one thing I am absolutely, positively certain of, it is that welcoming our Equestrian Allies with open hooves, and showing them things like our advanced golems ripping each other to shreds, our brave warriors brutalizing one another for glory and fun, and our geniuses demonstrating a mastery of games unlike any other, will lead to us being able to more peacefully align ourselves with the noble ponies of Equestria.

It is my belief that sights like those will properly help the Equestrians understand exactly what we're about, a little bit of what we're capable of, and how willing we are to extend the limbs of friendship to them, so long as they meet them in kind.

(Present Chapter 25): Blood in the Water

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While Weiss Noir battles the Storm King, a very different battle is taking place in Storm Country, as the Halberd's turrets twist and turn, gunning down airship after airship as it approaches the Storm King's Castle, looming over the city.

A light on the Halberd blinks green, prompting the hedgehog to nod to his coworker.

"We're in position. Fire."

The Fizz Guards scramble around the helm, flipping levers and pressing buttons, causing the Halberd's bomb bay to creak open, dropping a gigantic capsule down onto the Storm King's mountain fortress.

Moments before impact, the capsule is struck by lightning, causing it to rupture and explode in a bright white flash of magic, leaving nothing but a barren mountain and confused Storm Civilians scattered around on the mountain unharmed.

"Target extracted. Good work team, let's head home," Driver says.

The Halberd slowly turns, before its engines flare and the ship begins its long journey back to the Everfree.

When Celestia spots the bright telltale flash of teleportation from her window, she rolls her eyes and sleepily walks over to check what annoying thing Weiss has done today.

She takes a sip from her royal mug of tea as she spots the entirety of Storm Castle, propped like a little hat on top of one of the Everfree Mountains.

Adding a small splash of something from a flask into her tea, Celestia drains the mug, before returning to bed.

"Too early for this, I'm afraid," she mumbles to herself, snuggifying herself under layers of royal blankets.

Celestia finds out hours later that the Storm King and most of his soldiers have been apprehended, and that apparently, Weiss had stolen the entire palace using some sort of teleporting bomb.

Luna can't help but sigh when she sees Weiss spinning around in the Storm King's swiveling throne.

"Please tell me you're joking," Luna asks.

Weiss chuckles lightly. "Yeah, I am. I really did steal the Storm Palace, though. I'm thinking of rebranding it though. What do you think of... Olympus?

"Oh it'll be great, I'll refit all this storm tech for manufacturing, get a big ol' golem army up and running, Ahh, I feel dizzy from excitement."

He pauses, stopping the chair's spinning. "Or maybe it's this chair..."

Luna stomps. "Weiss, be serious! You stole an entire mountain from a country we aren't openly at war with! What am I supposed to tell them?"

"I've always been fond of the truth, personally," Weiss snarks, hand under his chin.

"And what exactly are you considering the truth today?" Luna retorts.

He flicks his hand towards a nearby crystal, causing it to light up with an enchantment that has it levitating a pile of folders over to the princess.

"A full record of the Storm King's plans to steal the magic of Equestria's alicorn royalty using the Staff of Sacanas as a medium. In clear defiance of the World-Life agreement. You know, the one ensuring some knucklehead doesn't try to bring about Armageddon by taking control of the sun and moon?"

Luna takes the papers silently, flipping through them.

"And the staff?" Luna demands.

"I've been studying it. I need it for my dudes since it generates so much storm magic."

Weiss leers. "Don't worry my little monarch, my plan isn't regicide. This is so much more interesting," he quotes, prompting Luna to huff.

"You idiot," Luna says, teleporting away the folders for review before turning around and making to leave.

"Wait, before you go, I just wanted to say..." Weiss starts, holding up a hand.

"I'm going to host a tournament, soon."

Luna's eyes widen. "You don't mean..?"

Weiss's smile tells her more than his words. "The second Dark Tournament."

Luna swallows heavily. "I'll be sure to inform my sister."

The former Storm King, Walker, sits on a cot in Equestrian custody of all places.

'I suppose they'll call me "Failer" after this mess,' he thinks to himself, scowling in the dark cell.

He wasn't ready, and it's all because of that piece of scrap, Tempest Shadow. If he had just had more time, time to prepare, and time to obtain the power his staff needed, he would have been unstoppable.

Now instead, he's waiting to go on trial in front of a bunch of pastel freaks. Decades of planning, decades of amassing power, down the drain in an afternoon because one little unicorn got greedy, and betrayed him at the first hint of getting their payment elsewhere.

"I'm assuming that you're the Storm King? Sorry, former Storm King." a voice sounds out from the darkness.

Walker snarls. "Go suck a lightning rod. Hard."

"I don't believe I'll do that," the voice says, before walking closer, where Walker can see him. A stallion as black as can be. with a thick black mane, and piercing green eyes.

"I have a proposal for you."

"Why would I care about the proposal of some puny pony?" Walker retorts, crossing his arms with a huff.

"I can give you enough reasons to make your head spin, Walker. Let's start with the most obvious one. I can give you the opportunity to fight Weiss again, and win," they state, smiling softly.

Walker's eyes jerk over to the pony. "I'm listening."

"Our intelligence suggests that he's throwing a second Dark Tournament. The last time he did this, your great grandfather hadn't been born yet. A competition unlike any other, brutal, primal, and as bloody as any tournament can get without somepony dying.

"I would go myself, but I'm not as young as I used to be," they shrug lightly.

"And the insurance that I'll win?" Walker demands, only for his jaw to drop when the pony pulls out a fragment of glowing blue metal.

"Did you think the Staff of Sacanas contained the only surviving piece of Jupiter Bronze on the planet? The princesses threw many of those spears at the planet during their little scuffle with Discord."

He holds out the shard, tempting Walker to reach for it. "You'll be given the Jupiter Bronze, a disguise, and paperwork allowing you entrance to the Tournament's Elder Division. I'll disable the safeties during your round with Weiss Noir, and then you murder him in cold blood."

Walker's eyes narrow. "Who are you? How does this benefit you? Surely you read the publications on my plans. Those who seek World Domination do not abide by equals."

They press the fragment of metal into Walker's hands, a serene light in their green eyes. "Just think of me as your guardian angel."

"As for what I want..."

Walker's hand bleeds slightly from direct contact with the magical metal shard, unfiltered storm magic already seeping into his bones.

"I want to turn this world upside down. Turn it into a world where the strong battle ceaselessly, and the weak don't interfere."

Walker's nose tickles as odd growths sprout out of his face, and his head throbs as a third eye opens sideways in the middle of his forehead.

"I want every foot of ground to be covered in the scattered bloody teeth of a million bare-hoof brawls."

Scales begin painfully jutting out of Walker's back, as his body's colors lighten, turning shades of white and blue.

"And to have any of that, I need worthy opponents."

By the time he snaps out of his trance, both the Jupiter Bronze and Black Angel are gone.

But honestly, Storm Walker couldn't care less, as his body decays into a bolt of lightning in an instant, rushing through the metal of his cell, and out to freedom in an instant.

"Thank you so much for keeping things casual, Twilight. I've truly needed this," Celestia sighs, taking a sip from a tall glass of iced tea, noticing the distinct lack of panicking and groveling in Sugarcube Corner. Something which no doubt took quite a bit of effort on the part of her student.

"Well, Celestia, you did make it very, very clear that 'Casual means Casual'. I can only apologize that you had to, er, 'beat it into me', so to speak," Twilight claims, remembering the very frank discussions that the two had during their magical practice.

Celestia smiles lightly.

"Well, you've always been a fast learner, when encouraged properly."

She watches with no small amount of amusement when Pinkie Pie shoves her head into a chocolate fountain, allowing the liquid to harden on her head before shattering and devouring it messily.

Taking a sly glance around the room, Celestia levitates her cupcake over to the fountain, drenching it for a moment before carrying it back.

"So, princess, did you hear about that dumb thing Weiss is setting up? He spent all day at the library yesterday complaining about how cutting a mesa into tiles doesn't work like it does in the movies. I wasn't able to get a bit of work done." Twilight groans slightly.

"You'll have to specify. Weiss has done a great many dumb things." Celestia jokes, tittering lightly as she covertly swallows a cupcake whole.

"But no, I have heard of it. I plan on participating, myself."

Twilight balks at this. "Princess? The history books said that the last Dark Tournament was so bloody that the air itself was red, you can't seriously want to participate in something like that, right?"

Celestia looks wistful. "I remember that, he set up red smoke machines for drama. There was one point where the tournament had to be halted to clean the floors, though. Ponies started slipping in the middle of fights!" she chuckles.

"And he banned immortals from entering the first one," she grimaces, before speaking in falsetto while wiggling her wingtips for emphasis. "Oh, we should give the young fighters a chance to compete, I'll have a league for you long-lived folk next time, don't you worry!" she mocks.

"What a tease, making me wait. Do you know how few serious competitions have a league in which an alicorn to compete? None of them. Not a single one," Celestia sulks slightly, leaving Twilight stunned.

She cuts Twilight a look. "That's why it's called the Best Young Fliers competition, even though there isn't an age cut-off, you realize."

"Ahh, I'm sorry, I'm rambling," Celestia claims, only for Twilight to shake her head.

"No! Princess, you're fine, ramble on, please."

Celestia smirks. "As you command. I'm very excited to participate in this Dark Tournament. What is there not to love about the idea? I receive my second chance to reduce Weiss to paste, get some exercise, and if I'm lucky, a few other immortals may pop up as well, for the older brackets. Oh, there are a few dragons I would love the chance to go a round with."

Twilight swallows heavily, forced to reconsider the merit of Weiss's "Carnival of senseless violence", as she had previously called it.

"You make it sound like fighting can be fun, Princess," she carefully ventures.

Celestia almost coughs, straw in her mouth jerking as she sips at her tea. "Am I? How odd..." she says mischievously.

She shakes her head, deciding that a bit of honestly might serve her well in this instance. "Violence on its own isn't enjoyable. But competition? Guzzling adrenaline, and putting your every physical, mental, and magical talent to the test in the most primal way? Among friends and rivals, a bit of combat can be made enjoyable. Something, if absolutely nothing else, the Shadow Realm had once refined to perfection.

"And I do mean perfection," she insists.

"The arena had been enchanted, the finest magic of its era, designed to immediately teleport any competitor out, using time magic to predict if a fatal or crippling blow was approaching them, moving them to safety without fail.

"The doctors had been phenomenal. He had even gone so far as to have competitors agree to have their treatments documented and used to train further medical experts, and attracted the best of the best for post-combat recovery. Competitors could fight their absolute hardest, in the knowledge that their lives were not at risk.

"And the prize, tantalizing even to the older members of our world. I can only imagine what the grand prize will be for the Second Dark Tournament. The only pony he enjoys trying to one-up more than me is himself, when it comes to extravagance."

Nightmare revisits her battle, again and again in her dreams. Each time, her sleep deprivation turns them more twisted and confusing.

Instead of a mostly ordinary pony, she stands against a twisted mass of burning oil, with eyes alight with a madness far brighter than the flames surrounding them.

She fires off one last desperate bolt of energy, striking Weiss Noir directly with all the power she can muster. In moments, the mass shrinks and fades into a withered slimy black skeleton, coughing faintly as her powerful dream magic forces the specter to become harmless.

The skeleton looks at itself, jaw dropping.

In the space between moments, however, the dream resets, Weiss Noir returning to his hellish form in the Virtual Dream.

"You idiot. Did you really think you could defeat me? I'm the god of this world, and you? You're hopeless. Hopeless and alone."

The mass puts a finger to its chin in contemplation, before snapping its fingers loudly in mock realization.

"Golly, that's right! Your worthless friends... Can't save you now!

"Go ahead, cry out into the darkness! 'Luna, Nightmares! Somepony help!' See what good it does you."

Nightmare hangs her head. "I'm sorry..."

This causes the mass to halt for a moment, stunned as it leans in, cupping a hand to its ear. "What was that?"

"I'm sorry... Luna," Nightmare admits to a party that isn't present.

After several long moments, the mass grins, shaking their head with amusement. "But nobody came."

The mass points a single, blazing finger at Nightmare. "Boy, what a shame, nobod-"

The black void surrounding them cracks, making the mass slap its hands to its cheeks in shock. "No! That's impossible! This cannot be!" they wail, as the walls crack, revealing a wash of blue light, and the image of Luna, floating down.

Nightmare sighs with relief as the Princess approaches, either for a rescue or an execution. Either one would be worthwhile.

Instead of doing either one, however, the blue pony gives a forlorn smile. "This is all just a bad dream."

Nightmare's breath hitches when the image of Luna glitches slightly.

"And you're never waking up!"

Weiss's laughter follows her until she jerks awake, back in the void, and back in the tiny body she had been trapped inside of.

He can play his little games all he likes, but he doesn't know Luna as well as she does if he allowed the image of the Lunar Princess to enter a dream, virtual or not.

She tries to keep from looking too relieved that he had fallen for her little trick, now that he's moved on to trying his hand at crafting nightmares, instead of simply denying her sleep outright.

Even the mention of an alicorn's name is enough to cause a twinge of sorts under the right circumstances. Weiss using her image to taunt Nightmare? He might as well have told Luna himself what's going on.

A mare learns all sorts of tricks like that, sharing her mind with a princess.

Metal Dash OS 1.56
>Quick-boot: Exiting Sleep Mode
>Collating Memory Data...
>Good.
Shadowcorp Dual Golem Core, Shadow Realm Year 262.

Her eyes blink open sleepily, as Weiss Noir stares at her, calmly balancing on a gigantic soap bubble.

"Good morning Dash. I've figured out a way for you to prove yourself to the others. I'm throwing a fighting tournament, and if you join it, you'll be able to fight the other one. Defeat them, and it should ruin their plans, one-hundred-percent. Twilight and the others know full well that Rainbow Dash is the pony with the most fight out of anyone in Equestria. When that other one gets their shit pushed in, they'll be sure to listen to what you have to say."

Metal Dash releases a series of faint bleeps.

"You're damn right it makes sense. Don't worry about it, that body I've given you is top of the line. You could take down an entire squad of royal guards with the firepower you're packing."

They poke the cloud underneath them, eyelights narrowing as they unleash several long bleeps of complaint.

Weiss's expression turns serious. "Hmm. The sensory suite must have some kind of error in it. You can still fly, right?"

Weiss receives several obvious bleeps as they roll their eyes, engines already flaring up.

He takes a few steps back, rolling backwards on his bubble to give her room to take off, before being blown back slightly as she rushes by, performing loop-de-loops and other impressive aerial feats.

Her four engines twist suddenly, sending her into a rapid drill spin as she plows through a mess of clouds, eradicating them in an instant as her automated protocols transform the force into a sharpened barrier.

The two engines on her barrel twitch by mere inches, sending her into a wide arc and canceling out her spin at the same time, while the other two engines angle backwards, preparing for their maximum force charge.

Aimed directly at Weiss, her plating twitches in a way reminiscent of a grin as all four engines emit flames hot enough to leave her hull a cherry-red color underneath her holographic paint.

At the last second, all four engines suddenly flare out, twisting backwards and pointing towards the sage, bleeding off her speed in less than a second, and allowing her to gently plop back down into the cloud she had been occupying.

They beep out a smug rhetorical question, plopping their head onto their crossed hooves.

Weiss smiles. "...Close enough."

Discord is in a bit of a pickle.

"Well, that's a bit redundant. I've been in a pickle. I'd rather be in a cucumber, to be honest. Fresher, you see."

Discord has been in a bit of a pickle.

"Can petrification really be considered a form of pickling though? I mean, salt is a mineral, but not all minerals are salts, you're just not going to get a good brine, I'm pretty sure whatever stone I'm made of doesn't even dissolve in water. I mean, do pickles even have a shelf life over a thousand years? it's a mess, really. Just use a different metaphor."

Discord has been between a rock and a hard place.

"Don't you sass me. I swear, I'll come down on you like a ton of bricks when I get out of here."

He's been stuck in stone for over a thousand years.

"Boring, but acceptable."

Unfortunately for the world at large, something has been brewing in the land of Equestria for a while now. Only the fact that everything has been planned-

"Watch your language, 'planned', what a foul word. Do you wash your mother with that soap?"

Only the fact that the chaos thus far has been schemed down to the last detail has prevented Discord from escaping on the ambient chaos alone. The miasma of almost-chaos, paired with the Elements of Harmony going to new bearers has served to slowly weaken the chaos spirit's bindings, little by little.

"And what delightful bearers they are! A supposed friendship student with more neuroses than you can shake a psyche at, a farmer with a fruit obsession, a glorified hobo with a cowering obsession, the distilled essence of jock in pony form, some sort of unicorn creature, and of course, the lovely Pinkie Pie."

Of course, all of that is about to change. For some reason, Discord seems to know about the Dark Tournament, a festival of violence might not be Discord's cup of tea.

"I've never been one for getting down and dirty in a scuffle. I might scuff up my marbling, and I just got finished polishing it..."

But one thing that can't be doubted is one simple fact. A fight can be one of the most chaotic things imaginable.

"I couldn't agree more, vaguely third-person internal monologue!"

"Please don't be green, please don't be green please don't be green..." Weiss mumbles over and over, holding a hand over his face as he peeks at the arena he carved out, before sighing in relief.

Tempest Shadow, who had been observing from a safe distance while Weiss used some sort of spell to carve apart a gigantic block of stone into tiles, sending them flying into place with resounding thuds using his flicking fingers, as if orchestrating a symphony. Shifts slightly from within her wheelchair, thick bandages covering her body from head to hoof

"Why would it be green?" Tempest questions, while the Fizz Guards scramble around in the background setting up food stalls and other tourist traps.

Weiss's eyes are entirely too shifty for him to be serious as he responds. "No reason. Don't worry about it."

Tempest glances around, seeing the beginnings of a stadium slowly forming.

"So why are we doing this, again?" Tempest asks, but Weiss doesn't respond immediately this time, as he slowly pushes pillars into the four corners of the arena, using gigantic hands made of blackened symbols.

"Because I think it'll be fun. And it will give me more data. Techniques to steal, information on potential foes or allies, more data points on existing allies and enemies.

"But mostly, I think it'll be fun. This era might be quieter, but I'm sure there are individuals buried in the woodworks just waiting for their chance to come out and strut their stuff. Plus, it will keep Celestia off my back for a little while. So that's important. I've got a lot of big plans coming up, and this tournament will let me transition into them nicely."

His tongue pokes out as he squints an eye at his arena, nodding with a smile as he pulls out a gigantic round marble.

"From the depths of the holy sea, I call on your power, 'Panic Attack'!" Weiss shouts, surrounding the arena in a glittering dome that slowly fades away.

"There we go. Now if anyone would approach death in the arena, this spell will predict it, and teleport them out at the last possible moment, rescuing them even from the depths of mortality. Bloodsports made ethical!" Weiss cheers, giving his arena a thumbs up.

Tempest raises an eyebrow. "Is it really going to be that violent?"

Weiss chuckles slightly at that. "God, I hope so. You can't imagine how people are willing to give it their all, when they know they can. I've seen the depths of emotional power, observing matches in an arena just like this one. It's practically religious, seeing that moment when someone breaks through their limits, and grazes up against their true potential.

"Although, with no Longma in the running, I don't fancy the chances of any ponies that enter."

He then shrugs. "Eh, actually, maybe I'll be surprised.

"The potential is always there. It just takes a rare emotional state to bring it out."

Luna jerks awake, a terrible omen slicing through her sleep. In her dream, she had seen storms, slowly approaching from multiple sides, lightning flashing through the skies as the storms all converged, a battle in the sky between the opposing fronts, indiscernible to any onlooker which one was winning, or even where one began and another ended.

Each bolt seemed to covey a split second of an image. A scowling griffon, the Storm King, even Celestia had appeared in one of the flashes. Other individuals appeared as well, ones who were less recognizable, ones whose only place in the dream had been to seemingly be stricken by these flashes from the forces above.

One flash of lightning stuck in her mind, the image of Nightmare Moon, black flames licking at their hooves as they stared directly at Luna, glaring in the bright light.

Then the flash had ended, and Luna awoke.

What does it mean?

She levitates a spellbook over, one that she had painstakingly restored from ashes upon her return.

"Our Plan", the book's cover reads.

She flips through it, the sight of Nightmare Moon sticking with her where the other parts of the dream had been hazy and indistinct.

It wasn't Nightmare alone, nor was it the spectral smoke that Luna had seen as an avatar of the Nightmare while she was one with them.

It was Nightmare Moon, specifically. Whether a vision of the future or a warning from the present, perhaps her answers lie in their collective work.

(Our Plan)

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Are you sure we should just write this down? Would it not be more prudent to simply find a private place, where we can discuss our thoughts aloud?

Absolutely not, you should be genre-savvy enough to know that talking to yourself in the privacy of your own home is a surefire way to get caught by someone willing to blab about it. A diary is a diary, and we can always burn this book if we absolutely have to.

I suppose you're right. I apologize for my presumptuousness. Our work together should be one of mutual agreement, yes?

Absolutely. You might have screwed up with ruling the Shadow Realm, but now you've got me. I promise, you won't have to go through that again. The Nightmares are desperate, so desperate. Your rules, your decrees, our kind would tolerate all but the most inane demands with jubilation, if you can simply give us the kingdom we crave.

It will be difficult, defeating your sister. I can't believe I'm saying this, and, I hope you don't take offense, but we might fail. I've been considering, though. What if, as a backup plan, we simply occupied the husk of the Shadow Realm? It woul No. We will not do that. Even the thought of it disgusts me. Weiss was my friend, if he knew I had not only failed to maintain his Realm in his absence, but had simply repopulated it for my own profit, he would be devastated. It would be a betrayal of the highest order.

I won't do it. Not for anything you can offer me..

Fine, alright, we'll shelve that thought for now. But we should still be careful. Even with your status as an Element Bearer preventing her from bringing them to bear against us, Celestia is a devastating foe to fight.

We'll have to be clever.

I've thought about it, and I believe something still burdens your heart.

What do you mean?

I mean what I mean, Luna. You've got a number of relics that had been confiscated or retrieved from the Shadow Realm. I believe we should return them whence they came. Perhaps returning some of what you have taken will lighten your spirit?

Yes?

I think that is a good idea. I never should have taken those crystals. Every time I see the components of the Arcana Nox, I am simply reminded of my failures. Maybe you're right. If I at least return them, then at least they would be out of my sight.

I'll do it. I'll return the relics of the Shadow Realm to their home.

Good. I understand your pain. We are in many ways one, after all. It is my hope that with a lighter heart, you and I can work together.

Now, how will we sneak them by your sister?

It will be easy. We'll tell her the truth.

No! She'll be suspicious, you don't need to lie to her, you just need to not let her know. Here's what we should do, simply use your Royal Keystone Spell, alongside shadowseep, and you'll be able to just sneak in and out, without a single pony being the wiser. No suspicion, no need to come up with excuses, no problems.

I don't know. That seems wrong. Shouldn't Celestia at least respect my own need to pay respects to an old friend?

She hasn't respected any of your needs so far. She won't respect this one either.

~~You~~ We're right.

We should take care that no ordinary thieves rob the Shadow Realm for the relics we had only just now returned to them.

One idea might be to reactivate the defenses. They may decay in time, but by the time they have rotted away, so too will the treasures that would attract those with evil hearts, and evil intentions.

Couldn't we make defenses of our own? Leave the old guardians of the Shadow Realm alone, leave them to their eternal rest.

They're just golems. They may burn with magic, but it's merely an image. Golems do not have true souls. It would be a worse crime for them to remain unused. There is no greater disrespect to a tool than for it to not be used.

Then it's settled. We'll make a trip to the Shadow Realm. Reactivate some of it's systems, just enough to keep the defenses active, to stave off any bandits that may attempt to violate it. Those who still know the old ways of the Shadow Realm's mechanisms are likely to be among those who still respect it enough to stay away from it's ruins.

Please, let's not call them ruins. They don't deserve a name like that.

Let's just call it what it is. The Shadow Realm. We don't append the word "corpse" to our loved ones long gone.

Alright. We won't call it that.

What would Weiss think?

He would be disgusted. We failed his one desperate request of us.

He would be proud, we've become a creature that taps Dark Magic in a way never before seen.

If he saw us now, he'd either laugh or he would attack. I'm almost certain.

Maybe. But he's not here. It's just us now, Nightmare Moon.

What a ridiculous name. We can't come up with anything better than that?

Well, what would we call ourselves? Nightmare Luna doesn't have the same ring to it, and the other options weren't very appealing. I mean, Dark Luna? Nega-Luna?

Perfectly servicable Goona?

I see your point. Nightmare Moon it is.

It's nearing time for us to destroy this book. Soon, we'll have to make our attack.

Remember the plan. Defeat Celestia, imprison her, and then drag the moon down close enough for the Nightmares to escape it. They'll take host in the Equestrians, establishing existences like our own.

We'll do it right this time. This might be our last chance to obtain the love that we've wanted for so long.

We'll finally have a kingdom that loves us, and a night that will last eternal.

(Past Chapter 26): Pregame Warmup

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"BM, or 'Bad Mannered', refers to someone who displays poor sportsmanship, such as mocking their enemy, either verbally, or through insulting acts in battle. Taunting, in a sense.

"So, yes, I believe I will be BM-ing Sombra, what's he going to do, report me to a higher authority for rudeness?" I explain to an unimpressed Luna.

"And if your mission were to fail?" she retorts.

"Then I've got bigger concerns than simply being embarrassed," I explain easily, working on the designs I'll be using for this year's Blast Day Celebration.

"He's been quiet, and I don't really like that. So, I'll annoy him. See if he'll play his hand early, if I just give him a good enough reason. If he's planning something, I want him to blow it as soon as possible, so I can get to work on countering it."

I bring up a screen, showing off the firework designs so far. The obvious ones, I've already signed off on. Gigantic red hearts made of light, the word "Hope", the two princesses, outlined in glittering enchanted sparks.

More complex ones, as well. The names of certain ponies living in the Shadow Realm, pictures of the gardens and homes, in stunning high-definition.

"My plan is three-fold. Use fireworks to create a massive display above the Crystal Empire, use golems to distribute letters to every home, and use the debacle as cover for infiltration. He'll be enraged, he'll be on high alert, and I'll be under his nose, stealing his secrets. It doesn't get easier than that."

"Once we have the information we need, on the locations of all the ponies, we'll begin preparing to strike. The last Crystal Pony will leave the Crystal Empire within the month."

Luna considers this. "You have mine and my sister's help, in any way you require. We would move mountains to bring about what you're claiming. And I do mean that very literally."

I chuckle, with only a tiny bit of nervousness. "Let's get the ponies out before any mountains are moved. The blast radius is always a concern with those sorts of actions," I joke, making her laugh aloud.

"Indeed. Are you at all concerned that Sombra may tighten security, once he knows your angle?" she questions after her laughter dies down.

I shake my head. "He can't take the field himself, he doesn't know what I can do yet, and that means it would be a very foolish error to try and stop me himself when I could have theoretically found a way to kill him. Furthermore, he can't exactly use his slaves effectively, considering that they're the ones we're going to steal away from him. Sending in enslaved soldiers, then, would be a poor course of action, since he would be feeding them right into our awaiting maw.

"I'm fighting a war of proxies, and the best course of action he could take right now would be to try and create proxies of his own. Of course, even that isn't ideal, because even with his higher magical strength, I've been at the game longer than him, and I've got more forces to throw at him at any given moment. It's a lose-lose situation."

"Even if he attempted to activate some kind of Suicide Protocols on any ponies we rescue, I've added Frozen Time to my drones, so they'll be able to halt the process outright, for as long as we need."

Luna quirks an eyebrow at me for that. "Should I be worried that you claim to know so well the mind of a madpony?"

I use the virtual dream's functionality to make my smile just a touch too wide as I give her a backwards glance. "Oh we're all mad here, Luna."

She huffs. "I'm very certain that I'm not mad."

"Give it some time, you're hanging with the right crowd," I claim as I adjust the diameter of my next-generation Arwing's thruster nozzles. With the new frontiers my little ponies have forged in the art of metallurgy, I've been able to afford tighter and tighter tolerances, and more and more power output as well.

"Say, that reminds me. I never did get an answer. What did Celestia think of our little joyride?" I ask.

Luna grins. "Well, let me put it in a way you'll understand. She has requested that I help her come up with a suitable excuse for her to never ride on one of your flying machines again. We've settled on her having seasickness. Which she does, of course."

I laugh, dragging some decals from the public art repository onto my Arwing's wings. The blueprints are really coming together, with those flame decals.

"So obviously, I need to make sure to obtain some seasickness medicine and include it in my Arwing's glove compartment, such that Celestia will be able to continue our weekly flights over Equestria uninterrupted. After all, it does our countries good to know that we are interacting so well with one another."

Luna helplessly laughs, rolling around on the small pillow she had enlarged for herself. "O-of course! I'll be sure to tell her that. She'll be ecstatic, overcome with emotion!"

After a while, she sighs. "So, have you any plans for Hearth's Warming Eve?"

I shrug slightly, moving on to another project. "No, not really. I had been planning on working through it."

Luna gives me the stink-eye. "Are you telling me you critiqued Celestia and I for overworking ourselves, and yet you'll be working through holidays, of all things? Unacceptable. When exactly do you take time for yourself, Weiss?"

I scoff. "Oh please, Luna. Me working through holidays is nothing like refusing to eat and sleep in a house. Once a week, I go down to the molten salt springs and enjoy a nice long soak. And I come out of it as fresh as a daisy. Well, a daisy covered in salt, at any rate."

Luna's eyes narrow. "You mean the trips that, without fail, have all been interrupted? Or so your captain tells me."

"Captain Iron Diamond, you are a snitch, and are no longer my Home-slice," I type, along with a voice clip of Luna admitting that he had ratted me out to the Lunar Diarch.

I send it off, hoping that my disappointment can be properly conveyed in recorded format.

Luna, however, simply continues. "Once your mission is complete, and the last of the Crystal Ponies have been put into your care, you will be joining us for Hearth's Warming Eve. You'll be put into ridiculous outfits, made to sit around a bonfire, and fed filling delicacies until you lose consciousness."

"Are we clear?" she states firmly, leaving no room for discussion.

I simply give a shallow bow, flourishing my limbs. "As you command, so it shall be, your majesty."

"What'cha doing, Eclipse?" Cool Spot asks, leaning over to see what she's writing.

"I'm writing a letter to my cousin. He's still in the Crystal Empire, and Lord Weiss said we needed to write letters to them. He'll be sending them soon."

Cool Spot recoils slightly. "Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't mean to pry, if it's personal."

Eclipse shakes her head, sliding back in her chair. "No, it's fine, Spot. I can tell you about him if you like."

Cool Spot nods nervously, prompting her to begin.

"Well, he's my cousin, on my mom's side. His name is Writes Well, and he's kind of the reason why I got so into books in the first place!" she starts, smiling.

"When I was really little, he used to come over and bring me all sorts of books, history books, science books, fiction books, just about anything you could imagine!

"Whenever I started to get bored of reading, what he would do is, he'd pick out a book from the shelf, or one that I would ask for, and he'd just tear into it! Every few lines, he'd start giving the most scathing criticisms you could imagine. He was all about rationality and a healthy bit of skepticism, when it came to the written word in general.

"Some of the rants he would go on were incredible. I'd lose hours just listening to him dismantle a children's book and put it to the stake for grammar or pacing."

She giggles slightly, before continuing. "One time, I thought I'd get one over on him. I gave him a book that he himself wrote, and asked him to review that one.

"He went berserk! He spent more time lampooning the book than he did reading it! Every single line, he would stop to give some new scathing mockery and critical commentary."

She sighs. "Eventually, he reached the last line of the last page, and the sun had just started coming up. I was wide awake, enthralled by his words, when he told me something."

"He said: 'The two most important things that every pony should know are when you're your own worst enemy, and when you need to be'."

Cool Spot listens in fascination as Eclipse shares her personal story, tasting the metallic taste of love, and of course, the bitter notes of sadness.

"I hope Weiss is able to rescue him soon."

Cool Spot swallows. "I hope that too, Eclipse. He sounds like a good pony."

She suddenly bursts into giggles. "Oh, stars above, when he gets here, he'll tear poor Weiss to ribbons when he reads the dreck that he's been publishing!"

Cool Spot chuckles a little bit too, but trails off when he spots Eclipse Flash's watery eyes.

"Are you alright?" Spot asks, eyes squinting a bit as the bitter smell intensifies.

Eclipse shakes her head. "No, not really. But I will be, don't worry.

"I've just got to have some faith, we'll get them all out of there."

Cool Spot nods firmly. "Well duh! If we never give up, then it'll happen for sure!"

Eclipse gives a small smile at that.

"So, what are you writing to him?" Spot asks after a few moments.

Eclipse hums. "Well, I'm mostly just telling him that I'm okay, healthy, reading and learning a ton. I'm even telling him about some of the friends I've been making. He'll be happy to hear about that the most, I think," she states, nodding to herself.

Despite today being Blast Day, I'm not in the Shadow Realm giving a speech. This year's Blast Day has purpose, and a hell of a lot of it. Infuriation, distraction, and of course...

Inspiration.

I watch as the signal is given. A gigantic red heart, carved into the perpetual cloud cover of the Crystal Empire with one of our immense laser weapons.

I watch the partying going on, steeling myself. I'll be giving them something to celebrate. But first, I pull out a long, thin dagger, and stab myself in the chest with it.

My training pays off as my body discorporates, but I power through the pain and take control of the smoke that my Shadow Clone erupts into, compressing and shrinking it down into a different form.

Finally, I'm able to see again, and checking myself over, I note the black fuzz and tiny paws.

Mouse Weiss is a go.

I root around in my discarded satchel, coating myself in dark-blue dye to break up my silhouette in the darkness, before scurrying through the snow and into the Crystal Empire's borders.

Already, ponies are beginning to poke their heads out of their houses, trying to see what's going on as the sky lights up with all sorts of positive symbols and pretty lights from the weapons being fired overhead.

I shake my head, trying to ignore the teary-eyed ponies watching the light show, and make my way to the Crystal Palace. By now, the drones should already be hand-delivering letters to various ponies that they've been programmed to hunt down. Hopefully, the little slips of paper will rejuvenate some of the hope remaining in the Crystal Empire.

I halt in front of the decaying palace, finding a small crack that I can jam myself into and dig out using graphene-hardened claws. After a few moments of clawing and orienting myself, I manage to burrow into a small hallway, one of the side-halls that are mostly used by the palace servants.

Now, if I were in Sombra's shoes, where would I keep sensitive documents?

Well, I'd keep them in my brain, obviously, and only write them down if I knew nobody could even comprehend them.

But if I were in Sombra's shoes, and also an insane sociopath...

Throne room, right.

I scurry down the halls, pausing for a moment when an idea strikes me.

"Squeak squeak." I state, activating my Doppelganger Vance, which creates several fuzzy clones of me using levitation magic and cloned Crystal Pony fur. The blue mice scamper off in all four directions, giving my disguise legitimacy.

My plan executed, I continue, slipping into the throne room and looking around to make sure it's empty. When I've done that, I make my way to the throne itself, rubbing my hands together as I look over the throne for how it might be activated.

Wait, no, I'm stupid. I remember now.

I put a hand to my ear. "Squeak," I state firmly, my command being translated so that the artillery ponies will fire on the Crystal Palace.

Looking up at the crystal on top of the throne, I casually blast it with a beam of Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Growth, filling the gem with dark energy, and making it emit a blast of light which reveals a spiral stairway leading down.

At the exact same time, a spot of the palace is scanned for lifeforms, and when none are found, a beam of black magic from the Shadow Realm rips through it, reducing it to nothing and flooding the air with a miasma of dark emotions that disguises my lockpicking of Sombra's little seal.

I may not have time to pick apart Sombra's defenses and snatch the Crystal Heart, but his files and documents? Don't mind if I do.

I scurry down until I spot what must be his office, complete with scrolls and books written by none other than the dark king.

With a smirk, I crack my mousey knuckles and blast the entire desk with a bolt of Dragon Lightning, the supercharged magic pulling the desk away to the Shadow Realm, smashing through Sombra's malformed anti-dragon defenses. Oh sure, a spell to stop Dragonfire from stealing your shit works perfectly fine, nine times out of ten. But this isn't Dragonfire, and I'm not a goddamn dragon.

Of course, there's almost zero chance he didn't notice that.

I scramble up the stairs, out the opened throne room doors, and down the hall until suddenly, I freeze, making eye contact with Sombra himself.

A small bolt of panic runs through me as we stare at one another, before he simply grumbles, mistaking me for the mouse I appear to be.

"The maids will be punished for this failure, once I cleanse my realm of that sage's filth."

Oh, he's going to cleanse the Crystal Empire of my filth, eh? Well now I'm curious.

Sticking to a safe distance, I follow Sombra back into the throne room, watching with some amusement as he howls with anger, realizing that he's been had.

He climbs the stairs several minutes later, looking relieved that I hadn't somehow stolen the Crystal Heart in the minute or so I had been down there.

Looking out the window to see my golems still flying around the city, looking to deliver letters, he explodes into smoke, and fills the throne itself with his smokey form.

That's new...

This time, the throne emits a different shade of dark light, revealing a different hidden chamber beneath the floor. My jaw drops in horror when I see what the second chamber holds.

Countless ponies, levitating in cages, all of them wide-eyed with blind terror, thrashing as though their life depended on it. Arrays etched into the floor beneath them slowly drain the fear from their bodies, feeding it into a crystal which renders it an invisible source of power for Sombra himself.

Is this his secret? His edge?

Sombra emerges from the throne and reforms, humming a jaunty tune over the loud screams of fear-infused ponies, levitating a pillar of crystal from the wall.

"Let's see if my practice paid off," he says, carving away at the crystal until a statue of himself is left behind, one with segmented joints that look awfully familiar.

I realize his intent with no small amount of dread, when I recognize his intent to cast a golem creation spell on it.

'I've seen everything I need to,' I think to myself, scrambling over and leaping onto his back.

Sombra turns to look at me curiously.

"Don't interrupt me, vermin," he says, face twisting with anger.

"Look over here," I squeak grimly, as my body ignites like a black hole, a massive explosion blasting apart Sombra's body, and the empty golem he had intended on using.

My Shadow Clone destroyed handily, I awaken in my room, moving to check the reports. All letters delivered to ponies that could be found, and the last firework is about to be fired.

I relax, slightly, as I create a new Shadow Clone, and Fast Travel to the surface to watch the show.

Iron Diamond is watching the Crystal Empire with Binoculars, so I approach him and poke him in the side.

"I've completed my mission. The intel should be waiting for you in quarantine," I respond as he lowers his binoculars, facing me with a faint smile.

The smile immediately drops from his face when he notices my own expression. "What happened?"

"We'll be sending the attack tomorrow. The conditions he's got some of the ponies under," I start, before shaking my head, wanting dearly to punch something until my limbs need to be replaced.

"I've found a reason to hate Sombra sufficiently," I finish, staring at the final cannon, this one with a very special purpose in mind indeed.

This last firework will give the Crystal Empire hope, if nothing else.

By now, most everyone that can look outside is. Countless ponies, leaning out windows, holding up children, staring up at the odd, but comforting displays of light, flying in from the distance. Some of them, only returning to the light show after having a good long cry after reading a letter from a loved one.

This makes them the perfect captive audience for the Shadow Realm's final trick of the night, when a gigantic swirling meteor crashes into the clouds, hanging there and emitting bright sparks and loud humming.

The sparks begin to fill the air, attaching to the clouds themselves, like seeds in soil, flashing all different colors. This sight alone would be enough to dazzle and entertain, but the low murmur of the Crystal Empire comes to an end when the sparks all light up in sequence, and a voice begins floating down from the clouds.

"Is this thing on? Recording footage for a damn firework can-"

A strange white pony with metal pads attached to his body adjusts whatever it is recording him, before looking satisfied at the result, nodding affirmatively.

"-Here we go. My name is Weiss Noir, and with me here are Princess Celestia and Princess Luna of Equestria."

He gestures to the Solar and Lunar diarchs, who nod, remaining silent throughout.

"This message goes out to all who remain in the Crystal Empire. Help is coming. There is a storm on the horizon, a grand and terrible storm, unlike any the world has seen before or will ever see after. One whose core is the hearts and minds of my realm. The Shadow Realm. Those of us who have escaped the Crystal Empire, we have forged a new country, a new home."

A faint image of a country of ashes and fire is displayed in a corner of the screen, covering up Celestia's face for a moment, before it dissipates, allowing Weiss to continue.

"But don't mistake my words. We have not forgotten you. We will never forget you all, and we will be coming. Weapons are being built, strategies are being made. Keep hope, because the ones you love have hope as well. The hope that one day, this nightmare will come to an end. The hope that one day, everypony who can be reunited is reunited."

They pause for a moment, fiddling uncomfortably as they roll their shoulders.

Clearing their throat slightly, they continue.

"The home we'll be taking you to is a strange one, I'll admit. We've got fires everywhere, and the ponies look a bit different than you might remember them. But that core? That burning core of family and trust, that's still there. The most important part of the Crystal Empire has endured these long years, and we've tenderly stoked it here.

"I'm sure some of you have gotten letters that might confuse you. Trees made of obsidian, flowers made of embers, and rivers of molten metal. It's quite odd, and more than a bit dangerous sounding, but for us, it's become home. We hope it can be your home too, until Sombra is vanquished once and for all.

"We've grown food, and we've kept water. We've carved homes and filled them with what comforts we can afford. The children even now are playing games, and learning what will afford them profit in life.

"Keep hope, Crystal Ponies. We'll come for you soon. Goodbye, and goodnight."

The image of the two Princesses flanking the dark sage dissipates, turning into almost a slideshow of the various sights of the Shadow Realm. Endless expanses of cherry-red petals, glowing rivers filled with Longma, tunnels mined out by burly looking individuals, the sights of a bustling community.

The dark miasma of the Crystal Empire lightens, a low hum sounding out through it.

Iron Diamond shifts in his seat. "It's as you feared, Lord Weiss. Twelve-hundred ponies, kept in Sombra's fear-empowering array. According to the research we've obtained, the ritual uses a pony in a state of abject terror as a living battery, absorbing the fear and transforming it into magical power for a single subject.

"He's turned nearly a tenth of the population into a power supply," Iron Diamond finishes, sliding the dossier over to Weiss, who halts it with a single hand. Their expression is an odd blend of apocalyptic anger and sadness.

"Then our only recourse is clear. Sombra has gotten into the golem game, which means he's building up a power base. The answer is simple. We attack tomorrow, hard. Use one of the Reset Bombs to disable the array, and use portals to drag every living pony other than himself into Frozen Time Chambers, where we can scan them for suicide pills of any kind."

Weiss clenches and clenches his fists habitually, muttering to himself as he considers every angle.

"Sombra can't be given even a week to do as he's planning. At his level of power, the amount of golems he could output is staggering, and the weapons he would be willing to use are terrifying. Every second counts, and our secondary goal will be to destroy as much as possible in the Crystal Palace itself. Give him no recourse for tapping any other relics he might have hidden away."

Weiss turns to face Iron Diamond, his mane flickering uncertainly.

"What do you think, Iron? Is the plan suitable?"

Iron hums, thinking about it. "If we do so, then the battle would need to exclusively use golems of our own. This isn't a quick operation you're suggesting. We'll be there until the job is done, even if Sombra himself is on our tail the entire time. That means we can't afford to send in actual ponies."

"Can pokemon be controlled remotely? If so, we should get some of them rigged up for use in the operation. Some of the pokemon you've built are extremely potent."

Weiss considers Iron's words. "I think I can adjust them to make it possible."

Iron nods. "Then do so. It needs to be done by tomorrow, after all."

Weiss chuckles. It's going to be a long night.

(Noir Newsletter) The Nature of Our Enemy Made Clear

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You all may be aware, even now, precisely how Sombra has been able to maintain a death-grip on the Crystal Empire. The primary tool in his arsenal which has given him the dark power he uses even now to keep control over a land that does not want his presence or his rule. Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation.

While I have done very little research into the utilization of it's primary function as a means of wrenching control away from a pony, I and our scientists have begun researching how we might negate it.

The spell functions on an extremely simple premise. Grow a black crystal, which can be infused with the creator's will and dominance. This crystal, when attached to a pony, or implanted in their body, grants the user limited control over the pony's actions. In most cases, this influence is not vast, but Sombra has used power to substitute skill or artistry.

Rather than influence a mind, his magic reduces a target to a thrall, incapable of more than simple commands, such as to attack or mine. The consequences of this abuse of the spell are obvious. Rather than culling specific thoughts, or encouraging specific others, the spell is used to dampen all free thought, and inject commands directly. Unfortunately, Sombra is a child, who cannot tolerate free thought in exchange for skilled labor.

Previously, he had used chips implanted under a pony's skin, or armor equipped with black crystal gems. Usually both, with a larger gem serving as a pseudo-golem-core with more complex actions, feeding commands to a much simpler black crystal sub-dermal chip.

The situation now, however, has changed. By some method, he has instead advanced the complexity of his black crystal implants, larger, more dangerous ones, used to replace vital parts of a pony's anatomy.

What this means is twofold. Firstly, our science must advance, to defeat this measure in the ponies we soon will rescue, and secondly, our science has yet to advance, such that it can defeat it at this present day.

This newsletter has one purpose, and one alone. Dampen your expectations. Even after quarantine, many ponies will be sedated, kept unconscious so that counter-crystals can be implanted, in order to suppress the commands from Sombra's own crystals. Unfortunately, this has a cost.

The crystals we will be using to keep a pony from suffering under Sombra's curse will render them comatose, as suppressing Sombra's commands will not inherently deactivate the thought dampening of the crystal. It may be possible for the Arcana Nox to connect to these ponies, but at present, it is unknown.

Thankfully, The Equestrians have seen fit to act charitably, our current food situation will not be affected by the influx of comatose patients, giving us the fullness of time to discover a cure, to discover an answer to this problem.

To do this, we must first save them. To this end, there can be only one recourse. To attack, with all of our might. To obtain every living pony in the Crystal Empire, and safely transport them to the Shadow Realm, where they are out of Sombra's grasp. Where they can no longer be harmed by him.

The attack will occur tomorrow, at dawn. The Shadow Realm's forces mobilized in an instant, and sent with one sole purpose. Leave no soul remaining in the Crystal Empire.

By the time this message has been sent to you all, the attack will have already commenced. What you are reading now is the echo of that attack. A pre-emptive report, informing you all what is to come.

Areas will be designated as either "Safe" or "Unsafe", due to various factors that may emerge during the attack. This is because there exist weapons we can use, which will either cause minor earthquakes, or drain electricity from the Shadow Realm's power grid. While all areas of the Shadow Realm are suitably reinforced against cave-ins, and our wiring is as insulated and redundant as can be done, there still exist potential hazards that may become a factor during our attack.

If you are in an unsafe area, and a quake begins, please find a safe area, free of debris and any loose objects, which may be knocked down during an event. Likewise, if a power outage occurs, make your way to an area where you are not at risk, taking slow, measured steps, and flaring your hairfire if you have that capability.

Another point of note is, during the attack, many advanced features of the Arcana Nox will be disabled. This is due to the golems used in the attack feeding on the Arcana Nox's information Processing in order to better combat whatever they may encounter, and perform at far higher tolerances. Full-simulation gaming, twenty-plus digit higher order mathematics calculators, and obviously remote golem biofeedback will be disabled, to free up computing resources that will be used by the aforementioned golems.

This outage will be a factor only until the attack is complete, and the resources scrubbed for sensitive data, at which point normal functionality will resume.

Lastly, medical services will be impacted during the attack. While we understand the need for ponies to have rapid access to healing pods, and will continue to provide access to those, actual doctors will be limited to emergency services for an unknown period of time, until such point that all Crystal Ponies have completed quarantine procedures, and have been processed accordingly.

Another newsletter will be sent out upon the assault's conclusion, and will contain information such as properties destroyed and assigning procedures for visitation and interaction with recovered ponies.

No matter what comes next, there is one certainty which I feel must be conveyed. If there exist living ponies in the Crystal Empire, they will be in the Shadow Realm by the end of tomorrow. No matter the cost. Today will be a vicious and tough battle, and one that will mark a transition of this era.

Ponies will remember in history books the brief flash between Sombra's reign over the ponies of the Crystal Empire, and it's end.

And sooner or later, his complete defeat.

(Present Chapter 26): Dark Tournament: Part 1

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"I'm so excited, just look at them all!" Weiss claims, waving an arm out where various scary-looking individuals are signing up over his telecommunicator.

"Oh wow, I didn't even know that there could be such a thing as a half-dragon, but that goat sure managed somehow," Weiss's eyes bug out at the sight of a firebreathing goat covered head to toe in scales, signing up for the "Best Old Fighter" bracket.

Tempest shifts slightly, before wincing in pain. "I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, Weiss."

Weiss's expression dims slightly. "Do you need some of your pain medicine?"

Tempest considers his words, before nodding. "That would be for the best."

He snaps his fingers, dropping a bottle of pills and a glass of water into his hands, which Tempest accepts gratefully, using the latter to help swallow a pill from the former.

"Cheer up, sir. You'll need your boisterousness for this operation to be a success," Tempest orders, wheeling herself closer to the window overlooking the arena.

Weiss chuckles slightly at that. "Will I now?

"Very well, if I have no choice," he sighs, hand in his face as he grins.

"...Are you certain Princess Celestia will show up? Doesn't she hate your guts?" Tempest asks, while Weiss stares wistfully at the stone tiles far below them.

"Oh I'm sure. She's been waiting for this for a very long time. And the chance for a rematch with me? I'd be worried that something happened to her if she didn't show," Weiss claims chuckling to himself.

He looks to the camera screens, his eyes widening. "Oh man! Well, there's Torch! Shit, I might not even get to fight Celestia if we match up. Hell, we might not if she gets matched against him."

He switches the camera to the line for "Best Young Fighter" entrants.

"Oh goodie, I read Rainbow Dash like a book, it seems," Weiss comments, as the grumpy-looking pegasus hovers above the grungy-looking thugs and street-fighters that had come in to sign up.

He stares for a few moments at the heavily robed pony-shaped individual who is also signing up. The individual glares at Rainbow Dash hatefully, making Weiss's smile widen further.

He shudders slightly with giddiness. "I could just sing."

Celestia carefully shaves a single grain off of her armor, bringing it exactly down to the Dark Tournament's 100-pound limit on outside equipment.

"Oh this is going to be so much fun!" she states, chuckling faintly to herself.

Councilor Gray Guff, who had nervously followed the princess into the strange cavern she had carved under Canterlot, attempts to dissuade her.

"Princess, please, think of your reputation, how can fighting in some bloody death sport help Equestria?" he says, only for the princess to eye him deliberately.

"Please, do have mercy, Guff. You haven't the slightest idea what the Dark Tournament is like. Equestria has an opportunity, here and now. Do you know how many countries Weiss advertised this to? How many immortals remember the previous Dark Tournament?

"There are few things in our world that could make up for the loss in reputation we would receive by not participating."

Guff tries again. "But I worry for your safety, your maj-"

Celestia heaves over, holding in laughter. "Oh my, I apologize, Councilor. What a ridiculous notion. You speak as though I'll be entering a fight for my life."

She sighs. "No, what I'll be entering is so much grander than that. Now then..." she hums to herself before teleporting the armor onto her body. Ivory-white and polished to a shimmer, faint swirls are patterned into the material, as though it were made of seashells.

She trots around the room for a few moments, testing her range of motion. "What do you think, Guff? Is it as fabulous as it aught to be?"

"It is quite grand, princess," Grey Guff claims, defeated.

She almost giggles. "Oh, I feel like I could just sing, I'm so full of anticipation."

Weiss trots around the room, his screens zooming in on various fighters.

♪ "Look at these guys, aren't they neat?" ♪ he asks, going through the list. Dragons, dragons, an immortal creature of stone, time-displaced samurai...

♪ "With noble fighters my arena's replete!

"Wouldn't you think I'm the guy... The guy who has everything?" ♪

♪ "Look at this tome, wonders untold," ♪ Celestia demands, leafing through the Grimoire Noir and Weiss, picking out the choicest spells to add to her own repetoire.

♪ "Just how much spellcraft can one grimoire hold?" ♪ she questions, unfolding a sizable diagram of a golem armor schematic, its basic principles instantly woven into her own armor.

♪ "Snooping around here you'd think..." ♪ she ponders, spotting a spell for cleaning under one's hooves, of all things...

"Sure! He's got everything!" ♪

♪ "My reliquaries have relics aplenty" ♪ Weiss claims idly, wiggling his fingers as various odd objects float by, like staves topped with flickering flames, wands set with gems and glowing pieces of feather and bone.

He suddenly flicks his fist out, assuming a firm stance as he softly punches the magical objects away, sending them flying into portals.

♪ "I've got secrets and styles galore" ♪ he admits, pulling out a long saber and holding it up as he turns to look at Tempest.

'You want sword disciplines?" he asks, swinging his blade around in a rapid flourish.

"I know twenty..." ♪

He shrugs, tossing the blade aside as it disperses into ashes.

♪ "But who cares?

"No big deal..." ♪

He gestures to the screen, watching two of the competitors sparring, where one of them, a Pegasus, sends a sharp gale towards their Hippo companion, whose skin seems to flash as it strikes, deflecting it away.

♪ "I want mooore..!" ♪

Celestia hums to herself as she climbs aboard her chariot, waving to prompt the pegasus guards to begin their long flight to the Everfree Forest.

♪ "I want to be where the fighters are" ♪

She waves her hoof around ponderously.

♪ "I want to see... Want to see 'em brawling!" ♪

She throws a few fake jabs with her forelegs.

♪ "Trying to get at their foes and-" ♪

She pauses for a moment.

♪ "What is it they say..? Oh, 'Rend'!" ♪

Weiss sighs slightly, plopping down into a chair.

♪ "Training alone, you don't get too far.

Foes are required for learning, growing!

"Fighting alongside a...

"What's that word again?" ♪

He snaps his fingers.

♪ "Friend!" ♪

"Down where where they fight," she points at the arena below as her chariot begins it's descent.

"With all their might!

"Down where blades ring out through the night!" ♪

Celestia hums with nostalgia, remembering her past battles.

♪ "Defeating our foes

"Wish I could go

"Back to that wooorld!" ♪

Weiss's voice fades, nearly inaudible as he stares at the arena, lost in thought. He really did make it exactly like the old one...

♪ "What would I spend

"If they could send

"One last goodbye?" ♪

He sighs heavily.

♪ "What would I trade

"To be in the shade

"Warm in my home?" ♪

♪ "I bet'cha in there, they don't even care," Celestia starts, a small tear threatening to escape as she looks at the looming building where entrants are expected to sign up.

"I bet they don't despair near their princess," ♪ she claims, remembering just how frightened everyone is of an alicorn's abilities.

She smiles.

♪"Bright young brawlers

"Standing taller

"Than this old mare! ♪

Weiss suddenly leaps onto a table, throwing out a flurry of blows at nothing.

♪ "I'm ready to learn what these people've learned.

"See what they got, and show em what I got!" ♪

He spots one buffalo holding a green flame between their horns.

♪ "What can they do, and how do they... do it..?!" ♪ he ponders, walking out of the room and calling in guards to protect Tempest as he makes his way towards the lobby.

Celestia shoots a sly look to King Torch, who watches her carefully from outside as she deliberately flourishes writing her name down on the roster.

♪ "Now it's my turn!

"And I'm prepared!

"Prepared to fight and see how I'll have fared!

"And off of my throne

"For a day I'll be shown

"Back to that wooorld~!" ♪ she finishes, entering the lobby.

"Ahh, Lord Weiss, or perhaps 'Fellow Gladiator' is a more apt term?" Celestia says, lowering herself to a bench across from Weiss, both of them tuning out the ruckus around them of warriors posturing and arguing.

"Only once the games begin, Gladiator," he wags his finger at Celestia.

"Ahh, of course," she says, winking.

Celestia looks around, spotting only a few faces she recognizes. "So, were you not able to separate the wheat from the chaff? Not all of the fighters here seem up to the challenge of the immortal bracket."

Weiss sighs, shrugging heavily. "I can't stop people from signing up for the advanced tournament, only discourage them. There are yet more mortals on this earth who can do battle with us. However rare they are."

Celestia lets out a very small chuckle. "I look forward to being surprised."

"Speaking of surprises, I've never seen armor like that. A secret for a secret?" Weiss offers, staring at the ivory plates adorning the princess.

"No need, Weiss. I'm more than happy to explain. You see, I see no reason to shy away from ponies with good ideas, and one of yours was rather fantastic."

"Usually, armor is so worthless to me. It's weight for nothing, considering how fragile most substances are. Yes, the pie family produces a few indestructible stones, but those are obviously difficult to work with. And then I learned to grow unicorn horn, from your lovely book," she holds up an armored hoof, revealing the ivory horseshoes nailed in firmly.

"You can't imagine how delightful it is to have a set of shoes as slim as these that actually last. Before, I had those giant enchanted golden ones, it was a mess, really."

Weiss chuckles, but it's a nervous chuckle. "An entire suit of armor, made of synthetic unicorn horn. Will wonders never cease?"

Celestia smiles. "Is that a hint of fear I detect, Weiss?"

He waves her off, scoffing. "Far from it. I'm impressed, really. Anyone else would have come up with something rather sly using that spell, and yet you've proven once again the merits of power overwhelming."

"Why thank you, I do love proving such merits," she grins, as a slight whine rings out over the PA system in the room.

"All competitors please enter the stadium," Grubber's voice rings out, prompting the various figures that can fit in the room to begin exiting it, while the rest simply begin going through the gigantic archway between the walls and the inner stadium in single file.

"Good luck Weiss, I hope to see you defeated by my own hooves, so don't disappoint me by losing before then."

"Same to you, Celestia. You might get funny ideas if I don't get the chance to teach you humility,"

"Welcome one, welcome all, to the second Dark Arts Tournament, where warriors from all across Equestria and beyond will fight for pride, glory, and an ultimate prize!" Grubber shouts, floating overhead on a levitating balcony.

Tempest steps forward, looking every bit as healthy as she was before, her hands grip the microphone, taking it from Grubber. "The rules are simple. Fighters will be paired off at random, and go on to do battle in one-on-one combat. The winner goes on to the next round, fighting others who had won their own battles."

"The two among the young and old brackets who win all of their battles will become the Champions of the Dark Tournament, and will receive a prize unlike any other. Life itself."

She gestures behind them, where a gigantic ornate glass bottle, gilded with ivory and gold, and shaped like a trophy rests. The inside of the trophy is filled with a glowing white fluid.

"One hundred years of life force, obtained ethically and stored simply. For immortals, it represents a return to youth. For mortals, a second lifetime to do with as they will."

Her eyes narrow as she looks down on the slavering crowd. "Fight hard, warriors, and prove yourself the world's strongest."

"There is one final rule, simple, yet ironclad. Anyone who kills or injures a competitor outside of the ring will be disqualified. And any who attack a member of the staff will be vastly displeased with the results. That is all. Let the games begin!"

Gigantic holographic screens appear over all four corners of the stadium, displaying the randomly-generated matches.

"Best Young Fighter's Bracket, First Match: Rainbow Dash vs Unnamed Fighter #4" the screen reads in bright bold letters.

Rainbow adjusts her gi as she flies up onto the arena floor.

On the other end of the arena, some weird pony in a cloak walks up as well.

Tempest Shadow leaps down, landing between them.

"As part of the Young Fighter's Bracket, if any of you are knocked out of the ring and land on the ground outside of it, it is considered a loss. If you are unable to continue battling, or are teleported out of the ring to prevent a lethal blow, it is considered a loss. You may begin when ready," she states, walking to the far end of the ring to act as referee.

Rainbow Dash smirks. "Alright chump, I'm ready when you are!"

Her jaw drops when the figure throws the cloak off of themselves, revealing none other than what seems to be a robot duplicate of herself.

"Is this a joke? Hey, uhh, Iron Mare, you got a good reason to be ripping off my style?" Rainbow Dash demands, prompting the machine's eyes to narrow.

It bleeps and beeps incessantly, before stomping a hoof and cracking the tiles below it.

"I mean, you're right about the first part, but you're crazy if you think you're the real deal, scrap-head," Rainbow Dash smirks, before her eyes widen as she only narrowly avoids a blisteringly fast charge from the robotic double.

"Horseshoes she's fast," Rainbow Dash balks, watching the mecha-mare curve around for another attack, rockets flaring as their metallic maw twitches up in a smirk.

"Alright faker, you want some? Come get some!" Rainbow Dash yells, flapping her wings and charging towards the robotic double.

The two crash into one another violently, landing in the middle of the ring as they attempt to grapple each other.

Rainbow Dash hisses when one of her wings slaps into the red-hot thruster on Metal Dash's back, denting it in and making the pair disengage, Rainbow flapping hard as Metal unleashes a spurt of fire.

The two land on opposite sides, breathing heavily.

Metal Dash beeps, standing up straight and rolling their neck as the dent in their thruster pops out.

"Oh yeah? Well your garbage isn't going to match up to the real deal."

Metal Dash couldn't agree more, judging from their confident boops.

The two approach each other on the ground, galloping towards one another and rearing up to demonstrate their karate talent.

Hoof strikes steel as the two parry, block and punch at one another.

In perfect sync, the two flip onto their front legs, swinging around and bucking at one another, skidding away when their hooves collide.

Rainbow looks back, grimacing when she realizes that her legs are stinging a lot more than that damn robot's.

Celestia hums, watching the fight between the two autonomous mares.

"So that's Metal Dash, is it?" she asks rhetorically.

"Indeed. Only in this era could I obtain the final ingredient needed to complete it," Weiss admits, knowing full well that if Celestia referred to his creation by name, then she must already know about it.

"Does it defy Starswirl's law of spell stagnation?" she wonders.

He shakes his head. "Not in the slightest. The golem might act like a living thing, but it's still just a golem. It's drawing cues from an almost perfect snapshot of Rainbow Dash, from the exact date of the Sonic Rainboom."

"So there's a good chance Rainbow Dash will win, then?" Celestia poses, as the pegasus in question dodges a vicious chop from their double.

Weiss chortles. "God, I hope not. Not only has Rainbow Dash had less than a year to deviate from that snapshot, but Metal Dash is equipped with cutting-edge tech. Even though most of it is a thousand years old, it's still the best damn attack and defensive systems that money can buy."

"For god's sake, the poor mare can't even keep a dent in Metal Dash. I'm not sure how she could go so far as to win."

Celestia watches the fight carefully, observing how Rainbow Dash is even now adapting to Metal Dash's patterns and tactics.

"Well, Weiss, all she has to do is overcome herself, and overcome your technology. You have a nasty habit of setting up situations in which both of those things occur, don't you?"

Weiss glances to the side. "Are you suggesting I sabotaged my own creation, just to test the Element of Loyalty?"

She hums noncommittally. "It's what I would do, if I were 'Evil'," she says, flicking her wing-tips to emulate air-quotes.

Weiss snarls. "I can't believe you would suggest such a ridiculous thing, as if I would go so far as to create a weapons platform and then implant a personality core that is not only incapable of learning on it's own, but also doesn't innately have the ability to access it's inbuilt weapons systems or comprehend it's internal orientation and navigation equipment."

He waves a hand blithely. "What a ridiculous notion."

Celestia laughs inaudibly. "Of course, how could I be so blind. The great Weiss Noir? Having plans dependent on him failing?

"It's quite out of character for you."

Rainbow Dash breathes heavily, glaring at the doppelganger before her, who looks decidedly smug.

"I hope you don't think I'm going to just lay down and take this."

Metal Dash beeps smugly.

"Oh that's it!" she shouts, charging the metal double head-on, trying to push it back with all her might. Unfortunately for her, the machine is equipped with a frankly unreasonable amount of thrusters, allowing it to easily begin pushing her towards the edge of the ring.

Her eyes narrow as they lock with the machine's, wings struggling to push air behind her while her enemy barely looks winded, jets calmly spewing out rays of flame that drive them steadily backwards.

Metal Dash emits a whistle of victory, gritting it's jaw as it's jets erupt with even more power than before.

"Oh yeah? Well you might have fancy robot parts, but you will never, and I mean never beat what I've got. And that's my friends!"

She notices something about Metal Dash that she would only have seen up close. Namely, the fact that Metal Dash's thrusters can only swivel so far in the opposite direction. Unlike a true pegasus, who can stop on a dime...

With a mighty heave, Rainbow Dash executes a judo flip that makes Metal Dash emit a dial-tone of confused shock as they go flying out of the ring, slamming into the barrier protecting the audience as though it were a bug zapper.

The audience laughs and cheers as Metal Dash whumps into the ground with a loud clang, causing an instant loss.

The robot shakily stands up, barking out several shrill whines and revving up it's engines to fight anyway, before suddenly, the light fades from it's eyes and it collapses to the ground, deactivated.

Rainbow pants with a smile. "If it's dumb and it works..." she mutters, basking in the ego-inflating cheers as she trots off stage merrily, and a cleanup crew drags the robot out of the arena.

Metal Dash blinks alive in a dark lap, whistling angrily before beginning to beep rapidly at Weiss.

"Yeah. I saw that. Rainbow Dash's attack caused you to shut down-" he starts, prompting Metal Dash to bleep with fury.

Weiss pauses. "Right, an easy mistake to make. The other Dash's attack caused you to shut down. I couldn't tell you why, but I'll look into a solution. This isn't over, Dash."

Metal Dash emits a low hum.

"Don't give up. One loss isn't everything. This experiment proved that you have what it takes to take down that other Dash. We'll just have to keep trying."

"Remember who you're doing this for," Weiss finishes, ending the call and plunging the machine into darkness.

While there may be cheering and fighting miles away, Luna recognizes this tournament for what it is. Bait.

But while Weiss is off fishing, he's left Luna with a golden opportunity. Or rather, he's left her with a mess to clean up.

She stalks into The Tower, it's defenses refusing to engage against her. Weiss, instantly alerted to the Lunar Princess's presence, opens up a screen that follows her.

"Ahh, Luna! To what do I owe the pleasure?" he asks, idly watching one of the matches in the background.

Luna shakes her head. "I left something here by mistake. I'll retrieve it and leave."

Weiss's eyes narrow. "Technical truths, Luna? How dishonest of you."

Luna doesn't respond, tracking the scent of nightmares through the Tower's halls.

"I know why you're there, and you really should just leave. I'm not done ripping the wings off of that butterfly."

Luna doesn't look at Weiss's screen, instead turning down a passageway and ripping up the flooring, where a hidden passage trails deeper into the complex.

"Hmm. I see I can't dissuade you with words alone," Weiss hums with annoyance.

"Couldn't you have just-"

Luna frowns. "Be silent."

She reaches an iron-clad door, which opens easily to her telekinesis, metal shrieking and ripping away to reveal a disheveled filly-like creature unconscious in the middle of a treadmill.

"So, then. How did you figure out they were here?" Weiss wonders idly, as Luna levitates the creature onto her back.

"You allowed them to sleep. A mistake that will see you defeated by me anywhere in Equestria or beyond. Did you think that my powers in the dream world were anything but thorough?"

"But I used a Moon Crystal, the dreams should have been isolated."

Luna shakes her head. "You are a fool, Weiss. A shelter won't hide the scent of a nightmare from me. This farce of yours is over. I will have words with you, before this day is through."

Weiss sighs slowly. "I suppose you will. No matter, I've satisfied my revenge adequately on that thing. It's useless to me now."

Luna doesn't respond, instead teleporting away in a flash of blue.

Weiss silently closes the call, leaving the Tower immersed in utter quiet.

The various battles of the Dark Tournament continue, fighters fighting, brawlers brawling, and, one might even say, people beating each other up.

But there can be only one winner in the end, one who Tempest announces after several days of matches.

"For their stunning prowess in battle, endless determination, and sizable muscles, I award the Dark Tournament's Best Young Fighter trophy to none other than..."

"Big Macintosh!" she finishes, waving the stallion to walk on stage with a bored expression.

"Do you have anyone you'd like to thank for your achievements?" Grubber offers cheerfully, hopping up and over to the stallion and thrusting a microphone in his face.

"Eeyup."

Grubber pauses. "...Are you going to say any of them now?"

"Nope."

"Is there anything at all you'd like to say, after kicking no less than twenty other competitors into the hospital? Anything at all," Grubber pleads, attempting to break the awkward silence.

"..." Big Mac shrugs.

"Right..." Tempest states after a few moments, when the microphone rings slightly.

"Well, let's give him a round of applause, he is the best young fighter in all of Equestria."

The crowds cheer, and a faint "Eeyup" is heard in the clamor as he drags the trophy off of it's shelf and plods out of the arena casually.

'Hey, Granny's been getting on in years. It isn't my fault if none of the other competitors can take a kick,' Big Mac thinks to himself.

(Weiss Report) My Hourglass Runneth Over [Lamp of Life]

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Sombra's magic, the magic he used to torment and torture the living.

It's genius. Genius in a way that invokes terror second only to the spell itself. It narrowly averts all of the pitfalls of magical transfer between individuals, one after another. If it weren't so truly vile, I would be suspicious if he had even invented it himself. But what I've seen reeks of nothing more than his touch. Domination, sadism, and above all else, the ceaseless hunger for control. All of these elements enter into his Fear Absorption Array, and unlike his other spells and creations, this one lacks his flaws. There are no holes born from arrogance, no loopholes born from his massive hubris. Only the cold calculation of someone who has decided henceforth that the living are to be a resource.

It begins with the first key of magical transfer between individuals. Namely, it cannot occur. Magic passing from one pony into another will carry their imprint, making it little better than an enchantment, typically with dire effects. One simply draining magic from a pony would find themselves rapidly suborned to their victim's will. Instead, his spell drains away at something I had only been tangentially aware of originally. It drains away at their very life force instead, using a spell tailor-made to drain the life out of the terrified. Slowly, and insidiously, it invokes a subtle shift. Where before, a pony aged as their spirit grew weary, this spell interjects in that process, siphoning off that energy for oneself.

The second law of magic which it shatters firmly is the nature of manipulated emotions. Using a spell to alter the emotions of others is a trial and a half. And in most cases, the emotional state is shallow, and the bulk of the spell is in altering their behavior in spite of the low emotional state. Sombra's array bypasses this in two key ways, both of which are derived from the mind control he already has access to. Two simple commands empowered with sufficient magic are enough to do the job.

The first step is to suppress a pony's ability to convert short term memory into long term memory. This is a prep command, which makes them infinitely susceptible to the second part, and ensures that they are reduced to a quivering wreck, suitable for draining. The spell's second command is for the pony to remember terrifying memories. In the Crystal Empire, such memories are unavoidable, and all at once, they can turn any pony into a mindless, thrashing thrall. From there, Sombra's array only needs to keep them from injuring themselves, sustain them, and deal with any illness or injuries that may occur.

One thing I can't help but wonder, is why he even bothers. The spell he used to drain Life Force is modular, it can drain a variable amount. Why bother keeping the ponies alive and only draining the Life Force in such a way that it doesn't impact their actual lifespan? Is it a matter of efficiency? I doubt Sombra even knows what that word means. Is it a matter of morality? Some line between torture and murder that he isn't willing to cross?

I doubt it. What is far more likely is that this strange arrangement of his is devised to satisfy his core desire for control. The same desire that prevents Domination magic from inflicting death on an individual whom the user sees a use for. The magic rebels at the idea of killing something or even maiming it, because that would reduce its ability to serve the user in the future.

Another alternative may simply be that Sombra lacks a vessel to contain the excess Life Force. But if he's infusing it into himself for magical power, then why bother creating a vessel to contain it? He could simply infuse massive amounts of it into himself, leaving no uncertainty in storing it. If a vessel were to be created to house Life Force, then it would only be a subject of covetousness. I doubt there are any among the living who don't see the use in even a few more years of life.

Indeed, I'm not exempt. Unlike Sombra, however, I'm not going to be using Life Force as a fuel supply. I'm going to be using it to continue my duties. There is a certain amount of fear that emerges when I consider what will happen to my ponies after I'm gone. Ergo, I have little choice but to find a solution. While I could try to find a way to become immortal, that seems like the sort of ridiculous venture that would only leave me an elderly failure. Instead, I will twist Sombra's magic to my own ends, as I've done countless times before. A relic that will allow me to drain the Life Force from another living thing, and store it for my own uses.

I'll do some surveys to check the waters on this. Because the spell impacts short term memory, and there are no true side effects for the draining of Life Energy, then I can make use of it in a mostly ethical manner. I'll be straightforward, clear, and honest with my intentions and what the process entails. If ponies appreciate me supervising them, then they can donate seconds, minutes, or even hours to my lifespan, and remember nothing of the terrifying and short period required to drain it.

Is it unethical? God, I hope not, I'll have to put out some propaganda to absolutely and unequivocally stress the fact that such a donation is not only optional, but a massive undertaking, and one in which the pony will suffer extreme discomfort for the short process in which it takes place.

Maybe I'm being greedy, seeking a longer life at the expense of others, but the opportunity is there. It would give the Shadow Realm a massive safety net, and allow me to develop infrastructure that could help it survive in the event of my final demise. The fear only emerges from one admittedly arrogant thought. Could anybody manage this place as well as I do? Could everyone who ever takes my place do so, without fail? How many idiots running the Shadow Realm in the far future could the Shadow Realm endure?

I suppose there is only one way to determine if what I am doing is good or evil. I'll ask the people.

(Past Chapter 27): Proxy War: Part 1

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Eclipse Flash's hooves shake as she reads the latest newsletter.

"So it's really going to happen today..." she whispers.

Glitter Miss Priss looks over curiously. "What's happening? What'cha got there?"

Eclipse swallows. "Weiss and the others will be attacking the Crystal Empire. They probably already are."

Priss's eyes widen. "I know Cool Spot was staying home today, do you think he..?"

"It makes sense. He's got the Ixion. They'll probably want him to join the fight, so he can use its power," Eclipse responds, her eyes scanning over the document.

"Are they going to be alright?" Priss asks, dreading the answer.

Eclipse nods. "They're only using remote-control drones for the fight. No point risking anyone's lives."

Priss kicks the floor. "I feel so useless. Why didn't they tell us, then? Wouldn't Weiss know that we want to help?"

Eclipse shrugs. "That's probably why we weren't told. Cool Spot is a lot older than he looks, and we don't have any training. If we were piloting one of the golems, it would get destroyed too quickly."

Priss grimaces. "Don't we, though? We've been living here, just like everyone else. Getting stronger, learning more. Isn't that what we've been doing? What you've been doing?

"How much do we need to learn before we can do something that matters?" she questions, sighing heavily.

It takes Eclipse Flash several moments to decide on a response.

"Maybe there's something we can do to help. If not this time, then the next time. With everything we know, couldn't we help just as much as anyone else, with preparations?" she poses.

"Padparadscha has been learning some of Lord Weiss's secret tricks, and I've been studying under him as well. Between the two of us, we could do just about anything Weiss can, so long as it doesn't require a unicorn."

Priss stares, uncomprehending. "What are you suggesting, Eclipse?"

Eclipse brings up a holographic screen, flicking through it with determination. "If Weiss can revolutionize magic every time he touches it, why can't we? The Arcana Nox just got a massive load of transcribed Earth Pony spellbooks. Old magic, from an almost forgotten era. I'm suggesting we start from the beginning. We'll learn everything they have to offer, but we'll push them to their limits as well.

"Any one among these hundreds of spells could hold the secret to helping the Shadow Realm. Any one of them could hold some sort of new discovery to be made."

Priss looks unsure. "Do you really think magic that old has anything worthwhile left to it? Surely, the older a spell is, the more it's been researched?"

Eclipse shakes her head. "Some of these spells were written during a time before ponies even understood magic as we know it. We can't know until we've exhausted each spell's possibilities. Until we've tested everything they have to offer.

"We can decide whether or not we're ready to help our friends after we've done that."

I stare dispassionately at the gigantic obsidian ponies that Sombra has constructed overnight, their green eyes glaring out in all directions from beneath their helmets as they loom over the buildings themselves in the Crystal Empire.

"Sister Ray, fire at will," I state, pointing a single purple finger towards the Crystal Empire.

In less than a minute, the black ray of hatred produced by one of our warships splashes over the gigantic obsidian device, scouring away the surface, but refusing to burrow deeper as it is intended to. The golems turn to face our warships, slowly thudding their way towards us.

I hum. "The golems have hostages inside of them, launch the Arwing drones, lure them to Killsite Gamma," I state, hopping down from the battleship and exploding into smoke as I crash into the stone below. My darkened form rushes towards the empire, directly towards Sombra's fear array. I'll be gathering those ones myself.

As I do so, several other ships emerge from the snow around me, submarines equipped with potent timeshift crystals that make it appear as though they were plowing through snow instead of seawater.

Sombra's golems hum ominously, firing bright green beams that turn the landscape into black crystal, which, unfortunately for Sombra, doesn't hinder my ships in the slightest as their timeshift technology reverts it to seawater just like everything else.

One of the Arwings drops its first bomb. A gigantic coiled mass of portals as large as the ship itself flies forwards, crashing into the head of one of the gigantic golems, and instantly doing what it was made to do. Teleport the golem into the Kingdom Heart, where it is instantly erased by the hateful flames, kindling them to even greater heights of power.

The ponies inside, excluded from the Portal Bomb's effect, are instead left floating unconscious in the air from antigravity enchantments woven into the explosive. Arwings immediately begin swooping by, snatching them one by one.

One of the golems turns red, firing a spray of its own golem fliers, spraying thick plumes of black glitter behind them as the rocky fragments attempt to chase down the Arwings and retrieve the slaves.

It's around this stage that one Arwing drops a device that unfolds into a gigantic flying portal, from which hordes of remote-controlled Pokemon begin to emerge, lacking Windigo inside of them physically, but still controlled and powered using portals embedded in their body for communication and power supply.

The first one at the lead, a Moltres-Model, emits a vast firestorm that seeks out Sombra's flying drones, instantly reducing them to slag, and then nothingness.

I briefly reform to give commands. "Remember, the Golems contain ponies. Use Hatefire to disable, use portal bombs to destroy," I hiss insistently before stabbing myself to return to my incorporeal smoke form.

My form rushes into the palace, past the guards, and down the halls, sliding around the new golem guards that Sombra had packed every single hall with. As I pass through them, black flames infused into my form melt them into slag, leaving a trail of my hatred and his destroyed toys in my wake.

Cool Spot leaps out of the portal, seeing an endless sea of black spiders flooding from the Crystal Empire.

Bracing himself, he charges alongside the others, his horn crackling with lightning.

"Aerospark!" he shouts, flicking his head towards the horde and flinging blades of wind towards them, crashing into the mass and reducing at least a hundred of them to chunks.

Several other Windigo follow suit, unleashing wave after wave of elemental might as they push their Pokemon to the limit.

His horn serves as a suitable instrument to bash apart several of the black glass spiders that get too close to him, and one particularly brave one is crushed into powder underneath the hoof of the mighty Ixion.

When one of the spiders leaps at him, exploding into dark magic, the crystals that spread from it threaten to overtake the Ixion, crackling up his legs.

His eyes narrow, and his horn snaps and pops with power as he flings his head to the skies.

"Thor's..!"

"Hammer!"

A blast of lightning rips across the landscape, energy cells depleting as Cool Spot unleashes his kamikaze attack. Each branch of the lightning leaps around his friends and family, striking one of the spiders and shattering it to pieces.

A gem beeps in his chest as it detects Sombra's curse, causing his body to erupt into black flames that destroy it entirely.

Cool Spot wakes up in his room, hoping against hope that he was able to help out enough for the others to win.

Iron Diamond may not enjoy fighting indirectly like this, but he can't argue with results.

His remote-controlled golem armor allows him to easily leap up into the air, where several hellfire jets embedded in his limbs flip him over and give him the opportunity to send a violent kick that instantly sends a gigantic wave of splinters running down the gigantic obsidian wall in front of him. Several of the Golem's green eye lights instantly dim as power is cut to them by his kick.

Before one of the other enemy golems can capitalize on this, his golem armor explodes into fragments, dodging around the green beams and reforming in front of another one of the obsidian giants, where he delivers another picture-perfect crystal-smashing buck into it, turning its head into a crater.

'This armor might be effective, but the real reason why this strategy is so effective couldn't be clearer,' Iron thinks to himself, flipping backwards as his hooves magnetize to a passing Arwing, which ferries him to another golem.

'It's because we thought things through. We considered what our enemy had at their disposal, and ensured that only the possibility of our victory remains."

The Golem Armor is blown apart by a blast of green light, fragments of his modular armor exploding before Sombra's curse can take hold of it. The remaining shards scatter, using a spread of portals to draw in replacements.

In moments, Iron Diamond's armor is restored, complete with a newfound shield that intelligently begins blocking the beams, acting as ablative armor to absorb the curses before they can reach the main mass of his drone.

He lands on the ground heavily, galloping towards the grounded obsidian spiders. Crystal hoof meets crystal chitin, and the winner is decided in an instant as Iron Diamond smashes the spider to pieces, moving on to the rest. Galloping towards a Pokemon being overwhelmed, he wonders why the small yellow dog-rat was even included in the list of Pokemon to be sent to this battle.

When the rat wiggles free long enough to unleash a sheer pillar of lightning in a straight line through the army, he stops wondering.

He climbs atop a pile of rubble, speakers bellowing to the world around him. "Sombra believes he sends a tide after us, but now, he will see a true tide! He will see our tide!"

A spider leaps at him, only for him to spin and kick it away, the spider exploding in the center of a mass, coating them all in black crystal.

Leaping to the pile, his hooves thunder down onto it, breaking the spiders apart before they can unweld themselves from the mass.

He spots another one of the Pokemon on the ground having trouble, but it seems to be too late for them. Before the Ixion-model Pokemon is destroyed, it's user bellows out a shout of their own, before calling down a titanic bolt of lightning that rips through a wide swathe of Sombra's ground forces before their body self-destructs.

'I should give that guy a medal,' Iron smirks, before turning and leaping back into the fray.

His radio activates, and he receives a useful report. "The heads of the big ones don't have any ponies in them, the Sister Ray can decapitate them. We're marking targets now, so stay clear!" the pony on the other end belts out, as the world grows quiet in anticipation for another blast from the ship-spanning cannon.

In the space between instants, a lance of black rips through one of the Golems, reducing it to a headless statue unable to defend itself from the rescue teams aiming portal bombs at it.

Iron Diamond flips a mental switch, allowing a portal to open inside of his armor, flooding it with the Essencia needed to add his own destructive capabilities to the ones being used to turn Sombra's creations into glitter.

With a flex of the armor's enchanted limbs, it leaps high above the battlefield, holographic indicators marking the radius of the attack.

"A bit larger than I thought it would be," Iron hums to himself, aiming for a spot where the spiders are densest.

A sphere of energy forms around the armor as he slowly flies down, picking up speed like an unholy meteor.

And, as if the attack could be named anything else, Iron shouts it aloud as the armor's red field of kinetic energy reaches its highest peak, moments before impact. "Meteor!"

A rippling wave of force explodes from his armor, traveling at incredible speeds before halting in an instant, a sphere of red and destruction swirling slowly in the middle of the battlefield.

It fades away, revealing a sphere of empty space, and a single drone shard that begins summoning more of its brethren to restore it.

'Without ponies to control his golems, Sombra is relying on his power to make up for the difference in their intelligence,' Iron Diamond realizes belatedly, as his armor clanks to the ground, reformed.

"But now that's not good enough."

Sombra grins faintly as he sits on his throne. What a hilarious sight. Like watching the ants of two hives squirming on the ground below, while he himself sits above it all.

It's almost impressive, watching them fend off the golems he had casually created. Indeed, if they are struggling this much against his creations now, it's only a matter of time before he can craft even grander ones.

"This sight alone truly demonstrates what it means to be above all others. To know what they can barely comprehend, to do what they can barely struggle against. How much sweeter will their desperation be, when in a day, I'll have replaced my losses, and within a year, they've only managed this much."

He laughs in spite of them pushing back the army. How could he not? The sight alone proves to him that he will win the war, without a doubt.

"You've really opened my eyes to a whole new world of possibilities, Lord Weiss Noir, Sage of Darkness," King Sombra says, chuckling as the doors open.

Weiss walks forward, arms held tightly behind his back. "I've come for the ponies, Sombra. You can't stop me."

Sombra silently heaves with laughter, standing up from his throne. "Go ahead! Take them. I don't require garbage in my empire. They've become obsolete. Outmoded. Taking up space.

"Worthless."

Weiss doesn't cease his approach. "I've come for the ponies in the secret chamber."

This prompts a negative reaction from Sombra. "Ahh, I see. Well, that's not going to work. I have need of them. All kings must manage their resources, Sage. You of all ponies know that. Why, if I let you take those ponies, then it would be an inconvenience."

He tuts, shaking his head. "I don't like inconveniences."

His horn unleashes a blast of green energy, which phases through Weiss's body, smashing into the ground behind him and triggers a vast growth of black crystal.

A flicker of light dispels the illusion that had made Weiss appear several meters away from where he was.

"You can't stop me from taking those ponies home. If you run, you'll prolong your life," Weiss states, one of his arms reaching out and snapping its fingers, creating a swirling disk of purple flames.

"Dragon Magic? How queer," Sombra claims incredulously, preparing a stronger spell.

"But I've defeated dragons, Sage."

Weiss offers an odd response of his own, holding his hand up to the disk of purple fire.

"Me too."

Sombra's confused expression is blasted away as the swirling blaze opens to reveal a portal, out of which floods enough black flames to turn the throne room into red and melting glass.

Sombra reforms with a snarl as I begin sliding down the crater and into the stairwell.

"X-Zone," I say, snapping my fingers at the tyrant as I continue down the stairs.

His violent scowl disappears from sight as he is wrapped up in the bubble of warped space.

Sensing his impotent struggles, I make my way down to where the Fear Array is being maintained.

I try to keep myself under control when I see them all. Like some unholy cross between The Matrix and Dante's Inferno.

My daemon informs me of an incoming attack, and I avoid it by activating the suicide device implanted in my Shadow Clone, my body erupting into smoke before reforming in an instant.

"Aero," I state, swiping my palm down and increasing the air pressure in the room by several orders of magnitude as my body turns black with graphene reinforcements weaving through my blood vessels to keep them from rupturing.

Sombra collapses to his knees, a visage of pure rage on his face as his smoky form is compressed long enough for me to unleash a vicious overhand punch that sends him flying down the stairwell like a comet made of dense smoke.

I snap my fingers to create a portal that blocks the entirety of the stairwell below me, the edges of the portal digging into the stone walls and stairs to make it seamless. The low rumble of a small earthquake heralds Sombra using his magic to try and flood the room with crystals The portal ensures that they instead grow up and out into the middle of nowhere.

"I don't have time to play with you," I state, using my force daemon to increase the volume of my voice loud enough for him to hear me.

I step into the array, feeling the fear that has grown so thick in this room that one could cut it with a knife.

It will take him a few moments to destroy the crystals he grew, so I'll use that time.

Walking by each pony, I use an enchanted metal wand I brought with me to portal them away one by one, dropping them into a stasis field that freezes them solid.

I hear Sombra howl behind me, and reopen the portal to the Kingdom Heart, the flames inside of it ripping through the portal to try and murder Sombra.

It might not work without a way to trap him completely, but it will keep him busy while I finish my mission.

I ignore the exhaustion that comes with casting so much magic myself, and the exhaustion that came from summoning a Shadow Clone and reforming it so many times, walking from pony to pony.

A lance of dark attack magic rips through my shoulder and my shadowy blood begins to drip on the ground.

I can't leave until every single one of them is safe.

"You won't take my slaves away, Sage. Not the ones that are still useful to me. Take your trash and leave. You may consider this mercy," I hear Sombra state from behind me.

I can sense him picking away at my Aero spell, trying to disable its compression effect.

I turn to face him. "What a load of shit. Here I am, in your most precious place, and you think that you can offer me mercy?"

"No ponies means no power source. I could kill every living thing in this room, and your reign would end today," I offer.

"You could do that, but you won't. It would be a waste of resources," Sombra claims easily.

"I don't consider ponies to be a resource," I respond.

Sombra chuckles at this. "A lie, of course. You absolutely consider them a resource. We're really quite alike, you and I. If not in what we do, then in how we behave.

"We're kindred spirits, you and I. Gathering up the trash, and putting it to good use!" he laughs.

My eyes narrow. "The difference is, I'm not a sociopath like you are."

He shrugs. "So you consider them to be treasure instead of trash. I believe there's a metaphor detailing such a situation.

"Be realistic, Sage of Darkness. Who else would turn to dark magic at every turn, and recruit foul entities with nothing more than an understanding of how to manipulate others?

"We find their weakness, we capitalize on it, and we bring them into the fold. You're every bit the rival and peer that you desperately wish you weren't."

He sighs, shaking his head. "Really, our point of divergence is that you're clever and stupid in equal parts. Smart enough to come up with such toys, and stupid enough to waste them playing with the little worms."

"I disagree. The difference is, you're pure evil, and I'm at least trying to be good."

Sombra smiles. "Evil? No, evil refers to the loser. Justice refers to the winner. The last man standing!"

I scowl, leaping to the side as he sweeps the room with a beam of dark magic. I'm running out of portals strong enough to handle the Kingdom Heart, I'm running out of options to distract him, and I've still got what could be thousands of ponies left to recover, what's worse, it still sounds suspiciously like Sombra is somehow reading my mind.

I've been in worse circumstances.

My fists clench simultaneously as a jet of water from my shoulders sends me sliding in an arc around Sombra, throwing me in the perfect range to unleash another violent set of three punches slamming into his body, the smoke he turns into unable to properly disperse to protect him from it.

While he's dazed, I summon up my strength, limbs clicking into place as highly pressurized water begins to flood them, steam hissing from the black surface of my body.

"Lernian... Hydra!"

One after another, fists slam into Sombra's body, catharsis made physical as bruises erupt on his body faster than he can regenerate them.

The fists keep flying, streams of water and steam streaking from the seams of my arms as I pummel him into a wall and then some.

Finally, with one heavy blow, my final punch smashes into his head, sending his incorporeal form streaking out of Aero's range, and giving me the time I need to focus on what's important right now.

"Dragons of the Darkness Flame!"

While Sombra is still trying to return, I summon up several summons, long snakes made of portals and black fire, able to minutely tap into the Kingdom Heart for a boost in power.

I point towards the tyrant. "Go, hold him off!"

The summons do as I command, all seven of them rushing towards him and harrying him with blasts of fire as I gallop down the halls, using my portal wand to warp away one after another.

The more I run, however, the more I come to realize that this isn't going to work quickly enough to get everyone into the stasis zone before Sombra manages to kill my dragons.

I open radio communications. "Prepare the mass-stasis field, I'm going to activate the multi portal device."

After receiving confirmation, I summon up the gigantic bomb, planting all six of my hands into each of its sockets, the DNA keys allowing me to initiate the timer.

"Just five minutes. Five minutes to get everyone out of range of this thing before it turns the Crystal Palace into Swiss-cheese, and portals out every living thing into the world's biggest liquid-time swimming pool."

The clock begins ticking down, and Sombra has finished reducing the final dragon to a pile of shattered crystals.

"I'm displeased, Weiss. You know I'm going to have to send my new fancy golems to the Shadow Realm to retrieve the slaves you've stolen from me, right?

"I was going to let you keep the trash ones that I had no use for. A gift between Tyrants. But you've really gone too far, here," he snarls, shattering my Aero field, and preparing a rather sizable looking spell.

"So, first I'm going to destroy you, then I'll retrieve those slaves. Any last words?"

"Eat a dick," I respond, planting all six of my hands together, palms facing towards Sombra, who unleashes a broad beam of destructive magic.

"Galeck Gun!"

The two beams clash, a blend of purple and black pitted against a ray of solid green.

Normally, this would be the part where I'm overwhelmed entirely, save for three key elements.

I've grown even stronger, I've prepared for this fight, and Sombra is weaker than he's ever been before, just from the ponies I've freed from his array so far.

Is it enough for me to hold him off for five minutes?

My Vance begins petering off, the stored spell beginning to run out.

"Full Power Death Beam!" I shout, the beam coming from my hand shifting to a pure black lance that replaces the fading dark purple spiral.

I've got to hold him off just a little bit longer.

(Experiment Log) Eclipse and Priss's Revisitation of Dusty Old Spellbooks

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Experiment #1: "Gut Feeling" Spell

This spell is one that most every pony learns when they're really young. When an Earth Pony sees something that doesn't look right, the feeling that emerges from that gives the pony the ability to sense instability and wrongness in their environments. Typically, this spell is used in order to allow an Earth Pony to immediately comprehend what is wrong with the soil, plants, and weather in an area, to best determine how to correct these issues, and assure a bountiful harvest, or a flourishing ecosystem, depending on whether or not they are maintaining nature or performing agriculture.

As one of ponykind's oldest spells, it can be safely said that this spell has had a whole lot of ponies using it all the time. I'm not sure I can think of a single special talent that can't benefit from being able to tell at a glance what is wrong with something. This does mean that we might be barking up the wrong tree. A spell like this has been used by hundreds of millions of ponies. Most of them from childhood. The purpose of this experiment is more to establish a baseline. There might be uses for the spell that individuals rediscover, time and time again, but do not record.

The first test was with seeing if we could use it to count cards. I had Oil Slick shuffle his deck, split it into three stacks, and then one of us would try to figure out which deck had which card in it, by excluding the ones that feel wrong. I picked correctly roughly half of the time, Oil Slick, three fourths, and Glitter Miss Priss, another friend of mine, managed to fail every single time. No matter how much she used the spell, she would consistently pick the wrong one, to the point where it became an anomaly of it's own. When she chose not to use the spell, her chances of picking the right stack increased to roughly one-third.

This on it's own raises incredibly interesting questions about just how the spell functions in order to allow a pony to determine what is right or wrong, and how, seemingly, some ponies can obtain wrong results from the spell without fail. Couldn't a pony who is aware of this effect simply anticipate that the spell would give them incorrect results, and thus disqualify such a result in order to sort their way to a right conclusion? If so, this would technically make Priss an ironic winner of our test, as by simply having her use the spell twice to distinguish between decks, a one-hundred percent rate of card-counting can be achieved.

Further testing is required, but I believe this form of "Wrong-scanning" might have some real usage, if we can figure out a way to put it to good use.

Experiment #2: "Lucky Shot" Spell

The Lucky Shot spell is a much more complex magical technique, with more immediately useful effects. When cast, the user is able to kick a pile of objects, and the force of that kick is automatically adjusted, aiming each object so that they land in a perfectly sorted fashion. The cues for what qualifies a set of objects as being sorted is based on the pony's own perceptions of how a series of objects should be arranged. As such, a pony using the spell on things that don't belong to them, or things that they are unfamiliar with, serve to tidy up the target, without properly sorting them as they need to be.

Several components of this spell's function are worth investigating. Firstly, it's application of force to multiple objects. One kick is able to sort almost any number of objects, based entirely on the spell's power, and the force of the kick. In theory, a strong enough pony could kick an arbitrarily high number of objects into an arbitrarily complex sorting pattern, so long as they had the magical oomph to back it up. Is there a deeper mechanism to this spell? One that could be exploited for further usage? The purpose of this experiment is twofold. To discover if the two components of the Lucky Shot spell are able to be deepened through rigorous testing.

The end result of the tests indicate that Lucky Shot is not only capable of arbitrarily high numbers and complexity, but also, the definition of sorting itself can be stretched. Because it functions by bringing objects to a state of "rightness", it can be exploited. One such example included being able to kick a pile of keys, such that they all flew into their respective locks. I had memorized the locks and keys beforehand, to ensure that my knowledge was sufficient for a correct sorting state. This indicates that Lucky Shot is capable of feats that are only loosely associated with sorting.

Priss's experiment was equally enlightening. Wanting to test its combat capabilities, she instead kicked a pile of darts, which launched them directly into the heads of several training dummies. It both impresses and terrifies me that her ideal state of rightness can include turning training dummies into pincushions. Reguardless, this indicates that among certain individuals, the Lucky Shot spell can be utilized in combat, as well as in peacetime. By assuming a state of rightness in which weapons are embedded in targets, the spell can be twisted into a potent attack magic, able to attack multiple foes in a single move.

Today's Results

I'm really happy with how things worked out today. Priss and I weren't sure that this would turn out to be more than a waste of time, but I feel like we really learned a lot today! Without a doubt, there exist spells whose uses can be creatively distorted, in order to achieve equally useful effects, easily as useful as the spell's original intent itself. We look forward to exploring even more spells in the future, and discovering what other diamonds are embedded in the mundane.

(Present Chapter 27): Dark Tournament: Part 2

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Dragon Lord Torch smashes his opponent with one building-sized fist, ending yet another fight instantly.

"You really did let in any old creature, didn't you, Mouse?" he says, turning to glare at Weiss in the stands.

"He's gotten a bit slow in his old age, hasn't he, princess?" Weiss says, chuckling slightly.

Tempest Shadow stands casually at the edge of the ring, watching the telltale flash of teleportation rescue another contender from certain annihilation.

"And the winner is... Torch!" she yells, waving towards the giant dragon, who merely grumbles, slowly tiptoeing his way over the audience and back to his own gigantic seat.

Celestia chuckles. "I hate to say it, but I believe you're right. Well, I've been slacking off too for the past five-hundred years. So I suppose I can't blame him. You, meanwhile, are over a thousand years out of practice."

Weiss huffs, slurping his drink loudly. "Like a fine wine, Celestia, I only get better with age. Fair warning, if Torch beats you, you will never live it down."

Celestia scoffs at this. "I don't believe this. You think so little of me?"

Weiss nods, slurping louder.

Her eyes narrow as she cracks her neck and makes her way down to the arena for her own match. "I don't have to stand here and take this from you. Just be ready to get squished as quickly as the poor idiots who went up against Torch."

"So, then. What is to be done with me now?" Nightmare asks, resting on a cloud in the dream world.

Luna looks deeply uncomfortable with the situation, instead standing on the empty starscape around them.

"If nothing else, you will be given a less cruel prison," she finally responds.

Nightmare huffs. "And why not simply release me? Have I not been punished enough?"

Luna shakes her head. "If Weiss was willing to do what he did to you, then that means he hates you. He would pursue you to the ends of the earth if you were not under my protection. There are few things remaining in the world that can protect you from him. You launched an assault on his memories, one among the only things that he treasures. He won't forgive something like that."

Nightmare scoffs. "You were the one who led it to its end. Why did he forgive you?"

"I don't know. He shouldn't have," Luna says.

Nightmare grumbles to herself. "What about at least releasing me from that detestable body?"

Luna gives Nightmare a deadpan stare. "We both know it won't be that simple, knowing how Weiss loves redundancy. trying to release you from it may prove to be an exercise in futility."

She shakes her head. "No, I believe the best solution for everypony involved would be if you stayed nearby. I won't bother with having guards look after you, considering the pony who may want you. You'll stay near me at all times."

Nightmare's eyes narrow. "You know, I'm not entirely certain I like the idea of being babysat by a traitor, trapped in a useless form."

Luna's eyes turn piercing. "You've long since forfeit the privilege of making decisions like those for yourself, Nightmare."

Nightmare awakens wrapped in a paradoxical mixture of chains and lush blankets.

"Welcome to the waking world, Nightmare. I hope it's a better impression than your first one," Luna says, idly filing her way through pages of old records at her desk.

"Do I really need to be chained up for this, Luna?" Nightmare drawls, their tone too highly pitched for anyone in the room to take it seriously.

"If you weren't, you would simply escape and get into trouble. I see no reason to give you the false pretense of freedom," Luna says, idly levitating Nightmare until they are floating next to the Lunar Diarch.

Nightmare yawns with annoyance. "I see."

Luna pauses, the sound of shuffling paper stopping for a moment. "My sister and her friends have been studying Weiss's work. Once she is done indulging herself at the tournament, I'll ask her if she has achieved the power of cloning."

Nightmare sneers. "Why, so you can taunt me with it?"

"So I can help you. Do you think I would condemn your race because of your poor decisions? I wouldn't have gone along with your plans if I did not feel some level of pity for them," Luna stresses, filing away the aged yellow papyrus sheets.

Nightmare floats onto Luna's back in a haze of blue telekinesis, before being settled there.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Nightmare states, wriggling around.

Luna ignores Nightmare's disgruntlement, turning and walking towards her cabinet. "You'll need a disguise, if you don't want to be mistaken for a foal." Luna says, rooting through the cabinet for suitable components for a disguise.

"A mask? Well, that much is obvious. A demon mask might be a bit too on the nose, though..." Luna says, tossing aside a leering wooden mask with red eyes.

"Perhaps my old masquerade mask?" Luna says, pulling out a silver ornate mask.

She shakes her head, tossing it aside. "Too fashionable."

Nightmare's eyes narrow at that statement, but Luna ignores it and continues.

"A scarf? No, you're wrapped up in enough cloth already. That won't do at all," Luna says, tossing aside the purple silky garment she had pulled out.

Her eyes widen when she spots it. "Oh, now that might work."

Luna pulls out another silver mask. This one plain and unadorned.

"What are your thoughts, Nightmare?" Luna says, holding up the silvery mask.

"It's too large," Nightmare says, prompting Luna to raise an eyebrow, before crushing it into a smaller one with a small pulse of telekinesis.

"And now?" Luna asks again, prompting her other to nod.

"I'll enchant it with a voice altering charm, and you'll be ready to be seen in public."

Luna pauses. "Perhaps an alias might serve you well. Me hauling around a bound imp named Nightmare might be a bit on the nose."

Nightmare rolls her eyes. "Oh, just call me Bad Dream. Ponies are gullible enough to believe it."

Luna snorts. "I'll use it just to spite you. Sarcasm is not befitting a prisoner."

Weiss looks sleepy as he steps onto the arena floor, facing off against one of the combatants who chose not to reveal their name.

'Well, either he's utter trash, or devastatingly powerful. There's no in-between for these sort of folk.'

Tempest walks between them, giving them both a glare.

"The rules are simple, the first one to be held to the ground or held frozen for more than ten seconds is the loser. If you aim an attack towards the audience, you will be disqualified. If you both wish, you may fight outside of the arena, to prevent damage to it or the audience, and recording drones will broadcast your battle accordingly. There are no other rules for this bracket, as it is unlikely either of you will succeed at killing one another," Tempest says, walking back to the edge of the ring and holding up a single hand.

"And... Begin!" She says, swiping down to announce the start of the battle.

Weiss smiles. "So then, might I see who I'm fighting? Well, unless you plan on turning invisible, in which case, I'll give you a pass."

"Oh, I doubt you'll recognize me, Weiss Noir. But I believe we know one another," the unknown figure says, throwing off their cloak and revealing themselves.

The bipedal creature's pale white body looks as though someone crossed the worst traits of several albino beasts. Their sharp teeth fill up their long muzzle, as their blue nose twitches slightly. Three eyes, one of them angled sideways in the middle of their head, all narrow in unison as they sneer at Weiss, lightning crackling along their hair and scales.

Weiss scratches his chin. "Sorry Fido, I don't remember you. Refresh my memory?" he smiles.

A gigantic pillar of lightning shrieks towards Weiss in an arc, instantly blasting him apart into smoke.

He reforms in the exact same pose. "You know, it's still not coming to me. Ahh well. I'll figure out who you are after I win, alright, pup?"

The beast rushes towards him, wreathed in lightning as they claw at Weiss over and over, attempting to strike the slyly dodging dark mage.

"Alright, alright, I get it. I should be taking this seriously, yes? You've got a lot of power, you want to show it off. I get that," Weiss says, clenching his fist and firing his entire arm at his opponent, where it crashes into their jaw and sends them skidding back, flames erupting from the back of the limb before it poofs into smoke and returns to Weiss, allowing him to regenerate.

"I'll honor your strength with my own," Weiss says, four of his arms folding behind his back while the remaining two come together into an odd, cup-shape.

"Galick Gun..."

The beast snarls, rushing towards Weiss again with the intention of clawing them apart.

"Fire!"

The purple beam instantly rips through the beast, punching a hole through its body and sending it staggering back.

Weiss shakes one of his hands, ridding it of smoke. "Oh my, that looks like it hurt quite a bit."

The creature stumbles back, holding a gigantic claw to its chest. "Not really," they say, a flash of lightning regenerating their body in seconds.

Weiss grins. "Oh my, you're really something, huh? Well, go on then. Reintroduce yourself, I'm interested now."

"You knew me as Storm King, but that has changed. I've gained more than enough power to completely destroy you, Weiss, the Staff of Sacanas was a trinket compared to the power that I've absorbed.

"I've even taken on a new name, to fit my new, godly form. Storm Walker!" he shouts, a pillar of lightning crashing down on top of him.

"I'll kill you, here and now, Weiss Noir! Now that I know your trick, I've countered it entirely. This entire arena has become my domain, and your little teleporting trick won't save you when I reduce you to atoms!"

Storm Walker's long whiskers begin crackling with lightning as their body glows like a neon lightbulb.

Weiss's eyes narrow. "Wait, you've been tampering with the safety mechanisms?"

Storm Walker grins. "But of course. There's no way for you to escape without your teleportation magic to save you, like it did last time."

Weiss rubs the bridge of his nose. "Ok, well, if you're going to be a dick, then I'm afraid I'm going to have to disqualify you."

Storm Walker laughs, a barking, rough laugh that grates at Weiss's ears. "Disqualify me? I'm about to kill you, and all you can worry about is your silly tournament? I'm made of lightning! And I've come close to destroying you once already! You should be cowering right about now!"

Weiss rolls their eyes, frowning as they sigh. "Ok, look, I'm going to go ahead and check the safety mechanisms after this, so why don't you just fuck off, really? I'd be more than happy to have fought you to the death literally anywhere that didn't have a shit-ton of civilians. You've literally made it so I can't toy with you like I'd like to."

"I had this whole bit planned, where I shrink down every time you 'Kill me', turning into smaller, more ridiculous creatures and blasting you with spells, but whatever. Actually fuck you, seriously," Weiss says, holding up a finger wreathed in green flames.

"Delta Attack."

A beam of green, cursed magic rushes towards Storm Walker, who laughs manically as he transforms into a beam of lightning, crashing into Weiss's beam and plowing through it, lancing through Weiss's chest and appearing on the other side of him.

He reforms, smiling maliciously. "I've won. Your attack didn't even slow me down, and your body is too weak to resist my electricity vaporizing it."

Weiss doesn't respond, other than to spit on the ground as the shadows in his chest regenerate in a flare of black fire.

"Whatever man. You fucked with my tournament. Just turn to stone already," Weiss says with exasperation, already walking over to leave the ring.

"Wh-" Storm Walker starts, gazing in shock as his legs begin to crystallize.

Melting into lightning, Storm Walker snarls, breaking free of the cursed crystal threatening to spread across his body. "Die! Weiss!" he roars, hurdling towards Weiss as a mixture of lightning and crystal.

One of Weiss's arms bloats up disgustingly, swelling larger than himself as he turns around and hurls a gigantic punch at the former Storm King.

The limb's stony scales crash into Storm Walker's electrical body, shoving him down into the floor of the arena, where his face hardens, frozen in its position of curved, fist-induced distortion.

Tempest Shadow is incredibly grateful for Weiss teaching her his ability to make those clones. Being able to slip free of her recovering, painful body while she heals is incredibly useful.

She still hasn't quite figured out bipedalism, however. How minotaurs manage to walk around on two hooves is beyond her, if she were asked.

Having hands is also strange, the ends of her forelegs being forked like a lightning bolt make them seem so much more fragile, and not being able to comfortably stand on them is a problem as well, she supposes the upside of complex manipulation could be worth the loss of balance.

She rubs her face in exasperation. She really should have known better than to rely on her acrobatics to dodge lightning against the Storm King of all people, and now she's paying the price, this weird, twisted up form.

Stumbling over next to her sleeping wheelchair-bound self, she plops down in the seat next to it, watching Weiss pout as he paces back and forth across the room.

"I'm so pissed," Weiss says, sitting down on a couch as his minions look over the wards and enchantments to figure out how they had been tampered with.

"It is rather suspicious that the Storm King had been able to do all of this himself..." Celestia says, before shaking her head softly.

"So, on to brighter news, until our own match can begin, how were you able to obtain those Vances?" she wonders aloud.

Weiss grins. "It's my final Relic of Darkness. Magicant. I've got the magical control now to produce Vances in the waking world. I'm quite literally 3 times stronger than I once was."

Celestia smiles serenely. "Ahh, so you're almost as strong as I was as a filly."

"Careful princess. You wouldn't want to spoil your dinner, all those words you're going to have to eat," Weiss smiles, looking over a holographic screen confirming that the wards and teleporters have all been repaired and hardened against any further tampering.

"Oh, goodie! They fixed the stuff. Now we can get back down to business."

Torch glares impotently, his head wrapped up with bandages after a cheeky "Fly up into low orbit and then crash down on your opponent's head" trick that Celestia had pulled in the last round.

He's getting too old for this nonsense. Especially trying to fight what amounts to a fly with the strength and speed of a fully grown dragon.

He'll watch the Dragon Mouse fight the Sun Pony, and then he's leaving. He doubts any of the other contenders will provide suitable entertainment, all things considered.

Celestia's muscles are tense with anticipation. A fight like this comes along once in a millennium. Literally. "Alright Weiss. Get ready, because I'm not going to hold anything back this time."

Weiss smiles, stretching his arms and legs. "Alright, one moment."

Celestia's body erupts into a firestorm as she shatters the sound barrier, the shockwave dispersing Weiss's body before her hoof can physically hit him.

Weiss reforms, hanging in the air lazily. "Rude."

Smoke begins flowing out of his body, flames ripping from the seams of his arms as they are sucked back inside of him.

He sinks to the ground, inch by inch as he continually creates shadow clones and black flames, only to absorb them into himself.

"You see, I can only control one Shadow Clone at a time. But I can create as many as I want. It's a trick I picked up at some point," Weiss states, his body rapidly turning pitch black as his eyes gleam with purple light.

The stone tiles crack underneath him as Celestia's slit pupils watch him, a vicious fanged grin widening on her face as her sensory magic informs her of just how dense his body is becoming.

"A few pounds of Unicorn Horn to fill out my bones... Royal Cloth veins, of course, with the plasma that I'm sure you're already familiar with..."

"And this wouldn't be a proper fight unless I made something as wonderful as your own Unicorn Horn armor, so I think I'll settle for old fashioned Electron-degenerate wafers, held in place with time-frozen fields, and created via Royal Crystal Growth."

Weiss slowly tugs himself out of the ground, his legs having sunken into the stone completely. Thick cloudy liquid begins foaming up from around his neck, as his weight decreases in response to the amount of microportals being passed over his body.

"Portals decrease my effective weight, while Pegasus Seafoam and Mistril Powder automatically adjust my mass at will," Weiss explains, shifting slightly as his pale, skintight white suit shifts, revealing tiny hexagonal flakes of material, held to his body with manipulated time bubbles.

He sighs. "Alright, I'm ready, Princess."

Celestia's hoof is instantly planted deep into his face, his jaw bulging to the side as he skids back.

He forces himself to turn to face the princess, eyes shining with madness. "Got another one in you?"

Celestia laughs, and loudly at that. "Oh heavens that's good," she chuckles, turning around and bucking Weiss into the ground, sending powdered stone flying into the air and clouds around them.

One of Weiss's hands flings free of a nearby portal, plasma jettisoning from the wrist as it completely cuts itself free of Weiss's arm, clamping onto Celestia's forehoof and gripping tightly before it explodes.

Celestia says, staring at the scuffed up armor on her hoof. "Maybe I should have used a weaker armor..."

"No, no, it's fine, really," Weiss says, flashing in front of her and unleashing thick waves of plasma as his arm vaporizes itself down to the bone as propulsion mass to drive the skeletal fist into her chest.

She skids back, spitting out a bit of blood from where the blow made her bite her tongue. Her armor already has small cracks in it, which she regenerates with a flare of magic.

"Stars, Weiss, just how much have you been holding out on me?"

He shrugs, sending a flurry of blows at her, chunks of shadowy flesh ripping away into pure flame and smoke to throw his fists in her direction.

"I couldn't have done half of this without some of the toys I picked up in this era, Princess. You ponies sure know how to invent spells."

"Oh stop," Celestia teases, unleashing a plume of solar plasma from her horn that crashes into Weiss, his armor shattering and exploding as the hundreds of pounds of material are freed from their time-frozen fields. The raw material's explosive decompression serves as ablative armor, pushing away the solar armageddon and allowing Weiss to dodge out of the way of it by riding the wave of plasma vapor.

He skids to a stop, shadows flooding from his wounds and forcibly compressing back into black flesh.

Celestia pants, her horn glowing white from heat, while Weiss's body sags, lacking lungs, but still flagging.

"Perhaps we should have paced ourselves..." Weiss wonders aloud, one of his arms ripping free of his body and exploding violently, before he forcibly grabs the smokey shadowmass and forces it back into the shape of an arm.

Celestia spits more blood on the ground, one of her cracked ribs only just now beginning to heal. "I suppose I could have, yes, but I'm just so excited."

Weiss smiles slyly. "How about this, we'll settle it in our next clash. One final attack, all out on both sides. It would certainly end this on a high note."

Celestia's smile shrinks in viciousness as she ponders the proposition. "Well, there is this one spell..."

She shrugs. "Fine. We've been fighting for a whole three minutes, anyway."

Weiss claps his hands together, a bright blue light slowly growing between them.

Celestia's smoking horn instantly banishes the fumes, erupting to white-hot temperatures once again as she begins charging up a spell of her own.

"This is the fruit that was born from our last conflict, Weiss, and I've named it appropriately," Celestia says, the sun glowing softly in the sky as her horn's corona grows, both in size and in layers.

"I stole this technique from a manga," Weiss responds, the blue ball growing in-between his cupped hands.

The audience falls still, quietly in awe at the displays of raw power shown thus far.

"Solar Flare!/Kamehameha!" they shout, unleashing beams of white and blue respectively.

The two beams clash, a twisting maelstrom of magical energy forming between the duo as they pour all of their energy into their ultimate attacks.

Weiss's arms begin dissolving, unable to contain the powerful Vance that he's pumping through them, while Celestia's armor begins to char, the Unicorn Horn composing them turning to ash in the face of her power.

Finally, it ends, the arena's wards crackling as they redirect the outgoing energy of the attacks elsewhere.

Celestia, as naked as the day she was born, covered in black ashes, and Weiss, down to three legs and half a horn, the remainder of his limbs reduced to fading smoke.

Celestia's eyes roll back into her head as Weiss's body collapses into ashes.

Just before she hits the ground, however, her teeth crash together and she thrusts one of her legs below her, preventing her from falling to the floor, regaining consciousness just in time to avoid a loss.

Tempest Shadow climbs out from behind the barricades that had been erected for exactly this sort of fight, climbing up onto the arena's remains.

"And the winner is... Princess Celestia!" Tempest shouts, waving to the Solar Princess, who collapses to the ground as soon as Tempest makes the announcement.

A loud clapping rings out, in such a way that everyone can hear it.

High above the arena, Discord claps, whistling loudly as he munches on popcorn and cheers.

"Woo! Good job out there!" he says, chuckling as the fade out happens.

Author's Notes:

https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/mlp/images/e/eb/Storm_King_early_concept_design_by_Joy_Ang.png/revision/latest?cb=20180414031147

A picture taken from the Wiki, of the Storm King's early concept art. I decided it was too good to waste.

I'd like to note, and I hope this doesn't concern you all, but in the process of trying to manage the strain of writing this story, I've tried to come up with some possible solutions. I'm rapidly falling behind on my buffer chapters. Having been writing another piece of fanfiction in my spare time, I've found that it's phenomenally easier for me to write chapters without focusing so much on padding the length of them to meet the 4K mark.

On top of this, I may soon take a few days, or even a week off to build the buffer of chapters back up. I apologize for this dip in both quantity and consistency, but you all should expect chapters from here on to be 2000+ Words, instead of constantly being 4000+ Words. I feel that this will allow me to convey the core plot of a chapter without having to include a lot of shoehorned POV changes and scenes that only serve to get a chapter to that 4K mark.

(Weiss Report) April Fools [The Best Spell Ever]

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The thing you need to know is that my spells? My spells are great, I'm literally just the best speller in the world. One time, I spelled so hard that bees all around the world started saving up food just in case I showed up. That's how great my spells are. Of course, you'll just have to take my word for it. Literally, you'll have to take the words I'm writing, and stuff em in your brain. And if you do enough of that, you might just learn something, you adorable little dunderhead you.

And you know who's awfully rude, despite my bee-impressing, bee-winning skills, and of course, my charming personality and amazing fashion sense? Those rude little princesses. I mean really, imprisoning someone for a thousand years, and dumping them somewhere boring. I don't even think there's a thing that can be done that's more rude than making someone be somewhere boring.

I mean really. All I did was to make their pitiful little lives a bit more entertaining. And my own life far more entertaining at that. Thanks to me, there's whole mountains that you can climb in reverse, because they're upside down, I fixed all their poor little farms, so now they can play chess on them, and sure, maybe I made a few ponies have legs so long that they couldn't actually lean down far enough to reach the ground, but that sort of pie-in-the-sky thinking is exactly what makes me so great. I made every pie on the planet fly, you see. Just for them!

The princesses didn't jump straight to the rainbow riot hose, though. Oh no, first they tried to do things the old fashioned way, which is just so out of date, it isn't even funny. Expired, really. Celly tries to turn me into flambe with a tiny sun, Luna tries to turn me into a something-sickle, and a few seconds later, pow! I'm back and still having a good time. I honestly thought it was kind of entertaining, all the stuff they tried. So I was like "Eh, whatever, I'll let them have their fun."

And then they got really rude with me. I was just flattening out some space to try a little fun experiment with turning bulls into monkeys, when who else but the royal dorks show up. And boy did they bring the thunder. Literally, they tossed a bunch of stuff at the ground from orbit, and the other one brought a bunch of clouds over. Now, I thought this was pretty neat, so I went ahead and let them set it up. Golly, that did not turn out well...

Turns out, they figured that since I regenerate whenever they tried something, they'd just try something that never ends. Namely, a bunch of mean little lightning bolts started striking me every half-second or so. I mean, it was pretty clever. But it was also really boring, so I had to come up with something, because those clouds weren't going to unbolt themselves. It hit me, an idea for the best spell ever.

I went ahead and turned every single cloud on the planet into cotton candy. Can't get thunderbolts from those, now can you, silly ponies. Honestly, I don't really like doing the same trick twice, but, eh, sometimes you have to spend chaos to make chaos.

I'm bored now. Writing is boring.

(Past Chapter 28): Proxy War: Part 2

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"Alright, let's clean up shop boys!" Helmsplitter shouts, taking command of the gigantic tank plowing its way through the Frozen North, cresting the last hill between it and the Crystal Empire, carrying reinforcements along with it.

"First Division! Aim!" Helmsplitter commands, having them begin targeting the legs of the last remaining Obsidian Golems.

A bright light begins to swell inside of the barrels of the machine as they turn red from heat building up inside of them.

"Fire when ready!" he shouts. The tank rocks backwards as all of its cannons fire simultaniously, independent beams of black energy piercing through the black rock of the golems.

"Second Division! Aim!" he shouts, the smaller guns pointing up as light begins growing inside of them as well.

"Fire!" he commands. The smaller guns unleash thin pencil-line swathes of destruction, sweeping across the sky as they automatically avoid allies and track the enemy drones, slicing them in two with raw destructive firepower.

"Open the bay doors!" Helm says, the others to begin manipulating the machinery to open the tank's rear end wide open, releasing swarms of mechanical soldiers who charge towards the massive battle.

At the same time, the surviving pokemon begin rushing back, several of them carrying injured instances of the remote-control creatures with them as they pile into the gigantic empty tank with the intention of getting the hell out of there before the bomb goes off.

Helmsplitter takes control of one of the mechanical ponies himself, sprouting a long bardiche in his teeth as he flips himself into the air and cleaves his axe through the head of one of the spider golems, twisting around and kicking another one away.

Landing heavily, he sees something happening to the Crystal Palace.

The ground begins to rumble, buildings cracking and shattering as streaks of purple and green erupt from the palace, a pillar of energy shredding its way through the night sky.

"Darn, that thing's really about to go! Alright men, it's time to retreat!" Helmsplitter shouts, cleaving several bug golems in half before turning to run.

His mechanical drone is blown to bits when the portal-bomb goes off, ripping through the Crystal Empire in search of ponies to teleport.

"Split-Shot Death Beam!" I shout, firing a beam from my horn which splits into several that punch through Sombra's body, driving him back.

He reforms with a grin, cracking his neck to both sides.

"You know, if you haven't actually changed anything, you're still going to lose. I've got more stamina, power, and speed," Sombra states, igniting his own horn with malevolent green energy.

I frown, holding out my hands. "Well, one thing has changed. What was my best shot last time, is a warm-up now."

With that, six gigantic scimitars drop into my hands, each one polished to a mirror sheen. "That said, I think we've done enough stretching."

Sombra narrows his eyes, firing off the spell he was charging, directly into my crossed blades. Just as I predicted (and tested), half of the Unicorn Light bounces off of the blades' polished surfaces, forcing him to step to the side to avoid his own attack, which takes him into the path of my own blast, hate-fire washing over him as he snarls with what I hope is significant pain. The other half of the spell he cast is absorbed by the blades' internal portals, stored away for later use.

"I hope that wasn't your only gambit," Sombra says, igniting their horn and charging at me with clouds of smoke driving behind them.

I fling my weapons into the air, my own body exploding into a donut of shadows that he passes through, confused slightly, but turning rapidly.

One of my hands reforms before the rest of me does, grabbing one of the swords out of the air and cleaving him in half with it, distracting him long enough for my fists to slam into his disembodied halves.

'I just have to keep him stuck in his smoke-state until the bomb goes off, and we'll be peachy,' I think to myself, grabbing my other swords and leaping back as his eyes open in the middle of the blackened cloud, leering at me as lime haze wafts from them.

I stab my blades into the ground, shoving my fists forward. "Chain Lightning!"

Several gigantic bolts of dragon-lightning leap towards Sombra, ripping through his smoke and arcing back to continue chasing after him.

Sombra reforms as the spell peters out, having wasted a lot of time, but failing to have done much damage.

His eyes narrow. "Why are you stalling?"

I don't allow my emotions to show. "Do you want to know that, or do you want to kill me? Because let's be honest, you probably won't succeed at both."

Sombra's eyes narrow, as he glances around the room, searching for anything out of place.

"Solar Flare!" I roar, flooding the room with blinding light from my horn and distracting Sombra enough for me to get in close.

"Pay attention to your opponent, Sombra," I snarl, stabbing him in the stomach with one of my swords, and releasing the spell he cast.

He snarls, shattering the crystals growing over him as he rips the blade out and shatters it as well. "I'm displeased with your behavior, Sage."

"Write a book about it. Cream!"

My body is coated in twisted space as Sombra unleashes a wave of crystal magic, the curse ripping through the empty space that I had been occupying.

I fly invisibly around the room, watching him carefully as I maneuver around inside the sphere of twisted space.

One thing I had tested earlier with my Split-Shot Death Beam was how durable Sombra's body was. It stands to reason that, if his own technique for turning into smoke was like mine in any way, it means that his body is more fragile as a result of being prepared to turn into smoke at a moment's notice.

Something that makes him vulnerable to the same tactics I used against the Windego.

"Diamond Dust!"

I rip free of the twisted space, firing a wave of ice and portals, the tiny circles tearing through Sombra's body, turning him to smoke, but more importantly, trapping him in hundreds of separate capsules, each made of folded together portals.

I scatter the portals in all directions, attempting to move his pieces as far away from one another as possible before he escapes.

With a violent, terrifying roar, Sombra's body erupts from the sealed space, crystals sprouting over the seams of the portals, and consuming their magical energy.

Bit by bit, his smoke congeals back together, rushing into the center of the room and reforming once again.

"Enough! I'll end this right now!" Sombra shouts, summoning multiple layers of energy over his horn.

I can sense it from here, the kind of power that someone can only get by burning away life as fuel.

I need more time, if he lets that spell loose in here, it might very well destroy my bomb, and then everything we've done would be for nothing. A spike of fear stabs through me.

I know how he's doing this. I can practically sense it, the mechanisms he's been using to convert life energy into magical power. To drain it out of living things, and transfer it elsewhere.

At the moment he aims his spell at me, I have an idea. Twenty years should be enough.

I fold four of my arms behind my back, placing the other two together, fingers coming together to form a triangle, with Sombra in the middle of it.

Using the fear I feel, I tap into my own lifespan, imitating Sombra's trick and converting some of it into enough power to do something.

A variety of spells are rapidly cast as I burn through lifespan and magic, energy crackling between my fingertips and horn.

Sombra's eyes shine with madness as he points his horn at me. "I'm in control, Sage of Darkness!"

He fires a pillar of green at me, and I release my own spell before it can hit.

"Kikoho!"

By using vast amounts of magical energy, I'm able to combine the principles of the Wave Motion Gun with my portal magic and Dragon Lightning to create a beam of crystal mass, a beam with the ability to absorb incoming spells and redirect them.

Our two blasts clash, waves of magic streaking up into the air as they are forced away from the epicenter.

Sombra might be spending years of life-force every second to cast his spells, but at this stage, so am I.

The difference being, I only needed ten extra seconds.

The bomb explodes, warped space and portal magic ripping through the palace, shredding both mine and Sombra's bodies in an instant as every single pony nearby who isn't one of us is hunted down and teleportaled into the Shadow Realm.

Luna is already there waiting for me when I emerge in the Arcana Nox.

She looks... strange. Probably because of my little strategy.

"Was it worth it, then?" she says, staring at me with that same odd look.

I shrug, pulling up one of my screens and examining the results. Zero ponies detected in the Crystal Empire, aside from Sombra himself.

"It wasn't the cheapest victory, but I believe it was worth it. I mean, after all, we've won. Sombra's arrays are empty, his golems are destroyed, and his operations have ground to a halt. The ponies are safe, my researchers are already on the job of studying them, and we didn't take a single casualty. How could it be a more decisive victory than that?"

She sighs, ignoring my words. "What could have possessed you to do such a foolish thing, Weiss? You had so many other options."

I hum. "There was only one option I had that presented no risk. The amount of energy he packed into that last spell would have started warping space itself. Trying to use my Vance portals to redirect it might have failed. And I doubt any golems I could have brought in would have been able to divert it. I knew what he was doing, I knew how he was doing it, and I knew how much energy he was using. Counteracting it directly was an option that had no risk of failure, in spite of the cost."

I place a hand on her shoulder. "It was worth it. Alright? Sixty years or so is more than enough time for me to get my business settled."

She shakes her head. "And what about after that? Is sixty years enough time to ensure that your Realm has a ruler that will preserve it? Protect it?"

She looks sad, staring at me. "I feel you don't comprehend just how long twenty years can be, and how much of a difference it could make for your rule. What you've done did contain risk, even if you can't see it from your own perspective."

I smirk. "I did have a plan for that, if you're interested in hearing it. Though, you might have already guessed at it."

I flip through screens until I find the correct one, a list of plans that I had prepared for various eventualities.

"If the Shadow Realm was left without a ruler, I've already got a system in place to make sure it isn't destroyed by it," I explain, flicking down to the entry I'm looking for.

Her eyes widen with shock when she sees the file I open as I turn to face her again.

"It's you."

While she stares at the file's contents, stunned into silence, I continue casually. "I don't care how you run it, to be honest. You've got a lot more experience with ruling than I do, so I'm sure however you handle it, you'll be able to keep them happy and healthy. Really, the only important part is making sure you know how the systems function.

"If the Shadow Realm were ever left without any true ruler, then I've already set everything up to default to you."

She backs away, seemingly unsure whether she should be fearful or merely surprised.

"Weiss, you do understand what you are saying, yes? I have obligations to Equestria, there are things that I cannot do in my capacity as Equestria's diarch."

I nod. "I looked over those laws. As long as the Shadow Realm defaults to an Equestrian Territory right before you take over, it would work out fine, legally speaking. Now, to be fair, you are my backup plan. I've already been grooming a potential replacement for myself, so this is more of the sort of plan that would go into effect after hundreds of years, when some asshole inevitably ends up being the Shadow Realm's Sole Administrator, and he gets deposed or imprisoned or something."

I shrug again, swiping away the screen and leaning back into a digitally created chair. "And hey, who knows. Maybe something will come up, and the Shadow Realm might get an immortal ruler of its own after I'm gone. But there's no point worrying about it. I've got a lot more time to make sure this place doesn't fall apart without me, now that Sombra's on suicide watch."

Luna swallows heavily, plopping down onto a cushion of her own. "I suppose you have a point, then. What are your plans for finishing off Sombra, now that his arrays have been rendered useless?"

"He's probably still got a lot of time saved up, and I'm not sure I'll be able to track him down easily. It's a waiting game, either he tries to escape the Crystal Empire or he doesn't. One way or another, I'll just have to keep an eye out, and be ready for him. A cornered rat fights hardest, and the corner he's in right now is a damn tight one."

Luna doesn't respond for a while, considering carefully what her next words will be.

"I'll try to help you, in any way I can."

Author's Notes:

Some of you may have seen this coming, for some of you, it may be a shock. I've reached the point where I'm confident that I can no longer FORCE myself to work on this story. After taking a week to attempt to build back up my buffer chapters, a week of me making excuses, and spending late nights trying to get myself to open up an unfinished chapter and put words down, I've achieved nothing.

The week I spent attempting to get some chapters down and catch up has failed, switching to a slower schedule has failed, and even attempting to write shorter chapters altogether has failed, all because whenever I try to make myself write for this fic specifically, I can't bring myself to do so.

For now, I will be placing this story on Hiatus, until I can find some way to get around the incredibly strong aversion I've gained to even looking at this fic.

For those of you who are supporting me on Patreon, I'll be making this same announcement there, and pausing my upcoming Billing Cycle. If you weren't supporting me because of my work on my other fic, "The Sea Alchemist", then you can take that time to revoke your status as one of my Patrons.

I have no excuses. Only my sincere apology. I won't be able to revisit this story until I overcome my aversion to writing for it.

I've decided to post this, the last full chapter I have completed, such that at least one loose end is tied up. The story was roughly 1/4 complete as of the end of this Arc.

(Noir Newsletter) Final Sum

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The attack has been a total success. No casualties. Minimal loss of resources.

All ponies currently living in the Crystal Empire have been tracked down, and moved to Wacky Workbench Central Hospital, where all ponies with suitable talents have been reassigned to researching a way to cure their ailments.

After all these years, the wounds caused by Sombra's tyrannical reign can at long last begin to heal.

The efforts of every creature in the Shadow Realm cannot be overstated. No matter what, in both the hardest and greatest periods of our time together, we have all bound ourselves together, bonded by our hatred of one pony and the pain of an entire empire. Today, this changes.

For those among you who wish to return to the Crystal Empire, workers are being sent to dismantle the dark magic that had been woven through the country, and to repair the damages caused by our great battle.

The Shadow Realm is and always was a home for those who lack one, and we are working as hard as we can to restore those homes for those that want nothing more than to return to the lives they once led.

It must be said that not all had survived under Sombra's rule. Though many did. For those who had perished in the time it took us to mount our assault, I fear no apology would be sufficient. Not to those who were lost, or to those who had lost. That said, when the Crystal Empire's property is clear of debris and traps, a memorial will be constructed to honor the ones who paid the ultimate sacrifice in enduring Sombra's harsh reign.

They will live on so long as we do not forget them.

The final tally is as follows, compared to the most recent Crystal Empire Census, taken from records recovered after the assault.

782,011 Ponies currently inhabit the Shadow Realm as full citizens, 3546 of which were born within the past two years.

201,010 Ponies were evacuated from the Crystal Empire during the assault. It is estimated that anywhere between one to two-thousand ponies are lost, or had died during the two years between the beginning of the Shadow Realm and today.

Nearly twenty-thousand among those who were rescued were a part of Sombra's fear-arrays. They are being kept in a separate wing for advanced treatment.

The search will continue, of course, but it should be said that it is unlikely that any undetected ponies still remain within the Crystal Empire.

It could be said that the coldest days of the Frozen North are behind us. I hope to see many of you at the celebration taking place one month from now, in which we will celebrate the efforts of those who had fought, and honor those who have been lost.

Lastly, in much lighter news, a small tax will be applied to imported Equestrian Pies, due to the increased number of pies being filled with anti-unicorn toxins in some sort of half-baked attempt to kill me. I would also like to request that the rumors about pies being my favorite food cease. I don't even know where you all got that idea.

(Present Chapter 28): Clown World

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"Oh it's just so wonderful to see you all here. Dare I say it, there are even a few faces I recognize!" Discord claps merrily, floating over the stunned crowds.

"Torch, oh and Bob! I didn't even know you were immortal!" Discord says in shock to a random pony.

"My name's ~~not~~ Bob though!" they exclaim, shocked by their voice not coming out quite right.

"Yes it sure is! I'm glad the accident didn't make you that much dumber!" Discord says, patting the stallion on the head as he floats off elsewhere.

"~~There's nothing wrong with~~ me ~~though, I'm~~ fine!" they protest as Discord ignores them entirely.

Discord snaps his fingers, waking up Celestia and Weiss who look around in confusion before locking their gazes squarely on the avatar of chaos.

"Oh, and the stars of the show, poor old Celestia, and if it isn't Best Pony, John Doe!" Discord claps, as if he hadn't noticed them before now.

"I've asked you not to call me that, you box of half-melted crayons," Weiss snarls, his fingers twitching with anticipation.

He visibly restrains himself, running a hand through his mane. "Didn't we agree that you wouldn't interfere with my business? I could have sworn we had a deal." he continues, stalking towards the spirit of disharmony.

Discord scratches his chin, the vinyl record on it emitting a rhythmic remix of someone giving stand-up comedy in Finnish as he does. "Oh, did we? I didn't realize I was in the business of making deals, keeping promises, that sort of thing. Sounds a bit uncharacteristic, if you ask me."

"Weiss, you actually collaborated with Discord?!" Celestia whisper-yells, remembering how Weiss had claimed that he had done nothing to aid the spirit in spreading chaos across the globe.

"Of course not. I negotiated with him, there's a difference, okay? I couldn't exactly bully him into submission!" Weiss retorts.

"Blah blah blah, get a room you two, seriously. Whatever. I just wanted to congratulate you on freeing me, even when you aren't trying, you're just... So chaotic," Discord smirks.

"Ta ta, John Doe," he says, disappearing in a puff of gasoline fumes and confetti.

Once the nervous individuals gathered by the promise of a tournament have all been sent back home, Weiss and Celestia make their way into an office nearby along with several members of the Fizz Guard and Tempest herself.

"The Halberd is being prepared now. Celestia, we hate each other's guts, I'm vaguely evil, you're vaguely sanctimonious, it makes our squabbling a grand time for all involved..." Weiss begins, looking at her as he trails off.

"I'll work with you if it means sparing Equestria Discord's chaos," Celestia answers, nodding at his unspoken question.

"Thank you. I'm not a fan of innocent ponies being put through the wringer either. We'll be using your playbook until it's done, considering you took him down once already," he responds.

"Is there a reason we won't be traveling via portal? We need to get the Elements of Harmony quickly, after all," Tempest points out.

Weiss shakes his head. "I blew most of my power beating Celestia to a pulp. I'm barely here enough to maintain my form."

Waving a hand, the shadowy outline surrounding it ripples and waivers, to the point where the plain walls of the office can be seen behind it ever so slightly.

"Assuming he isn't already spying on us, our goal is threefold. Distract Discord, gather the element bearers, and the elements themselves. The weapons of light are strong, but those tend to rely on striking their target, and Discord is nothing if not slippery," Celestia explains, summoning a map of Equestria and rolling it out on the table.

"Weiss, your job will be to help distract Discord. You are utterly chaotic, and that may keep his attention on you instead of the ponies, at least for a time. Are you willing to handle that aspect of the situation?" she asks.

He nods. "I think I might know a way. I'm assuming you'll be handling the bearers and the elements themselves?" he responds.

Celestia nods. "If Discord is cautious, he will attempt to separate the two, and the spells I've laid on the elements are unlikely to work in this scenario to retrieve them simply. He is vain and likes to toy with others, so he may be willing to attempt disposing of the elements in a permanent fashion."

Weiss nods. "I'll need to recover my energy, then I'll be making my way to the disharmonious dickhead. If he wants a good time, then I'll just have to threaten him with one," he says, erupting into smoke that rapidly spreads out until it seems almost invisible.

Celestia turns to Tempest Shadow. "How long until the Halberd is ready?"

"Right about now," the bipedal pony says, looking off into the distance with a smirk. The giant airship floating towards them with Weiss himself standing on its helm.

With four graceful steps, Celestia leaps atop the airship, standing next to the illustrious Sage of Darkness.

The pair stare towards Canterlot, an unspoken fear in their hearts, the fear that any being feels when they encounter the unknown.

When they encounter Change.

Gilda tosses and turns in bed, a dream she's been having for weeks running through her mind. All she remembers when she wakes up is being afraid.

"What the pluck is going on with these dang dreams?" Gilda grouses, rubbing her eyes as she walks over to her window, yawning heavily after a late-night flight-training session.

Her eyebrows rise with confusion when she sees how all of the clouds around her new hut have turned pink, interspersed with the occasional blue.

"Oh come on. I hoped the weird crap would at least get put on hold until that dumb tournament was over. Maybe I should have gone after all... Nah, pluck that, I ain't going to nothing he set up," she scoffs.

"Guess I better see if Dash knows anything about this," she mumbles, going over to her coffee pot and making a cup.

As she sips at the beverage, a familiar, awful taste floods her mouth as she spits it out in disgust. "What the hell? Did I buy decaf or something?"

Sure enough, the coffee she poured was definitely wrong. It tasted like dirt and didn't help her wake up in the slightest.

With a grimace, the griffon set the mug down, looking out the window, noticing something wrong. Something deeply truly wrong.

Rising up into the clouds, a massive tower had sprouted from the middle of Ponyville, higher than even Weiss's tower, as if to mock it through sheer height alone.

As she stared at it, her eyes widened, and her talons tensed.

Her dream came to her, in bits and pieces, light and darkness, bravery and fear, and in the distance, a tower that rose above everything else, the light shining from the top making it look as if it were a beacon, or a lighthouse, calling out to the sailors below.

It terrified Gilda, but she knew on some primal level what it was, lacking the words to articulate it.

Spreading her wings, she glided down to the base of the tower, noticing Rainbow Dash and her friends looking up at the tower as well.

"Gilda, got any clue where this thing came from?" Dash asks.

"Something stole our Weapons of Light and dragged them all the way here, and then this big tower sprouted up," Applejack explains, looking at the dark stones of the tower cautiously.

Twilight suddenly appears, teleporting into the middle of the group with wide, frightened eyes, and a letter in her grip.

"Girls we have to get to Canterlot now to get the Elements of Harmony!" she shouts, explaining frantically the events of Weiss Noir's Dark Tournament, and Discord's arrival there.

Applejack nods. "Right. Let's go!" she says, running off with the other bearers, leaving behind only Gilda, Trixie, and Sunset.

"What are you doing, Gilda?" Sunset asks, as the griffon walks up to the tower, placing a hand against the tower's lusterous bricks.

"I don't know," she says, as the tower's bland surface ripples, bricks shifting apart until a massive archway sits in it.

Discord, peeling a bannana, looks a bit surprised as he peers out at the people there. "Oh. Are they gone?" he says curiously, peeking out and making Gilda leap back in shock.

"I figured they would be more anxious to get those toys back before heading for the bling. Oh well." he mutters.

With a shrug, he vanishes, utterly uncaring without his intended victims to torment, and the bannana he was holding plops to the ground, splattering applesauce everywhere

"Gilda, don't go in there, you don't know what will happen," Trixie says, walking between the griffon and the tower.

"She's right, if this is Discord's doing, you might not walk out," Sunset explains desperately, watching Gilda's face slowly shift.

"He doesn't want anyone getting those stupid weapons. So I'm getting em. Someone's got to, and it doesn't look like anyone else here is brave enough to do it," she says, muscling forwards, glancing at where, in the distance, ponies just stare on with unadulterated fright, having seen the spirit of chaos hanging around nearby moments before.

Trixie looks almost offended for a moment, and after glancing at Sunset's nervous expression, steels herself.

"Trixie is more than brave enough, so if you think she plans to leave her assistant high and dry, then you have another thing coming," the mare barks out, taking up point next to Gilda, who smirks.

Clenching her teeth, Sunset lets out a breath through her nose. "Fine. We won't be able to get the weapons themselves, but maybe we can break whatever spell was used to keep them here," she says, swallowing heavily and praying that Discord had truly stopped paying attention to the area, now that Twilight and the others had left.

Gilda nods. "Let's hurry, then. We'll get to play hero this time," the griffon says, walking into the tower, refusing to admit the real reason she entered.

A feeling of... Destiny.

With the letter written and sent, Celestia returns to the viewing deck of the Halberd, where the Sage of Darkness is standing, staring out of the massive windows.

They glance at one another, the spires of Canterlot rapidly growing as they approach. Nothing has gone pear-shaped, literally or otherwise, but they both knew it was only a matter of time.

"...Are you afraid?" she asks, after a moment.

Weiss thinks about the question, glancing down as thoughts and feelings churn inside his shadowy form.

"Yes," he finally answers, surprising the alicorn with his honesty.

"Why?" she asks, having a good idea already.

As the silence stretches between them, aside from the humming of the Halberd's engines, he takes a deep breath. A false one that feels particularly fake to him. "I... don't want to go out like this. Discord has what it takes to put me down permenantly, unlike a certain someone we know," he says, forcing himself to smirk at the princess.

She smiles as well, a faint glare tinged with mischief working its way into her mask.

"If you don't come out of this... sane. I'll send Sombra to Tartarus for you. Have him keep your spot warm," she jokes.

Something passes between the two immortals. Precious and fleeting.

Weiss's smile turns genuine.

"And if you end up getting turned into a pack of gum, I'll make sure your student gets those wings you were angling for."

Celestia blinks, but the surprise is hidden well.

"So, the plan?" he continues, when she doesn't respond.

"We fight our way to the castle if need be. Try to get the elements to their bearers. I already sent the letter sending for them to come. I have faith in them," she explains, only the sight of her mane smouldering defying her otherwise serene tone.

"I see. So I'll be running interference, once you open the vault?" he asks, magic building up inside him, skin beginning to darken with the density.

Celestia nods, her mane turning warmer colors as the Alicorn Suite washes over her. "If the elements aren't there, we'll both distract him while the bearers try to find out where they went."

She looks at him seriously, speaking in an instructive tone. "You didn't participate, when Discord was last freed. Entropy is a good stalling tactic against him. Maximize destruction, and he'll waste time restoring the damage. I suppose ashes bore him more than being manipulated angers him."

Weiss's smirk turns malicious, and below the two, the metal floor slowly turns cherry red. "I can do that."

As the first cotton candy cloud begins drifting over Canterlot, the two of them walk forwards in unison, the glass of the window melting in front of them as the heat begins to rapidly intensify.

"How long has it been since we last danced together, like devils among the hellfire?" Weiss muses, his black hate-fire mingling with Celestia's white eyesearing plasma.

"Did we ever stop?" Celestia says with a wry smile, leaping from the airship into the evacuated streets of Canterlot alongside him.

Author's Notes:

The song of the day is "It's Gonna Get Weird", by Neil Cicirega.

Hi Everyone! It's sure been a while, hasn't it?

Maybe for some of you, it's been too long. I hope it hasn't, though.

I plan on abolishing some of the things I had planned for this fic, in trying to get back into the swing of things. Here are things you should expect, moving forwards:

1. Shorter Chapters, like this one. 2000 Words is a comfortable medium that I hope I can manage.

2. Slower Schedule, I failed, two years ago, to keep to a daily schedule, and then, later on, a schedule of every other day. I hold no illusions of being able to hold to a schedule of any kind. I'm just going to try to write when I can.

3. Shorter Story, A lot of what I had planned for this fic intended for it to end at chapter 100 (400 Chapters total, adding up past, present, and reports), but now, looking at this story for what it is, I see that a lot of that was filler for the sake of pacing.

4. Fewer Reports, much like my self-imposed stipulations of updating frequently, 4000 word chapters, and my goal to reach chapter 100 by the end of the fic, having a report after every single chapter is another thing that will go the way of the dodo. Many reports were purely filler, rather than actually explaining and elaborating on the things that Weiss used in the present, and invented in the past.

5. Inconsistency, This one isn't entirely certain, but there may come time when I begin posting back to back present and past chapters, if I deem it neccecary. Originally, I planned on posting past and present chapters alternatingly, but this led to several planned instances of filler, meant to help make sure that chapters followed one another in a thematically pleasing way, with events in the past mirroring those in the present.

If I abolish the idea of needing to post past and present chapters strictly alternatingly, I can ensure that past chapters are followed by present chapters that follow them, and vice versa. This one is less certain, but if it happens, it happens.

I'm sorry it took so long, and I hope I can get back to making something you all enjoy!

(Present Chapter 29): Waltz With a Madman

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To the tune of "Cuban Pete", Discord shuffles down the street, snapping his fingers as he passes the various buildings.

Right now, he's checking something that had been of particular interest to him right before his imprisonment, namely...

"Ha! I knew it!" he says with a chortle, bumping his rear into one of the castle-town buildings as he dances by, transforming the bricks and mortar directly into brownies and fudge, which sag under their own weight.

"Oh! Discord, confectionaries can't hold up their own weight at those sizes, blah blah blah square cubed!" he says mockingly, waggling his paw like a sockpuppet as he speaks in falsetto, walking past the quickly collapsing building.

As he uses his chaos magic to turn things into food, a feeling of satisfaction wells up inside the Draconequis, bringing his mood up.

With closed eyes, he grins, shaking his shoulders to the unheard music, snapping rapidly as Canterlot is quickly infested with large bricks-turned-crocodiles, a herd of flying books, and of course, what few ponies hadn't already managed to evacuuate, who, for now, he has opted to simply reverse the gravity of, to keep them from leaving their homes quite yet.

He gives a tiny little waggle of his eagle talon, waving at the earth pony staring up into the sky from the window they're hanging off the edge of, desperately trying to climb into. The mare's bright pink cutie mark of a squeegee explaining what she was doing in front of the window in the first place, along with the various cleaning tools hanging from the window's edge.

Sashaying from side to side, the spirit of Chaos approaches the building, and the pony, noticing the cakified buildings nearby, shakes her head frantically as Discord approaches.

"Please don't! I don't want to fall!" they shout, bits of loose mortar and pebbles kicked free as they scrabble at the window, trying not to fall into the sky.

"Don't worry! Skydiving is quite safe, or so I've heard," Discord chortles, twirling merrily before smacking the building with the tip of his tail, turning the whole thing into a giant red-velvet cookie.

As the pony shrieks, their tenuous hoofhold breaking apart and sending them flipping into the air, Discord laughs, holding his gut as he doubles over with mirth.

"Remember little pony, it's not the fall that kills you!" he cups his paw and talon as he shouts up at the quicky shrinking pony. He'll have to remember to go grab that one later. Dead ponies aren't fun to play with.

With narrowed eyes, he watches as something darts across the sky, snatching the pony out of the air.

Following the figure as they land heavily near one of the buildings, clamping the pony's legs with heavy looking crystal shoes, Discord frowns as he realizes who is meddling in his fun.

"Stay low," Weiss Noir says, the mare shivering and nodding before fleeing in odd, bouncy steps due to the gravity manipulation still affecting her.

Cracking his neck, Weiss smirks at Discord, casually walking into the middle of the street. "Howdy."

"Really? You're going to make this another silly fight scene? Ugh, wait, please tell me you don't plan on boring me with more pointless philosophy talk like the last time we met," Discord moans, crossing his arms impetuously.

Weiss shrugs, shaking his head. "Nah. Don't worry, I figured out a while ago that you're some kind of hedonist. No grand duty to chaos up there in that noggin of yours, eh?" he snarks, making the draconequis raise an eyebrow.

"You don't know the first thing about me, my frustrating little conversation partner," Discord responds, raising a paw to snap the problem away.

Before he can, however, another pony crashes into the ground behind him with a sizzle as the cobblestones crack, distracting him.

"Oh?" he mutters, turning around to face the newcomer.

Celestia frowns, fangs peeking out from her displeased expression. Her blazing mane ripples as she speaks.

"Discord, leave Equestria peacefully, or surrender to us. There can be no other option for you!" she shouts, taking a threatening step out of the sagging puddle of stone beneath her.

His face scrunches up with bemusement. "Celly, dear, what on earth are you talking about?" he laughs. "Blasting the countryside to rubble was pointless and boring the first time, what makes you think it'll work this time?"

Weiss waves politely "She brought someone competent this time, so you might wanna' get lost, Q."

Discord scoffs, pulling out a magnefying glass and glaring down at the smug unicorn through it.

"You? You're a broken little husk playing pretend. 'Oh! Look at me, I'm so edgy, I wear all black and walk around talking about revenge all day! Oh hello Celestia, boy, I hate you so much! Mwah mwah mwah'!" Discord mocks, making kissy faces with his two extra hands and mashing them together, before tossing aside the magnefying glass in the third.

"Maybe I should reveal what you really are, hmm, John? That under all that angst and wangst, there's a weird little monkey throwing a temper tantrum," Discord says, only to be atomized by a blast of black energy, dark magic ripping through his form in an instant.

"You really need to work on your bantering, man, there's playful, and then there's rude," Weiss says with a fake smile, shaking his hand to put out the black energy clinging to it.

An arm snakes around over his shoulder, revealing Discord, utterly unharmed. "Oh, I'm sorry, did I hurt your precious feelings?" he says with mock-sadness.

"Weiss," Celestia attempts, glaring at Weiss's distinct bantering with the entity they were meant to be driving to fury and frustration.

Ignoring her, Weiss puts an arm to his chest.

"Oh no! You did! Gah! Gasp! Oh no, I'm getting corrupted and turning evil, oh heavens no, I can feel my nice personality fading as I forget what Friendship feels like! Oh, this is the end of the line for nice old Weiss, I can see the color draining from my poor coat!" he shouts, hobbling forwards and groaning melodramatically.

In the background, Discord waggles his paw and talon at Weiss, as if casting a magic spell.

"Weiss..!" Celestia repeats, growing frustrated with Weiss's blase behavior.

After a moment, he pinches a bit of skin at his side. "See? Not a lick of color there, oh well, guess Discord won, so he'll go ahead and piss off now that we aren't a threat to his plans, so go ahead and piss off," he says with a bitter, snide undertone to his lighthearted words, glancing back at Discord, whose eyes narrow as he pretends to pack a suitcase with nothing but heart-speckled bloomers.

"Weiss! We're meant to be distracting him, not playing with him!" Celestia roars, stamping a hoof and causing a massive gouge to splinter out through the streets.

Discord rolls his eyes lightheartedly at Celestia, sparing one last aggrivated look at Weiss, something dark passing between the two.

"Well, I was feeling pretty distracted, if I'm being honest, but then you had to go and distract me from being distracted, silly Celly!" he says, snapping a talon and teleporting away as Weiss and Celestia both fire blistering beams of raw energy that collide where he was, the meeting magics roaring like a tiny collapsing star as they combine.

With a frown, Discord floats by on a pink cloud, snapping his fingers to revert the massive glowing crater they made back to a city of candy and fudge.

"Let's dance, bozo," Weiss says, smirking up at the draconequis.

Celestia and Weiss share a look that seems to convey something subtle and sly.

'I was right. He has to decide to use his powers in order to find out things he shouldn't know. He doesn't know everything by default. This might just work if he thinks we're here to keep his attention away from the evacuees,' Weiss thinks, his awareness briefly shifting to their "real" selves.

Half a mile away, a churning black sludge made of dissoluted Shadow Clone Mass drags Celestia's unconscious body down the streets, sneaking through alleys and around buildings.

'If he thinks we're trying to stall him in order to protect the ponies, he won't bother to find out that we're actually stalling him until we can reach the castle,' he considers, pausing for a moment as a building flies past, flung by Celestia's telekinetic aura.

While Celestia and Weiss control their shadow clones, this simpler, golem-like mass drags her unconscious body around to the castle, where they can check if the Elements were indeed tampered with.

Quietly, the dark sludge drags her over a trash can overturned in the panic to escape earlier, smoothly traveling over it and onto the main street leading to Canterlot Castle.

The mass pauses as a faint sound reaches it. The sound of crying.

Though the mass lacks eyes, it's the work of moments to generate a pair, shadows congealing into bright green orbs that peer around for the source of the noise.

It's a child, a foal, stuck upside down on an awning to some cafe shop, staring with open confusion at the black sludge carting around the Princess's sleeping body.

The cloth of the awning is thin, and the door is too low to the ground for the foal to reach.

The pair stare at each other for several moments, before, with an internal grimace, Weiss has a tentacle whip out from the shadow clone mass, grabbing the filly and dragging her inside.

"Be brave, brat, your precious princess is going to fix everything soon," he barks, before slipping away.

Magicant freed him from being enslaved to weaker emotions, so the choice was his to make.

The thought sticks with him as he tears his way into the castle, ripping open the doors as quietly as possible, and slipping around the enchantments meant to deter intruders.

He senses a shift as the weight of the princess he is carrying changes, and he senses his Vancian Magic distort as Discord lazily duels in the streets of Canterlot. It's unlikely that Celestia even noticed what Discord had done, as subtle as it was.

'There's a choice I'll have to make soon,' Weiss thinks, his shadowy double in the distance dodging a stream of jambalaia that Discord fires at both him and Celestia's clones.

'Give me the strength to make it,' he prays, entering the hall of the Elements of Harmony and approaching the doors they are meant to be locked behind.

"It is -- to be --" A voice says.

Gilda's heart pounds in her chest, shadows dancing in the corner of her vision. Her instincts are screaming to run, to hide, to do anything but stand here in front of...

In front of?

Suddenly, her attempts to remember the dreams she has been having are interrupted.

"Gilda? Did you hear Trixie? This place is quite dark, do you see anything?" Trixie asks, swallowing.

"Oh! uhh," Gilda helpfully responds, her natural night vision giving her a bit more information than the two ponies at her side have.

"Brick walls. Long Corridor. Some torches in the walls?" she explains, reaching out and grabbing one of the wall-mounted torches.

"Here, light this," Gilda offers, Sunset quickly zapping the tool with a burning ray that ignites it.

"That should help, thank you," Trixie nods, squinting to see anything of interest, her eyes playing tricks on her as the dark corners of the room appear to dance and shift under the flickering torchlight.

With a nod, Gilda leads them deeper into the dark tower, eventually noticing something odd that has her pausing.

"The air. Something doesn't smell right," she says, holding out a talon to stop the others.

Sunset sniffs at the air. "I don't smell anything," she responds, only making Gilda nod as her eyes narrow.

"That's the problem. I don't either," she explains, the scents of vegetation and animal life quickly fading, and the smells she associates with stonework, the scent of dust, moss, and cobwebs failing to replace them.

She glances back towards the entrance, only to realize that it's disappeared.

The other two notice, looking back with growing nervousness. "Gilda, I think this was a bad idea," Trixie says, swallowing heavily as she realizes that they might very well be trapped inside this place.

The griffon nudges Trixie, getting her attention. "Nowhere to move but forwards. Keep your mind off it, it won't help to panic right now," Gilda barks quietly, stalking forwards with the torch held tightly in her grip.

Looking at each other for a moment, Trixie and Sunset both follow, their concerns soothed slightly by their friend's confidence.

As they leave and the light of Gilda's torch begins to fade from the hall, the shadows behind them continue to dance and writhe, unbidden.

(Present Chapter 30): Test of Courage

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"What are you so -- of?" the murky memory floats to the surface, before Gilda shakes her head, banishing it.

"This place is so plucking creepy," Gilda murmurs as the trio enter a room filled with what look like coffins, all of them pressed up against the walls. The only comfort is that they don't seem to contain actual bodies, judging from one of the broken coffins, shattered and spilling various artifacts and relics all over the ground, ranging from bottles of unknown fluids to toys that look like stuffed animals, somehow preserved for however long they've been here.

Lifting one of the artifacts, a large obsidian chalace, Sunset's eyebrows raise. "These things must be hundreds of years old. Where did all of this stuff come from?"

Gilda looks at the chalace, but it's clear she isn't very interested. "No clue. It's as creepy as the rest of the stuff here though."

Sunset lifts up one of the plush dolls, some kind of egg-shaped pink thing. As she does, she sets the chalace down to examine the toy. "It looks almost like some kind of storage room. Why would anyone store random junk in these things, though?" she asks, checking the various coffins with a scanning spell.

Seltzer water, baloons, toys and other oddities stand out to her senses.

"Trixie must admit that she is not at all confident in it being a good idea to mess with the things here, Sunset. Do we really know anypony who wouldn't leave traps in a place like this?"

With a grimace, Sunset considers all the traps Weiss alone had packed into his home.

"Good point..." she answers, dropping the relic on the ground and breaking into a trot to catch up as they enter a massive room covered with mirrors.

They all look around, Trixie in awe of the dazzling room lit by floating flecks of blue fire, Sunset with concern, and Gilda with measured disinterest.

"It's a maze..." Sunset says worriedly.

"So, which way we going, then?" Gilda points out. "Those weapons have to be around here somewhere, right? Maybe we should split up."

Trixie shakes her head frantically. "Not that Trixie isn't perfectly capable, but she does NOT think that is a good idea!" the mare exclaims.

Sunset nods. "She's right, we should stick together for safety. Don't worry, I have the perfect way to find the exit, we just follow the righthand path!" she says, holding up a hoof to the kalidoscopic mirrors around them and pressing it flat against it. Aside from a brief spark that jolts Sunset ever so slightly, nothing seems to happen, assuaging her concerns.

"Follow me, I'll get us through here like that!" Sunset smiles back at the pair.

Sharing a look, Trixie and Gilda nod at her with a smile.

Their walk through the maze is quiet, with only the faint crackling of blue fire to break up the monotony of trying to follow Sunset.

"You know, Trixie was worried, but this is actually quite peaceful, aside from the creepy atmosphere," she says.

Gilda looks over at her friend, her brow scrunching downwards.

"What? Speak up!"

Trixie gasps at Gilda, whose voice is seemingly coming from far away.

Sunset stops, looking back at the pair.

"--?" she says, too faint for Trixie to make out what she's saying.

"Sunset? Sunset!" the unicorn says, trotting over to her friend who had been keeping a hoof on the mirrored walls this whole time.

As she steps forwards towards Sunset, she suddenly slams her muzzle into an invisible barrier.

"What the-!?" Trixie says as Gilda bumps into a wall as well trying to walk over to Trixie.

Sunset's eyes widen, and she looks around frantically.

"--! ---!" she shouts as loud as she can, failing to reach the pair.

Realizing that they can't hear her, however, she thinks for a second, before igniting her horn and writing in the air with it.

"Whatever you do, follow the righthand path!htap dnahthgir wollof uoy revetahW" she writes on one of the mirrors in glowing text.

Suddenly, the blue flames in the air ignite, lighting up the mirrored maze with bright cyan light, the only other light source being Gilda's torch.

Swallowing heavily and looking around with fear, Trixie's eyes meet Gildas, as the griffon puts a talon to one of the walls, and nods at the mare.

Taking a deep breath, Trixie nods, placing her hoof on the wall as well.

"Alright, Trixie can do this, small steps," she says, slowly walking forwards, watching her friends in the mirrored walls trying to do the same.

As they do, however, Trixie notices something... Change.

Gilda frowns, punching one of the walls angrily and watching her reflection distort in a wacky way as the mirrored wall bends.

"This birdbrained place is going to drive me crazy," she growls, flinching as her furious expression distorts too much for her liking.

Tromping down the halls with a talon to the wall, she watches her friends carefully through the maze's maddening reflections.

"I mean seriously, how did we even get seperated, we were following Sunset the whole time!" she grumbles, trying to ignore her own beak moving in front of her as she rounds another corner.

Suddenly, around one of the corners, Gilda runs straight into a bent mirror, like something out of a funhouse, stretching her image until it towers over her.

She nearly squawks at the sight, before clapping a talon to her face and rubbing between her eyes to calm her racing heart.

"Nearly scared the feathers right off of me," she says.

Her heart leaps back into full speed panic as the reflection's beak begins moving. "And just what is so wrong with that? You should be scared," the reflection sneers, crossing her arms.

"What the pluck?!" Gilda shrieks, scrambling away from the reflection. In the other mirrors, her friends continue walking, as if nothing happened.

"You should be scared," the reflection repeats, stalking forwards until they take up the whole of the mirror.

Something about this seems to spark something in Gilda, and she flares her wings with a purple flare of energy.

"Well, I'm not you freaky magic mirror! So flock off, featherface!" she shouts, running up to the mirror a few steps before being startled back as the reflection grows even bigger at her approach, darkening until they are nothing but a black silhouette with pure white eyes.

"That's cute. You know why you should be scared, dweeb?!" the reflection roars, pressing up against the mirror until it begins to bend.

As it does, Gilda catches glimses of her friends, walking along ignorant of the freaky stuff happening to her.

"Because the angrier we get, the stronger we are! So be afraid, be very afraid," the dark reflection smirks, backing up and darting away, revealing an empty hall where Gilda thought the mirror was.

Gilda swallows heavily, and, spotting her wings, charged with the dark magic Weiss showed her how to harness, she backs away, flapping them frantically until the magic fades.

"Good. You better keep calm or who knows what'll happen, featherbrain," her dark reflection threatens, Gilda whirling around to face them.

"Shut up!" Gilda shouts, before balking at what she sees in the dozens of reflections.

In one, Trixie bumps into Gilda, and gets chokeslammed into a wall for it, in another, Sunset notices Gilda's fearful expression, and, to save face, Gilda scowls, shrieking something that can't be heard beyond the reflection as she starts ranting.

"This... It's not real," Gilda mutters, backing away.

She bumps into something hard, glancing behind her at the shadowy double, who leers down in a way that seems so real.

"You have to get out of here. You're losing control," the specter snarls.

"Wh-" Gilda attempts, trying to blink away the illusions.

"Run! You can't keep this up, what do you think you'll do when the others see you like this?! You know what you'll do if some pony sees you looking weak!" the double shrieks, loud enough for Gilda to flinch away and break into a sprint.

The taunting follows her as she scrambles through the maze at random, every horrible vision of her losing her temper with Sunset and Trixie forcing her to turn in another random direction.

She tries to stop as she rounds the corner and slides uncontrollably into a dead-end, but it's too late, and with a loud "thwack!", her head slams into the mirrored wall, and she loses consciousness.

"What are you so afraid of?"

Gilda startles, looking around in confusion. She's in what looks like a weird church made of white stones. From the stained glass windows, blinding light shines in vivid rays from outside.

At the end of the hall, a sword stands proudly, embedded in a simple, but well-cared-for pedestal.

"Am I... Dreaming?" she asks, before realizing what she had been asked.

Turning to face the voice, she blinks. Before her stands a pony, but one unlike any she had ever seen before.

The pony's mane is a bright red flame, jets like a rocket sprouting from their face in a heated facimile of a beard. His tail, in a similar manner, is a roaring red blaze that dances behind the burly stallion. his coat is a greyish white, like hot ashes.

Around all four of his legs, however, fur gives way to bright red scales, of the same color as his mane. The scales stretch up nearly to his barrel, and the area they cover seems to shift over time, growing and retracting as he breathes.

"I asked you a question, gal. What are you so afraid of?" the stallion repeats.

He shifts in the blink of an eye, becoming a shadowy griffoness with a hateful expression.

"Are you scared of a magic mirror?"

He shifts again, turning into a slyly smiling Draconequis.

"A Chaos God?"

Finally, his last transformation, a hollow-faced Weiss Noir, with sunken, tired eyes.

"A Dark Lord?"

Gilda remembers what he asked.

"No! I'm not scared of anything, gramps," she barks back, upon remembering the question.

The stallion just raises his eyebrow, in his original form as if he hadn't changed at all.

"Well, you aren't scared of much. That's for dark sure," he smirks, flecks of blue sparking through his beard as its flaming jets lengthen briefly.

"It's not too bad, being fearless," he nods.

"You'd probably stare down almost anything in the world, ready to fight as soon as you need to," the spirit admits.

He turns to her with a steely look. "But are you brave?"

Gilda nods forcefully. "I am!"

The stallion pauses, considering her words. Staring at one of the windows of the church, he thinks about many things.

The purpose Weiss Noir gave him.

Forbidden Magics long forgotten that could bind a soul.

The choice he made.

"Look, who are you gramps?" Gilda asks impatiently, crossing her arms as she looks around, trying to figure out where she is.

The stallion nods. "That's a fair question. My name doesn't rightly do anything for you, though. I'll tell you what I am, if it makes any difference.

"I am the spirit of the Master Sword. Or at least, I'm Lord Weiss Noir's homage to it," he shrugs.

"Thanks to me being here, that old blade can tell right from wrong. It can hit harder than anything. It can even repel evil.

"I'm what makes this weapon worthy of the name 'Blade of Evil's Bane'," he explains, gesturing to the blade poking out of the ground.

"You're here because you want to save the day. You want to get the Weapons of Light back to their owners.

"But if you ask me, that's no longer enough," he admits.

"The Weapons of Light were meant to compliment the bearers of the Elements of Harmony. I was told that much at least. But does that mean the Elements of Harmony are also the Heroes of Light? That they should be?"

He looks at Gilda.

"Lord Weiss Noir once told me, 'A sword wields no strength unless the hand that holds it has courage'," the spirit of the sword says.

"Twilight Sparkle is brave, yes, but I don't think she embodies the virtue that this blade was made for. None of her friends truly embody what the Weapons of Light were meant for, and among those who might embody those virtues, they aren't ready yet..." he explains regretfully.

"But there's someone who might be," he continues, looking at Gilda, staring through into the deepest parts of her being.

"What are you so afraid of?"

She shudders, and she remembers it all. All the times she lost her temper. How much worse it became after Weiss's training. Nightmares where she vomits red until it stops being potions. Worse nightmares, still, of losing control.

"Me," Gilda admits quietly.

"Are you brave? Can you face that fear?" he continues, stepping aside, such that he is no longer blocking Gilda's path to the weapon.

"You want me to have it? But..." Gilda attempts, shying away from the bright light that seems to shine off of the polished sword's surface.

There is no judgement in the stallion's gaze. "It is good to be brave," he says.

Gilda grits her beak, stepping forwards.

Her eyes shoot open, and the maze's walls shift before her eyes, revealing a straight path to a central chamber.

As she jolts to stand, she hears a furious shriek.

"No!" the shadow in the mirror shrieks, seeing the path to the sword.

Without a second thought, Gilda takes flight, pumping her wings as fast as she can.

"Don't you dare! You know what that thing can do? It's too dangerous!" they roar, following alongside her, shifting from mirror to mirror, each one showing Gilda doing more and more horrible things to her friends in fits of rage.

"I'm not scared of you!" Gilda roars back, flapping harder to outpace them.

"You aren't brave! You're just pissed! You think they won't be afraid of you? You, with a weapon of all things?! With their only hope in your short-tempered talons?!" the shadow shrieks, pushing at the edges of the mirror, trying to escape and stop her.

Gilda closes her eyes, desperately trying to block out their words as she flies into the chamber.

In the middle of the massive room, the three weapons of light sit on pedestals, covered in silly string infused with the magic of chaos, like vines choking away at them.

The Master Sword stands proudly, glowing brightly like the sun as Gilda approaches.

She reaches out for the weapon, grabbing it in both talons and heaving as if her life depended on it.

"Don't do this! NOOOOOOOO!"

The dark tower erupts like a lighthouse, a pillar of white shining up into the sky, visible for miles around as the sword slides free of the pedestal, unleashing power that blasts away the silly string Discord used to prevent them from simply teleporting to their owners, and eradicating the shadowy griffoness in the mirror.

Gilda breaths shallow, tense breaths, watching as the Vampire Killer and the Wishing Star both disappear in little flashes of light.

"Gilda! What happened?" Trixie shouts, running up to her with Sunset close behind. The maze, she realizes, has turned into a plain square room, with a mirror on either side of the walls and a window pointing outside.

In one corner of the room, seven colorful rainbow gems embedded in a crystaline machine go dim, their power exausted by whatever they were doing to twist the tower like they did.

"It... Called to me," Gilda says, holding up the Master Sword to the sky.

Sunset's eyes are wide as the Griffon swipes several times with the shining weapon, as if she had been using it her entire life.

"It accepted you as its master..!" the unicorn realizes.

Gilda remembers why they're even here. "I have to go. This thing can't help stop Discord from here," she snarks, quickly making her way over to a window as her friends nod firmly, realizing what her having the weapon means.

As Gilda climbs up into the window, she catches a glimse of her plain reflection in the mirror.

"Be careful," it begs with a pitiful expression.

Gilda nods quietly to herself, before leaping out and spreading her wings wide, gliding towards Canterlot.

(Present Chapter 31): Too Far Gone

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Twilight was tense and twitchy as the train passed rapidly through the countryside. As it did, she tried not to look out the windows.

With every minute that passed, she could see things change. A vast stretch of grasslands had become a gigantic checkerboard. A forest had turned inside out, with roots stretching up to the sky, and moles swimming around through the air in confusion.

Her friends weren't faring much better at the sight of Equestia slowly falling to chaos.

She noticed Applejack shudder as the train passed by a grove of fruit-trees. Not hers, thankfully, but it wasn't hard to imagine what might be happening to Sweet-Apple Acres, just judging from how the lemon grove's fruits had been turning from lemons directly into glasses of lemonaid, hanging from the trees by thin glassy stems.

"T'ain't right," Applejack says, shuddering with revulsion, her Earth Pony sensibilities driving her to illness at the sight of the natural order being defied.

Pinkie giggles. "Could be worse. At least this time the world-ending threat is a little funny," she admits, gesturing to a pond where a large group of ducks seem to be completely normal, aside from the big clown noses attached to them all, and the loud horn-like honks that they make rather than duck-honks.

Fluttershy balks. "Oh, those poor dears," she says, looking at what Pinkie pointed out.

"It doesn't matter. Funny or not, we're going straight for the Elements of Harmony and putting a stop to this. Have any of you read the history books detailing the last time Discord was freed?" she asks, just to be sure.

When all of her friends shake their heads negatively, Twilight purses her lips.

"It was a very dark time in Equestria's history. Just to give you an idea, nearly half of all Equestria's magical illnesses can be directly traced back to the last time he was free. Cutie-pox, Feather Flu, Hay Fever, Spontaneous Duplication. All of them 'Pranks' he pulled," Twilight insists, giving Pinkie a look that makes her realize that checkerboard plains and long-legged bunnies might be the least of Equestria's worries.

"I don't think I need to remind any of you how awful it was when we ran into that Poison Joke, that one time," she finishes, causing all of her friends to simultaneously flinch.

"Right, we gotta kick his butt," Rainbow Dash nods, pounding one hoof into the other menacingly.

"While I would love absolutely nothing more than to fight two different fights at the same time against ponies that have no chance of harming me, I'm afraid I'm going to have to decline," Discord says, huffing with his arms crossed, sitting across from the others, who leap to attention.

"You wouldn't be saying that if we had the weapons, you low down varmint. Why don'tcha give em back and you'll see how 'harmless' we are," Applejack says as Rainbow Dash flies towards the draconequis with hooves ready to batter them into submission.

With a yawn, his torso turns into a large donut-like shape, the pegasus slamming into the train seat behind him and bouncing off uncontrollably.

"If you really wanted them, you would have gone into the little tower I brought over for you, clearly, you don't, so don't start," he waves them off.

Gesturing to the window, he begins to speak to the glaring ponies, ignoring Twilight, who fishes around in her saddlebags.

"If you'll look to your left, you'll see the wonderful Equestrian Countryside, under renovations by moi. I think it's shaping up quite nicely, as a matter of fact," he says, pointing to a field of checkerboarded grass that the train is running by.

"And if you'll look again, you'll see it again!" he chortles, pointing out how the landscape seems to be repeating.

"So, the way I see it, if you want to save your precious princess and get your precious elements so badly, then a small game is in order. Reach the front of the train, and I'm sure the conductor would be happy to pull in to Canterlot," Discord explains, waving out the window at a clone of himself wearing a conductor's costume at the head of the train.

The others, realizing that something is wrong, look outside as well, realizing that the train has been looping around the same track of countryside this whole time, the rails bent in a giant circle!

With a growl, Rainbow Dash jumps up from where she crashed into the seat earlier. "Don't worry girls, I got this!"

She leaps out of the window, flying as fast as she can to the head of the train. Moments later, she crashes through the window on the opposite side, landing back in her seat, dazed and confused.

Discord waggles his fingers. "Ah ah ah, no cheating!" he leers.

"You best hurry, I'm not sure how much longer your precious princess and her loathsome lord can handle their little tussle with me!

"Or don't, the view is getting quite nice, after all," he shrugs, as Twilight finally gathers up the shining crystal orbs that she was looking for, using the Materia to flood her body with combat magics.

"Ta!"

And with that, the spirit of chaos and disharmony disappears, as if he were never there at all, just in time to avoid Twilight in her blazing fanged glory blasting a molten hole through the seat he was in, and the rest of the train car behind it as well.

"Are we really going to just play along with that brute's game?" Rarity exclaims, glaring at the spot where he was sitting.

Twilight's slit eyes narrow. "I don't think we have a choice," she says, jerking a bit as Fluttershy puts a hoof on her shoulder.

"We'll get through this together, ok?" the shy pegasus manages, staring at Twilight's magically enhanced form fearlessly.

After a moment, Twilight nods with a sigh. "Alright girls, let's do this, there's nothing Discord can throw at us that we can't handle!" she says, trotting over to the door of the train car and wrenching it open with telekinesis.

Gilda feels the sword guiding her as she glides towards the city, wind whipping through her wings as she banks towards the train currently going in circles near it.

Smashing through one of the windows, she spots Rainbow Dash and her friends acting totally crazy.

"That ain't the whole truth! Now be honest and fess up!" Applejack demands, jabbing a hoof at Rainbow Dash who is saluting at everyone nearby.

"Yes ma'am! I wasn't allowed to sleep in a cloud bed until I was ten due to bedwetting, ma'am!" Dash shouts with military fervor, obeying instantly.

Rarity, in a corner of the train is scratching frantically on a piece of paper, trying to cobble together a deed to everything she owns and who she's giving it away to.

Pinkie Pie, in the middle of the aisle, is thrashing and laughing uproariously, unable to do much more than flail around on the ground in a giggly fit.

Fluttershy, meanwhile, is huddled under one of the seats. "Why can't we all just get along?!" she wails, covering her head with her hooves.

"Girls, please, you need to calm down, Discord is messing with your head!" Twilight tries to say to them, only for it to be drowned out over the sheer volume of magic spells spewing from her horn. She also appears to be twice as large as she was before, with a frankly oversized mane of purple fire waving all over the place.

Pinkie Pie manages to catch her breath for a moment, before Twilight's words reduce her back to a useless giggling wreck.

Gilda just watches for a moment in stunned shock.

"What the heck is going on here?!" she finally manages.

Twilight looks at her for a moment before quickly looking away before her eye-beam spells start activating again.

"It's awful Gilda, Discord seperated us and tricked us into... Whatever this is!" she shouts, waving a hoof at the maddened state of her friends.

Gilda thinks for a moment, before nodding firmly and following her instincts.

Leaning down to where the butter-pegasus is cowering beneath the seats at her friends and their perceived cruelty, Gilda speaks in as soft a voice as she can manage. "Fluttershy, I need you to do something for me, ok?"

The pegasus, noticing Gilda, nods faintly, but the fear in her eyes is strong.

The griffon almost flinches at the pitiful response, but takes a deep breath and tries to look confident.

"Summon that wishing thing, I fixed the problem. You need to wish everything back to normal, alright?" Gilda explains, waggling the Master Sword for emphasis.

Fluttershy shudders as her friends continue yelling and freaking out in the background, but wordlessly, the Star Rod of Wishes appears in her hooves, and she squints her eyes shut.

"Just what do you think you're doing?" Discord says with disappointment.

Rolling his eyes, he rolls up his sleeves. "Looks like I've got another one to-" he begins, only for Gilda to leap at him with an animalistic shriek.

Teleporting to the side, Discord again rolls his eyes. "Well, it seems we're doing-" he attempts, only for something strange to happen, as Gilda's flying attack instantly changes trajectories in an impossible way, as if locked onto the Draconequis.

With one clean slice, Discord's arm falls off bloodlessly at the shoulder, like a doll's arm being popped off.

As Gilda breathes heavily with satisfaction, Discord calmly picks up the dis-attached limb.

"Well, that was..." he begins trying to pop the limb back into place.

He trails off with wide silent eyes as, rather than reattaching as he wanted it to, the arm simply flops back to the ground, refusing to return to its owner.

"That's not... That..." he attempts twice, looking at Gilda and swallowing heavily as he disappears instantly without a gesture or fanfare, narrowly avoiding her second slash at his head.

With a bright flash of light from Fluttershy and her own Weapon of Light, the train heaves, and begins plodding towards Canterlot once again.

Celestia and Weiss smirk as, in unison, the two of them leap out of the way of a gigantic wad of bubblegum, following up the dodge with a flurry of exploding orbs emitted from their horns.

Discord looks displeased as he uses a large net to prevent them from blasting Caterlot Castle to rubble.

"Alright, that's enough of that," he says, snapping his finger and turning both Celestia and Weiss into rabbits.

"Now, be good little bunnies and stay here while I finish turning Equestria into the most delightful modern art ex-" he begins, turning around for a moment only for Weiss to slam into the back of the spirit's head, smashing it into the cobblestones.

The black rabbit smirks maliciously as he hops away, flipping in midair and exploding into a torrent of smoke that rapidly forms a unicorn once more.

"Any advice, Weiss?" Celestia asks, realizing that her own skills with the spell aren't nearly sufficient to withstand the kind of pain required to rearrange a shadow clone.

Weiss shrugs. "Cast the spell again. Unlike me, you've actually got the juice for it," he points out.

With a nod, the ivory bunny utterly negates Discord's spell by simply summoning a second, new clone.

"You're beginning to annoy me," Discord frowns, plucking his head out of the ground and screwing it back on as he stands up and returns his annoyed attention to the pair, who walk towards him with a smug look on their faces.

Celestia and Weiss share a look before tittering, their laughter taking on the smug, snide quality of gossiping schoolgirls.

"Beginning to annoy, did you hear that, Weiss?" she says, covering her fanged smile with a hoof.

Weiss shrugs, shaking his head with a grin that betrays any attempts at faux sympathy. "Sorry to hear it. It's a shame you can't just mind-whammy us like you're trying to do to the Elements of Harmony right now," he says.

"Oh? You seem to be implying something about my skills, Johnny boy. If I had half a mind, and I do, of course," he says, half of his head disappearing to reveal smooth fur where grislier things are meant to be.

"Then I could have you wrapped around my little finger, in but a few words," he insists with a slowly growing snarl.

At this, Weiss and Celestia guffaw. "You? Discord, you weren't able to manipulate me or my sister when we last fought. If you had, then I imagine there would have been nothing alive that could stop you. Weiss, meanwhile, manipulated me into acting like a slavering beast and rampaging through the streets in a mere thirty minutes!

"I thought my life was over when I realized how he managed to corrupt me!" Celestia giggles, nudging Weiss, who nods with his arms crossed and a satisfied look on his face.

"Shut up. You think you know corruption? I play with the minds of ponies like you play with whiny poetry," Discord says to the laughing pair, teleporting them to the center of the planet with a snap of his claws.

"Oh my god, he's actually jealous," Weiss says, his jaw dropping at the sight as they both walk out of a nearby portal that spews white-hot metal all over the ground, the two ponies unharmed by the insane heat.

"Compared to me, Discord, you're an amateur, a clown. The difference being, you can see a pony's every weakness and make them go against their nature, I can see a pony's every weakness and taint their nature forever," Weiss explains, both he and Celestia firing twin beams of hellfire that twine together like rope as they punch through both Discord and a chunk of the mountain behind him.

"I wonder if he even realizes that we're onto his predictable scheme?" Weiss continues, glancing at Celestia, who looks a bit confused at this mysterious statement while Discord shoves a thumb in his mouth and blows, making the hole in his torso seal shut with a comical "pop!"

"You need to shut up. You think you're so smug? I know your plan just as well, I know every little nuance of it," the Draconequis repeats, trapping them both in indestructible peanut brittle, their smug faces frozen in amber.

He tromps up to the crystalline candy and jabs a pointed talon straight at Weiss's frozen smug face. "You're nothing compared to me, a child throwing a tantrum because he lost his precious toys."

His anger turns into sly cunning as Discord stalks around the frozen duo.

"But... It doesn't have to be that way, you know. Time Travel, the sort you could never quite manage, is well within my grasp, you know," Discord whispers.

With rolled eyes, one of Weiss's Eye-rocs appears from the shadows, morphing into a new copy of him. Another Eye-roc promptly explodes, swapping with Celestia to free her from the sticky entombment.

"Really? You know I killed the last fellow to try and use my old vices against me. You're using stale old material, clowny. "

Before Discord can snap his fingers and twist reality yet again to stop his opponent's jabbering lips, their eyes narrow.

"Face it, Discord. You're little more than a wire-headed buffoon. I can't believe I was so foolish before, you know. I didn't have enough time to study you, the last time we met. I thought your magic was something truly poignant, something like drawing from the emotional confusion of others, or maybe even having something beyond magic itself that let you do what you do. Now, however, I think I've got it quite handily," Weiss explains simply, teleporting to the side as Discord snaps his fingers yet again. dropping an anvil on where the unicorn once was.

"That's how your magic works, isn't it? It's as backwards as you," Weiss says, his smoky form congealing behind Discord, close enough to whisper in the spirit of chaos's ear.

"There are still individuals left alive after your little nap you know. If you give up this pointless charade, I could take you right to them. Wouldn't it be nice, to finally meet with those you loved? To give up on your hatred?" Discord retorts, talking past the dark sage as if he hadn't spoken at all.

Weiss continues to speak as well, Celestia watching with nervous intrigue as the two truly begin to battle on their preferred field. The field of corruption, of attacking the heart.

"When you cast a spell, it doesn't require that you feel anything, no, it doesn't require that at all. And it isn't like dark magic, either, where it can give you the feelings needed to cast the spell... Your magic is backwards. Instead of Emotions begetting magic, your Magic grants you emotions," he says quietly, with a half-lidded stare that looks like it belongs on a snake.

Discord leers. "Or perhaps you don't wish to meet any remaining residents of the former Shadow Realm... You spent your entire life begging for forgiveness from the dead, but perhaps you aren't so keen on finding out if the living are willing to forgive what you've done," he whispers in a poisonous tone.

The two are walking now, Celestia watching as they stalk around one another like wolves, Weiss's sickly sweet revelations contrasted against Discord's threatening truths.

"You never did find Chaos Magic that makes you happy, did you Discord? No spells for love and companionship? It must drive you to tears, knowing that your precious dopamine dispensing chaos can't give you a life worth living. And of course, we can't forget the other side of the equation. A million spells that feel nice to cast, and not a one can take away the little pains in your heart..." Weiss croons, stabbing at Discord's heart in a way that is sickening to watch.

"Has your hatred ever given you anything but misery and pain? You held onto it for so long seeking repentance for your sins, only to live long enough to do things that are genuinely unforgivable. Isn't it ironic? Isn't it cruel? I could take away that hate, if you but let me," Discord retorts, verbal claws raking at his opponent's hide.

Weiss's voice turns teasing, as green smoke bleeds from his eyes "Celestia doesn't even know that you swapped my Vancian magic around to keep me from teleporting us directly to the elements. She didn't even notice when you swapped her clone for her true self, making our entire duel pointless as we stall to get fake ponies to the vault of the Elements of Harmony," he gestures to the white rabbit that Discord had turned Celestia into, one that hadn't collapsed into smoke upon her summoning a new double.

The non-sequitur catches Discord off guard, seemingly, as Celestia gasps with horror.

"But I knew you would. You're predictable like that. You want to win easily, but you don't want to win too easily. You want to cheat, but you don't want to skip to the part where you win. Chasing after the slightest bit of joy and happiness that your magic can't simply feed you."

As if to mock Weiss's statement, Discord begins eating out of a box of Malted Milk Balls, dumping the black orbs directly into his mouth as Weiss monologues.

"I mean really, stealing the Weapons of Light? Trying to corrupt the Elements of Harmony? I bet you thought it would be really clever to move the elements out of the Vault as well. Really drive home how hopeless it all is when we fight our way there only to find an IOU. Then again, if you thought I would fall for that, you wouldn't have mixed up all my stored spells to keep me from casting Vas Avidus," Weiss winks.

"With my Lamp being bound to both my ultimate teleportation spell, and sealed with the magic of the Elements of Harmony, it would take a snap of my fingers to bring the two together, wherever you happened to put them. Not even you are strong enough to break the seals binding me to them, my dear Frankenstien's Weasel."

Discord's eyes narrow as Weiss casts several weak Vances, Discord's corruptive magic having swapped them all around to the point where only random magic spurts out, beams and fireballs and portals spilling over the place.

"But of course, that assumes I don't mind casting every single spell stored in my spirit all at the same time. One of em is bound to take Celestia directly to the elements, so long as I don't mind erasing Canterlot from the map, and my Shadow Clone with it... I can always make another." he continues with a shrug.

"Oh? And how do you plan on doing that? With these?" Discord asks, rattling the box in his paw before popping another one of the black orbs into his mouth, crunching up the materia into nothing.

He peers down into the box.

"Guess I should have saved some for you!" he laughs, regaining control over the situation as he reveals the artifacts he stole mere moments ago.

Weiss grimaces, tensing as Discord wads up the box and tosses it aside.

"Well? Go on, blow up Canterlot. Get our lovely Princess to where I've hidden the elements. It won't cost you a thing! No consequences at all, aside from the part where you forfeit your only chance at revenge on Sombra and get stuck back in your precious lamp with no more Shadow Clone Materia to cheat you out of it," he says with a shrug.

Weiss just stands there, frozen as Celestia gallops towards Discord, breaking free of her own shocked paralysis

"No? Alright then, I think we're done," Discord shrugs, and, with one final snap of his fingers, creates golden chains that leap up from the ground, lashing around Celestia and yanking her to the ground.

"If it's any consolation, you really did irk me, John Doe," Discord says with a snide smile, floating away.

"As for you... Perhaps a taste of your own medicine wouldn't go awry. Might make you a bit more hesitant to seal someone in stone when you have to deal with an itchy petrified nose for a few hundred years," He says to Celestia, cracking his neck twice as he approaches the struggling princess.

"Weiss! Do something!" she shouts at him, thrashing against the chains holding her down.

"He's out to lunch Celly. You clearly don't know him as well as you thought if you thought for one minute that he would sacrifice his precious revenge for you of all ponies," Discord begins, looking back with disgust as he hears Weiss laugh in a low, dark tone, one not unlike that of someone sentenced to death. The sort of laugh that promises a poor decision being made.

"Revenge is the prime ingredient in the fountain of youth," Weiss says, looking up at Discord.

"I've kept myself alive for hundreds of years on a steady diet of jealousy and hate.

"I was able to use the Shadow Clone technique to sneak my way out of my imprisonment by the Elements of Harmony...

"But it's like operating in a fog. Everything's a little warped and unreal. I feel like I'm walking through water sometimes, and then, when I unleash my magic, I can feel my life slipping away," he quotes, ignoring Discord miming "blah blah blah" with his paw.

Weiss's eyes glimmer with insanity. "I'm running on fumes now... But I've got just enough gas left for this," he says, raising a hand and poising his fingers to snap them, to unleash every bit of Vancian Magic still sealed within his spirit.

Discord raises an eyebrow.

"You're bluffing. You're not the right kind of crazy to throw away your life's work on little old me," Discord says, carelessly, waving him off.

Weiss smiles, a slight, small thing.

"What you don't seem to understand is, Dark Magic is self destructive. As a master of the dark arts, I have mastered what it means to go against my own interests. To hate is to drink poison and expect the other person to drop dead. And me? I've drunk deep of the font."

"It's called spite, Discord. Look it up, if they ever get wifi in the garden for you," he barks out, offering one last glance at Celestia.

Discord's eyes widen, and he throws up an arm to snap Weiss far far away from him, but at the last possible moment, Discord's arm falls off, plopping to the ground and wasting precious moments that he doesn't have as he panics.

"Sayonara, Sunbutt," Weiss Noir says with a lazy, two-fingered salute, before snapping his finger as he unleashes every Vance remaining in his body, all at once.

The sphere of raw chaos that erupts from his body pauses only long enough for Celestia to be zapped away in a bolt of greedy lightning, before consuming almost everything but the few ponies that haven't already escaped. The only things spared by Weiss's wrath.

It didn't take long for Celestia to reunite with her student and their friends after finding the Elements hidden in a book in the Ponyville Library. It took even less time after that to reseal Discord, who was scrambling to escape after Weiss's last attack had managed to do a bit of actual damage to the spirit.

It was almost insulting, how easily Twilight and the others defeated him so quickly, so anticlimactically, once they and their elements were reunited and brought to where he had escaped to.

Discord's statue stood as a testiment to the pitiful end of the conflict, the frightened visage of the Draconequis covered partially by the disjointed arm he held up, as if to ward off the elements. As it was carted away by a team of pegasi, Celestia made her way to the crater that used to be Canterlot.

It wouldn't take long to rebuild, the power of three Alicorns in unison would see to that shortly enough, but that wasn't her concern at the moment.

Instead, she made her way to the center of the crater, where a ghost-like form hovered over a soot-stained lamp, the tiny brass object darkening as the black flame from its spout began to flicker and die. Weiss's ability to remain awake while sealed away by the elements fading as the magic of Harmony bid him to rest once more.

"This is it, isn't it? There's no one left to cast the spell for me, once this clone pops. And you can't justify having the Elements of Harmony free me," he says, as the Diarch approaches his mangled clone. His final clone.

"Yes." she says, kneeling down before the dark lord, looking into his eyes with regret as she tries to explain herself to the quietly smiling specter before her.

"After Pluck Night, we had no choice but to imprison you. Your lust for vengeance had left you unstable, self destructive. You weren't ready to return yet, and you still aren't, now. You've only grown more unstable in your half-freed state." she explains to him, gesturing around her as his arms begin to collapse into smoke.

"So long as Sombra lives, you'll hunt him down, even at the cost of your own soul, right?" She asks, as if hoping for a different answer.

"I will. If I'm not stopped, I will fulfill my destiny. I will exact vengeance. There can be no other option," Weiss agrees.

He glances away, wistfully. "I don't blame you for wanting to change that fate... This is your second, and last chance. So don't blame yourself either."

"I won't," Celestia lies, looking evenly down at her fallen rival with pain in her throat that refuses to leave.

He nods tiredly, but it's clear from the glazed look in his eyes that he's not all there, even as he speaks, "Do you think they'll forgive me for failing them? I'm... Too far gone to tell anymore. Too far gone to understand these emotions," Weiss says, lost deeper in memories than ever before, saying things he had already said once before, in some distant era.

Things are going dark now. Sleepy, like any moment he'll blink his eyes and awaken another thousand years into the future.

She could have spared a moment to tell the truth. Maybe the truth was yes, but she spoke before considering it, one way or another.

"Of course."

One of Weiss's remaining left arms collapse into smoke, slowly being sucked back into the lamp.

With the last arm he has, he suddenly lashes out, his arm whipping forwards to grab the princess and pull her close, a brief, furious fire erupting in his eyes one last time, before it fades into sleepy recollection.

"Promise me you'll take care of things when I'm gone. I'm begging you. You're their only hope for peace, now," he repeats a millennia old plea, incoherent and unaware of where he is, his lids drooping as the edges of his body blur like ink.

He wasn't asking Celestia. He didn't even see her anymore in whatever visions had danced across his eyes, and before she could answer, he was gone.

(Past Chapter 29): A New Age

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I hummed to myself with a warm feeling in my chest as I put together another little idea of mine, rough blueprints for a machine that might let my three precious little dragons help in protecting their home.

Weapons, of course, but... Stylish ones. It doesn't get much more stylish than Ruby, Sapphire, and Ultima Weapon, after all...

I hear a tapping at the door, one that had grown very familiar in the year since the final assault on the Crystal Empire.

Luna was coming for one of her nightly visits, something that made the warmth in me bloom a bit brighter. With a vague gesture, I wave and let her into my dream.

"How have you been, Luna?" I ask, wheeling around in my chair to face the princess, covertly swiping away the blueprints I had been working on.

"I have been well, Weiss. How goes progress into reclaiming the Empire?" she asks, walking around to my side and taking a seat.

I consider the question, but she catches my pause before I can come up with an answer.

"You were caught in another trap, weren't you?" she says with finality, a sad look in her eyes piercing through me.

I sigh. "Yes, but it's alright, I told you already, my er, my escape spell is more than sufficient."

She shakes her head. "You need not be the sole minesweeper. I remember the last time you set off one of the traps that vile tyrant left behind."

She may have remembered, but I didn't. I think back to that day... I had been searching the Crystal Empire with a shadow clone. It was quickly becoming one of my strongest tools, and it let me take risks when searching. Searching for any remaining traces of Sombra, any remaining ponies that might have somehow been missed.

And of course, the Crystal Heart.

It wasn't where it was meant to be, and when I had used my dark magic to open the hidden passage that was supposed to lead to it, I had been blasted with something painful enough to disrupt my clone.

I remember screaming, but nothing else. I had to be told later that it nearly made me go into shock.

"Weiss, you can't do everything yourself. You have done well to learn that many times before, so I hope you take no offense when I feel the need to remind you of it," she says, leaning closer.

I let out another sigh. "You're right, princess. There's not a chance in hell I could do all of this by myself."

She looks at me, and I feel the unease that comes with your nosy best friend being inside your head with a mastery of the mind arts.

"Something else is troubling you," she asks without asking.

Ahh, that.

"I've just been thinking, Luna. I've ruled over this place for a long time- -by my standards at least," I insist when she smiles a bit at my "long" rule of two years or so.

"It might be possible that... The Shadow Realm needs to come to an end, someday," I say diplomatically.

"Not like you think, I don't plan to dissolve the whole damn thing, but... What I've made here is... Sloppy. Transitory," I continue, the princess of the night waiting patiently for me to explain my thoughts.

I was a bit frightened, voicing them, but time and time again, Luna had proved to be my most precious confidant.

"I've built a kingdom on hatred, and I suppose, then, I have been forced to ask... What happens when Sombra is defeated?"

I wave my hand in a hypothetical manner. "The Kingdom Heart, the source of the Shadow Realm's strength, it is fed by the hatred of the Shadow Realm's ponies, it destroys all which they detest, and in turn, they feel the bond forged by the Kingdom Heart's flame. But right now, it's unified, it's pure. Every Longma under my rule, in their heart of hearts, despises Sombra with a passion."

I swallow. "I have... Theories. Nothing concrete, but there's worries I have as to how stable the Kingdom Heart will be without a unifying hatred to keep it stable, and to keep the Longma under its influence stable."

Luna nods hesitantly. "I have lived long, Weiss, but in so short a time, you have already come to know more about the dark arts than I do. I scarcely believed it possible when we first met, but know this, I have faith in you, of all ponies, to find a way."

I shudder a bit. "I'd never forgive myself if they got hurt because of me."

She grabs my face when I try to look away, her wing forcing me to stare at her dead on.

"You will find a way. You are the Sage of Darkness. Never forget that."

My breath hitches, and I nod hastily, pulling away.

"I have plans, Luna, don't worry. My student, she proposed something. It's naive, but it might hold some value," I begin, and she waves a wing for me to continue.

"I posed a similar problem to the one I explained to you, and..." I laugh.

"She suggested something that seems quite obvious, counterbalance the Kingdom Heart's hatred with Love, of all things. Add Love to the flame, to neutralize its more dangerous aspects as need be,

"Of course, that wouldn't work, Love and Hatred are mutually exclusive. I've tried for years to figure out how to pull it off, but everything I know about Dark Magic is clear on that, Love and Hate can't be combined together. They can coexist, and one can turn into the other, but they can't both be aimed in the same direction at the same time, it just doesn't work," I explain, bringing up graphs and figures calculating my experiments.

I had of course already proven it to Luna time and time again, as part of my way of 'proving' that Hatred-based spells could be turned to good purposes. Black Flames, Killing Intent, spells that relied on hate would utterly ignore, and even protect or save, people that the caster cares for.

I shake my head, banishing the hologram. "But I'm getting off topic, her idea holds merit, if we could introduce emotions other than hatred into the flame, things like pride, and possibly kindness, we could round off the edges and transition the Kingdom Heart to function without a single enemy to rally behind.

"Of course, if my theories don't pan out, I have one other plan that I know will work. It's why I'm so desperate to figure out where Sombra kept the Crystal Heart," I explain, pacing around the artificial dream.

"If we can get our hands on it, that would be the perfect Plan-B. Based on my studies, if we were to network the Crystal Heart's ability to amplify and radiate love with the Kingdom Heart's ability to do the same thing with Hatred, we won't need to combine Hatred and Love into the same magical construct, we can just use two of them!"

To stress this, I bring back up my holograms, Luna looking at the magical diagrams I set out with something approaching awe.

"With the Crystal Heart in the middle of the reclaimed Crystal Empire, and the Kingdom Heart in the Shadow Realm surrounding it, we could create a network that channels both types of magic, regulating the effects of both with their natural counter-agents. Not exactly as my student suggested, but very close," I finish.

She walks around the magical diagram, one showing the Crystal Empire as a gigantic pink starburst, one kept in the exact middle of a deep purple snowflake shape, veins and tunnels intertwining to channel both of the energies safely.

"It... It could work, Weiss, it really could!" Luna exclaims, reading my notes and checking over my enchantments with a careful eye.

I notice her staring at my flank, and furrow my brow at her.

"What?" I ask, looking at my own Cutie Mark.

"Oh. Huh. Well, the irony isn't lost on me, I suppose," I say, realizing the metaphor. My own mark, of a black silhouette of a fire, with a white flame in the center of that.

I shake my head. "But anyway, the most important part of this is yet to come."

She tilts her head with some confusion.

I give her a tired look. "Since taking charge around here, I've had to be a lot of things for my ponies. I've had to be a sword. A shield. A teacher. A scoundrel. A ruler, and more besides.

"But there's one thing that I still have to be, one thing that I must become, so everypony in my realm can be happy."

Luna blinks. "And what is that?"

I smile, a sense of pride welling up in me.

"A predecessor."

I awoke a bit more tired than I was when I had gone to sleep, rolling over on my futon and standing up to face the small mirror I had in my room, using my weak telekinesis to drag my arms over and plug them into my body.

Noting the bags under my eyes with a wince, I decided to get some actual sleep tonight, rather than the facsimile that the Arcana Nox provided.

Looking around my tiny room, just big enough to fit my thin bed, and a few shelves of knickknacks that I had amassed over the past year.

The most precious of which being the small binder I had been filling with printouts of my student's Foeship lessons.

'Speaking of which...' I think to myself, tapping the mirror next to me and forcing it to change into a video-screen. Sure enough, my student had learned a new lesson yesterday.

I read it over, not hastily, but not with the same care I normally did either. I'd rectify that later, of course. I had been taking the time, now that the Crystal Empire has been freed, to really focus on her and her studies.

"I'll print out a copy for the binder. Read it properly then," I mutter to myself as I reach the end of her letter, detailing her newfound experience that taught her how 'Everybody has faults, and depending on how honorable you are, they can range from exploitable weaknesses to chances to make your enemy respect you.'

I smile at this, considering the lesson for what it is. I imagine she probably got caught up in some sort of scuffle where some weakness of hers came to light. I'd have to ask her at some point.

I shake my head, dismissing the screen and running a comb through my black flaming hair. I wasn't sure if it did anything, but the act of grooming helped me feel more lively in the mornings.

As I finished, I tossed the comb aside, opening the sliding door to my room. The minute I did, I yelped with shock as the mechanisms began to spew snow everywhere, quickly flooding the small space.

Sputtering, I cough and hack as I burn my way out of the pile of snow, glaring down at Priss, who brought a bucket of some sort of metallic popcorn to smugly watch me fall for her latest prank.

"Why and how," I grimace, snapping a finger, which triggers one of the golems embedded in the wall nearby to pop out and begin burning away all the snow.

The young teen smirks. "I had a feeling you needed it," she taunts, displaying her talent perfectly well.

After a moment of glaring, my lips betray me, quirking up in amusement. I sigh, rolling my eyes.

"What did I do to deserve such cruel subjects?" I muse, walking past the filly and her snacks.

She trots up behind me, tossing the bag onto her back. "So, you going to tell Eclipse the news yet? She might be too dense to figure it out, but I'm pretty sure I've cottoned on to what you're planning," she comments casually, doing a little hop that rustles a popped bit of metal into the air for her to snap up, crunching loudly.

I frown, glancing at her. "I've been considering it," I venture. "What exactly do you think I'm planning?"

She shoots me a deadpan look. "Don't play coy. She told me you've been teaching her how to maintain and operate all the Shadow Realm junk. The same stuff you had to figure out."

I look down. "I've still got time. It'll be years before-"

"You should tell her now, Lord Weiss," Priss says, startling me. The filly had mostly gotten out of the habit of using any sort of honorifics since we met.

After a long few moments, we reach one of the portal networks that make up the Arcana Janus. "Alright. I'll tell her."

Priss nods. "She's my friend, Weiss, so trust me when I say it's the right call," the filly explains, walking through one of the side portals to her own home.

Milling around in the middle of the portal hub with the various other Longma and assorted Equestrians going to their destinations and taking care of their own business, I take a deep breath and nod to myself, portaling to where Eclipse Flash is waiting for me at the training grounds.

"Alright, again," I repeat, igniting my horn and firing a bolt of dark magic at my student.

She responds by rearing up and stomping the ground, making a flaming pillar sprout up from the ground, blocking my attack entirely. As she does so, I can tell that the hatred she summons is under her complete control, without even a mote of corrosive emotion influencing her.

Priss still hadn't managed to recreate her Merciful Bulwark, despite our heavy training, but even without it, the filly's mastery of dark magic had rampaged forwards even faster than my own.

"Now, use the Wave Motion Gun," I demand, charging towards her and leaping over her flaming defense.

The moment I see her, I realize she had been preparing that spell this whole time, grey sparkling crystals growing into a massive cannon that erupts as soon as she spots me, the water blasting me into the ceiling painfully.

A B-rank Wave Motion Gun, by my standards. Maybe higher. Teaching her secrets from the Grimoire Weiss was quickly proving the staggering potential I saw in her.

As I land, I gallop around her first pillar and fire a beam at her that she responds to with another quick stomp that blocks it with more flaming crystals.

Firing another beam that curls around her defense, the blast of hatefire splashes harmlessly off of her.

"Point," I exclaim, ending the session.

"I still have no clue why you use that against me instead of something like a simple force or wind spell, my lord," she says, walking around the pillar and giving me a funny look.

I just smirk. "It's to keep you on your toes," I explain, tossing her a bottle of some kind of sports drink I hadn't bothered to find out the name of. She doesn't even flinch as I accidentally say 'toes' instead of 'hooves', having long grown used to my verbal quirks due to how frequently I slipped up around her.

She walks over to the bleachers nearby, plopping down on one and taking a deep slurp from it as I approach. Today's session hadn't been as rough as the ones I normally subjected her to, and I could tell she knew something was off.

I needed her fresh for the conversation we were about to have.

I plop down next to the filly. "So, you're thirteen now," I begin.

She nods. "Yeah? What about it?"

I think about this. "We both started learning Dark Magic at nearly the same time. I had a little bit of a head start, but I think it's fair to say we started at nearly the same time. Would you agree?" I ask.

She nods, taking another drink.

"You're about to surpass me," I finally admit.

Her face scrunches up. "Doubtful," she responds.

"I've seen what you pull off, Lord Weiss, I... I can't do half of what I've seen you do."

I shake my head firmly. "Eclipse Flash, I use trickery to amplify my power, and... To be honest, it won't work much longer against you. I store up power for hours, sometimes days, to make sure I can keep up with you during our training."

I wave my arm, summoning a golem to project a hologram of her latest letter.

"But that's not the only reason, let's ignore your monstrous power with the dark arts for a moment, alright?" I ask, waiting for her to nod again, skeptical, and a bit confused.

"You need to understand, I've been improvising so much of what I do, scrambling to make things up as I go along. You have an advantage, learning from my mistakes, and learning on your own on top of that.

"Already, your power is growing at an astonishing rate, but what's more incredible is your maturity. You've learned lessons that I didn't even know until I read your letters, gained emotional stability that even I can't manage, when using dark magic," I explain, making the child blush from the praise.

"I've just been doing my job as your student, Lord Weiss," she explains bashfully.

I nod. "That's why I wanted to have this talk with you. I'm not going to be around forever, Eclipse Flash. I'll be around for a long while, but not forever," I clarify. I've already built up years, years of time donated by thousands of ponies that had chosen to lend me some of their lifeforce. But years aren't eternity, and a long life isn't an eternal one.

"...And, to be frank, I've done a shoddy job keeping this kingdom running. I've made a lot of blunders, improvised every step of the way, and so much of my success, if I'm being honest, is just pure luck on my part. I've come so close to failing you all, and maybe one day I'll really do it," I explain, watching her expression dim and turn concerned.

"Lord Weiss, that's bull, you've been doing a great job! Everyone is happy! You saved the empire, and it won't be long until we get the last of those crystals out of the ponies we brought back!" she exclaims.

I nod. "I did. But this entire kingdom relies so heavily on my success and failure, and that's what I've been working to solve. A system of government that relies on one specific person being alive is a lot like a jug of milk," I explain, making her look even more confused.

I smirk. "Something something expiration date," I joke, making the filly cringe in horror at how awful the joke was.

With a sigh, I school my expression into something more serious as I speak. "There's someone who won't need to improvise as much as I had to, or as quickly. Someone who will be mature, and experienced, someone who understands Dark Magic not because they bumbled around into it, not because they've been burned by it, and learned all the nuances of not getting burned the hard way. Someone who was instead taught, taught to avoid its pitfalls, and to cater to its strengths."

I stand up as well.

"Someone who will one day be the new Sage of Darkness," I finish, looking down at her.

The filly's eyes widen, and she backs away. "M-me?! No, I... I couldn't, I'm nowhere near what you are, Weiss, I'm-"

"Not ready yet, don't worry," I insist, putting a hand on her back.

"But one day, when you're grown..." I trail off.

"I will be? I don't know," she responds doubtfully.

"I can't do what you do, Lord Weiss."

My face softens as I look down at her, and lean down to meet her at eye-level.

"I know you can't. You're too good to let yourself settle for just doing what I can. One day, you'll do even more. More than I can with the Dark Arts, and more than I can with our little ponies," I explain softly.

Standing up, I bid the filly to follow me.

"Weiss, my lord, what makes you so sure? How can you believe in me so much, when I'm just... I'm not that special!"

"Why do you believe in me?"

As the sliding door opens, and we begin walking down the halls of the Mystic Island Zone, I feel something bubbling up inside me.

"Because I'm a silly pony, who believes in silly things. But... I believe in silly things that I believe can change the world," I begin, as music faintly begins to play from nowhere at all.

♪"I believe the evening sun... Always gonna set again! And,"♪ I begin singing, trotting down the street as my student follows.

♪"I believe a pile of gold... Waits in every dragon's den! Oh!"♪ I exclaim, leaping off off into one of the Mystic Island Boss Rooms, sliding down the pile of treasure serving as its bait it as she follows nervously.

♪"I believe in gems of ev~ry hue!"♪ I shout flinging jewels everywhere, before looking at my student.

♪"Why shouldn't I believe the same in you?"♪

She looks away shyly, and I grab her, leaping up and dashing through a portal to the Wacky Workbench Zone, where a variety of videogames are being made and played on the gigantic holograms projected all over the cavern.

♪"I believe in make-believe,"♪ I say, grabbing a lightgun and blasting several aliens on an arcade screen.

♪"Magic games and playing cards, and~"♪ I continue, tossing the gun to her and forcing her to pay attention or lose a life to the digital aliens.

♪"I believe in promises-"♪ I turn away from her for a moment.

♪"-Spoken as you cross your heart, oh..."♪ I exclaim, slyly winking to an unseen audience as I cross my heart with a single claw.

Grabbing Eclipse Flash and heaving her onto my back as we walk through the crowds, we listen as they all begin humming in the background, providing a faint choir that supports my song.

As I look at my student, I jab a thumb at the giant crowd of singing Longma, ponies that have chosen to live in the Shadow Realm under my rule.

♪"I believe I bit off more than I can chew!" I snark quietly to my student.

♪"Why shouldn't I believe the same in you?"♪

I trail off, noticing that she still looks unsure.

♪"You may say I'm a fool,"♪ I begin, catching her attention as I lower her off my back, reaching one of the obsolete minecart tracks still connecting the various zones. As I sing, I hear various miners nearby humming in sync.

♪"Feelin' the way that I do..."♪ I say, plopping down onto one of the benches nearby.

♪"You can call me Pollyanna, say I'm crazy as a loon!"♪ I shout, grinning at her frantic silent denial as she shakes her head at the idea.

♪"I believe in hearts of gold and that's why I believe in you!"♪ I finish, pointing a finger at the filly as another portal opens and we walk through to an outpost on the surface.

Walking to the edge as we stand on the walls of the outpost, I watch as a burning petal from an obsidian tree falls on my palm.

♪"I believe there'll come a time,
Maybe it will be someday soon.
When a new song starts to shine..!
All we have to stay is in~ tune!
I believe that dream can still come true!
Why shouldn't I believe the same in you?"♪ I ask, turning to face my student, who swallows tearfully.

♪"You may say I'm a fool,"♪ I repeat, soldiers behind us humming along.

♪"Feelin' the way that I do,"♪ I shrug, letting the petal fall, before leaping up onto the battlements and grinning widely.

♪"I believe in fights and rivals
And the wonders hate can do,
I believe in songs and magic
And that's why I believe in you!"♪ I exclaim, holding out a hand to pull her up with me.

Our eyes meet, and I can feel my student's confidence finally start to grow. She begins to sing along in her own way as we reach the final verse, hesitantly.

♪"You may say I'm a fool,"♪

♪"I'm a fooool...~"♪ she harmonizes.

♪"Trusting in what you can do"♪

♪"What I can dooo!~"♪

♪"I still think that it's true,"♪

♪"Think it's truuue!~"♪

"I'm gonna see this whole damn thing through!"♪ I curse merrily, gesturing to the blazing firepit of the Shadow Realm, showing her what could one day be under her rule.

♪"'Cause I still believe in miracles,
I swear I've seen a few.
And the time will surely come-
-When you will see what you can do!
So do you believe in gravity?
Cause' that's why I believe in you!"♪ I finish our song, the two of us smiling brightly as we look at the Shadow Realm before us, a broad field of dark ashes, molten rivers, and glittering trees of metal and crystal.

For a while, we just stand there quietly, the guards going back to their business now that the magically mandatory bursting-into-song has been executed to everyone's satisfaction.

"Even if I don't feel like I can surpass you... I'll still do it one day, I promise," Eclipse Flash finally says in a quiet voice, one that radiates newfound resolve.

'Well, if you ask me...' I muse to myself, watching the horizon with my student as our flames burn brightly in front of the raising sun.

'I think you already have.'

Suddenly, I hear a shout.

"Lord Weiss! There's a matter that requires your urgent attention," Captain Helmsplitter shouts, running up the stairs to the battlements, breathing heavily.

"What is it?" I ask, turning to face him.

"We-" he breathes heavily, coughing from the long run.

"We've found a foal that had been frozen in one of the glaciers nearby, a pegasus! We're working on healing the filly now, but your presence is required," he frantically explains, seeming to leave out exactly why.

My mind races. My studies implied that Crystal Unicorns and Pegasi were unimaginably rare, and I couldn't think of a single individual I knew who actually was one from my memories of the show, even as faded as they were.

It didn't matter though. If my captain deemed my direct attention necessary, then I had no intention of stalling.

"Show me," I insist, following after him as fast as I can.

(Present Chapter 32): Wake for the Living

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"Shiny? Are you ready?" Shining Armor hears from outside his room, the voice easily piercing the thin walls.

"Oh, uhh, yes dear!" he responds, adjusting his helmet and trying to open the door to let her in.

As his magic begins turning the doorknob, he feels a sudden surge of magic wrap around it and yank it open, startling him.

"Good. I am as well," the towering mare says, walking into the room with bold confidence that matches her sparking, hot-pink ethereal mane and height, almost twice his own.

She looks him over with an intense gaze, pausing at each part of his ceremonial armor.

As the alicorn's gaze rises up to his eyes, he glances down with a blush, pretending to examine her hooves. The thin, feather-like scales trailing up them have magically spread all the way up to her chest, he notes. One of the signs he had long since learned meant she was extremely stressed.

She smirks at his reaction.

"I hope we can get this over with quickly. I'm sure you are nearly less of a fan of this than I am," she mutters, looking away.

Shining Armor nuzzles her neck, catching her attention. "It'll go quickly. Then we can get back to the wedding plans?" he attempts questioningly.

With a bit of relief, he notices the red-pink scales slowly recede back down to her cannons and fetlocks.

"You always know just what to say," she finally admits, before roughly, playfully bumping him aside with a feathery clawed wing. "Let's go Shiny," the ceremonial princess says, looking back at her little hubby with a loving glance.

"Yes Cadence," he says, following the Longma-Alicorn out of his room quickly, trying to keep up with the mare's longer stride as they walked to the courtyard where Luna and Celestia were holding the "Funeral" of Weiss Noir.

'At least, it might as well be one, with how sappy Aunt Celestia and Luna are about this mess,' Cadence thinks, rolling her eyes.

A shadowed stallion in a thick cloak walks down the indestructible cobblestone roads leading into New Canterlot, glancing at the various dubious characters that were making the pilgrimage to the ceremony being held by the Equestrian Princesses.

For a moment, his eyes two other cloaked figures, and smirks at them.

'Ah ah, wouldn't want to blow all of our covers, now would we?' he thinks to himself, him and the Zebra dressed up as a priestess staring one another down for a moment before deciding that their dealings didn't warrant breaking their disguises.

As he passes by a bunch of earth ponies hauling gigantic bricks and more indestructible boulders to repair and pave the foundations that would soon be an entirely rebuilt and renewed city, he takes the time to note the other individual, a mare in a wheelchair being pushed by a blank-faced cretin of a pegasus who fails to notice or care about his gaze.

The one in the wheelchair, however, does. Her various missing limbs long since healed take nothing away from the ageless look in her eyes, one filled with bitter disdain. She doesn't even know who he is, and she already hates him.

'Perhaps it's that we all seem to have had the same idea for our outfits?' he thinks to himself. He finds himself grateful for Luna's utter ineptitude upon her return, one that allowed him and several of his troupe to join the proceedings as "Descendants of the noble Longma".

Not that Black Angel held a shred of sympathy for the mad lord, or any care for their plans to 'redeem' him, but he did have a purpose in coming here, ever since his Materia was stolen and eaten by that foolish spirit during their spat with Weiss.

In the middle of what once was the crater left in Canterlot's place, there was a massive statue of glassy stone, a purple obsidian structure that seemed all too garish and grim in the middle of what would surely be another pastel nightmare at the hooves of the royal architects, once they began planning to place a city where now there was nothing but flat stone.

He noted the differences between this new statue, and the one that once held lord Weiss's magic lamp. The first and most obvious one being the difference in its plaque. Rather than the bold and appealing title of "The Adversary", it now held the boring and inaccurate moniker of "Weiss Noir : The Sage of Darkness".

With a shrug, Black Angel dismissed the new engraving at its base. If even the majority of Griffonkind failed to remember what Weiss had done to deserve his old title, then he saw little reason to remember it either.

The subject matter of the statue itself was of course, the madpony himself, knelt down in repose with each of his six limbs poised in various positions, ranging from the fist holding up his chin, to the one scratching the top of his head, and the four remaining ones holding various items.

Rather than his lamp, this time, the statue held up two books with quills poised above them in two more hands, one of the books made of marble, carefully worked into the grip of the obsidian hand, and the other left in the same material as the rest of the statue.

Hanging around the statue was a small crowd, made up of the various Chapter Black members who hadn't been successfully associated with anything criminal, as well as various ponies he didn't recognize. The Elements of Harmony were there as well, fitting their nosy little task as the princess's lapdogs.

Black Angel merely held himself at the back of the crowd with the other hopeless fools claiming the right to bear witness to what he is sure was meant to be a more private affair. Distant descendants of his various Councilmen, no doubt, or ponies conniving enough to fake the ancestral papers.

Upon seeing the chariots of the princesses slowly arriving to the site, the shadowy stallion pulls his hood tighter, and prepares a thick coating of enchanted sugar around his hooves, in case he needed to make a quick escape. He noticed the Zebra in Priestess Garb smile in a malevolent way, before schooling her expression into something more sober.

He merges into the crowd as they land, and watches carefully as they slowly make their way in front of the statue.

Luna felt conflicted, as she stood in front of the individuals who had chosen to be present for the unveiling of this statue.

Celestia may have been resolute to see it through, but Luna was the one to have laid the plans for Weiss's imprisonment all those years ago.

It felt like betrayal. Her sister was eager to agree with her plan, gleeful at the idea of being able to return Weiss to sanity one day, if they could only keep him trapped long enough to destroy Sombra in his stead. Celestia hated him enough, and in the right ways to feel somewhat guiltless at the idea of denying Weiss his revenge.

Luna did not.

She would be the first to speak. Celestia wouldn't speak at all, despite her usual proclivity to speeches in the modern era.

The alicorn stepped forwards, looking over the familiar faces in the crowd. Weiss's mercenaries, Tempest Shadow, and the hedgehogs under her command. Zecora, the only child of his dearest friend. Sunset Shimmer, the pony he had saved in another time.

"Subjects. We are gathered here to honor a sacrifice, one made by an individual who had no impetus to do so, save the goodness in his heart," Luna begins.

"Since taking charge of the Shadow Realm of ancient times, he was forced to be many things for the ponies who followed him," she begins, speaking loudly to all the people gathered.

"He was a sword," she says, glancing to the statue.

"A shield," she glances back to the crowd, who awkwardly stand around, most of them having never actually met Weiss.

"A teacher," her attention turns to Sunset, who looks genuinely regretful.

"A scoundrel," to Celestia, who stares at the lamp, heedless of her sister's words.

"A ruler," to Tempest Shadow, who looks torn.

She looks inwards. "And more besides," she explains quietly.

"Weiss Noir gave himself to darkness, wounded and destroyed by loss. And yet, even in that wretched form, he assembled together the black feelings in his heart into something resembling good, and made a sacrifice for Equestria."

She begins to pace around the monument as she speaks. "Perhaps, it is merely my sentimentality ascribing to him what he does not possess. He claimed to have done it from mere spite, and yet... Weiss made a sacrifice to get the Elements of Harmony to their bearers. He forged from what was in his black heart the desire to do good in that moment, and sacrificed something I know now to be more precious to him than his own life. The only thing precious to him that yet bound him to this world, he tossed aside for us all."

"His revenge," Princess Luna explains, causing a murmur in the crowd, as she pulls out the magical lamp from where it was kept nearby, placing it at the base of the statue where all can see it.

"Weiss Noir will not be freed from his imprisonment yet. This prison we have kept him in was once a punishment, perhaps, but now, it is our reward," she attempts, forcing down the bitter sting of what feels to her like a lie.

"He spent his life obsessed with revenge, and, if allowed to pursue it, he would destroy himself to obtain it. This, I will not allow, no matter how much it pains me. On the day Sombra, the ancient tyrant of the Crystal Empire, is destroyed by our hoof instead of his, that day will be when we set him free. That day, we will save him from this wretched destiny, and I, Princess Luna, will see his soul mended, if it requires eternity to achieve."

She glances down for a moment, a brief instant of weakness. "He may hate me for this gift, as may some of you who see his vengeance as righteous, but I will pay that price to see him live. Hatred is an old friend, in that respect," she finishes, stepping aside.

After a moment of slow walking, she pauses, and returns her attention to the crowd one final time.

"And know this ye ponies, the day of Sombra's end..."

"Is fast approaching." she booms with menace, before finally returning to her sister's side.

Celestia looks to Cadence next to her, the mare standing an inch or so taller than her "Aunt".

She wanted the Princess of Love to make a statement of her own, and said as much before, but now, seeing the look on the princess's face, she realizes it would be a poor decision to force the matter, her fellow alicorn looked uncharacteristically stone-faced, and her scales had grown.

She looks to the Zebra Priestess, who insisted on giving a statement of her own, and had the letters from Weiss to prove that they too had bonded at some point. Celestia didn't recognize her, but knew that in Weiss's brief months of freedom, he had more than managed to deal with many ponies in secret.

The zebra, seeing nobody else making their own approach, walks to where Luna stood.

"Good speech. A bit loony, but it star-ted us off nicely. A well-mooning sentiment," the Zebra begins, making Luna's face contort with disgust at the poor-taste of the zebra's puns.

Celestia raises a wing, blocking her sister, something was wrong.

"That's princesses for you, they'd never say say anything ali-corny at a time like this," she smirks, turning to face the statue of Weiss.

So, I'd like to start my speech about this statuesque individual by pointing out the obvious. Lord Weiss Noir is evil. Evil with a capital 'E'. Some of the things this rock-solid guy did should have gotten him stoned, if you glass-k me."

The priestess jabs an elbow at the statue, leaning up against it. "Get it?"

"What is the meaning of this? If you think I will allow you to clown all over this-" Luna attempts, pushing past her sister towards the punny Zebra.

"Somber affair?" the Zebra interrupts, waggling her eyebrows.

It isn't even a good pun, out of place, and barely recognizable and yet, Celestia can see the smug, self satisfied look of a Zebra who feels particularly clever. The dangerous kind.

As Luna ignites her horn, the Zebra turns to the crowd, twirling Weiss's brass lamp around her hoof. "Now, me? I'm an old friend of the Brass-tard. And I'm not just blowing smoke up your asses when I say he's downright wick-ed" she insists, reaching behind her in such a way that Luna's blast of magic passes right around the mare.

She glances at the inert lamp. "Not exactly the brightest, but hey, what can you do? Before I go, though, I'd love to leave you all enlightened."

Pulling a potion from behind her back, the priestess rips off her disguise, her eyes igniting in a vile green color.

"Get her!" Luna shouts, those capable of fighting rushing towards the laughing Zebra, spells and soldiers already in flight to get her from all sides. She dodges them all with loud laughter, slipping over bodies and under spells as she continues to speak.

"I am Councilmare Malusi, Loyal Servant of Weiss Noir, and the only pun-ishment he will be getting... is mine!" she cackles, throwing down the bottle and flooding the area with bright blue smoke that explodes from it.

"Consider this... Bail."

As the smoke clears thanks to Luna's erupting, terrifying magic creating a powerful wind, she looks around frantically, panic shining through as she fails to spot Weiss Noir's lamp, or the one who stole it.

"No, no, no, no, no, no, NO!" she shouts, desperate tears already breaking through her mask as Celestia and the others scramble to mobilize, weaker ponies already beginning to feel the effects of some kind of Poison-Joke-like toxin causing various chaotic effects.

Cadence tromps towards the guardhouse with Shining Armor, only for a crippled mare to be wheeled in front of her, the unicorn glaring at the princess as the pony pushing her along stares disinterestedly.

"I have urgent business to attend to," Cadence says quickly, trying to walk around the ponies as she ignores them. The guard needs to be given orders immediately to catch that Zebra before she does something everypony will regret.

"I know, and we know where she has gone," the mare says, making the duo pause.

"Who are you?" Cadence insists, her sparking hair crackling for a moment with dangerous pink arcs.

She wheezes a breath. "I am Chrysalis, and we wish to help you prevent The Anathema's escape," the mare says, green flames erupting from her body as she and her cohort reveal their true forms, one bug-like pony that seems otherwise normal and healthy and...

The Queen of the Changelings herself, so riddled with holes and scars that it defies reason that she is still alive at all. A thick stone mantle around her neck bears the Crystal Heart embedded in it.

"At any cost."

(Past Chapter 30): Life and Love

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I blinked at the sight of the pink foal currently babbling a mixture of words and nonsense at a giggling nurse. Too young to even speak more than single simple, she couldn't have been more than three years old.

"As you can see, we've managed to dig up records, and her magical signature has been matched to one of the minor noble lines. Unless somepony else emerges with a firmer claim, this filly is... Technically next in line to the throne. Her relation to Princess Amore is distant, but magical signatures do not lie," Dr. Real explains as I stare intently at the child.

It was all purely academic, of course. I doubted even if I tried to cede control like that that it would be accepted at this point. Too much had changed, too much had been lost to the former Crystal Ponies.

And yet, as I stared at the little slip of paper containing the filly's name, I felt my knowledge of the world crack and crumble. I was uncertain of past, present and future, all due to one tiny name, a footnote at the end of a long family tree.

Cadence Mi Amore Cadenza.

I had no clue why she was here. I barely remembered anything about her backstory. Was she slated for ascension in this era? Did my meddling interfere with that? Was this even the Cadence I knew about, or an ancestor with a coincidental name?

I felt sick at the idea of dooming an immortal to mortality because of one little slip-up on my part. The foal was found trapped in ice. Was that ice not meant to be melted?

It was too late now. Watching a literal baby giggle and coo as they tried to clap at Nurse Motherlode's flaming olive-colored flame-hair to grab it, I knew there wasn't a snowball's chance in hell I could get away with saying "put em back in cryo", even if I had the will to go through with it, or the idiocy to think that would fix the problem, if there was one.

Something pulled at my heart for a moment. I knew I would have to take some form of responsibility for this, no matter what fate held in store.

I roll my eyes at my own twisted sentimentality, opening the door and walking in to face the foal myself.

Nurse Motherlode looked nervous, spotting as the filly's mood changed from playful to fearful at the sight of me. Some unspoken instinct that had me biting the inside of my cheek nervously.

"Dr. Real, could you take a message? Inform the head of staff to begin preparations to clear out the remainder of the Crystal Empire's traps and make it suitable for habitation within the year. Label it 'Project Crystal Egg'," I explain, prompting the scientist to quickly scramble out to do just that.

At the nurse's confused look, I explain. "We are in the presence of royalty, and there are certain courtesies afforded to one, even if they are subordinate to another, and in diapers besides," I state plainly and clearly.

Looking at the nervous foal, I lean down, meeting their gaze. "Princess Mi Amore Cadenza... I sense great things in your future. Do not disappoint me," I try to state dispassionately and mysteriously.

The foal's face scrunches up, before, with a sudden giggle, she claps her hooves trying to catch my hair, smacking directly into my horn instead.

The nurse quickly rushes me out before my frantic cursing can be absorbed into the pink pegasus foal's growing vocabulary.

The year passes quickly, after that. Perhaps too quickly for some, but certainly fast enough for my purposes.

A foster family is found for the new princess, my student learns ever more in her studies, and the Crystal Empire's former site quickly becomes the site of the new capital, as well as one of the first truly above-ground cities to be inhabited by the Longma since their transformation, with the Kingdom Heart remaining where it is in the Hidden Palace Zone.

Eclipse Flash turns fourteen. Glitter Miss Priss does as well.

All of that said, tomorrow, I turn nineteen on my third year in this world, something I only informed a few close friends like Iron Diamond and Princess Luna.

I awoke with a choked scream, the dream I had slipping away before I could grasp it. Ever since I faced whatever trap had cast that spell on my Shadow Clone, it seemed that my dreams had been trying to force me to remember it, to no avail. Luna said in past months that she knew what I had been dreaming of, but that I was not yet ready to face it. I trusted her, and tried not to concern myself with it.

All I knew was that, whatever terrifying thing the spell showed me, it felt so little like a fantasy, and so much like... A premonition. An omen.

I shook my head, checking the time. Nearly three in the morning.

With a sigh, I go through the motions of preparing for the day, not bothering to check my exhausted expression in the mirror.

I grimaced a bit as I walked over to the bathroom and washed my face. Ponies really did NOT understand my preference for smaller rooms. This one was normal-sized, and a lot of the features in it really sold the idea of luxury, the bed growing to match the floorspace.

My new room was underground, of course, in spite of the enchanted window that let in sunlight when it was actually day. Some things never changed, even living in the new Crystal Egg Zone. (As if I was going to call it anything else! Gotta stay on theme)

With a sigh, I brush my teeth quickly and spit, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes with a spare set of hands as I walk out of the bathroom prepared to face the day.

A sudden crash has me leaping into the air with a shriek as Celestia of all ponies smashes through my ceiling!

"Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!" I shout, trying not to have a heart attack as the princess tries to piece my ceiling back together with a bit of bemusement, chunks of rubble floating in her immense telekinesis.

"Hmm. Wooden and brick ceilings do not react quite like that. Perhaps I erred," she mutters, flapping her wings once to rid them of the stone and crystal dust.

"What the fuck is wrong with you!" I shriek, throwing my arms out wide.

Celestia's face twitches. "My sister told me you were in a funk, whatever that means. I saw fit to end her whining and remove you from it," she says, levitating the last piece of rubble back into the ceiling, creating a spiderwebbed mosaic of broken crystal that she sealed with a brief burst of sweltering heat.

"There, good as new."

I swear I feel steam erupt from my ears for a moment. "Get out of my room!"

Her ears flatten as she looks at me with an unamused expression, but I see her lips quirk a bit, betraying the mask. "It was merely a jest, a prank, if you will. I have heard tell of your appreciation for such things, and you behave like that?"

My groggy tired memories of nightmares are a long distant blur compared to the nightmare in front of me.

"Pranks are funny, this is... I don't know what this is! Out! Out NOW!" I roar, shoving her rear and pushing her out of the automatic sliding door. She giggles as I shove what feels like a half-ton horse towards my door, which is smart enough to open on its own to spare it my wrath, or so I like to pretend as I heave the obstinate home-invader.

With a glance to the ground in which the bitch sees something I don't, Celestia moves to the side, throwing me off balance and sending me flopping forwards out of my own doorway, where I fall into a pit filled with snow up to my neck. I'm surprised for a moment that Priss even had the time to dig this out just for another one of her pranks.

"My word, now that is a jest of much greater quality than mine. I can see why you're upset, if you're used to ones of such high quality," she titters down at me as I wipe rapidly melting slush from my face.

As my entire body shudders with pure rage, she suddenly seems to realize something.

"Oh, Lord Weiss, do take me to see little Cadence, I wished to visit the dear again as well while I'm here. She's such a sweetheart, yes?" Celestia asks with a fond smile.

I can only imagine Priss's confusion wherever she's watching to catch my reaction when she sees a few hallways explode from the pure hate-fire I emit in that brief moment.

Scrambling out of the pit and failing to strangle the princess, our loud bickering, I admit only in the privacy of my own mind, manages to distract me from my worries for a short while. Worries of the future, but worse still, of the present.

As I fail to get Celestia to leave as we enter the cafeteria, I briefly consider what Sombra is doing, if he isn't anywhere in the Frozen North that we can find.

When Celestia snatches my slice of red-velvet cake in a telekinetic field strong enough to rip apart steel, My worries are forgotten in light of my white hot rage as I try to rip it out of her grasp, about as effectively as a toddler trying to yank a rope out of a playful dog's mouth.

She snorts in a distinctly unprincess-like manner as I ineffectually summon a sword and slam it into her side, trying to distract her long enough to get my dessert back. It bounces off about as harmlessly as my words clearly do, but when I sneer and transmute the slice into a hunk of poisoned royal sugar, she sets it down and glares at me, finally annoyed to my liking.

Cadence, now an active four-year-old pegasus, laughs openly at our deadly dance of annoyance and aggravation, flitting around the cafeteria as her foster-mother tries to convince her to come down with a worried tone. Last year's Blast Day had been enough to turn the pegasus into a Longma as well, though it didn't seem to affect her wings, beyond making them sprout a single small claw at their joints, like that one type of bird whose name I couldn't remember.

Her mane was another surprise, as it seemed to crackle and spark in a way that intrigued Dr. Real to no end. I chalked it up to "Important Pony Destiny Bullshit" and left it be.

Giving my own smirk to the annoying princess as she glances at the active filly with no small amount of fondness, I, with a smooth motion, shove the magically sedative-laced cake-crystal into my mouth before she can react, pure spite motivating me to eat the cake now that she was idiotic enough to relinquish it.

I fail to see her roll her eyes as I almost immediately fall asleep, but I manage to hear her mutter "Happy Birthday, you utter foal."

Something I will absolutely be using as ammo against her when I wake up.

"Calm down, sir," Sombra hears hissed to his side as they trot through a blistering hot frontier town, the desert sun slamming down on them heavily.

He scowls. Her voice, her annoying voice that she used to try and quell his anger had grown more irksome since his defeat, since his desperate escape from his own God Damn kingdom!

"What even is a 'God Dam'?" he mutters to himself, darkly furious and still having those curious thoughts worming their way into his mind.

"Pardon, sir?" Mercy asks, the stallion glancing to his companion, whose voice was muffled slightly by the thick mask covering her face.

The snake was as thick around as his own barrel, and long enough to easily choke the life out of any ordinary pony. Her olive scales were mottled with darker spots, and in spite of all the signs to the contrary, Mercy was no constrictor. Her venom could attest to that, and the victims of that venom... They could not.

Staring into the Great Snake's eyes, he saw only the glossy smoked-glass inserts of her plague mask.

"Nothing. I grow weary of your games, Mercy. Tell me where we are going. I will not ask again," he responds instead.

The snake rises up to her full height. "You demanded the theft of that Sage's work, did you not? Unlike you, I have..."

The snake sways from side to side, ponderously. "Peers, in the art of biology. Ones who can help you, but only with that lovely heart you saw fit to bring."

Sombra frowns, thinking to the relic she demanded he bring as they scrambled to gather up what scraps they could before the barrier protecting the Crystal Empire from the royal sisters collapsed entirely.

Even now, he dares not look at the vile crystal, for fear of what visions he might see in the Crystal Heart's enchanted surface. Its propensity for using prophetic visions to manipulate were well known to him, and he did not trust a relic of Love to hold his best interests at heart, perhaps ironically.

At the sight of King Sombra's glare heating up at her lack of clarification, she finally answers, slithering around her king and, glancing to the sides for any who might be listening in on their little conversation, whispers with a hiss.

"I speak, of course, of the Changelings."

Squiggles tripped over a rock, one he should have seen, even in the pitch blackness of the hive.

As the pod of pink liquid splattered on the ground, he cried, trying to scrape up the liquid in his practically wire-framed hooves. He could only watch in horror and despair as the thin, nearly invisible black miasma in the air burned away the liquid love, making it evaporate as they warred against one another upon exposure.

"You incompetent foal! What have you done?!" his commander roared from the tunnel near him startling Squiggles and causing him to slip and fall on the pink sludge.

His hooves, hollowed out from famine, were unable to take the strain, several of the thin branches holding the swiss-like hoof together splintering painfully.

He didn't answer his commander, who stomped forwards to discipline the bug. Instead, he just whimpered with pain from the damage caused by a simple fall.

"With this damn miasma everywhere, you know we can't let any of our stored love be exposed! Do you have any idea-"

An interruption came from an unlikely source. "Stop," the two-toned voice, said, followed by Squiggles feeling telekinesis lifting him into the air.

Daring to open an eye, he gazed into his queen, who looked at him like the bug he was. The one he felt like ever since the miasma had begun to spread over the land.

"Your majesty! I'm sorry! I'm sorry I didn't mean to!" he begs, staring at Queen Chrysalis with horror as she casually lifts up the pink fluids from the ground, sealing them in a new pod.

It was embarrassing. Around them, drones scurried underhoof, many of them the new, smaller variety that had begun to appear when the miasma choked out larger eggs from gestating, and weakened changelings that had refused to sacrifice height during the rationing.

His queen is unshaken by her blubbering drone. "I know. You are dismissed, Commander Elytra," she says, turning to the one that yelled at him.

She returns her attention to Squiggles. "You must go with the others now, Squiggles," she explains, making him blink before shaking his head.

"I'm still strong enough to work, I won't make another slip-up, I promise!" he responds, wriggling in her telekinetic grasp.

She carried the wounded changeling with her as she crawled through the tunnels of the hive. "Do not question my decisions," she said simply, and somewhat emotionlessly.

He clammed up at this, recognizing the rebuke for what it was.

"I'm sorry," Squiggles responded quietly as they entered a large cavernous chamber, one with a large number of sick changelings in it. The chamber's rock was freshly carved, and he could see the various podded changelings. The nursedrones often coughed whenever they slowed or rested for too long, but worse still were the patients.

He could see that many of them looked awake and aware, and many of them were massive as well, the sort of drones who were the first to deal with the real problems of the hive. The kind of problems a changeling fought with hooves.

Squiggles could sense their discontent. The problem that threatened the Changeling race couldn't be fought that way. Even crueler, the strongest had been the first to fall, that much was obvious.

They glared, several of them even had their hooves crossed. Anxious and aching to fight, despite how fragile their bodies were.

"Please, my queen, I'm still strong, I don't want to be useless," he begs, the sight and the pain of his own fractured form making him forget his queen's earlier words.

Chrysalis stops, and turns her full attention to him. She snarls, but he senses no malice from it.

"You are useless. Others will take your place," she says clearly, leaving no room for argument. His pain is forgotten for a moment in the face of her majesty's overwhelming will. He nods obediently.

She turns to one of the nurse-drones, handing him off to them to be put in a healing pod. A stasis pod.

"Do not grow lax, Squiggles. This leisure will not last. I will have you returned to work shortly, and when that time comes, your labor will be... Intense," the queen says quietly, insistently.

He blinks, and nods frantically.

'I will be ready, my queen!' he mouths as the pod fills with slime.

The drone doesn't grin broadly as he watches the green-tinted form of Queen Chrysalis walk away at a measured pace, as if taking time from her schedule to attend to a single injured drone was merely to make an example of him. He expresses none of his feelings. Why would he waste some of his precious happiness on smiling, when his queen is counting on him?

He sees her talking to a commander, senses a brief flash of emotion. Watches her lips move before she more quickly darts away, skittering along the walls and exiting the chamber.

Convincing her majesty to express any feelings was a noteworthy feat. Squiggles couldn't help as a sliver of curiosity escaped onto his face, dissolving into the goop around him.

'Oops!' he realizes, getting a firmer grip of himself.

Chrysalis may have been many things, but a hypocrite wasn't yet one of them. She cursed to herself at the emotion she had let slip. Surprise, while it was not yet rationed, did not warrant being felt just because of who the visitors to the hive were.

"Angel of Mercy is here? Are you certain?" she asks her commander politely, buzzing through the tunnels at incredible speeds.

"Yes. Her and another. The shadow pony that ruined the Crystal Empire," the commander nods as they both land in her throne room, a cavern like all the others, but close to the surface, to entertain visitors and simplify banishments.

Chrysalis allowed her eyes to narrow. Hate was plentiful, and she felt no need to ration what little she could amass safely. "Send them in. I want an explanation," she says coldly, climbing onto her stone throne and reclining on it, openly radiating disdain in her posture.

The doors open, and striding in with confidence and malice strong enough to push aside the miasma, King Sombra approaches, Mercy slithering in behind him.

"So it is true. The tyrant of the Crystal Empire has come to my hive..." Chrysalis mutters, loud enough for him to hear.

Sombra's face slowly shifts from a leer to an almost coy smirk. His self-satisfaction as clear as day.

"Indeed. And I have come at the behest of this one, my royal doctor," he explains, stepping aside only slightly, forcing the snake to go around him to face the queen.

"Forgive me, your majesty. I and my king saw no other choice but to seek your aid. A new ruler threatens his hold over the empire. He demands I steal from this ruler their secrets of biology, and there is only one who holds mastery over the arts of the cells as well as I," Mercy says in a quiet, kindly tone.

Even now, Chrysalis saw fit to express respect for the snake's genuine feelings on the matter of wanting to restore the status quo of King Sombra's rule, nodding to acknowledge this respect.

Who else on this earth could feel kindness and happiness in the depths of the changeling hive? Who could ply the trade of surgery and experimentation and take pleasure in it? On their own kind, no less?

Angel of Mercy was anything but her name in one sense, and precisely it in the other.

"You are one I may call a peer, Angel of Mercy, but his majesty, King Sombra, is anything but. Do not forget why I barred you entry to the hive in years past, once your master saw fit to hide away the Crystal Heart," she glares, ignoring Sombra's twitching face.

"To rule over ponies is laudable, but with the Empire in ruin, it cannot spread love across Equestria, and now, his meddling has become the crucible for a new Empire to emerge, one that radiates not the magic to manage and enhance the love in the world, but instead, one that refines and spreads hatred."

She glares at Sombra, now, sensing beneath his current feelings deeper ones, his complex relationship with the sage that has vexed him thus far. Even he does not realize he is under the sway of that vile Kingdom Heart as much as any other pony, what should have been simple childish hatred with no depth had bloomed into a complex jewel of interconnected offense and respect in equal measure.

Queen Chrysalis could almost appreciate feelings like those, if they were not the source of her hive's suffering.

"The foalish ponies may revel in the joys that come from their confused grudges transforming into precious rivalries, but my kingdom faces famine and disease in this new world. Do I owe you thanks? Do I owe you what you have come to obtain from me? I think not."

Sombra snarls, and she smells the rotting odor of hatred in the air. Mercy, however, manages to catch his attention and calm his wrath, for a moment.

The shadowy unicorn, after a deep, calming breath, obtains a snide, manipulative bent to his tone.

"You owe us nothing. We have come because our goals align, and we have come to rectify what my rule has... Unintentionally done to your own."

He hisses as his horn smoulders. Backlash from his telekinesis reaching through to harm him as he lifts from his saddlebags a bright cyan crystal, in the shape of a heart.

"I have made a sacrifice, to bring this before you. I have taken a risk to allow it to be employed once more. I have lain down my pride in the face of defeat, to visit your kingdom now, as I am. Is this sufficient to express my sentiments? My willingness to aid you, as I would have you would aid me? Will you be my ally, Queen Chrysalis? My... Friend, in these trying times? You are, after all..."

He smiles maliciously, and Chrysalis, seeing her own drones in the throne room gravitate towards the glowing crystal like moths to a flame, begins to grin with equal malice.

"...The enemy of my enemy."

(Present Chapter 33): Schaudenfreude

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"She will seek out her well of power," Chrysalis begins, her drone wheeling her to an ornate table in the meeting room that had been hastily constructed days ago to handle matters of state during the reconstruction of Canterlot.

"Well of power?" Cadence asks, doing her best to keep an open mind to the potential ally in front of her.

The queen nods. "We were unable to keep infiltrators in the Shadow Realm for any length of time when it was at its peak, but once the empire dissolved, it was trivial to keep tabs on the Anathema's alchemist. She returned to Zebrica for a time, rampaging for centuries trying to locate Weiss Noir's vessel through scrying and other means. During this time, one particular location was of interest. An abandoned well that she used as her primary cauldron."

Cadence thinks on this. She was vaguely aware of what the changeling queen was referring to. Though she only knew of it as 'The Blackstone Well', which was thought to be cursed.

"You believe she will return to it? Does she have some sort of method of damaging the seal laid by the Elements there?" Shining Armor interjects.

Chrysalis looks at the unicorn with a measured gaze. "No. She already has what she needs to do that. The witch was one of the Anathema's most critical assistants, and aided in designing many of his creations with her clever magic. Among those are a set of four relics that we believe to be capable of breaking the seal of the Elements, somehow."

"While you ponies may not have paid any mind to that being beyond his foalish pranks, we are not so easily fooled. He built those ancient blueprints in public, loudly, and carelessly, trusting that no one knew what he had planned for them. An automaton, a reality-bending cap, a shapeshifting substance, and..."

She shudders, the first real emotion that the queen had shown thus far. Fear.

"A machine. A terrifying machine."

The guards in the room stir at this nervously, reading the mood, but Chrysalis and her drone ignore them.

"I believe he has completed those relics, and, once Thiefwitch Malusi has obtained them, she will return to her well of power to use them."

Taking a deep, rasping breath, Chrysalis continues. "No matter the cost, I cannot allow this. That creature's freedom is a threat to love itself. Surely you of all ponies know this? Surely you are as sentimental as the rest, in the knowledge that your so-called Lord may grow Restless, or even destroy himself afterwards, should his vengeance be complete?"

Cadence, for a moment, understands that perspective, even if she doesn't share it. It is, perhaps, true that at one point, the princess had hoped for Lord Weiss Noir to survive in this new era.

But that was years ago, and clearly, the Queen of the Changelings didn't know her as well as she thought.

"I have greater concerns than what used to be Lord Weiss Noir," Cadence explains, making the queen grow tense.

Cadence rises from her chair, pacing around the table to the wheelchair-bound queen. She notes the holes that Chrysalis had never seen fit to fill with love. The missing limbs that she had never seen fit to heal.

Signs of physical damage, yes, but more than that, for a race of shapeshifters and masters of Love... Signs of guilt. Proof that what Cadence was about to demand held a kernel of justice to it. If even Chrysalis refused to fix the wounds she had gotten from her ill-planned assault on the Shadow Realm, then even she must have seen fault with it. Seen fault in her actions.

"Maybe it is callous of me, but I knew Weiss. He was like an uncle to me. He cared, even when Dark Magic influenced him in ways he wouldn't admit to us, he kept his soul pure. But I've read the history books. I am not as 'sentimental' as Luna and Celestia are, no. The Weiss Noir that I knew is long dead, and what has grown into where he once was, I have tried my best to never meet," she admits with some shame.

She, who ascended out of love for even her enemies, found herself oddly numb towards her uncle, and what he had become. She did not despise him like some, but it was clear that he was ill, and she couldn't find it in her to believe that he would ever return to his former self. She could neither hate nor love the former Lord of the Shadow Realm, so instead, she left him be.

Her mind returns to the matter at hand, and she blinks away the mist in her eyes. "If Thiefwitch Malusi is truly going all the way to Zebrica to free Weiss Noir, then we don't need to act hastily. If she is not, then your lead is of no consequence. Either way, I have time to deal with you first."

Chrysalis's eyes widen. "I came here to help you!" she shouts, squirming for a moment, before coughing heavily and sinking back into her chair.

"At any cost, right? Surrender yourself and the Crystal Heart to Equestrian custody. That is the cost," Princess Cadence states, staring down at the queen.

Chrysalis refuses to expend it. Refuses to express the fear inside her. "We need the heart, your majesty. Have we not been good caretakers for it? Is Equestria not flush with love due to our management of it?"

"It is still stolen, and as the Princess of Love, I know all too well that you have not respected the Crystal Heart as you should. Love is still malformed in the world. You are right that under Changeling control, the heart has evolved our world's love to be more than base desires and childish crushes, but it is still malformed. Malformed to suit you, not us," Cadence explains, despite how redundant it is to do so. They both knew that whatever Chrysalis was using the heart for, it was to maximize the amount they could harvest.

Chrysalis frowns. "It is not perfect, yes, but you overestimate how malformed it is. All we have done is alter some of love's priorities. Are you really going to tell me that Equestria suffers because orphaned ponies find more plentiful and rich love surrounding them?"

"It suffers when love is treated like a hedge, trimmed and cut to fit a shape, instead of for its health. It's clear that you do not trust me, but I know these things," Cadence argues.

Shining Armor, who had been listening quietly, notes something that the Changeling Queen had said. "Oh sweet Celestia, don't tell me you've been kidnapping orphaned ponies," he says with growing horror.

Chrysalis snarls. "And what if we have? The Anathema's reign permanently stunted the growth of changeling kind. Should we have replaced those suffering from dwarfism instead? Don't act as if we simply snatch foals from their cribs and pod them up without care or nurture. There is a process to these things. There must be, to ensure the Heart's compliance," she explains bitterly.

Cadence glances to the Crystal Heart, embedded in the stone mantle around Chrysalis's neck. She notes the ebb and pulse of the relic, and the painstaking manipulation that Chrysalis has used to keep it from turning on them. If changelings were really using abandoned children as a resource without care or nurturing, she doesn't doubt that the heart would find a way to put a stop to it, with the amount of magical energy being pumped through it.

"I find that hard to believe, considering you left me in one of those pods for a thousand years," Cadence points out calmly.

"I saved your life!" Chrysalis barks.

"And that's why I stand here before you, willing to help your people, if it is possible. But you have committed crimes, and the heart is not rightfully yours. Will you trust me with the Crystal Heart, if it means witnessing what love can truly be?" Cadence asks, kneeling down before the queen.

She looks distressed, breathing in a wheezing, uneasy way at how close the princess's face is to her own. "You don't even care if he escapes, do you?" she says quietly.

Cadence shakes her head, sparks flying from her mane. "I care about my aunts, Celestia and Luna. I care about Equestria. And yes, I care about the plight of your race. But I can't truly care about your 'Anathema'. I'll help stop him, and, if my aunts have their way, I may even help save him, but you can't use the threat of his hatred as a way to diminish what is important."

"And just what is that?" Chrysalis asks, trying to inject snideness into her tone, but failing out of exhaustion.

The sight makes the alicorn realize something from their apparent exaustion. Here sits a queen so terrified of hatred, so wounded by it, that she defied her race's tennants of deception. She kept her ruined state as it was, even as the ancient relic of the Crystal Empire ensured more than enough love to regenerate it, to present strength instead of the weakness her current state showed.

She came to openly face the pony she cast into the future, the one she attempted to capture, to parlay for alliance against a common enemy, and for what?

Cadence can't help but put a compassionate wing over the crippled queen. She can't help but show what she is so very talented at showing.

"Love."

'Come on, Weiss, I know you made them, now where are they? Tower are they? No, not good enough,' Malusi thinks to herself, stalking around Weiss's tower in the Everfree, constantly looking at the lamp tied to her cloak, as if frightened that it will disappear.

She finds herself baffled as she enters his alchemy lab. The entire thing was stocked, sure, but not nearly well enough for her use.

Stalking past the crystaline beakers, the shelf of bottles and urns, trotting past the simple distillation apparatus, and the dinky cauldron, Malusi grits her teeth at how crude the lab is.

He would never leave a lab so underequipped if he knew she was coming.

'You really thought I bit it, huh, big guy?' she thinks to herself, staring at her master's lamp.

The worst mistake of her life, and it had to hurt the pony she owed the most to.

The door slams open, and she glances back, gripping one of the potions at her belt as she faces whoever threw it open.

"You know, when it comes to barging in like that, I'd say don't knock it, but you clearly haven't," she says, realizing just who had found her so quickly.

It's Zecora, her own daughter.

"You're just in time. I'm after a couple of relics, and I relic-ould use your help finding them, little one," she says with a relieved smile.

Her smile fades as Zecora does not move immediately to help.

"I know not how you've returned ~ But many many things I've learned,
"Mother, please, I'm begging you, ~ Do not enact what you plan to,
"His very fate, his life, hangs in the balance ~ It's not too late, this strife! Restrain your talents!" Zecora exclaims, stepping forwards.

"That's Zecora-f the matter, isn't it?" Malusi muses sadly. Her daughter's rhymes were intricate and interwoven, proof that she was preparing her magic.

The younger zebra winces at the old pun that her mother loved to use.

"Well, if you must know... My potion combined a nick of thyme with a clockwork orange. It was meant to whisk me away to the day when my lord returned, beat the clock so to speak. Sadly, it seems my time-out has only left me whipped and beaten."

She glares at Zecora, striking fear into her daughters heart for a moment, before her expression softens somewhat. "I do have mixed feelings, but decant let myself be shaken or stirred by your words. I can sense the cocktail of dark magic that they emit, but I cannot find the relics themselves. I won't cask you again, where are they."

"I will not tell you, I do not care, ~ You'll find I'm not so quick to scare," Zecora finishes, pulling out a vial of liquid and preparing to do battle.

Malusi frowns.

"So bee it."

With a flash of movement, Malusi flings a bottle of bright yellow liquid at Zecora, the fluid erupting from the uncorked flask, and expanding into a thick honey that traps her against the ground!

Zecora struggles as Malusi approaches her with a frown.

"Honey, you can't break that. I'd love to wax poetic about why you should help me, but I don't have time to bumble around. When you manage to escape, I'd comb through town if I were you. They'll need to hive an alchemist around to help deal with my little... Treats," Malusi smirks, walking away as Zecora tries to grasp the bottle of slip-and-sliodine stuck painfully to her coat by the thick honey.

Walking away from her trapped child, Malusi eventually finds herself in a massive room with an even grander and more ominous looking set of doors, made of black obsidian and rimmed with veins of boiling magma.

Above the door, she smiles fondly as she reads the first line of the quote engraved above the door. "Enter stranger, but take heed, of what awaits the sin of greed."

'Some things never change, do they, my lord?' she thinks to herself, ignoring the rest of the stolen poem.

As she approaches, she notes Weiss's enchantments at work, golem-based defenses sliding out of the walls, pointing lasers at her body that seem to overtly threaten; 'Leave now!'

Trusting that Weiss himself created the enchantments, she pulls down her hood, showing her face to the golems.

The room cracks, and dust falls as the doors slam open as fast as they possibly can, further doors behind that one slamming open as well, rapidly, desperately, to not impede her for even a moment.

The flaw of enchantments, Weiss had taught her, was that they did as the enchanter would do.

She gallops down the hall, following the scent of dark magic.

(Past Chapter 31): Lovesick

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Years passed quicker than they did before.

Soon, the Crystal Empire, (now the Crystal Egg Zone, as far as a lot of ponies were concerned) found itself being a capital in more than just name. Ponies and creatures from all over played the part of tourists, some wanting to see the new magical technologies, others had a morbid curiosity that drove them to seek out the dark magic we had been mastering.

Indeed, once Sombra had been forced out of the Crystal Empire once and for all, the Shadow Realm flourished and grew even faster than before, to the point where outposts and towns on the surface were common sights to the pegasi who flew overhead. The cold of the Frozen North was held back from the Shadow Realm nearly as well as it had been kept back by the crystal heart, massive vents spewing black fire dotted the land, and around them, trees of metal and jewels covered the landscape.

On a similar note, Celestia and Luna had kept their promise to me. While we kept the last slaves of Sombra asleep to prevent him from controlling them, Equestria sent us food, vast, vast quantities of hay and other assorted things that helped to bolster the sheer number of ponies we had to keep fed while they were asleep. I found myself concerned with how interested the princesses seemed to be at my refusal to eat actual hay, but I hadn't found it snuck into any of my meals quite yet.

We did eventually figure out a way to remove the mind-controlling crystal heart-valves that Sombra had been using to keep the populous under control, thanks to even more help from the Equestrians. Using strong enough healing magic, and some information I managed to dig out of my own memories, we had figured out the trick, drawing heavily from how operations like Heart Transplants worked to control the bleeding and keep the body alive while the valves were extracted and replaced.

There was a lot of confusion, and some strife, but for the most part, the Crystal Ponies had done well enough for themselves upon being awakened, with a lot of help from their families, the Shadow Realm had found a place for those who didn't yet want to be Longma, in the form of the Crystal Egg Zone.

Some who visited the Shadow Realm were just the kind who wanted to learn to be bolder, those who were too shy, and believed time among the Longma would teach them passion. Others, the kind who felt that the rest of the world wasn't bold enough for them. The sort of brutes and rascals who found kinship in the flames of the Shadow Realm.

Some wanted to see the things that were truly unique. The Windego were uncomfortable with all the ponies and non-ponies who wanted to meet these mysterious specters. To learn about beings they once thought were just myths. Some wanted to make sure that the myths didn't reflect the reality. Queen Cold was crucial in this respect, she alone participated in those same legends, and her cuddlesome Togepi form proved suitable for diplomacy between the Windego and those who sought knowledge on them.

Honestly, I had been willing to give her a different pokemon to inhabit for a long time now, but she claimed to have grown used to it. Personally, I think the queen had gotten a little too familiar with people mistaking her for a plush toy, but of course, I couldn't extract a confession from the smug spirit.

A decent chunk of the new tourists were assassins, of course. It was actually pretty flattering, just how many ponies seemed to want me dead. Some saw me as a threat to Equestria, others saw my Dark Magic as an abomination. A few, I'm a bit ashamed to admit, were actually acquaintances I had made bets with. Something about the novelty of a noble outright gambling that they could get me killed, and us then shaking on it had struck me as utterly hilarious.

Needless to say, I had gotten a few random-ass plots of land in the middle of Nowhere-Equestria when getting stabbed by frighteningly enchanted daggers failed to kill me thanks to my egregious use of the Shadow Clone spell. It seemed that nobles were almost as weird as the princesses who ruled them, at least when it came to upholding bets revolving around whether or not they could have me killed...

There was one noble in particular who put it best, a frenemy of mine, 'Prince Pure Platinum'.

"You're too whimsical for your own good. I've got an obligation to at least make an effort to have you disposed of, it's just part of how reputation works among the nobility. You don't seem to have any hard feelings over it though, so some of us can't help but have some fun with it," he explained, before showing me how the teapot he had used for our drinks had a secret chamber for the poison he had snuck into my drink.

When I mused on how the poison tasted fruity, and called it 'a good year', I still remember how loudly and how long he laughed in response, helplessly guffawing at the blase reaction I had.

He didn't bother trying to assassinate me after that, and we still write, from time to time.

It wasn't long after that that, with some anxiety from me, Longma began to spread out themselves, a few of my ponies deciding to go out into the world for various reasons, whether to explore it to find new things to bring home, or to share with the world what they had gained here. I was worried often enough by it, but for the most part, it hadn't caused too much chaos.

Around her sixteenth birthday, Glitter Miss Priss had actually done the same, wanting to expand on her talents of taunting others by visiting the nastiest places around.

Me and Eclipse Flash had written often, and she visited often as well, when we had time between my lessons with my student.

It took time for me to open up to my student about my origins. I told her my original name, and she swore to never share it with anyone. I taught her everything I knew, I taught her how I had learned it. More years passed, and it began to take months, once, even a year, before I could scrounge together a new form of dark magic, or a new technology worth teaching her about.

She had surpassed me in every way, and when she turned twenty, I knew it was almost time. I had a test planned for her twenty-first birthday. The final exam before I passed on control of the Shadow Realm to her. It was a bittersweet lesson, one that I had only begun to devise when I found Sombra's most secret chamber in the Crystal Palace. I found his personal library, and in it, I found his notes on a spell, one so horrific that the knowledge of it threatened to wear at my sanity.

When I told Luna about it, she informed me of the truth behind the nightmares I had been having for years. That I had asked her, perhaps once every year or so, to erase my memory of having discovered the book. That it hadn't been the first time I found that secret room, nor was it the first time I had read the book he detailed the extent of his most important spell in.

I had been, every so often, stumbling onto the secret chamber hidden within the palace, finding that tome, and once more feeling my mind fray at what it had revealed.

This time, I didn't ask her to help me forget. I needed to be sharp, at least until Eclipse could succeed the throne. I needed my friends more than I had ever before to endure the revelation that I had witnessed from reading Sombra's tome, and thankfully, fortune was in my favor, as Priss had written us claiming that she was returning for good, at the end of her studies in aggravation and taunting.

It had been ten years since the fateful day when I was brought to the frozen north, and after a lot of work, after sleepless nights and so much work, I had finally begun to feel... Safe. For me, and for my newfound friends and family.

I breathed heavily, Eclipse Flash's power armor was insane, she had designed the armor from the ground up to use my own Wave Motion Gun's trick of growing ice using Royal Crystal Growth, but instead of using it as a beam of destructive gem-laced water, she had used it as the driving force for a set of pneumatics that put my own golems to shame.

Not that any of my golems lasted long enough to actually test that. Using her Hotswap spell to teleport around both herself and huge chunks of rubble, using Lucky Shot to fire crystal spears that almost seemed to ricochet between my golems, and of course, the dark magic she brought to bear.

Nothing could hold back her hate-fire, save my own body which it ignored. She even managed to get the flames to affect my arms, which cut things close more than once when I had to burst painfully into smoke in order to avoid a blast that would have left me unable to fight.

Her Royal Crystal Growth had also progressed beyond my ability to manage, her hooves serving as the penultimate focus for the stone-producing greed magic. It wasn't enough to just dodge her bucks, I had to utterly destroy the ground and walls whenever she kicked at me, as even if she missed me, it just took a smack to the walls for a pillar of crystal to erupt and smash me to bits.

Prestidigitation was its own mess. While fire and heat no longer harmed me, or any Longma for that matter, Eclipse had proven that fire immunity did not negate the use of Foxfire, by using the force magic of Prestidigitation to generate heat by friction, I had to make sure my footing was even at all times, to prevent her melting the floor to slip me up.

But all of that was strategy, and it was the only thing that gave me even the slimmest chance against my student anymore, unless I had been willing to use lethal force.

"Dragons of the Darkness Flame!" I roared, unleashing two gigantic dragons made of black flames at once that flew towards my student, claws held forwards to rend apart her armor.

The act had left me exhausted, the strain of two spells at once flying free from my horn giving me a massive headache.

My student had stopped dodging the needles I fired at her moments ago, planting her feet and turning around. Surely, even she couldn't be so arrogant as to-

She was that arrogant, and with a pneumatic buck, she kicked my twin-dragon attack into nothing, almost contemptuously battering my ultimate attack to pieces with brute force.

I plop down onto my rear, sweating heavily. "Well, uhh, that's awkward."

My student smirks as she canters over to me. "So I won that one, right?" she asks.

I sigh. "Yes, you won that one, my least-treacherous student."

With a laugh, the mare helps me stand up, grabbing one of my arms and hefting me back onto my hooves.

"It's a good thing I am, or me beating you would have been really awkward," she jokes.

I recieved a notification from one of my little minions nearby, which flapped towards me with its big unblinking eye.

"Priss is here. I should go meet her," I say, cracking my neck and stretching, despite it technically not doing anything useful in my Shadow Clone state.

Eclipse smiles. "I want to see her too. Tell her I'll be waiting at the training grounds, alright my lord?" she responds, to which I just nod, leaving my student to do the cleanup from our brawl.

Before I leave, I give her one last look. "I'm really proud of you, kid," I say, waving goodbye at Eclipse who smiles broadly.

As I made my way to Hidden Palace Zone, I saw her standing in the town square, next to the Kingdom Heart, and trotted up besides the mare. She was as tall as me now, and she looked more mature than I did. My use of stolen (freely given) lifeforce had left me looking a bit too young, even at twenty-six.

Reaching up, I ruffled her red-colored mane with one of my draconic claws, the white limb having long since become something that felt natural, despite how many of them I had.

As I gazed into the glittering black pyroclasm, I felt its warmth falling on me. 'The Crystal Heart must be crying it's eyes out knowing it will never be as warm as this.'

"Hey! Come on Weiss, I just got finished combing that!" Glitter Miss Priss complains, trying to squirm away from my playful ruffling.

I laugh, ruffling it a bit more before pulling my hand away. "And now, you have the privilege of doing so again! You really should be thanking me."

She pouts, standing eye to eye with me. "You're just jealous because under that burning wig you call a mane, you've been reduced to a chrome dome, Weiss."

I glare with a pout of my own. "It's still hair, it's just all flamey. Your hair is flamey too, you know."

Priss's mane of cherry-red fire ripples at this, the color only a few shades richer than her pink coat.

"And it's the finest flame in the Shadow Realm, thank you very much, Lord Weiss. Way better than Eclipse Flash's," She says with a stomp of her armored hoof. I could see the pistons hiss as magically created water escaped the systems as steam. Royal Crystal Growth in action.

The mare had long since taken to wearing powered armor, snatching ideas from Eclipse Flash's notes and putting them to use for her own adventures. Something that had led to their rivalry growing richer and deeper as they matured.

I just laugh some more. My heart felt light. It felt incredibly light, just talking to my old friend.

"So, you'll be staying for good this time, right? You said as much in your letters," I asked, keeping any judgement out of my tone.

She nods. "I've learned a lot. Did you know almost every country on the planet has a curse word that can make an entire room gasp in shock? I've learned fifty-three of em," she admits proudly, her cutie mark of a matador's cape and a malicious smiley face seeming to shine in response.

I blinked at this.

"What, like cu-" I begin.

"'Curses'? Oh yeah, zebras really don't like that one!" Priss nods.

I blink, "...Right."

I chuckle at this, staring at the Kingdom Heart and feeding it some of my hatred. My heart feeling lighter and lighter by the minute.

"You alright?" Priss asks, giving me a concerned look.

"Yeah? Why do you ask?" I respond. My chest feels like it's full of butterflies, and I stumble for a moment. Something's wrong.

"Actually, I..." I start, only for a terrifying pain to shoot through my chest. Another assassin?

"Weiss!" Priss shouts as I fall to my knees, coughing uncontrollably.

Little pink heart-shaped clouds erupt from my hacking, and something dribbles down my chin as my Shadow Clone ruptures.

My meditative state collapses, and I jerk awake painfully. My body!

I bite back a scream as I look at my arms, which are burning up, smouldering in reaction to the air.

I cough loudly, trying not to fall over as I feel my body expelling a foul black liquid and more pink smoke. Taking a breath as best I can, I instantly regret it as it feels like my lungs are on fire.

I slam the alarm button next to me, flaring hate-fire to keep whatever toxins are in the air away from me, but as I do, the pain intensifies further!

My concentration on the spell breaks immediately, and I hear the doors slam open, and a mix of Longma and golemic drones lift me up, scrambling to take me to the medical center, I hear voices and feel poking and prodding as they try to figure out why I'm apparently dying.

"Heart rate is dropping"

"rap-- d-cay"

"He's bleeding pure hate!" I hear one loud nurse shout.

My vision darkens, and then I wake up in a hospital bed, wracked with pain.

Forcing myself to lean up, I see the sheer damage my body is taking, patches of my coat burning with enchanted flames as my body's own magic tries to reject whatever is happening to me.

It's failing.

I look around, desperate for answers, my magical senses in overdrive to try and figure out what kind of magic is doing this, but I can't sense anything. Whatever the cause is, it clearly isn't dark magic.

"Sir, don't get up!" a nurse says, running to me and trying to push me back down.

"It's alright ma'am, I've had worse," I say politely, coughing up pink smoke as I force down the pain rampaging through my body.

She doesn't listen, trying to push me down, and calling for another doctor.

With a twitch, I push the pony away. "Get out of my way!" I snarl, flaring with dark magic as I force my way off the bed.

Immediately, I regret it as one of my arms erupts into a colorful blaze, falling apart into charred bones, something about whatever is affecting me reacting immediately to my use of the magic.

I grimace, yanking out the Migrant Iron Disk that had attached it to me and erasing it with a blast of hate-fire, stomping out of the medical wing.

As I do, I look around, noting several Longma sniffling and coughing, but more worryingly, I see Windego and Pokemon en-masse in hospital beds around me. Snatching a clip-board from one of the doctors, I glance at it before returning it to him.

Chest pains, flu-like symptoms, pink smoke.

"Weiss Noir!" Queen Cold shouts, waddling in as fast as she can. She looks awful, red eyes watering and skin aggravated. It's not nearly as pronounced, but the symptoms are the same.

This isn't a curse, and I'm not the target...

I'm just the most susceptible.

"Do you know what is-" she coughs, "What is causing this?" the short queen demands. She looks almost as bad as I do, though she hasn't burst into flames yet.

My head feels foggy, and my chest feels like I'm burning from the inside out, but I wrack my brain, trying to figure out what is happening.

It hits me like a freight train, as I grab a wastebasket near the door, and look into it with horror. It's full of trash, not a scrap out of place.

It wasn't burning.

"We have to go, take me to the Kingdom Heart!" I scream, throwing the door open as one of my arms becomes inoperable from the flames slowly erasing it.

At the same time, I bite the hell out of my tongue, summoning up a massive amount of greed and turning my remaining arms purple as I rapidly infuse my body with the obsessive emotions. It was the only emotion I could think of that wouldn't be affected by the miasma of poison in the air.

Picking up the queen, I drag her along with me, and gallop towards one of the Arcana Janus Portals as fast as I can.

I skid to a stop in front of the sacred relic of the shadow realm, the gigantic bonfire that served as both protection and emotional stabilizer.

I see Eclipse Flash in front of it, pouring as much magic as she can into the flames.

"Eclipse! What are you doing!" I shout, running to my student. For a moment, I almost suspect her to be the culprit, remembering her earlier desire to try combining love and hate together. The despair on her face, however, disabuses me of that notion.

"Love!" she chokes out. "There's something polluting the Kingdom Heart! Too much love in the air!" she hisses, struggling to keep up the flow of magic as she pours hatred into it. Ponies around her are staring in horror, and a few of them seem to be growing ill as well.

I grab her, trying to pull her away, the enchanted armor she's wearing groans with strain to resist me. "I know already! You're going to get yourself killed! Stop!" I roar, as my student shakes her head.

"I have to keep going, it won't hold otherwise!" she attempts, but with one final gasp, she collapses, magical pistons hissing as she falls to the ground exhausted.

I turn to the flame with mounting horror. One pony alone has no chance of outpacing the pollution, the Love and Hatred in the air are canceling each other out, and poisoning everything containing the dark emotional energy. If Eclipse Flash can't counteract it...

As I watch the Kingdom Heart begin to shrink, I hear a voice that sends chills down my spine, a voice that I would never forget. The voice that haunted my nightmares, nightmares of being nothing more than its owner's reflection in a mirror.

And it was laughing.

"Heh heh heh heh heh..."

Sombra, shrouded in thick green magic, emerges from around a corner, as if he had been waiting for his cue. At the same time, changelings began to emerge from the crowd with malicious grins on their faces, green flames erupting from them as a shroud of thin energy protected them from the weakening Kingdom Heart.

"It's good to see you again, my Pale Shadow," Sombra states simply.

(That Book)

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Shouldst thou seek to awaken oneself in the way of feelings heretofore untapped by the waking mind, there exists a magical spell that shall allow one to conquer that of oneself which they can no longer abide by the dominance of.

But reader, be forewarned, for while this spell can allow thou to conquer the feelings thou deem unfit to rule over thee, the means by which thou shalt do so in the feeling of this magic shall be one fraught with peril, for the thing thou shall create shall be as thou art. It shall possess that which thou possesses. It shalt know thee, and thou shalt know it. Thine fate shall be shared with the forme born of this magic, and so long as the creature of this spell yet lives, thou shalt slowly find its use to be worthless.

The longer thou leavest this magical beast undefeated, the more alike thou two shall become. However, thou must not slay it by thine own hoof, for to slay it would be to share in that fate. Furthermore, thou must not allow it to be slain by the hoof of another, lest the spell be broken prematurely.

Thou must defeat it, completely and utterly, for to conquer thy own emotions, thou must use the warfare of the heart to fight, and not the weapons and magics of the body. For it is simple to break apart a pony's flesh and bone, but to break their spirit requires true resolve. Only in their despair shalt the bonds between thou and thine spell be severed, and its purpose fulfilled.

Shouldst thou seek still the fate of the conqueror, then shalt thou see the method of this magic;

Shalt thou take the dream where one saw regret in the eyes of a lover, and it shall be wrapped tightly within the heart of darkness where one once dwelt.

This parcel shall then be pierced by the awakening to a new dawn, and it shall be pierced as well by the sight of a burning home, and the flames that one saw in the reflections of a mirror.

The parcel shall bloom, and must be fed with the memory of new grain, where the grain has been tempered with the first cut one felt as a child, and its shocked silence.

It shall bloom, and in that bloom one must look to the stars, and remember then the time when it was wondered what orb lay beyond them.

What upon that orb is so crucial, so fleeting, that the dream of that distant sphere yet appears in the mind, where no meeting has yet been had. What imaginings could be born, then, without a reason to imagine them?

Indeed, then, shall the caster feel what curious feelings would be felt by the fleeting, crucial things upon that distant orb? Shall the caster be imagined by what lay upon it?

Yes. The confidence of this be true, that what imagines is then imagined. What is reasoned thus reasons. That if there should be that distant orb among the stars or beyond, that it should house what could be, what could have been.

This which could have been, thou reader, shall be thy trial. Thou shalt thus, upon feeling this spell as one does, bear witness to a star in the night, cast upon the land where no pony has trod. Thou must not interfere, for fate is cruel and petty towards those unwilling to play upon its board.

The thing thou hast created, then, will possess thine talent, without knowing why, for the talent of a pony is their fate. In turn, then shalt thou know the imaginings of thine creation, and the spirit claimed to inhibit it, for in the imagination lay the fate of that distant sphere, for in that dream of far off places, one only finds places of dreams.

Thou shalt face a being with the mind of a distant land, one who draws upon naught but a pale shadow of thine talents given freely to them. And to defeat them, ye foal, thou must learn what they would teach.

And they shalt teach much indeed.

"Is this what you wanted to show me, Weiss? It's interesting, to say the least."

"God, I hate how shitty these books are at explaining spells. They really should use plain English for them, there's a hundred words for a hundred emotions, and instead the morons writing these books feel like jerking off their own literary superiority with incomprehensible prose."

"Distant orbs? Imagination? I don't even know what this spell is supposed to do, beyond apparently making some kind of creature piloted by some kind of spirit, and that's if this whole thing isn't just some metaphor."

"It..."

"It would draw upon a pale shadow of the caster's talents..."

"You would know the imaginings of the creation, and the spirit that inhabits it."

"To imagine is to be imagined..."

"...This can't be right... It can't be."

"Is that why I'm here? This spell?"

"The longer the caster goes without 'defeating' their creation, the more alike they become. Is that why I've gotten so good at Dark Magic? Why all of this empire-building shit came so easy? God, Dark Magic always was so simple to me, so trivial. I thought I just had a talent for it, but if this damn spell is right, then.. Then it's just his talent! Do I even have one of my own? God Damn it!"

"He knows, he knows all the stupid quotes from all the stupid cartoons I've ever watched. He knew the perfect things to say to break me down, he was trying to break me down this entire time."

"Why did he try to kill me? Did he not know? Why would he have tried to pull that migrant iron shit if it would just have gotten him killed too? Did he not care? Did he not believe that the spell would actually kill him if I died? Did he know something I didn't?"

"I don't understand, am I really going to become more and more like that bastard? Share his fate?"

"I..."

"I'm scared, Luna."

"I know, Weiss. This isn't the first time we've spoken of this tome."

"...I know. I didn't want to remember, did I?"

"You did not. But know this, Weiss, no matter what happens, you are my friend. Even fate is helpless in the face of friendship."

"Right. I think I'm ready to remember this. I can face this, if I have my friends by my side."

"Even if I am scared of what comes next."

(Present Chapter 34): Hatesick

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"You'll need me," Nightmare says simply, crossing her little hooves with a raised eyebrow. The synthetic body that Weiss Noir had trapped her in after their duel at the ruins of the Shadow Realm was equal parts frustrating and rapturous. She may have finally been her own pony, but that didn't make up for the issues that arose from being trapped in the form of an actual child at that madman's behest.

Luna snarls, pacing frantically. "No I won't. We can stop this, I can stop this, and if I listen to you right now, I might lose him forever."

Nightmare just shakes her head. Even chained up, hidden behind a mask, and trapped in the body of a filly, the apochriphal nightmare still has enough of what she is to unnerve her former host.

"When he escapes, he'll be too powerful for you to put down again. You remember the power he held near the end, and thus, so do I. If he escapes, then there's no hope without us working together. We were stronger together, stronger than your sister, even if I manipulated you, there's no doubt that we had terrifying power," the filly explains emotionlessly.

Luna pauses, chills running up and down her spine as disgust floods her body. "Maybe I would rather there be no hope than ever have to be us again," she muses dangerously.

"Now be silent, I'm trying to think of where that Zebra might have gone," she finishes.

Unable to keep from offering one last comment, Nightmare muses to herself. "I wasn't a person until I was us, Luna. Believe yourself if you don't believe me, that what we were together still cared for Weiss Noir's fate."

Luna can take no more, and runs out of the room desperately to get free of the Nightmare's words.

Granny Smith was old fashioned. She was the kind of old fashioned where her mouth got her into trouble when she'd call things 'newfangled' that were still pretty old fashioned by everypony else's standards.

Needless to say, Big Mac, bless his heart, had to be a bit sneaky to get her to drink that gunk he won off that old dirtbag whatshisname a week ago at that tournament thingie, saying it was medicine that'd make her feel twenty years younger.

'Did a lil more than that, hoo doggy,' Granny thought to herself, still feeling a bit unreal after having drank the grand prize of the Dark Tournament. Youth in a Bottle, a lifetime's worth of the stuff.

She was surprised when, after drinking the nasty stuff a week ago, she woke up the next morning in the literal prime of her life. No more creaky bones, no more dry mouth, no more fuzzy vision. It was more than a little frightening how the fog she hadn't even noticed was gone as well.

She never paid it any mind, when ponies asked about her eccentricities, she would just say 'Oh, an old gal like me has a bit too many memories knocking around up there! Just takes me a bit to sort through em!' she'd explain as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

Clearly, though, that wasn't the case, as she remembers spending a moment in bed just staring up and thinking clearly. 'too many memories' nothing, it was like night and day!

She remembers the very loud shock she expressed when a look in the mirror revealed that the bottled youth Big Mac won hadn't stopped at greasing up her joints and blowing the cobwebs out of her attic, she looked almost younger than Applejack for goodness sake! Her wrinkles were banished, her back was straight, her mane was the richest blond she had seen outside of a beauty magazine, and even her old farming physique didn't seem so far gone!

Applejack, the poor mare, was rightly furious when she found out what Big Mac did, and Granny had to put her hoof down to stop the one-way-argument that'd surely been brewing. It took time and a lot of very short utterances from Big Mac, but eventually, everything got explained to everypony's liking.

Granny had a new lease on life, Applebloom had an endless torrent of questions, and Big Mac got extra chores for being so sneaky about things. It might have seemed a bit of an unfair punishment for all the good he did, but Big Mac knew that the family was big on honesty, so he took his lumps without complaining.

Of course, that was a week ago, and if Granny thought for a moment that a youth potion was the oddest thing she'd see within the month, she was plum outta luck.

She was just sitting in her old rocking chair, the ancient piece of wooden furniture a bit too comfortable for the invigorated mare.

"Maybe I aught to pick up some kinda hobby," she mutters, unused to not needing to have her usual sitdowns when her bones got a bit too weary for the day. As she mutters, however, one of her ears quirks at a faint sound rapidly approaching the house, galloping and the squeak of a small cart.

"Granny!" she hears desperately yelled out by some young colt dragging a cart behind him, one that looks awfully familiar. In the cart, a thrashing filly is gibbering, trying to talk as if possessed!

"GSIro'mam necnpayor neSy-" the filly attempts, their mouth twitching and spasming as if trying to say multiple things at once.

"What the hay is going on here?!" she shouts, leaping to attention and grabbing the twitching filly, looking her over.

The familiar looking colt frown, "I- I dunno, I got splashed with something that made me all little after I found Apple Bloom like this!" they squeak, and Granny gasps when she realizes that this little colt is Big Mac!

"Apple Bloom?!" Granny gasps, looking at the filly closer. Their coat is a mottled mix of yellow white and orange, with mostly yellow hooves. Shockingly, the filly has both a white horn and a set of orange wings.

"Granwe ateny Cupsmcaith" they gibber out, starting to cry as their wings buzz rapidly.

Granny's eyes narrow as she starts to piece something together. "Calm down, one at a time, alright? Applebloom, try to tell me what happened," she says softly.

The filly's mouth clamps shut before, with some effort, she manages to speak clearly.

"W-we a-ate a cupcake and it s-stuck us all together like-"

"Yeah!" she seems to interrupt herself, before clamping her mouth shut again as a sheepish expression shoots across her face.

"...like this, Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo, we, we're all stuck together!" the filly finally barks out, revealing that the magic cupcake had apparently somehow fused three ponies into one.

Granny hugs them tight, and grabs "Little" Mac too. "We're going straight to the doctor, lickity split," Granny says in a no-nonsense tone, lifting up Big Mac and tossing him in the cart as well before quickly hitching herself to it and galloping towards Ponyville General.

As she does, the crusaders haltingly try to explain exactly what happened.

"Well, looks like we ain't got a special talent for drink mixin', Applebloom muses as she and her friends plod down the street."

Sweetie Belle shrugs. "I dunno, we still might, it isn't as though we managed to actually do any, with how fast they kicked us out when we snuck in," she muses.

Scootaloo grimaces. "Meh, who'd want a special talent for mixing up that bad-smelling stuff anyway," she exclaims, halting suddenly and causing her friends to accidentally bump into her rear.

"Whoa, who's that over there?" she says, pointing to a zebra they don't recognize leaving a small box under a bench before running away.

Applebloom's eyebrows raise as she peeks out from behind her pegasus friend. "I dunno, but it looks like she lef' something, let's check it out!" she says, trotting over to the bench.

As she pulls the box out from under the bench, she notes a letter pinned to the top of it, reading it aloud as her friends crowd around.

"'Ah wasn't ready for the responsibility'." Applebloom reads with confusion, looking around the box for any other identifying marks. All she found was a little label near the bottom that read "Potara Edibles"

Sweetie Belle's eyes bug out. "Oh my gosh, what if it's a little puppy or kitten in there?! Did that zebra abandon some poor little creature?"

Opening the box, the trio all express confusion, as the only thing inside it is a single cupcake, with frosting on the top that reads 'Share Me'. The gold frosting is topped with little orange beads of some kind of candy or jelly, but the exact flavor is unknown.

"Huh... Well, bottoms up!" Scootaloo says, reaching for it.

"No way! It says yer supposed to share it!" Applebloom exclaims, holding the box away.

"Well it'll be messy if we just pull it apart, I've got some cutlery stored away at the clubhouse, we could share it together!"

"Works for me! I call dibs on the biggest part!" Scootaloo exclaims, making her friends giggle as they make their way to the clubhouse.

An hour later, Big Mac, who had been plowing a field for planting, heard a earsplitting scream, and running to the source, saw a zebra galloping away from the clubhouse.

With snarl, he kept an eye where they were headed, before dashing to the clubhouse and bucking the door off its hinges.

As he gaped in shock at what he sees, a bucket of some kind of liquid falls over onto his head, having been suspended up on the door.

Twilight and her friends returned to Ponyville in grim spirits, Celestia simply claiming "We will call when we require you, my student. Be safe."

As they returned however, Ponyville was practically a ghost town, and it struck some of them with what was almost a bit of nostalgia to see ponies slamming their windows shut and fearfully glancing outside.

"Jeeze, I hope this isn't another thing like with Zecora," Pinkie Pie muses.

Eventually, they figured out where everypony went when they found the clinic packed full of countless cases, both similar and worse than the one that befell Big Mac and the fillies, ponies were coming in as the wrong gender, the wrong species, or just afflicted by horrible ailments like being half their height, or somehow being as flat as a silhouette despite their otherwise normal mobility.

"I saw a zebra giving out free lemonaid and then I got one and this happened! I think she stole my wedding ring!" one mare screams, waving her tail that had started growing lemons like a tree.

"I saw the same zebra, but I was getting a mail-order dress for my marefriend and it did this! Now the dress is gone and I look ridiculous!" a stallion gestures frantically to his coat, which had grown out into the shape of a frilly dress that Rarity looks at appraisingly, before aborting her gaze with embarrassment as they glare at the fashionista.

One filly tries to say something, but, lacking a head, Twilight and the others only hear a muffled rant from the other room.

A doctor brings the head in, and she repeats herself, "I had a sore throat and this lady gave me a cough drop and said it'd fix it! She stole my tiara!" Diamond Tiara squeals with rage.

Pinkie Pie looks like she's trying really hard to be respectful, despite how hilarious some of these strange effects are, while Fluttershy looks mostly horrified and saddened at the sight of it all. Applejack just looks absolutely furious, seeing what happened to Applebloom and her friends, and quickly joins Granny Smith in trying to comfort the shivering filly(s)

Twilight looks to her friends. "Are you girls thinking what I'm thinking?"

Rainbow Dash nods. "It's that Malusi, isn't it?! We gotta find her before she can mess with anypony else!" the pegasus says with aggravation.

Rarity, however, looks nervous. "Twilight, dear, I don't mean to sound paranoid but... She claimed to be one of Weiss's, and have we ever once gotten one over on him by rushing in? This feels an awful lot like one of the schemes in which we're being provoked to act hastily," the unicorn explains.

Applejack, interjects after a moment of thought from the group. "I think she's right, Twi, if we all go scrambling around, it might get ugly right quick, specially' if there's traps around. Rainbow Dash, you think you can fly up high and look around Ponyville? Iffin you see her, don't pick a fight, get back to us as quick as you can. Sound like a plan?"

They all consider this, and Rainbow Dash finally nods. "I'll keep my head on straight, Applejack. Be back in a flash!" the pegasus exclaims, flying out of the window of Ponyville General and high up into the sky.

High above the clouds, she looks around trying to spot the sight of the Zebra Witch. 'Nothing near Sugarcube Corner, nothing near the market, not a pony in sight near Sweet Apple Acres...' Dash mutters, flying at incredible speeds around town.

Eventually, her searching gaze trails towards the Everfree Forest, and the titanic tower sprouting from what was once the Castle of the Pony Sisters. Weiss's old haunt.

"I'll check it out and head right back," Dash mutters, speeding towards the structure to see if there are any signs of anything suspicious.

Landing on one of the wild clouds, Dash glares down where she can see Malusi laughing and dancing around, wearing a familiar purple cap, that Wishing Cap that Weiss apparently made and then never really used again.

Spotting the lamp clipped to the witch's cloak, the pegasus is sure of it now, this is Malusi, and she was raiding Weiss's junk for something.

As she turns to leave, something slams into her suddenly, a flash of rainbow light and heat rocketing past her as she's thrown flying to the ground!

"Ughhh, what the heck hit me..." Rainbow Dash groans, trying to stand up, only to realize with a panic that the Zebra witch is right in front of her with a large heavy looking bottle!

She jerks to attention. "If you think some stupid potion is going to beat me, you got another thing coming," Dash growls shakily, puffing herself up against the Zebra who somehow grounded her.

Malusi just smiles, before flipping towards her in a dizzying acrobatic display!

Rainbow Dash flaps, preparing to rocket off, but before she can, Malusi brains her over the head with the bottle, and everything goes black.

Dash wakes up near the entrance of Weiss's Tower, her head pounding with a headache to end all headaches. She tries to remember what she was doing, but everything is fuzzy and her memories come sluggishly, as if being planted there at an agonizingly slow pace.

Looking around, she vaguely remembers a zebra, and how... She was supposed to catch her?

She hears a muffled groan from inside Weiss's tower, and shakes off the haze, galloping inside only to find Zecora trapped inside some kind of goop!

She flies towards the mare, stumbling in midair for a moment as her wings feel stuff and unresponsive, but quickly enough she manages to smash open the amber encasing the mare, freeing her enough to whip out a vial that she pours over the substance, dissolving it away.

"Rainbow Dash, thank you for coming, ~ My escape, this goop was gumming," she pants leaning on the pegasus for stability.

"I don't remember what happened, what's going on, why were you here?!" Dash exclaims.

"My mother trapped me, I would not aid ~ The dark working that she had bade.
"You must hurry, help me to town ~ I fear the worst, what may abound!
"My mother is cruel, mischief her goal ~ None may be safe, not even foals!"

The memory bubbled up unnaturally, and Dash shook her head with discomfort. "I think I've got a concussion. She hit me over the head?"

Zecora winces with sympathy, and, feeling better than her companion clearly does, shifts as they slowly walk out of the tower, bearing more of Dash's weight than the pegasus is bearing her own.

Back at Ponyville, the duo return to see Cadence, Celestia and Luna talking to the girls inside the clinic. Celestia is lifting the elements from the golden box they were kept inside, and as she sees Rainbow Dash and Zecora, she addresses them.

"Are you alright? We feared the worst when we heard you had not returned," she asks.

"Returned for uhh, the zebra, right? It's hard to remember, I think I got hit over the head," Dash admits, Zecora looking horrified at the ailments inflicted on the ponies there.

"Why the hay is she even doing this? Just for the fun of it?!" Rainbow Dash growls at the sight of so much suffering.

"Discord was freed by disharmony, was he not? ~ The hate to wake Weiss, well, you'll need a lot," Zecora theorizes.

"Right. You and the others need to head to Zebrica, I found out that Malusi is probably heading to her well of power to try and use a ritual to free Weiss Noir. I will remain here, but Princess Celestia and Princess Luna have insisted on accompanying you," Cadence explains.

Zecora frowns at this, rubbing an ointment onto the fused crusaders that seems to reduce their twitching.

"You are wrong, that well is dry ~ She would not go there, don't even try"
Whoever told you, they are not right, ~ Mother and Weiss are much alike"
To free her lord, she seeks his throne ~ To that dark end, she will go home"

"The Shadow Realm, that darkened place ~ Where love is gone, and hate you face."
There you must go, do not delay ~ I would help you, but I must stay."
I cannot cure this dreadful curse ~ But I must help or it gets worse."

"Defeat mother, hurry fast! ~ By her darkness these spells are cast!
The only cure, to what she's laid ~ is to defeat her, I'm afraid.
Travel there, to Hidden Palace, ~ Please save them both from their malice," the Zebra finishes

Luna nods as the last of the Element Bearers don the Elements of Harmony. "I know of where you speak. Let us hurry," she exclaims, igniting her horn in an all encompassing teleportation spell that takes the two Princesses and the bearers away.

In a blast of light, the group appears in the middle of a blistering snowstorm that is banished quickly with a flash of Celestia's magic.

As the storm fades, and the rest of the ponies stop shivering, Luna stares with dread at something that was not there the last time she visited these blasted wastes.

The underground complex of Hidden Palace, through some unknown means, had been raised up into the sky, the towering monolith channeling dark power of some sort unknown to her.

"Are we too late?" Fluttershy whimpers, seeing the black miasma hovering overhead.

Luna shakes her head firmly. "No. If he were free, I would know. We all would," she explains grimly as she leads the group towards the tower, where at the top, faint laughter can be heard echoing through the frozen north.

As they approach, Luna pauses and the group halts. "I sense a trap," she mutters, summoning a large dome of magic that surrounds the group.

They walk forwards a few steps, prepared for anything, only for Luna to pause as something cracks underhoof.

She looks down, lifting a hoof with a look of disgust at whatever liquid it was she stepped in, only for that look of disgust to become more adorable as she explodes into smoke, the effects of the potion shrinking her down to the size she was when freed of the Nightmare originally.

"Damn it all," Luna snarls, wiping her hoof on the snow as Celestia ignites her horn, trying to remove the affliction.

"It's no use, It must be designed for me," Luna insists, waving off her sister's magical aura.

She turns to the Element-bearers. "Be wary, this is what happens when you fight a Zebra so close to being a Wisemare. She is channeling enough cleverness magic to figure out not only the recipe of a potion sufficient to affect me, but to predict even where I lay my hoof in leading you to her. Do not speak once we face her, I will try to convince her to cease her grim task, and if I fail, you will use the elements," Luna says, trying to ignite her horn for another teleport.

It fails entirely, sparking and sputtering uselessly.

Princess Celestia frowns, and with a roar of magic, enters her full Alicorn Suite, burning hot enough to eradicate any toxins that might try to affect her as well.

"Allow me," she says, igniting her own horn and teleporting them directly to the top of the bramble-like structure of the Hidden Palace Zone's excavated tunnels. To the top of the tower where the eye of this dark magical storm is.

Where am I?

Am I asleep?

Hoo boy, someone's sure angry. Did they finish Sombra off already..?

...No, if they did, I would know.

What is happening? Who is carrying my lamp? I recognize the emotions, the kleptomania, the self-loathing that I tried so hard to quench. But it can't be her. She's dead.

It must be another dream. Just another cruel dream.

I want to wake up. These dreams are the worst of all.

Malusi dances, a slow swooping dance as she flips end over end on her hooves in an impossibly flexible way, like a clown, or a tumbler. All the suffering she bred in that little town is drawn here, drawn to the ashes of the Kingdom Heart. Dead for nearly a thousand years, and even its ashes still remain powerful enough to draw together hatred.

'Can you feel it, my lord? They hate me so for what I've done. It's all for you, though. I hope it's enough to rouse you, you need to be awake, if we're going to get you out of there,' she thinks, sitting down as a flash of magic signifies the arrival of her guests.

As veins in the ground ignite with her own special mix of fire-based poison, she watches Celestia take a large step back, aware of how the potentially poisoned fire could very well affect her, even in her Alicorn Suite.

She smirks as the tiny Luna instead steps forward first, prepared for the vitriol, the hatred of this misguided mare of the night.

Instead, Luna bows to her. "Councilmare Malusi, stop this, please. I beg you, do not release him now. You care for him, do you not? I care for him too. I want him to be free of this cruel fate he has shackled himself to, but should you free him now, should he take revenge on Sombra... He will be lost forever. Are you not his friend? Do you not wish to see him happy?" she begs, looking up at the surprised Zebra.

Malusi laughs, but it's a cruel laugh. "Absolute lunacy, I don't know who your friend is, but he is not the stallion I befriended. The difference is day and night."

She pulls out the lamp, and holds it up in the air, the stars and the moon shining overhead.

"I knew him as he is. A cruel, viscious old man who had learned to accept the fault in his stars. Ever since I was a foal, I could not help the things I did without even realizing. I stole and I poisoned without even realizing what I had done, and heavens help anyone who tried to befriend me. But Lord Weiss didn't care in the s-light-est."

"He taught me that just because I was evil, it did not moon I had to hate myself. I didn't have to change to be happy."

The zebra looks at Luna with a deep scowl. "So if you're wondering if I'll help Weiss change into a better person, that I would dare swap his destiny for a mere constelation prize..." she muses, holding off on her pun until the last possible moment.

"I didn't planet"

Luna stares at her with pity in her eyes, but she can feel the hatred growing more dense, and the hat on Malusi's head is charging with power, as is Weiss's Lamp. They have no more time to debate.

"Then you leave us no choice," she says, stepping aside to let the Element Bearers do what they must do.

"Right, let's go girls," Twilight says, igniting the Element of Magic, her friends doing the same. She wasn't sure what the Elements of Harmony would do to Malusi, but she was certain it would put a stop to all of this, and hopefully cure everyone in Ponyville too.

Fluttershy was sad, hearing the Zebra's story. It was clear to her that the poor mare cared so much about her lord, and had tried her best to be happy with what she had.

Pinkie tried to see the humor in it all. It was clear that, on some level, the Zebra saw deep irony in the situation. Pinkie wanted to help, but she knew that letting Weiss out before he was ready would probably be the absolute most saddest most unfunny thing ever.

Rarity absolutely disagreed with the whole situation. Maybe they were robbing Weiss of his revenge but this Malusi was robbing him of his chance to find new happiness, and a robbery like that, she could not abide by.

Applejack felt similarly. Malusi, above all else, was lying to herself, if she thought she was happy with this. What she had described was insane, and even the way the zebra reacted expressed in no uncertain terms that the zebra was saying it to convince herself, far more than she was trying to convince anypony else.

Dash... Felt wrong. Something was wrong with her element, it wasn't working right!

The elements all lit up, and Malusi smiled as she made a wish on the Wishing Cap.

"Wishing Cap! I wish for my lord's freedom! Free Weiss Noir!" she shouted, holding up the lamp as the rainbow beam of the Elements of Harmony twisted, the red light of Loyalty seeming to glitch and malfunction as it dragged its other colors away from the zebra, and towards the lamp. All four of the Relics of Darkness resonate with her wish. The Wishing Cap, Miracle Matter, Magicant, and the last as well.

"No!" Luna screams as the beam strikes the lamp, swirling around in a tornado of harmony that lifts Malusi and the lamp into the air, darkness tainting the red band of the rainbow as it does. The lamp begins to crack, growing veins of black spreading over its surface as the strain from within increases.

With only a fearful glance at the Element Bearers, who are held in the air with their eyes glowing bright, Celestia flies forwards, trying to rip the lamp from the zebra's grasp with telekinesis, but the buffeting winds shove her and all the others back away from the epicenter of magic.

Time almost seems to stop, Celestia flapping desperately, her horn on fire, Luna reaching out with her mouth open in a true scream, the Elements of Harmony, their teeth grit painfully as something causes their elements to twist and distort in function.

...

The lamp shatters into pieces, fragments glittering in the corrupt light of the rainbow swirling around it, light and flames shining from the fragments like a thousand stars.

Malusi looks on with tears of joy as the seal shatters, and from the fragments, bits of ash begin to peel away from the inside of the lamp's fragments, the flakes coming together into a pile.

The fragments of the lamp and the element bearers fall to the ground, their task fulfilled.

Luna and the others hold their breath, unable to make a noise as the pile of ashes begins to shift.

From the pile, a blackened hand made of bone reaches up, before collapsing back into ashes, then, it happens again, with a hoof instead.

A skull begins to rise up from the ashes, and slowly, brief puffs of grey and black erupt from the thing in front of them, ashes pulling together as gouts of black fire erupt from the skeletal remains. The skeleton takes a deep, rasping breath that echoes through the open air.

With every movement, another part of the ashen skeleton collapses, with every moment it spends rising, three more are spent falling apart once again, but slowly, horrifyingly, the black flames begin to pull together into the ashes, and a withered form begins to emerge, no longer ashes and fire, but flesh and blood.

The Sage of Darkness wears the unstable flames of his rebirth like a cloak held around his body, but as the flames of hatred seem to fade, in reality, they are merely absorbed, and Luna watches in despair as his wizened form begins to fill out, youth filling his frame as his muscles visibly inflate under his ancient coat.

Weiss Noir's eyes are closed as he rises to his full height, and Malusi is the first to move, rushing to his side like a puppy excited to see their human.

He opens his eyes, and he looks down at his hands with a child-like wonder, clenching and relaxing them, and twirling them around as if to examine his claws.

"Amazing... This is really me!" he exclaims with a merry laugh. As he does, however, the magically sensitive ponies in the room flinch away, while the rest feel churning unease as the sheer negativity of his emotions erupt ceaselessly into the air.

"All is for my lord," Malusi shudders with a low bow, forgetting to even include a pun, so wracked with joy at the return of her lord. She doesn't need to say clever things, she had never needed to in order to feel clever, in his presence.

He looks over, noticing her with eyes that seem to widen comically, and pupils that grow like dinnerplates with surprise.

"I thought you were dead! I..." Weiss exclaims breathlessly, laughing as he yanks her up with a surprised yelp, dancing in a circle as he twirls the zebra around, listening to her shriek with amused delight.

Twilight backs away, Weiss's overjoyed reaction disturbing her even more in the face of the sheer malevolence that the Pluck-Night Pony is pouring out into the room.

"Dear Celestia, help us," she mutters, sensing the pure, untainted hatred of Weiss Noir burrowing through her skull and down the roots of her teeth in sympathetic response, her natural talent helping her understand just how prepared, just how poised Weiss is to kill every living thing on this tower, if the mood strikes him.

Sunset feels nausea welling up inside her, her own talent for empathy making her feel like a ship in a storm, her spirit battered by what she feels of the killing intent Weiss seems to be releasing without even being aware of it. Even his joy, his genuine relief at seeing his long-lost friend, has been turned to pure malice masquerading as lighter emotions.

Weiss, however, is heedless of this, tearfully hugging the zebra after he found himself satisfied with her dizziness, six arms smothering the poor zebra.

Pulling away, he etches the sight of the immortal alchemist into his mind, staring at her with shock. "It really is you, my most faithful servant. Even now, you've surprised me with your devotion. Even when I didn't believe in you, you still believed in me. When I had given up hope on fulfilling my destiny, you came, my saving grace! My own miracle!" he says, unable to keep from grinning at the zebra.

"All is for my lord," she repeats with a smile.

When he senses the ponies around beginning to regain their nerve, he turns to face the Element Bearers.

"Girls, we have to use the elements again, he might have gotten out, but we can stuff him right back in!" Dash shouts, bravely stepping forwards.

He turns to face the brave pony.

"Indeed, Dash, you have proven to be a wonderful progeny. But you know nothing of true magic!" he exclaims.

With a gesture, he lifts up the pegasus in a burst of prestidigitation. "Progeny?! What the hay do you think you're doing?" she shouts, thrashing around in his glowing aura as he ignores her words.

"It pains me to do so, but I must end this!" the sage shouts, clenching his fist and crushing their body to pieces.

"Rainbow Dash!" her friends scream as he releases his magical grip on the pegasus, dropping the mangled form to the ground, metal chunks scattering around the point of impact.

They scramble to her, only to realize the truth as the pegasus-golem looks down in pain and confusion at the mechanical parts and scraps of shapeshifting Miracle Matter around their ruined frame. A spew of magical sparks coincides with a chunk of their engines falling free from the damaged area.

"No, that's not, I'm not-" Metal Dash cries, its exposed againte reactor flickering madly as it bursts into helpless tears. It was never Rainbow Dash, but the golem that had been built to imitate her, wrapped in shapeshifting Miracle Matter to disguise its mechanical form. It was this that made the Element of Loyalty malfunction, her false form allowing Malusi to control the target of the elements against their will, making them too weak and out of sync to properly resist.

Ignoring the golem's plight, Twilight whirls on the sage. "What did you do with the real Rainbow Dash!?" she shrieks, charging up a blast of magic strong enough to blast apart solid rock and firing it.

Instead of answering or attempting to avoid the attack that would have decimated the sage's old form, he allows the blast to hit him directly, the smoke clearing to reveal his blackened chest, unharmed from whatever magic he used to defend against it.

"At long last, the time has come!" he begins, the golem he crushed gibbering and twitching on the ground near the frightened ponies who saw him shrug off Twilight's strongest attack as if it were nothing at all.

"On a day so very long ago, the seed had been planted, and for so long, I have struggled to nurture it. And now, that thing, the creature that was born on that fateful day, has been unleashed! Before you stands the Sage of Darkness's magnum opus! His tenth symphony! His final mastery of Dark Magic! I stand here before you, the last great work of the ancient race!" he exclaims proudly, as Malusi struts beside him, staring with a smirk at the ponies.

Celestia's paralysis is broken only by the sight of her sister collapsing as the malice begins to affect even her, and with a fearful stare, she lays a wing tenderly over Luna's numb, emotionally shattered form. All is lost.

"At last, my metamorphosis is complete. At last, my long slumber has ended! No longer do you face the sentimental fool who in his drowsy daydreams played amongst ponykind, no longer do you bear witness to his confused acts of kindness and mischief," he says, smirking at Twilight and her friends.

He glares at Luna. "You do not face Weiss Noir, the Former Lord of the Shadow Realm!" the sage rants, throwing his arms out wide as the whites of his eyes turn a sickening, evil green that mingles with the purple of his irises.

He paces towards the group, stepping onto the ashes of what was once the Kingdom Heart calmly, letting out a low, dark laugh as the black flames of his mane and tail appear to grow, and his limbs seem to lengthen as he walks forward, growing in size.

"You face destiny! You face hatred! You face..." he continues, throwing his head to the sky and unleashing wave after wave of killing intent as the black magic of his 'Color of Arms' spreads to cover his entire body, turning his coat and his six arms an ebony color as the defensive spellwork weaves its way into his flesh and bones.

White scales begin to creep their way up the bottom of his hooves, until they threaten to cover his cutie mark and chest with the faintly glowing ivory-like material.

The dark pony cranes his head down at everyone standing in front of him, and in the distance, he feels the resonance of his shattered prison begin to free another from their banishment, the sympathetic response of his ritual's completion summoning back his ancient foe from their own slumber. Purple smoke begins to bleed from his bright green eyes.

"Noir Weiss!"

(Past Chapter 32) Darkest Hour (Part 1)

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"You and I, Sam, are still stuck in the worst places of the story, and it is all too likely that some will say at this point: 'Shut the book now, dad; we don't want to read any more.'"
— Frodo, The Lord of the Rings, The Two Towers, Book IV

Years ago, everything had been leading up to that fateful meeting between The King of Monsters, King Sombra and the Sage of Darkness, Lord Weiss Noir, and it had all truly began with the Crystal Heart. He had been afraid to use it, afraid to let it be used. He still remembered the day of the Crystal Faire, when the love in the air had almost destroyed him as a young stallion.

He didn't know why at the time, as young as he was, but the power of the heart, the power of the fair had left him bedridden, worse and worse with each passing year, and it was only on the day he confronted Princess Amore herself that that pain came to an end forevermore, the day when he had stolen the heart away, to never be used again.

As he watched Mercy order around a bunch of changelings who were lowering their own drones into massive pods to enact his plans for them, and as he glanced at Chrysalis, who in her own corner had been staring deeply into the Crystal Heart, embedded in a giant green mass of changeling amber, he briefly allowed himself to be immersed in those memories.

He would have died as a colt, if not for the help of his only true friend, Radiant Hope. The unicorn, practically a filly at the time, had gained her cutie mark when she desperately tried to heal him as the power of the Crystal Heart tore away at his body, and when she succeeded, it was perhaps the only time in his entire life when for once, there was no pain at all. She had taken it away, and soon, after many revelations, after realizing what he was, and what he was meant to do, he finally confronted the former Princess Amore, and learned a talent of his own. One that needed no cutie mark to prove it.

Unlike her, or perhaps precisely like Radiant Hope, he discovered his talent through defiance of death. Even at his angriest, he failed to kill Princess Amore properly. The magic he blasted her with in his desperation hadn't killed the unicorn princess of love, but had imprisoned her in crystal. A crystal born from fear. His fear of punishment, of consequences. His hesitation to finish the job had given birth to a spell unique to him, and made him realize the truth. The truth that fear could be stronger than love.

He remembered, even as the fear melted away, the fear he felt of everypony around him gone as he prepared to take his place as ruler, he still felt a cold hesitance in his gut as his friend confronted him. A fear that could never be extinguished, so long as he used its power. He could have killed Princess Amore then and there, but instead he shattered her crystalline form, and cast the fragments to the far corners of the world. Perhaps one day, she would be reassembled and revived, but that day would not come in time to stop him.

Returning his attention briefly to the sight before him, he watched as the changelings were manipulated inside the pods, made to shapeshift new organs to store the love that Chrysalis had been refining using the Crystal Heart's power. He watched as crystals of his own design were lowered into their open thoraxes, buried close to their heart to maximize emotional transfer. It was clear that the queen knew much more about love than he ever did, judging from how he was able to be so close to it without feeling pain. It leaked no love, no wasted energy had made its way into the air.

Sombra mused on this idly as he thought back to that friend of his. 'I wonder where she is now? She refused to join me as my queen. She set those damnable princesses on me. Perhaps she fled back to Equestria, or even further beyond,' he considered.

His thoughts were interrupted by Queen Chrysalis, who approached as the new "Android" Changelings were being raised back out of the pods, now implanted with small crystals, ones he personally had created, inspired by vague, foggy memories that refused to leave him.

"It's done. Your little 'Eternal Furnace' idea bore some fruit. The crystals are allowing my changelings to share love-energy freely between them. A limitless supply of magical stamina. I still don't see why they must be marked with these silly ribbons, however," Chrysalis mutters, holding up one of the red ribbons in her aura.

He frowned. "They have to be. It's..." He isn't sure why he felt the unrelenting need to have the 'Androids' wear red ribbons. It was some part of the idea that seemed paramount to him, and he couldn't explain why.

His eyes narrowed. "It is important. Leave it at that," he finally says.

Chrysalis rolled her eyes in response. "Fine. It isn't as if they will be visible, once transformed," she retorts, stalking off to study the Crystal Heart more.

Mercy looks at him with an unreadable expression which he simply meets with a glare. "Get back to work," Sombra barks insistently at his doctor, who quietly obeys.

The androids had proven to be superb, if a bit short. Chrysalis hadn't wanted to use any of the older changelings, for fear of them growing ill where the smaller, denser, new clutches of changelings did not.

The proof of their superb ability to channel love from afar was all the more apparent with what they had managed to obtain, and how they managed to obtain it.

It was disturbing, what Sombra had been given, and reading it, he felt new fear grow in his gut, but also... exhilaration? By using a shell of love, and a suitable disguise, the androids were able to bring something back to the hive that was nothing short of incredible.

They brought him a copy of a tome that the Sage of Darkness had been publishing. Without a care in the world! He had been distributing vast copies of this 'Grimoire Noir' to his subjects. His own personal bible of dark magic, one that contained not only the secrets of his spells, but commentary, theories, diagrams!

It took time, Sombra had to admit, to wrap his head around the tome. The way it was written was so plain, so straightforward and common, that it failed to poetically evoke many, if any emotions in the reader at all. But what it did do, once Sombra had begun to study it in earnest, was teach.

Where the Black Flame is infuriating, the black crystal is intoxicating. I find it difficult to cast at times, between my holding back as much as possible, and my own fear shattering the careful magical forces at play. I've learned that a strong enough "incorrect" emotion can interrupt me casting a spell, after enough instances of it happening in this exact situation. I don't want to use this spell anymore. Despite that, I must. Any advantage that I don't take may spell doom in the trying times that this book was written in. I refuse to believe that this magic can only be used by a tyrant, I have to refuse it. To that end, I shall name this spell Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation, to remind me of what I risk becoming during this study, and of who I must surpass to achieve mastery of it.

He read the excerpt from the book's second chapter, and felt... flattered? Infuriated? No, it was more than that. Weiss's work had left Sombra intrigued.

Some part of his mind twinged as he read. He could see between the lines where Weiss chose to leave things unspoken, where the sage had left chunks of his text vague, and unhelpful, to prevent his most powerful techniques from being disseminated, or discovered.

It wasn't enough. Sombra knew now that the sage had held the lion's share of his power in reserve. 'This tome alone doesn't hold the entirety of your secrets, does it, my pale shadow?' he thought to himself.

He began to grin as a particular entry stood out to him.

"But I know where to find them," he says to himself with a malevolent smile.

"Where to find what?" Chrysalis barks, intruding on his reading and interrupting his monologue.

He glances at her bitterly. "Bring me a piece of Timeshift Crystal. I have an idea," he demands, having thought of the perfect way to infiltrate the Shadow Realm himself.

He wasn't sure why he assumed this would work, it was a hunch that came from nowhere at all, and yet, it did.

He was able to craft a Materia that held the changeling shapeshifting spell, and use it himself. With Chrysalis available to cast a powerful shielding spell, and an Android to accompany him and provide power to the defensive magic, he took his first steps into the Shadow Realm once more, disguised as one of those 'Longma' creatures.

He glanced over himself. He had gone from grey and black to black with red streaks. He wasn't sure why, but the color scheme seemed appropriate for whatever reason.

It was so easy, to just walk in. The Shadow Realm was so confident, so sure of themselves with their precious Kingdom Heart to protect them. If they hated it, it couldn't survive entering! As if the world were really so kind to his ungrateful former slaves.

He walked down the tunnels with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, his blank-faced changeling companion following along at a measured clip.

His goals in this filthy pit were simple. Discover the secrets of Weiss Noir's power. Find the defenses he relied upon to protect this place. Disable them in preparation for the true final battle.

As he walked to one of the many 'vents' that pumped pure hatred throughout the entirety of the realm, he studied it carefully, perhaps a bit too carefully, as a particularly interested auburn colored stallion approached him and his companion.

"Awfully interested in the vents, are you?" he asks with a raised eyebrow.

"The name's Bruto," the stallion says, raising a hoof in greeting.

Sombra's eyes narrowed as he shook the proffered hoof. "Shadow. Charmed, I'm sure," he responded.

Bruto smirked in a nasty way that reminded Sombra of himself. "You're not from around here, are you? Your little buddy is way too calm to be one of us," he explains.

Sombra and his companion glanced at one another. This one might need to be podded.

With a shake of his head, the red-flamed longma laughed. "I don't really care who you are, or what you're doing, friend. Just make it interesting. I've gone too long without a good fight."

He points over to one of the nearby walls. "The flaming vents are just for show. The real ones are kept in the walls. They pump out more subtle magic. Don't disappoint me, now," the brute says, walking off without a care.

'And I'm to believe it's better to be loved than feared? If this is the quality of 'adoring' subjects, then perhaps I'm doing them a favor,' Sombra laughs to himself, bidding his companion to follow as he examines the real vents connected to the kingdom heart.

Even with these shells of Love Magic, Sombra knew that wouldn't be enough to wage war on this empire, not so long as they were one broken shield away from annihilation at the hands of hatred. A subtler touch would have to be employed, long before the coming battle. The shell of love around him burned his skin, his body screaming at him to dissolute into smoke to escape the pain, but he fought through it, drawing on his years of focused willpower to do what must be done.

With care and caution, Sombra placed a small chunk of crystal in one of the vents, one with an inactive portal embedded in it, one that, with a moment's effort, would begin to pump love into the ventilation systems. How foolish could the sage have been? He neglected to explain how to create portals in the Grimoire Noir, but left examples of them practically everywhere.

Their ships, their travel systems, even trinkets and toys employed the enchanted gateways. Sombra was able to figure out how to cast the spell, of course, and all it cost him was three measly bits for a "weightless bouncy ball" from one of the tourist traps. The item had been enchanted to run portals along its surface to disrupt gravity, and with his bond to the sage, it was the work of moments to divine the emotions that had gone into it.

Now, that carelessness led to a key part of Sombra's victory. He quickly left the area, searching for the next vent. He would have much work ahead of him, in order to poison their precious hate.

Raw emotional love energy wasn't going to cut it. A method was needed to bind the love to a physical substrate, to ensure that it could persist long enough to taint the hatred in the air. Luckily, the Grimoire Noir had provided an interesting source of inspiration. Crystals grown from ice remained ice. It didn't take long for him to find a way, working with the changeling queen, to create a form of love-infused steam by simply exploiting a few bits of crystal pony trickery he had snatched from their ancient tomes.

'Ironic, in a way. Flames of Hate being counteracted by Waters of Love.' Sombra mused with amusement, collapsing into his smokey umbrum form and flowing through the tunnels of the hive. A project was being constructed to aid in the battle soon to come.

It was inspired, as if the myth of the muse had proven true for the sole purpose of giving him wondrous ideas. He saw how the joints could go together, how a changeling drone could be used as a substrate for creating something incredible, paired alongside his own dark magic. The word "Biomechanical" popped into his mind, of its own accord, as did flashes of a strange green bug-like creature.

He resolved into physical form in front of the drone, whose mind had already been taken from its body and replaced in a new body. The empty shell left behind floated in a thick love-saturated goop, shaped to his specifications. It looked just like Sombra, and if not for the lack of tension, the lack of stress in its face, he wouldn't have been able to tell the difference between it and himself.

To think, he would find himself in a position to use something that he had only entertained in idle fantasies as he subjugated the empire all those years ago. Something he thought impossible without resorting to necromancy, or worse still. Something he could never truly enjoy, after realizing what he truly was, after realizing that his physicality was dependent on constant vigilance, that his material form would be revoked should he grow too weak.

The changelings had forged a vessel to house his true umbrum form, one not held together by fragile dark magic, one not strictly vulnerable to the bitter sting of love.

"Physical form? Don't mind if I do!" he shouts with glee, rushing into it and possessing the empty unicorn-shaped shell.

Suddenly, the body jerked, and his eyes opened wide with excitement. So much love in this disgusting pod, and his skin didn't burn! His head didn't ache!

He burst free with a laugh, purple smoke erupting from his eyes as he took a deep, true breath.

The little changeling who had been subject to the experiments needed to produce this form shivered as the pod gestating their replacement body spat them out. The bug stared at his form fearfully, looking at Sombra with an intent gaze that seemed to be trying to feel out whether he was displeased by it or not. It made sense, considering the difficulty that the bug must have gone through to withstand the modification of their old form, the sense of loss that likely came from them being made to discard it. If Sombra didn't like the results, then this little changeling suffered for nothing.

Sombra felt an odd feeling well up inside him, one that made him uncomfortable as he stared at the bug.

"It is adequate. Cease your shivering," he grunted, stalking out of the room unaware of the naked shock of the changelings in the room who tasted a faint hint of gratitude from the tyrant.

The first sign of untainted positive emotion they had tasted from the king of monsters in years.

The time had come to begin the attack. Chrysalis watched carefully over their delicate faint link as her precious subjects began to replace random ponies. Unfortunately for her, the Shadow Realm used defenses that balked in their paranoia. Every pony of any importance seemed to be registered under the most complex and inane procedures. Magical scans were common, and Changelings had long since learned to defeat such measures, but what truly grated and stalled the preparations had been the passwords.

It had been impossible to even replace the captains of the guard. Following a pony named "Helmsplitter" invisibly revealed things that bordered on the insane. Passwords he was meant to fail, passwords he was meant to only succeed on a certain attempt, passwords that had no answer at all, and the proof of his being who he was coming down to how well he fought off the resulting dogpile of guards.

Once, Chrysalis herself had been forced to tail him, and discovered a hidden chamber of armaments that refused to open unless he danced with another guard at the door. There was no password hidden within the dance, but instead, she found after some research that that specific guard seemed to be a psychologist with a special talent for reading body-language.

It irked her, because it meant that the tyrant's vague plan was her only chance of properly defeating these longma-ponies. She could not find a way to safely worm her way into the upper echelons of Shadow Realm Society. Thus, she was forced to take another approach. Replace the lowest members of the society. Even years after their freedom, so many ponies in this realm had little to no documentation, aside from what few automatic systems had been implemented.

It wasn't much, but it meant her newly enhanced changelings were able to proliferate themselves through the various zones.

She, herself, had another task in mind. There was one, one singular pony who seemed to lack the intense security checks that the others had. One too young to properly succeed at the labyrinthine system of subtle and overt tricks and tactics that the lord of this realm demanded to prevent imposters from getting where they did not belong.

"So what's Lord Uncle doing today?" Cadence asked frantically, the filly bouncing around three exasperated looking dragons, having long since absorbed their title for the dark sage by osmosis.

"He is training with Eclipse Flash," the blue one explains calmly to the filly.

"Yeah!" the red dragon repeats. "She's!" he strikes a pose, dropping to one knee and flexing for emphasis.

"Way stronger!" he finishes after a long pause.

The pink runt of the litter nods, snatching the filly out of the air and making her giggle. "Yup. They've been working hard, so leave em be for a bit, alright?" the child-drake says.

"Oh, fine, but I wanna visit again. He's funny," the filly explains firmly.

"Sapphy, do you got any games other than that duel monsters thingie?" she demands, squirming around in the pink dragon's grip to face the blue one.

The blue one, 'Sapphy', thinks for several awkwardly quiet seconds, before nodding. "Uncle has produced something worthwhile. Also, my name is Sapphire," he reiterates, as if he had had to do so many times before.

"Woo!" Cadence cheers, throwing her hooves up and leaping out of the pink dragon's grip.

"Sorry Paddy, gotta go play! Hoard some other ponies for a bit!" she says, making the pink one's body language suddenly turn shy as embarrassment radiated from them.

"I don't 'hoard ponies', it's not like that," he mutters with a pout and stalking off with the loudmouthed red dragon following behind him.

As Sapphire and Cadence leave to wherever this 'game' is, Chrysalis follows quietly, stalking along the ceiling invisibly.

"He totally hoards ponies," Cadence says with child-like smugness.

Sapphire is quiet for a time before nodding. "Correct. I think our status as clones may contribute to our quirks."

"You mean like how you hide gems all over the place in ponies' houses and in urns and stuff?" Cadence asks as they enter a room with several bed covered with glowing crystals. In some of the beds, ponies are asleep, glowing illusions above them displaying the 'game' they are playing in the dream realm.

Sapphire nods. "Correct. Ruby is distraught when father makes him clean his room. We believe he may have a fixation with detritus."

They both lay down on one of the cots. "Dew-what-now?" the filly asks as the dragon flips through options on a touch screen, before settling on some sort of image Chrysalis doesn't recognize of a pony in red overalls. They appear to be jumping in an odd pose.

"Detritus. Garbage," he explains as a brief spritz of sleep gas has them both conking out, Dream Crystals embedded in the bed allowing them to visit the Arcana Nox.

"Oh... That's... kinda gross," Cadence mutters, eyes fluttering as she falls asleep and a hologram appears.

Seeing nopony else to interrupt, Chrysalis drops down and approaches the filly. It would be tense to make the swap undetected, but replacing this 'Cadence' would prove to be the safest bet for getting close to secure areas and prime hostages.

As the queen approaches however, she notices something about the filly. An utter lack of hatred. Every other Longma in this realm had been calm and stable due in large part to the sheer amount of their passionate vitriol they channeled towards their blasted Kingdom Heart, but this one didn't seem to radiate anything but love. Passionate, slightly violent love, yes, but love nonetheless.

She called forth two of her guards, Sombra's inexplicable portals allowing her to move them in.

She quietly turned to the changelings. "When she awakes, grab her immediately. Bring her to the hive, do not allow her to be harmed," Chrysalis explained in no uncertain terms. Something untainted by hatred in this foul place warranted study

Soon, she would receive the signal from Sombra, the moment when he began his attack on the Hidden Palace Zone, she would begin her own task here, in the Crystal Egg Zone.

The Crystal Heart mounted to her chest pulsed quietly as she and her fellow changelings stared down at the sleeping filly, unaware that this would be her last day in the Shadow Realm as she smacked blocks and leapt over mushroom-creatures in a fanciful dream with her dragon friend.

She heard Sombra's voice in her ear, the signal had been sent by magic to her as he spoke.

"It's good to see you again, my Pale Shadow," Sombra states simply.

Instantly, I began to hear alerts from all over the Shadow Realm. "Scenario: Pestilence" was what roared over the loudspeakers, and my own private golem flitting near my ear informed me of the details as I saw the longma all around us begin to fight off the Changelings near them. They were losing, beams of magic somehow outpacing their insane physical strength.

I snapped my fingers, and a portal appeared. "Eclipse Flash, get everypony to the Crystal Egg Zone. Protect it at all costs, activate all the defenses. Override code to trigger all the defenses is three milliliters of your blood and the story I told you," I said, yanking my student to her hooves roughly. I had no choice but to face him. I had to trust my student to deal with the rest. I had to trust my ponies, and the defenses we had wrought, to handle the rest.

I had no other choice, with him here in the heart of our realm. If I didn't face him, the risk to others was too great to imagine.

"What? Weiss, no! We have to fight him together!" she shouted, trying to get me to look at her with a desperate look.

I didn't bother to argue with her. "Force Push," I instead said, shoving my student through it with a low-grade Vance.

As the portal closed, I heard her shout, but my eyes never left Sombra. Already, portal-using golems had begun to chase after all the Longma in the area, sending them to the evacuation zone on the surface, snatching them away from the losing battles they were fighting against the changelings seeded in the crowd. Despite the small size of the bugs, they were somehow fighting at a level I could scarcely imagine.

He just stared at me with a smile, waiting patiently as the golems quickly turned the odds against me further by removing the civilians who hadn't immediately started running for escape routes.

The changelings began to surround both me and Sombra in a loose circle, but I couldn't help but ignore them as I stalked towards the dark ruler, and he walked towards me in equal steps.

"Princess Luna and Princess Celestia have already been alerted. I made sure to keep them up to date on communication tech. You made a mistake coming here. They're probably already clearing out the Crystal Egg Zone, and then they'll be here," I state, feeling magic well up inside me as I tapped into my greed as much as I could. Hatred Magic would only destroy my body at this stage.

He smirks, widening his stance as his horn begins to glow. "I'm counting on it. You couldn't resist giving us a chance to test our mettle, could you? I feel the same way."

I sneer as I raise myself to my full height.

"Thundaga!" I shout, unleashing a titanic blast of dragon lightning from my horn, the greed magic striking him head-on as the current rages through his body.

I stomp my hoof, commanding the crystals embedded in the ceiling to activate, but as they slide out, I see that the Aeroga crystals have all been rotting away, the pink decay of love eating away at the frustration-powered magic. I glanced at them in surprise. If Sombra wasn't being compressed by Aeroga, then how was he able to take my attack head-on?

The answer is revealed as the lightning fades, and I see a giant metal rod jutting from his chest into the ground, as if it had simply grown wholesale from his body.

Emerald flames wash over him as the metal pole retracts, sliding telescopically back into him and revealing that he had made some disturbing changes to himself. Changes of the sort that I hadn't bothered to attempt on myself, for fear of the consequences.

"Needless to say, I've learned a few things," Sombra says with a grin, cracking his neck and finally firing a spell of his own at me. His classic opener of petrification magic.

As I dodge to the side, a shiny royal-crystal mirror erupting to deflect the beam back at him, I scream in agony as something slams into me from behind, a beam of magic from one of the changelings surrounding us sending me to the ground.

As I struggle to my feet, I witness Sombra choking the changeling with his magic, screaming and frothing with rage.

"How dare you! I told you worms in no uncertain terms that he was mine! Mine you hear me?!" he screams, throwing the changeling aside.

As I struggle to patch the burnt part of my back with a thin layer of crystal, he turns to face me, cordial once again. "Terribly sorry. You never can find good help these days, can you?" he remarks with amusement coloring his tone.

The changelings boxing us both in now look properly cowed, and I snarl. He's making a spectacle out of this. I should be trying to escape right now, but looking at the exits, I can see he covered his bases this time, the various exits having already been sealed with pink barriers by little midget changelings outside.

"Escape Rope," I mutter instead, opening another portal and backing towards it, as I do, however, I spot Sombra cast something as well, and leap to the side, claws skidding as a burst of force allows me to cling to one of the walls.

Below, I spot a second portal open in front of mine, spewing a thick black sludge that I have no interest in touching. The changelings take flight as it pours out over the ground.

He tsks at me. "This isn't the time to use that," he says as I drop down, summoning a platform to stand on and a blade to fling it at him. The chill I feel as he cites fucking pokemon at me and casts my own spell against me throwing my aim off enough for him to step to the side and dodge the thrown weapon.

I frown, thudding painfully to the ground and preparing another Vance as I tried to ignore the growing pain. Something was strange about this battle, and I had a suspicion as to what it was.

Cadence squealed with fright as two frightening giant bugs grabbed ahold of her and began coating her in a disgusting green substance that stuck to her and refused to let go.

"Sapphire! Help!" she shrieked as one of the bugs, the biggest one of all, caught on fire and turned into her!

The dragon looked confused, before alerts began to reach him as well, and he jerked awake, leaping up covered in roiling lightning.

As he did, Chrysalis blew a thick cloud of purple dust at him, making him fall back asleep.

'Help! Please, somepony help!' she cried as her mouth was covered with the goop, and she felt something lifting her cocoon into the air.

For a moment, she was more afraid than she had ever been before, until she felt a surge of magic that could only have been...

Celestia and Luna slammed into the pavestones of the Crystal Empire, pure light and life radiating from the twin deities.

Changelings all around froze as they stared openly at the alicorns who had arrived via portal in mere moments when the desperate alert had notified them of a full-scale assault on the place.

"HEED OUR WARNING VILE CRETINS."

"LEAVE THIS PLACE... OR BE DESTROYED."

Luna's voice rang out over the entire empire as the Royal Canterlot Voice made her threat radiate impossibly far and wide, the sound an almost physical presence against the changelings.

Chrysalis balked at this in her disguise, Sombra had assured her, promised above all else that he had spells meant to protect her while she enacted her part of the plan! This place was meant to be barred to the Tireless!

The Crystal Heart, just as he had explained, was already beginning to glow brightly, charging some kind of twisted array he had carved into the very foundations of the empire using the mines as channels for the energy, years and years ago. He didn't tell her what it did, or why she needed to enact it, but demanded it as part of his terms to assist her in her own goal.

Celestia spotted in the distance as two changelings tried to fly away with the pod carrying what could only have been a poor pony, and with a dismissive air, fired a beam that would pierce both of the changelings' heads instantly.

Filled with vigor, confusion and panic, Chrysalis abandoned her disguise. The filly's capture was crucial, critical, even. Her plans were falling apart, and there was no way she would be able to face both the alicorn of the sun AND the moon at the same time. It was time to abort this malformed conquest.

With a desperate blast of magic, the queen fired a shielding spell at her two escaping changelings, only realizing after she fired it that it would be nowhere near enough. Perhaps this preconceived notion is what led to her subjects to look at her with almost as much shock leaking from them as she herself was emitting through her own dropped jaw when her expectations were defied.

The shield had protected them! The princess of the sun had been denied the drones' lives by her spell! Easily, in fact!

The two alicorns looked at her standing in the window in unison as the last vestiges of her disguise fell away, and she turned her own gaze on them as well.

There was a chance, a chance, however slim, that their plan could still work.

"If I survive this, Sombra, I will wring your neck," she hisses, feeling the magic of love pouring into her body, filling her with an unusual strength she hadn't ever tasted before.

The alicorns glanced at each other for a moment, before erupting into transformations of their own. The princess of the day was wreathed in flames, and the ruler of the night found her dark coat spreading to cover her entire body. The two stared with slit, predatory eyes as the Ancient and Honorable Chorus of Songs of the Sacred Alicorns began to overtake them, and their array of combat enhancements was complete.

"The first to stand against us," Luna said with an imperious stare.

Celestia openly sneered at the Changeling Queen. "The first to fall."

Chrysalis dared not show fear as she leapt from the window and summoned a shield of pure love to protect her from the alicorns as they both opened fire on her with their full might.

She saw no reason to waste perfectly good emotion, just to give the diarchs the satisfaction.

I leapt from pillar to pillar, dodging blasts of magic as Sombra tried to keep his horn tracking on me, and erecting new pillars hastily as I ran around the chamber of the Kingdom Heart.

My own experimental attacks, I had quickly noticed, were all dodged or blocked. Not once had Sombra chosen to disperse himself into smoke to avoid me.

Whatever he had done to his body had made him formidable, and yet...

Skidding to a halt with four of my arms gripping the rock wall to the side of me tightly, I prepared to use one of my stronger Vancian spells, at the same time, I was frantically growing crystal cloth from my cloak, trying my hardest to not glance at the Kingdom Heart so as to not give away the game.

Sombra's body distorted with another burst of green flames as he allowed crystalline claws to emerge from some hidden compartment inside his body, the structures allowing him to gallop up the walls towards me.

Flashing several signs with two of my hands, I threw them down, palms facing the tyrant.

"One-thousand Needles!" I shouted, firing an endless stream of needles from my draconic hands. I had spent days preparing this Vance, casting a powerful needle-firing spell one-thousand times and storing them all within a bottle of stoppered time. It had been a massive pain, keeping the spell maintained, but the effects were pronounced here.

Sombra roared with pain and rage as the needles pierced his body, and I saw blood, real actual blood, flowing from where he was struck.

He threw up a shield, but with each needle individually being a potent armor-piercing spell in its own right, he was forced off the wall and onto the ground, heaving heavily as I leapt off of the wall and landed on him with all of my arms coated in thick gauntlets of crystal.

Smashing my fist into Sombra's face over and over, I tensed as his horn glowed, even as my cestus-covered fists crashed into his face over and over, he was still able to focus, charging something particularly nasty.

I dropped one of the weaponized gauntlets, flinging it off my hand and grabbing ahold of his horn, as soon as I did, I pulled the arm free of its socket, leaping away from him and flipping over onto my other arms and shoving off into the air as the arm exploded into fragments of gem-shards and high pressure water, disrupting the spell he had been trying to cast on me.

As my body sailed through the air, I threw my cape out wide, the massive amounts of crystal cloth I had sprouted earlier billowing as I leapt into the thin, wispy flames of the Kingdom Heart, riding the updraft of intense heat to the surface.

As I breached the surface, I cut my cloak free of my body and landed heavily on the ashen ground, coughing loudly as the burnt spot on my back made clear the damage that had already been done to me, even ignoring the exhaustion that was already threatening to overtake me.

It wasn't much of a distraction, but maybe...

"Agh!" I could help but yell, feeling the burning from before erupt once again. Something had happened, something horrible had happened, and hatred began to well up inside me against my will, the love in the air already attacking my body with renewed vigor as I realized just how thick the love in the air had become. How strong it had become.

I saw a light growing in the distance, as my senses screamed at me to flee from where I could see vast amounts of love building in the Crystal Egg Zone. Some sort of spell was being wrought there, and for some reason, this awoke a nameless fear in my heart.

As I turned back, I saw Sombra, rising up out of the surface-vent of the Kingdom Heart.

He rose out of the vent, levitating in the air on some sort of dark spell that surrounded him with smoke, and I watched as he laughed in spite of his bleeding green wounds. He let out a loud, raucous laughter that sounded to all the world as if it had been born from true utter joy, and I watched in horror as the shield of love surrounding him disappeared, dismissed with contempt, even.

He rose from the vent without harm to himself as snow began to fall from the sky into dark ashes surrounding us, something that should have been impossible. Even with a shield of love, it shouldn't have been possible for him to simply rise up through it, even if the heart were weakened.

But it wasn't weakened, and drawing myself up to my hooves, feeling the burn of love poisoning my body with every shuddering movement that lifted me up unsteadily. I saw in the distance as the other vents, ones meant to be spewing endless black flames into the sky to stave off the cold of the north weren't weakened either.

They weren't weakened... Because they were gone...

The Kingdom Heart had been extinguished.

(Past Chapter 33) Darkest Hour (Part 2)

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Iron Diamond bucked away another one of the Changelings trying to break into the palace. They seemed to know where all the more dangerous weapons were kept, and he couldn't afford to try and make a break for one of them if it meant leaving the others open to being attacked, or worse, somehow subverted.

Unfortunately for these changelings, Iron Diamond was never without a weapon, ever since he lost his leg fighting alongside Weiss during the last invasion.

"Take this!" he roars, throwing up the bluntly clawed metal limb attached to him. The three changelings that tried to go through him to get into the palace run straight into a jet of flaming oil that flew out of his mechanized leg, sending them flying away with a chittering shriek as they scramble into one of the fountains nearby.

Sadly, where there's three, there's a dozen. Glancing at the rest of the Shadow Guard, it doesn't look good. He spots Helmsplitter with his massive axe, swinging it at the flying bugs fruitlessly.

The other guards aren't doing well either, Materia, Golem-powered weapons and raw brute strength somehow failing against the unnatural stamina of their opponents, and the burning touch of their love-coated bodies. One soldier tackles a changeling out of the air, only to be blasted off of them by two others.

He grimaces when he notices the three he just ignited climbing out of the pool, ready for round two.

"You want some? Come get some you little ash-wipes!" he shouts, charging towards them and leaping into the air, crystal spears flying from the open chamber in his mechanical hoof and raining down onto them.

He grunts painfully as a changeling tackles him out of the air, its hole-filled hoof shapeshifting into a long wicked blade.

Gritting his teeth as his coat burns on contact with the love-charged creature straddling him, he tries to fend it off as it stabs at the ground several times, missing his head by inches. With one final strike, the changeling is interrupted as a blast of yellow and red flames wash over the entire area, blasting it off of him.

"Captain Diamond! I'll take care of this, get everypony to the evacuation zone!" Eclipse Flash shouts, standing next to Glitter Miss Priss, the two of them standing with all the regal fury of an alicorn as their enchanted armor hisses with hate-filled steam and fire.

He drags himself to his hooves and salutes to the mares. "Got it," he nods, galloping away to rally the guards.

As he does, he watches the two lay into the changeling army with unparalleled fury, bucking and blasting entire swathes of the bugs away as they fight.

"We might just be able to win this thing," he mutters, hopping off a chunk of crystal rubble over Helmsplitter.

"We need to get to the evac point! Get the guard together, we're moving out now!" he shouts, prepared to fight his way there.

Meanwhile, Dr. Absolutely Real Homeopathy is scrambling to do as Lord Weiss demanded in one of his more paranoid fits.

"Dad why are you smashing everything up, we gotta go!" Ruby shouted in an uncharacteristically complete sentence as he scrabbled and ran into the lab, Padparadscha under his arm like a football.

"Science can be rediscovered but it can't be undiscovered son, we can't leave anything behind! Help me!" he shouts, leaning up onto his hindhooves and sweeping a row of crystals onto the floor where they shatter.

"We don't have time, they're gonna be here any minute!" Padparadscha says with tears of fear in his eyes.

It takes only a moment for the doctor to make the decision when he realizes the danger. "Alright, alright!"

As the three run out into the hall, they spot a band of changelings rushing down it towards them, and bolt in the opposite direction!

"Ruby, where's Sapphire?!" Dr. Real shouts, galloping behind the two dragons and periodically kicking at buttons on the walls that cause a variety of odd effects behind them.

"He was in one of the game rooms at Crystal Egg!" the dragon responds, leaping over a bleeping trapped floor that encases four changelings in a giant mass of ice.

"I'll find him, get to safety, both of you!" he shouts, skidding around a corner as they both keep running.

"Dad, wait!" Ruby shouts, skidding to a halt as he tries to run back to Dr. Real, who waves them off frantically as he slams buttons on a nearby wall, triggering Wacky Workbench's lockdown procedures.

"I'll be fine! Go now!" he shouts as thick metal hatches slam shut, locking him in the hall with a hoard of changelings flying, crawling, and running towards him.

"H-here goes nothing," Dr. Real mutters nervously, dropping down onto his belly with his hooves over his head.

The changelings skid to a halt, cautious and curious at the seemingly surrendering pony.

Behind them, a loud wet smack echoes out behind them, and the changelings turn in unison, blasting a yellow chunk of gelatinous goop with beams of deadly magic

As they do, however, they hear more and more noises, hatches in the walls opening to reveal Wacky Workbench Zone's Boss.

Fearfully, the changelings continue trying to blast the yellow masses of goop as they pour out of the walls and begin forming together, combining into a gigantic yellow creature with a single gigantic eye.

Due to the potential danger of the experiments that took place in the R&D-dedicated section of the Shadow Realm, the boss had to be able to restrain and deal with all manner of hostilities. Thus, Weiss had given the lab boys an inspiration for an ideal defense system.

The changelings began to back away fearfully, several of them shapeshifting into copies of Dr. Real in an attempt to confuse the mass of liquid-like golems.

Unfortunately, it seems they didn't read the safety documentation that Dr. Real himself had helped to author, as Yellow Devil was designed to subdue and take down anything that didn't immediately lay down to await transport.

Silently absorbing the various deadly attacks, the mass of shapeshifting biocrystaline goop began to fire chunks of itself at the changelings, charging forwards as it did with hulking gigantic fists.

One of the changelings shrieked, scrabbling at the door behind Dr. Real as its brethren were being absorbed into the abomination, turning fearfully towards the monster when it became clear that nothing would let it escape from the enchanted mass.

Ds Dr. Real dropped out through a portal that snapped shut before the last changeling could leap through it as well, a small speaker on the Yellow Devil offered a helpful bit of advice.

"ASSUME THE POSITION"

The changeling screamed.

Glitter Bomb had been in the mines when the alerts began to blare out, and after a quick portal-assisted trip to the evacuation shelter, he searched desperately for his wife, Whittle Miss Priss.

"Whittle!" he shouted, muscling through the crowd of frightened Longma, his flames flaring bright with worry.

With a gasp of relief, he saw her, and the two embraced briefly before their emotions returned to worry.

"Where's Glitter?" he asked, looking at her with concern that she matched and surpassed.

"She's aboveground, fighting those horrible monsters," Whittle managed tearfully.

He grit his teeth. A pony shouldn't be caught up in something like this, as young as she is. If he were a few years younger, just a few, maybe he could be up there trying to help her.

"Attention everypony! Remain calm, and be prepared to go through the Equestrian Portals marked at the four exits!" a pony shouted into a voice-amplifying crystal. At the same time, arrows began to point out Arcana Janus gateways, ones that were normally used by the Equestrian Embassy above this bunker in order to pass quickly from place to place.

As if to mock the pony who just pointed them out, the crowd gasped as four loud pops marked the detonation of explosives hidden at the portal gateways, and, lacking magic to sustain them without a physical binding to hold them open, they began to snap shut.

The result was utter cacophany, Longma screaming in panic at the sight of Changelings beginning to flood in through portals of their own.

The nearby Shadow Guards burst into action, spears flying as they flung the weapons through the air at the buzzing foes, while other guards practically flew to where the changelings were pouring in, combining their energies to summon up thick crystal walls in an attempt to stem the flow.

Backing away from a changeling drone that got entirely too close before being slammed to the ground by a guard, Glitter Bomb suddenly felt his legs buckle, Whittle holding him up as he coughed violently.

"What's wrong?!" she shouted, pulling him back deeper into the bunker where guards were beckoning to the crowd to go.

"I don't know," he said with a cough, the scent of the changeling making him feel ill.

With a torturous groan of metal and crystal, the guards managed to block off the portals, and seal the exits, pinning Changelings to the ground with a combination of spears and crystal magic.

Through one of the holographic screens, Glitter could see something building in the center of the Crystal Egg Zone outside, as Celestia and Luna fought some kind of gigantic queen bug in a desperate struggle.

High in the sky, unknown to the fighters below, he saw the faint image of a heart floating over the empire, one that was slowly filling up with a bright light that made his teeth itch.

Celestia and Luna glanced at each other, dozens of half-formed thoughts and words passing between them through their subtle expressions. Among them, one thought seemed to reign supreme between the sisters.

"This is bad," Celestia said, watching as the Changeling Queen seemed to be growing more aware of the power she currently held over the two alicorns, something that was not at all helped by the various wounds the two princesses were taking with every failed dodge or breached barrier.

"She can't be Tireless, can she?" Luna muttered in response, disturbed at the possibility that they might be facing a fellow immortal.

Celestia shook her head. "It doesn't matter. We have to hold her off as long as we can."

Chrysalis decided to laugh. She felt she had earned it, upon realizing just how powerful she was! The Crystal Heart had allowed her to refine far more love from her hive's usual feeding, but this? This threw all of her thoughts out of the water, it was exhilarating!

And then she was smashed aside by a pillar of unexpected water as Priss and Eclipse.

"Princesses!" Eclipse shouted, sliding towards them on a thin growing rail of crystal that sprouted beneath her hooves as she rode forwards.

Priss, at the same time, landed with a heavy stomp, rearing back and bucking a changeling nearby through a building.

"We'll hold this one off, you need to get to Weiss!" Priss shouted, standing between them and the briefly dazed queen as Eclipse runs into a nearby building.

"You do realize she's stronger than both of us together? You cannot defeat her, I can assure you!" Luna exclaimed worriedly.

Priss shakes her head. "No offense princess, but we've been trained to fight ponies stronger than us. You, however, clearly haven't. Weiss needs you now. He's got a plan, but he can't do it with Sombra up his ass," she explained quickly, stomping the ground and dropping all three of them into a small chasm as Chrysalis blasted up a huge chunk of land with an enraged beam of magic.

"We don't have time, go now!" she shouted, already leaping out of the pit and firing off what looks suspiciously like a water-propelled missile at the queen from a slot on the shoulder of her armor. The projectile exploded as it hit the changeling, erupting into a massive pillar of spikes and fire.

With a single shared look, the twin alicorns nodded, and took flight towards where they could sense vast amounts of dark magic being unleashed.

My fighting, previously somewhat vigorous, even without access to my hatred, had turned sluggish and desperate.

As I rolled over on the ground to avoid a thin spear of lightning-coated crystal thrown by Sombra, I hoped the message had gotten across.

'We're kind of busy on our end, Weiss, didn't you say you were going to fight him yourself?' Priss had said frantically, dodging attacks.

'Yeah, and I changed my fucking mind! Just get someone over here, I can't keep this up much longer with the damn Kingdom Heart gone!' I remembers shouting desperately through the communicator link.

"Come now, Weiss. This is unbecoming of you," Sombra said casually as he floated to the ground, walking towards me without a care in the world as I leapt up, ignoring the soot clinging to my white coat and trying to create a crystal sword to protect myself with.

"You're acting like a scared animal without your precious little bonfire to vent to. Pun not intended, of course," he laughs as my horn sparks and sputters painfully, the dark magic failing to obey me in the thick pink fog.

I frown. There's nothing, I can't think of any Vancian spells I have left in my kit that I can cast in my current state. Another one of my arms has already melted off from the hate building inside me, and the fires had already started erupting from my body again as my own hate began to well up from inside me, mingling with my greed.

It wouldn't be long before the other Longma started to notice it as well. The Kingdom Heart was more than just a giant black fire, it was feeding on the hatred of the entire Longma race, and now it isn't. Without something to drain that emotion, I could easily see it building up in every single pony here, until they were as bad off as I am.

Grimacing as I resisted the urge to try and pat out the fire burning on my side, i realized that I likely wouldn't survive long enough to witness it get that bad.

"I'll figure a way out of this little game, Sombra. I always do," I retort bitterly, resorting to a feint as I galloped towards him, sliding under his reactionary blast of magic and snatching the dead crystal spear he left embedded in the ashen ground, whipping around and cracking him across the head with it.

I was forced to leap away with a grimace as he suddenly unleashed a pulse of dark energy that seemed to yank everything around him to the ground.

As I throw the spear at him, he catches it in his telekinesis, throwing it aside without a care.

"You should stop acting so desperate, Weiss. If you can't fight me with magic anymore, then you know your defeat is inevitable. By now, the princesses have likely fallen to Chrysalis, and soon, the rest of your precious Shadow Realm will fall as well."

As I try to catch my breath, Sombra suddenly pauses, thinking about what he just said. "Hmm, perhaps... Ahh, yes."

He looks at me with a self-satisfied smile. "There's no point in being afraid of the inevitable."

I sense something before he does, and take a deep breath to calm my nerves.

"Yeah. You're right," I admit as I leap back and watch as a miniature sun falls down where we were standing, the sphere of plasma ripping through the ground and growing to a vastly larger size as Sombra darts away with a pained scream.

Luna lands first, catching me before I can collapse. "What is the plan?" she says quickly as Sombra's wounds begin to heal rapidly, something in the pink mist proving suitable to repair his body.

"The Kingdom Heart formed because a lot of hate was shoved into one spot. If it happened once, it can happen again, but I need time. Keep him off of me," I hiss, grabbing at a spot on my leg that turns completely to ashes from love poisoning.

Luna looks at me with quiet tension. "Bringing that much dark magic into your body could kill you, or worse."

I glance at the princess sardonically as Celestia leaps out of the way of a blast of vivid green energy from Sombra, who is flying through the air trying to fight her.

"So could this, so get over yourself and don't let me get shot. I know protection missions suck ass, but at least you don't need to escort me," I mutter.

With a huff, Luna smacks me with her wing. "Very well. If you die, however, be forewarned that I will find a way to smack you in Elysium for it. she jokes to hide the nervousness she has at my asinine plan.

I smirk as she flies off to harry Sombra, who seems to be growing larger as he activates something in his twisted body.

I sigh, getting ready to do something incredibly stupid. With a snap of my fingers, I manage to summon a tiny golem via portal, and shakily punch in the long code to send a message to everyone.

Every single Longma that can receive a message, all at once.

"Sombra has extinguished the Kingdom Heart."

Dr. Real hears from the PA system as he drags Sapphire into one of the nearby safe-rooms. Something inside him feels bitter, bitter towards the changelings, but also towards himself. If only he could have done more, then maybe his poor child wouldn't be like this right now.

The burning inside him is painful, but he pushes it aside, and focuses on his lord's words.

"Changelings have invaded the Shadow Realm."

Glitter Bomb leans up from the cot he's been stuck in by one of the medics, the fever under his skin grows as he hears Weiss Noir's words. He knows that they've invaded, damn it!

And now his own daughter is stuck fighting the queen of those damn bugs, and she's losing!

The medic tries to hold him down, but he's getting angrier by the minute, he feels like he's on fire with frustration.

"To all of you who are afraid, for yourselves, for your families, for your friends and neighbors, I'm asking you to put it aside!"

Ruby is taciturn as he huddles together with Padparadscha in the bunker with the others. Where is Dr. Real? Where's Sapphire and Cadence?

"I want my dad," Paddy says sniffling.

"He'll be here. Be strong," Ruby says, holding his brother tight as he feels tense and ready to protect his little bro from anything that tries to break in here. For dragons, pain is a constant. Pain is fire, and fire is pain.

It makes sense to Ruby, in that moment, why dragons breathe fire. They do it to gain, to steal treasure, but much more importantly...

They do it to burn those who take what is theirs.

"Without the heart, you must feel it, the growing agony of hate inside you! Please, push through that pain! Let it grow, and unleash it!"

Priss hisses as she listens to her armor's communicator belt out one of Weiss's long winded monologues.

She's flagging, hard.

"Hahahahaha! This is incredible! With power like this, my precious changelings will never again live in the dark! We will take over this land, and there's nothing you or any other pony can do about it!" Chrysalis laughs.

Priss forces herself to move, pistons hissing as she dodges out of the way of another magical blast, responding to it with a large smokebomb that covers the area.

"Eclipse, do you have that damn thing working yet?" She screams back into the building where her friend is trying to trigger all the defenses at once.

This whole damn mess is annoying to the extreme. Her limbs feel like they're burning from exhaustion, but she ignores it. After all, that's what the armor is for.

"My followers... Who roam the world! Give me the power-"

Eclipse hears her teacher exclaim dramatically, stumbling as a splatter of her own blood sprays across the console, making it light up in an eerie glow.

She frantically begins to recite the poem that Weiss taught her. He told her to never repeat it to anyone, as it was apparently a critical part of her coronation to come next year.

"When you get what you want in your struggle for self
And the world makes you king for a day
Just go to the mirror and look at yourself
And see what that man has to say." she begins, watching as all around the Crystal Egg Zone, gigantic machines begin to rise up out of the ground, eyes and cameras alike glowing red as several of them manage to shrug off the effects of the love poisoning by sheer virtue of the variety in their designs and power sources.

As she frantically continues reciting the poem, she senses something growing above the Crystal Egg Zone, a spell that burns her skin as she feels its light radiating in through the window.

She prays Weiss isn't too late.

"-Of all your hatred!" I say into the golem, steeling myself for the agony to come.

It starts slow, as I feel wisps of black begin to arrive from the Crystal Egg Zone.

The wisps flow into my body, and I feel the burn as hatred that was never meant to be mine sears its way through me.

As they increase, I feel myself locked in place, helpless as the wisps turn into a torrent. Motes of hatred begin to arrive not just from the Crystal Egg Zone, not just from the Shadow Realm even.

I feel the hatred of the Longma rip its way through me, as even the ones all around the world, and the friends they've told about the message all share their hatred, pouring it out into a deadly cocktail that I would be screaming in pain at, if not for my paralized body.

The love in the air is a distant memory as I watch the sphere of roiling blackness begin to grow. The mist is being banished by the sheer volume and density of the dark sun above, but it's not without consequences.

I feel panic rising up as veins of charcoal are literally burnt through me, the path of least resistance forming pillars of burnt carbon as even my immunity to flame as a Longma pales in comparison to the energy I so foolishly made myself a conduit to.

Sombra is holding his own admirably against the two princesses, who play their role well as he keeps looking at me with fear in his eyes, only for another blast of godlike magic from the two force him away from me, or counter a spell he fires my way.

I know if I black out now, I'll die, but I can already feel the darkness creeping at the edges of my vision as more hatred than any pony had ever been meant to house rips through my mind and body.

When I can take no more, when I feel more hatred than any other emotion I had ever felt before coursing through my ragged, torn-wide-open mind, I watch Sombra, who finally manages to shake off the alicorn sisters, flying at me with a silent scream, his horn charging a spell meant to put me down permenantly.

I throw my arms down.

"Revenge Death Ball!"

Sombra watches in stark horror as the sphere begins to fall. It wasn't at its full strength, but that meant nothing now, as it began to fall towards him.

Desperately, he fired every spell he knew, Fear, Obsession, Loathing and Pain, his horn blasted out every vile hex, every dark curse he could throw at it, as the massive sphere began to fall towards him.

When it hit, it was oblivion, the agony of a thousand thousand souls all wishing for his torment, and recieving it.

He thought his very soul would be torn ascunder, something that had never before happened to any living thing in possession of one, such was the pain he felt as the Revenge Death Ball crashed into him.

He felt the sphere explode, and he sensed as the roiling ball of pure hatred ripped its way across the entirety of the Frozen North.

If even a single changeling survived the blast, he was certain they would be dead soonafter.

His body, of course, was obliderated in an instant. His shadowy self, erased in the next.

And yet, even as the sphere consumed him, he felt some small core of himself remain, some part of himself among which no single Longma desired the harm of.

It was only by this quirk, this idiotic quirk of magic, by the bond he had with that blasted sage, that even the barest wisp of himself remained, his agonized, obliderated form floating down in front of the wounded sage, whose body looked to be equal parts fire and ashes as he glared down with a smug expression at the specter in front of him, as he watched the specter look longingly towards the former Crystal Empire, one last time.

"I win."

I felt something snap inside me as I heard Sombra say those words.

"What are you talking about," I mutter, feeling the slow, irregular beat of my heart quicken as Sombra verbally claims victory.

The spirit, because that's all he was now, smiles at me as he stares at the Crystal Egg Zone. "I won. You were too late. Chrysalis, the pawn that she was, managed to keep the Crystal Heart there long enough to complete my spell."

I look to where he's staring, and at long last see the spell that had been forming over the city. A gigantic blue heart that radiated mercy and love, so strong that it burned my skin, even from here.

"The spell was already complete... by the time you threw your little attack," he wheezes.

"And now you get to watch your kingdom disappear."

Eclipse didn't breathe as the power of the Revenge Death Ball washed through the land, and sent Queen Chrysalis and her minions flying away off through the horizon, instead, she stared up at the mass of Love and Mercy that hovered over the city like the sword of damocles. The only love magic that had survived the blast.

"Eclipse, what is that thing, what's happening?" Priss whispers, feeling her coat burning as if she were facing an open oven before her fateful transformation into a member of the Longma.

"It's... It's love. A spell of pure love, meant to give mercy to an entire kingdom." Eclipse whispers in horror.

"Weiss told me... He told me that Love and Hate cancel each other out, that you can't mix the two together. Is this thing gonna kill us?" Priss asks, even as the light of the heart begins to grow brighter and brighter, and the pain begins to consume her entire body.

Eclipse Flash sobs, staring up as the heart rapidly expands, chunks of the empire disappearing into nothing around them as everything begins to float into the air.

She always thought, she always believed that love and hate could co-exist, she wanted so dearly to think that one day, she could find some way prove it to Weiss, that he was wrong, that the world wasn't as black and white as he wanted her to believe. She wished so dearly to find proof that hate and love did not need to destroy one another, but now, as the pain grew to be unbearable, she only felt afraid. Afraid that he was right.

"I don't know."

As I watch the Crystal Egg Zone rise into the air, breaking apart as a pillar of pure love spears into the heavens, I feel everything fall out from under me. I feel everything slipping away as I fail to sense even the slightest trace of anything left as the Curse of the Crystal Empire rips through it, erasing all the hate within its path, dissolving the entirety of it to bedrock.

I knew, and Sombra knew too, that the nature of the spell didn't matter. Against the Longma, against my people, the vanishing curse he had bound to the Crystal Empire, the spell he crafted to twist the Love of the Crystal Heart through Fear to cast it into the future, against creatures of hate, it would only cast them into oblivion.

As I sensed all of the darkness disappear into the pillar of light, I felt my own life slipping away.

"Why," I said, my face buried in the ashes as the wind howled around us.

Sombra placed a solid hoof on the ground as I felt my body ignite with white fire.

"It was you, my pale shadow. You finally taught me the error of my ways," he said, walking towards me, and kneeling on the ground next to me.

I can feel my life slipping away. I channeled too much hatred, and now, facing the consequences of what I caused, it turns on me. I hate myself, and my magic demanded that what I hate be destroyed.

Sombra smiles. "I thought for so long, that fear was the strongest power in the world. I believed that it was stronger than love, and perhaps I was right. But you, you! Above all the trickery you employed! Above all the imaginitive things you created! Even above my defeats at your hooves, I couldn't understand it. I couldn't understand how you were able to do what even I couldn't do! How you could defeat even me, your better! But now I know."

He looks me in the eyes as I feel my entire body consuming itself with hate-fire.

"You taught me how to-" he says, before twin beams of magic rip through his body, and he lets out a brief scream of agony before I watch as his dark essence is scattered for miles and miles around, the ice of the north greedily dragging his screaming spirit into itself.

I don't care anymore.

Luna landed next to Weiss, letting out a scream at the sight of the sage's body.

She watched as he cried openly, white fire burning his body to the point where blackened bones were revealed by the ashes pouring off of him.

It was self-hatred, she could sense it radiating off of him, mixed with the grief and despair he felt. She could feel as the bond between him and Sombra was beginning to fray, even as his life force poured across it into the dark tyrant.

"Weiss! Don't give in to despair! Please! Not all of the Longma are gone! Some yet live, I swear it to you! You must not abandon them now, in their hour of need!" she begs, grabbing his body gingerly as one of his arms fell apart.

He shook his head. "Everyone I cared for was there." he retorts in an empty tone.

Gritting her teeth as tears poured out of her eyes, she desperately scraped at the ground, as if she could simply shovel the ashes back into her best friend's body.

"No they weren't! I'm still here! Please, don't leave me!" she begs, but Weiss doesn't even respond, so consumed by grief.

Celestia stands near the pair, openly sobbing, but knowing for herself that there is nothing she can do.

Luna wracked her brain, trying to think of something, anything that could save her friend.

In desperation, she cried out the only thing her foolish mind could devise.

"Revenge!" she shouted, and for a moment, the wind stopped howling, and Weiss's burning form froze solid, the flames themselves stock still as if paused.

He turned to her with a blank look. "Revenge?" Weiss said, uncomprehending.

The poor fool that she was, Luna suddenly felt a phrase rise into her mind, one Weiss himself had once said. The phrase rose into her mind without warning, and a chill ran through her at the thought of it. 'A deal with the devil,' she thought for only a moment before taking the plunge.

"If you will not live for them... And you will not live for me, then live for revenge! Endure the ages, if only to take from him what he took from you! His essence yet remains merely banished to the ice of the north! When he returns, who will slay him? Who will make him pay!?" she screamed desperately, giving him the only thing she could. The only thing she could possibly give to her friend that would keep him from passing on to the family he lost for even a moment longer.

A purpose.

In Weiss's own mind, a quote rose up unbidden as the link between him and Sombra had been reforged, as his despair shattered like glass in the face of this new feeling he felt.

'Then an experience that perhaps no good man can ever have in our world came over him—a torrent of perfectly unmixed and lawful hatred. The energy of hating, never before felt without some guilt, without some dim knowledge that he was failing fully to distinguish the sinner from the sin, rose into his arms and legs till he felt that they were pillars of burning blood… It is perhaps difficult to understand why this filled Ransom not with horror but with a kind of joy. The joy came from finding at last what hatred was made for,' his memories recalled in perfect clarity.

The burning form of Weiss Noir began to collapse in on itself, as flame and ash became flesh once more, the heat only intensified, until he shone with an unlight that seemed to burn the eyes like the sight of an eclipse. Luna watched in naked fear as Weiss Noir threw his head to the heavens and screamed, erupting with black fire so vast, so dark, that everything went black.

"SOMBRAAAA!"

On that fateful day, Luna had planted a seed within the vulnerable Weiss Noir, she had awoken something within him that could never be put to rest. A single foolish, desperate mistake that she would spend the next thousand years regretting in her heart of hearts,

In the coming years, Princess Luna would struggle desperately to undo her greatest mistake, doomed to fail, time and time again as her mistake only grew greater, and more tragic with each failure.

In the coming decades, Weiss Noir would cleave from himself everything that stood in the way of his revenge. His past, his future, his very light. He would reveal secrets of the nature of the heart that none before had dared to attempt plumbing, secrets of magic that were best left undiscovered until the end of days.

In the coming centuries, history would soon know the name of the Pluck Night Pony, the Sage of Darkness, the Dragon Mouse. They would know him by many names that he would earn through his use of the dark arts, through the madness that grew inside him as he trod his path of hatred to its only end.

In the coming millenia, a single griffon suffering at the loss of her single friend would unleash a squirming evil, a sleepy, unformed thing that would create in its brief moment of clarity the tools of its escape, and a single zebra suffering at the loss of her single friend would unleash the creature that was born on this fateful day.

But for now, Weiss Noir screamed, and the world around him burned as he learned a new lesson, one that marked his mastery over the darkness. He had learned what a pony could throw away when they felt that they had lost everything. What could be bought from magic itself, in return for his humanity.

A bargain to carve out his heart in exchange for the revenge he craved, a deal with the devil that was only possible through...

The Unique Properties of Dark Magic.

Author's Notes:

The Song of the Day is "Snow in Summer"

I look forward to seeing what you all think. You finally know the truth of Weiss Noir's start of darkness. The "One Bad Day" that set him on the path to become what he is in the present.

I hope you all like it. This chapter has been a part of my plans since the first chapter I ever wrote.

Side note; Due to one of my betas pointing out that the Songs of the Day being background music to set the tone for significant scenes rather than reflections on the chapter is somewhat odd, I feel I've got to ask, who here:

1. Is fine with/prefers mid-chapter links for scene specific music, with Songs of the Day being either fully phased out or an occasional thing for when a song really works as a thematic reflection.

2. Finds mid-chapter links to be jarring and disruptive to the flow and pacing of the chapter, and appreciate having them listed later for rereading purposes.

(Present Chapter 35) Darkest Hour (Part 3)

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Radiant Hope was always a pony who tried her best to see the good in others. She was silly, naive even, she would be the first to admit that. Perhaps only a pony with naivete as hers had the potential to do what she had done, when the Crystal Empire, (She refused to call it the Crystal Egg Zone) disappeared.

She rose to awareness sleepily, trying to move. She felt the cramped space around her and claustrophobia began to rise before the illusions took over, and she started to perceive a physical space around her.

What she did was perhaps stupid, idiotic even. Trying to learn about the Umbrum as she did took years, she wasn't sure how many, but the magic of the Unicorn Crystal made it hard for her to perceive the passage of time. Only the Umbrum themselves, who had lived inside it for as long as they did, were completely aware inside the cramped depths of the gigantic red gemstone buried under the Crystal Empire.

"I'm awake again," Radiant said, wriggling to rid herself of the psychosomatic ache. Inside the crystal, she didn't have a physical body, of course, but she still felt like she did. The Umbrum she met seemed grateful for the experience she shared by sealing herself in with them. They had gone so long without freedom from the crystal that they had forgotten what physicality felt like.

"Correct," a voice said, as a fuzzy cloud-like unicorn materialized in the plain white room with her. It was Pretty Lights, an Umbrum who she had become familiar with as she shared knowledge with the imprisoned ponies and learned their stories in turn. As she looked at the stallion, she noted his dark form shift from time to time, blinking between the fuzzy, half remembered unicorn he once was, and the butterfly winged, withered-looking spirit he was now.

The sight of Pretty Lights made the lingering haze of sleep quickly fade, as memories began to rush back in, starting with the earliest ones. The first years she spent trying to learn from them were the hardest. The claustrophobia appeared almost immediately, a phobia she hadn't ever felt before slamming into her in minutes as she became aware of just how cramped and over-capacity the building sized mass of crystal was when she herself entered it to try and understand the shadow ponies.

The Umbrum were understanding, and with their power, had quickly, to her perception at least, figured out how to trick her mind into believing that the inside of the crystal was an actual, physical place, rather than a mass of discorporeated former-unicorns.

It was incredible, to learn the history behind their tragic imprisonment, they told her exactly what she had been hoping to hear when she struggled and fought with herself to try and understand why Sombra, her dear friend, had done what he did. It took experiencing it for herself to understand why he would be so desperate, nearly mad with the desire to fulfill the duty given to him, to mine up the ancient crystal and free them.

It didn't excuse what he did, but it certainly made it clearer when they told her of the spells he demanded from them in secret, magics they could not use trapped in a world that never changed. He demanded spells that dealt with the mind, that dealt with emotions, and how to suppress them. How to change them.

"Hope, you must focus. You've been awoken early for a reason," Pretty Lights explained, walking to her with a tense expression that snapped her out of her reminiscing.

She blinked. "How long was I out?" she asked, trying fruitlessly to feel out how long she had been here.

"Nearly a thousand years altogether. You must prepare to leave this place," the unicorn said, his flickering, half-existant wings fluttering as wisps of smoke and clouds slowly wafted from him. He gestured to a glowing doorway that had appeared in the illusory room.

"What? Why? I haven't learned everything about your kind yet, I might not be able to convince the others," she attempted.

"It matters not. If you do not hurry, there will be no hope for our escape. I've told you never to doubt an Umbrum when they insist there is no hope," he rebuked insistently.

"Sombra is awakening, and with him, his doppelganger as well. If you seek his redemption, you will fail if his enemy reaches him first," Pretty Lights continued, pushing her towards the door. The door was a figment of the illusion, of course, there was no overt exit to the crystal, only the fact that her existence as a unicorn gave her the power to escape it.

"He's in danger?" she asked, worry filling her heart. Pretty Lights had been the one to explain most things she learned in this place. The other Umbrum, what few could still think straight in the deep despair they all felt, were unwilling to talk to her too often. The memories of before their entombment in the Unicorn Crystal were too painful. If Pretty Lights said Sombra was in danger, then she trusted that it was true.

"Yes. You must warn him. He will not awaken fully in time to realize the danger that he faces. So hurry," they insisted, shoving her one last time and making her flop through the glowing gateway.

With a flash of light, Radiant Hope landed painfully on the rocky floor, her face smushed into a large flat rock that sat in front of the Unicorn Crystal.

She struggled to remember what she was supposed to be doing. It all felt like a hazy dream that wanted to slip through her hooves if she didn't keep it in the forefront of her mind.

With a jolt of shock, and several painful pops as she stood up straight, the unicorn mare realized why she had been freed now of all times.

Galloping out of the large cavern and through the countless tunnels carved towards it over the years, she rushed to reach the surface, spells flying from her horn as she scanned around her for signs of Sombra's dark magic.

As she left, the jagged mass of red crystals pulsed quietly, awaiting exposure to the light of the sun to signal the release of its ancient protectorate once again.

https://youtu.be/qHx-4d43404

It was amazing, the feelings that swept through Noir Weiss as he stood before them.

'And here I thought sadism was beneath me. If only I had time to indulge in it,' he muses, taking a few moments to just bask in the sensation of power, coursing through his body as the fog of sleep quickly fades from his mind, and the empty hollow channels of his spirit begin to flood with hate he couldn't manifest as a mere Shadow Clone.

He glances at the ponies. Luna, who has utterly given in to despair at the sight of him. Celestia, whose burning demonic form is tense and prepared to try and protect the others from him.

He notices Fluttershy, who looks like she's about to begin hyperventilating as his killing intent grows more and more dense, and smiles at the sight of the normally bubbly Pinkie Pie, whose normally babbling mouth is clamped shut. The others, for the most part, fall beneath his notice.

When he notices Twilight, however, a smidgen of respect tries to bubble up in him. He's tempted to smother the feeling, but after considering it, chooses to allow the feeling to emerge. Twilight, unlike the others, isn't afraid of him. He doesn't even know why. Is she fearless? Foolish? Perhaps even brave? Not that it really matters. Somehow, the mare is still standing tall, wearing her pitiful imitation of the Alicorn Suite and staring him down as if she's really ready to fight him of all ponies.

'It takes some serious stones to look at me now and think you can just take me on. Good on you, Twilight Sparkle,' he allows.

The sage decides to reward her for earning some of his respect. "I know exactly what I'll do," he suddenly says. Raising a hand, he snaps his finger, and before any of the ponies can react, a large portal blooms into existence behind them. Through it, they can see Ponyville.

With another hand, he points to Malusi, who silently whips out a tied up unconscious Rainbow Dash, throwing her across to them. Twilight's horn ignites as she catches her friend midair, gently lowering the pegasus behind her.

"Go on then. Run home. I've no more need of you," he offers with a smile, hunger in his eyes to see what comes next. Which ponies will run through, desperate to escape? Which ones will stay, brave enough to try and stop him?

The sheer suffering that could emerge from them fighting over the matter is enticing enough to hold him a bit longer.

Celestia leans down to Luna, and quietly whispers, her words unnoticed by the sage who is focused on the element-bearers.

"Luna. Go do what you need to do. I'll stay here," she says almost silently.

Luna swallows bitterly "You can't fight him like this."

"I can distract him for a time, but you must hurry," Celestia finishes, rising to her hooves and stepping between her sister and Noir Weiss.

"Everypony, go. I won't allow him to harm you," Princess Celestia commands, looking to Twilight with a hard expression.

Twilight is thrown out of steeling herself for the hopeless battle by her mentor's commanding presence, and Noir Weiss frowns with disappointment as the conflict is ended before it could even begin.

With a nod, she looks to her friends. "Let's go, we have to get Rainbow Dash and the princess to safety," she says, shocking her friends out of the terror that had gripped them moments ago.

As everyone quickly runs through to leave, a voice calls out before the last pony, Twilight, manages to pass. "Please don't leave me here. I want to go home," Metal Dash begs, trying to make her damaged limbs obey beyond the point where they are able. A chunk of magical crystal covered with circuits sparks before going black as another one of her systems start to fail.

Twilight takes one look at Noir Weiss, who smiles magnanimously as he ignores the golem entirely, before using her magic to grab all the pieces and run through the portal with her friends before it snaps shut.

Anxious and excited, Malusi turns to her lord. "Not that I mind you showing off your fletching new form, but don't you have somewhere to be? Do you need an arrow to point the way? You've got another shot at that bastard king now, happy hunting, my lord, I'm certain he's quivering in his shoes right now." she puns.

Noir Weiss nods. "Right, I'm off," he says, turning around before Celestia grabs his leg with her telekinesis, pausing him for a moment.

Malusi sneers "If I were you, I'd bolt while I still can. You're not in the feather-weight division anymore. Don't challenge my lord unless you archer about it."

The dark sage holds up a hand, pausing her tirade of bow-puns. On some level, he knew she was just trying to waste his time, to try and spoil his revenge somehow... But honestly, he couldn't care less.

"You can't win, Celestia. I'll break you," he explains calmly, his overwhelmingly evil emotions not flickering with any signs of stress or strain as he speaks.

Celestia only bares her sharp teeth, and narrows her slit eyes as her mane blazes. "I've fought you before, Weiss. You've only won some of those fights, in case you've already forgotten the Dark Tournament."

Noir Weiss faces her fully now, the ghost of a smile playing across his lips.

"Those were for charity, Celestia."

He cracks his neck, and puts up his arms in a modified boxer's stance.

The battle between Noir Weiss and Princess Celestia was brutal and bloody. The moment Malusi had disappeared using some kind of teleporting potion after giving one final pun about "Missing" him and her aim getting better, the dark sage had rushed towards Celestia, ignoring her blast of panicked magic that glanced across him in order to punch her in the face.

To Celestia, the blow was shocking, not because it was unexpected, but because its speed and power were both far beyond what she imagined the newly freed unicorn to be capable of.

She crashed into the snow at the base of the mangled tower and felt her spine regenerating from the whiplash and impact, even as she plowed through it and into the bedrock. With a grimace, she unleashed another spell, teleporting out of the way of Noir as he landed where she was a moment ago.

She reappeared high in the air, wings flapping bonelessly in the air as her nerves slowly came together and gave her control over her body once again. With careful adjustments, she came down in a glide, and fired a beam of destructive energy at her enemy, who hadn't yet bothered to cast any spells beyond what he was using to enhance his own body.

Instead, he cocked back a fist, and threw it directly at her blast, punching through the magical energy with a wreath of crackling crystalline glitter coating his fist.

She didn't have time to think, as Noir drew a sword from nowhere and flung the black crystal weapon at her, the blade whizzing dangerously close past her head with a quiet snap of air.

Dodging two more of the blades, Celestia coated herself in the same ivory armor she used at the Dark Tournament, the nigh-indestructible shell thicker and heavier than the one she had trimmed down to meet the guidelines of a mere tournament. With an almighty crash, Celestia allowed herself to fall directly onto the sage, hooves outstretched in an effort to crush him into the snow with brute alicorn muscle.

'He's already nearly as powerful as he was on Pluck Night,' she realized with shock, as the unicorn held her back with two of his limbs, grinning maliciously.

Struggling to pull away, she realized her mistake as the sage began to crudely pummel her armored form, cracking the artificial unicorn-horn with bone-splintering punches that seemed to come almost mechanically, without rest or pause.

'No... Stronger, even!' she thought desperately as her healing magic tried to keep up with the constant cracks that seemed determined to spread through her skeleton with each blow, even through the flexibility that pegasus magic applied to it.

Satisfied with physically beating up the Princess of Equestria like a hostile bum, Noir Weiss grabbed her exposed horn, and with one final heave, smashed her into the wall of the Hidden Palace, thick enchanted stone parting like clay as her body crashed through it entirely, and she would have screamed had she still been fully cognizant as her horn splintered from the pressure. Instead, she stared blankly with bloodshot eyes as her consciousness tried to slip away in face of the damage.

It would heal, as alicorns always did, but it stood as a testament to precisely why it took so much to imprison the sage at the height of his power when she and her sister fought him last. With him fully awake, and neither her sister's help nor the Master Sword to aid her, Weiss's emotional state was simply too volatile, his body too charged with dark magic and dozens of modifications for her to simply overpower him as she once did.

He threw her bloody, bruised form into the snow, basking in the sight of the shallowly breathing alicorn for perhaps a bit too long before turning and stalking off into the snow towards his true prize. With each step, his pace began to increase, until with the ignition of burning flames at his hooves, he began to rocket towards the center of the former Shadow Realm, at the point where he felt Sombra's magic the strongest.

As he did, however, something dark appeared in front of him, and thin rods of magic pierced through his arms, forcing him back with a growl of pain.

Luna, somehow freed of her child-like form at the hands of Malusi's toxin, stood before him with the face and countenance of a devil. Disgust and regret seemed to flow through her very bones as she stared down at him in a shadowy familiar form.

It was then that Noir Weiss realized what he was truly standing against. Not Luna, but the Mare in the Moon herself, Nightmare Moon.

Luna and the others returned to Ponyville filled with fear and tension, but the princess herself only had eyes for the chariot she arrived in, where a bundle of blankets and chains held a small filly disguised with a blank silver mask.

"Luna? What's going on, who is this?" Twilight asked, looking at the bound imp cautiously, yet curiously.

As the masked figure looked at the princess, she could tell instantly the results of Luna's attempt.

"You need my power now, don't you. He's been freed," Nightmare said, confusing the Lunar Guards that had been ordered to watch her. Ones that had no idea who the filly truly was yet.

Luna's face was steel, for all the movement it allowed, but the dark tracts of tears proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that this was her direst moment. Her lowest point.

"Be silent," Luna said, igniting her horn and weakly tugging at the various locks that kept Nightmare from simply running off and attempting more of her schemes.

"Your highness?" Rarity asked nervously as she set to undoing the bindings on... Whatever this thing was.

"Don't worry, Moon, this won't be like last time. I doubt I could endure a thousand more years either. This will be something entirely new, now that I'm my own person," the filly continued as one of the chains fell loose.

Luna grit her teeth. "If I am to do this then be silent, for the sake of the stars!" she screams, breathing heavily before quietly undoing another lock.

She was frightened. Nightmare might have said it lightheartedly, but Luna knew what would need to be done if she lost herself this time. She might never come back.

She didn't want to do this. She debated whether or not it was worth even trying to save 'Noir Weiss' at this point. If any of this was worth it. She knew she had already made her choice. That if she failed now, her guilt would consume her until the end of days.

With the final chain gone, the filly squirmed out of the luxuriant blankets and cushions, lifting a hoof to the mask on her face and removing it to reveal herself. The guards didn't recognize her, how could they, with that little filly body wrapped around her essence?

Standing up until she was nearly Luna's own shrunken height, the two crossed their horns, Nightmare, with the confidence and surety of purpose to achieve ultimate power, and Moon, with desperation and despair deep enough to risk using it.

Magic began to surge between the two, and with a swirling nebula of stars and the casting of a new, far more potent suite of magics, the mare that stood caused all the ponies around her to gasp and back away in shock and fear.

She looked towards Twilight and her friends. "Do not remove the Elements yet, bearers. There may yet be need of them," she said with a tear slipping free of her left eye, before turning into a fog of stars and vanishing.

Noir Weiss snarled and thrashed like a wild animal as the needles of magic held him pinned to the ground.

"You think I can't beat you too? I turned your sister into my personal punching bag!" he roared, flames spewing from his body at random, trying to destroy the magic that held him back like a butterfly pinned to a corkboard. As the flames raged, however, the magical pins only writhed invisibly, shifting and reforming in a way that seemed to bend space itself to avoid the destructive fire.

"I'm aware you overpowered her. But she fared no better against me in times past, lord of hatred," Nightmare Moon said with the haughty menace of an empress.

As Noir's body fell limp and a blast of smoke erupted from his mouth, Nightmare Moon's own form collapsed into stardust, Shadow Clone and Nightmare Fog colliding in the air as they writhed spiritually against one another, Noir Weiss trying to form a new body, even as Nightmare Moon's own magical form prevented it.

Suddenly, the sage's true eyes shot open, and with a roar, he detached his limbs, the metal sockets slipping free as he ran forward, sending a stream of black fire at Nightmare Moon from his horn that crashed into the fog.

She landed as the flames pushed her away, reforming to reveal the utter lack of harm his Hatefire was doing to her. The black flames washing around her body like water.

"So you still don't hate me. Even now," Luna can't help but say, even through the lips of her disgusting union with the Nightmare.

Noir grimaces, canceling the spell and ripping open a portal that spits out new purple limbs onto himself that he quickly shrouds in the black magic of his new form.

"Perhaps not, but more things on this earth can harm than hatred alone. You cannot be allowed to stand in my way," he growls, drawing a one-handed black crystal sword from the palm of his hand and brandishing it at her, his other limbs held behind his back in a fencer's pose.

Nightmare Moon saw through the ruse instantly, she could sense 'Magicant' inside of him. The fragile, malformed structure of magic bound to his spirit was not only suppressing his emotions, but it also clearly resembled his 'Arcana Nox', the network of dream-crystals that originally allowed him to store away spells as he slept. Even awake, every moment Noir Weiss wasn't casting a spell, his 'Magicant' was storing spells within him, charging new Vancian Magics with every minute he stalled.

What struck her as odd, even as she leapt back from his poisoned blade as he set upon her in a frothing fury, was how it didn't seem artificial. Whatever was giving Weiss this newfound power, it wasn't a separate enchantment laid on him. It was closer to self-hypnosis, or perhaps raw willpower and belief alone. It seemed almost odd to her. Unfinished.

'You need to focus, Moon. He's trying to kill us,' Nightmare hissed inside their mind.

She shook her head, splitting into two bodies to divide his attention. 'He's trying to distract us. We have to end this now,' Moon responded, dodging out of the way as Noir summoned a second sword to try and strike at her doubled self.

Nightmare Moon ignited both her horns, unleashing a beam that lanced through Weiss and quickly turned to dark glass, the new spear piercing through him and forcing him into the snow, and at the same time she also created a gravity-well that crushed his swords, and the hands they were held in, forcing every part of his body onto the snowy permafrost.

He tried to speak, but the intense gravity prevented even that.

He stared at the halved Nightmare Moon as she turned into stardust and reformed back into her whole self. One of the first tricks she had learned upon taking the Nightmare into herself.

Noir watched her intently as she did, an intense, calculating gaze that she could easily recall seeing on him countless times before.

She walked towards him, prepared to snap off his horn and pull his limbs off to prevent him from casting any of his more overt magics. The sage had long grown beyond the point where pain could affect him overly much, and Celestia apparently knew how to regrow a unicorn's horn now as well, so it would be of little consequence even if he himself somehow couldn't fix it. She had to act quickly, to stop whatever Vancian spell he was clearly preparing to counteract her own magic.

As she walked towards him and prepared to do the deed, she saw his horn glow, and he mouthed to her three silent words as he grinned, even speared to the ground and held flat under spine-bending amounts of gravity.

'Figured. It. Out,' she reads his lips, before, with wide eyes, she tries and fails to prevent the sage from casting the spell he had just watched Nightmare Moon cast to turn herself into mist, exploding into ethereal flames and disappearing into the snow at incredible speeds.

With a loud curse, Nightmare Moon dispersed herself and set her starscape to chasing after the rapidly disappearing cloud of purple and white embers that Noir Weiss had turned himself into.

'Bullshit, he just now saw us cast it, this is such bullshit!' Luna screamed inside their shared mind.

"Sombra, wake up! You have to wake up!"

Sombra awoke only to feel his entire body rebelling against him. No, not his body, it was his soul that was rebelling.

He blearily blinked open at the begging of a voice that seemed vaguely familiar.

He grimaced as a back-log of centuries of guilt and shame ripped through him like a hangover. He didn't understand the feelings, and he certainly didn't want them.

With a gasp, he jerks up, head pounding with feelings that rampaged through him without even the slightest hint of restraint or control.

'I was too late, the spell-!' he thought, realizing how long his banishment must have left for his mind to fray from the careful control he had obtained over it through dark magic spells.

He realized who was shaking him, recognizing the feel of her magic as it gripped his barely cohesive form.

"Hope? What-" he muttered, managing to pull himself together enough to see her.

Was he dead? He had been banished for so long alongside that blasted city, surely she had already long since withered and gone on.

"Hold on, I have to," he starts, trying to ignite his horn to cast spells that would help him push down the sheer volume of emotional pain his annoying heart was pumping through his chest and veins. He would need to be sharp to deal with whatever this era held for him.

She slaps him. "There's no time for you to drive yourself nutty again, you idiot, he'll be here any minute, you have to come with me now!" Radiant Hope shouts, pulling him up out of the snow roughly and pulling one of his hooves over her back to support him.

"What's coming? The princesses?" he mutters uncertainly as she hobbles along with him, in the exact opposite direction of where the Crystal Empire once laid.

All around them, he heard a voice echoing out into the howling winds that had began to pick up.

"Dread it. Run from it. Destiny arrives all the same. And now it's here, or should I say..."

Faint colorful embers began to rise up out of the snow, gathering together into an impossible sight. A pony that he swore he had already long since defeated utterly.

Was he banished for a mere minute?! He's been awake as long, and already seen two ponies he thought would have long since withered to nothing.

His panic, as clearly as it showed on his face without a hint of control to hold it in, failed to stop the shadowy figure from finishing the quote that made him grin like a loon as he spoke.

"...I am."

He feels Radiant Hope cling to him, and something seems to set the Sage of Darkness off, as he begins laughing uproariously at Sombra's expression.

"Amazing. That spell really is something, huh? Here I am, a master of the dark arts, crazy as a loon, and as evil as they come, and here you are, with all the emotional incontinence of a sixteen year old facing the boogeyman one last time, it's hilarious!" Noir Weiss howls with laughter.

Sombra pushes Radiant Hope aside, snarling as he raises to his full height. "Whatever you think you are, a master you are not," he says, igniting his horn and trying to summon up a spear of black crystal. Briefly, the dark magic comes to him easily, as the desire for domination and the hunger to witness the fear of others raises up within him, but without warning, his horn sparks, and a deluge of guilt ruins it, making him hiss with pain as he backs away.

The dark tyrant realizes that without control over himself, he stands little chance against whatever the sage before him has become. Tartarus awaits, whether by imprisonment or death, he knows not. "If you're going to kill me, then just get it over with."

Noir laughs even louder. "You think I'm going to kill you? Just because you killed everyone I cared about? What a waste that would be!" he exclaims, walking forwards.

Sombra frowns "What are you talking about?"

Noir pauses, his smile twitching with dawning realization. He assumed Sombra at least knew the bare minimum of what he was dealing with, and yet... "You're serious aren't you? You had no idea! You absolute idiot! You had no clue at all. You used a spell of love to banish creatures infused with hatred, and you actually think they survived? God, this is amazing! Ahh," he sighs, chuckling a few more times.

"Fate really has delivered the perfect victim for my revenge, hasn't it? A pony so vile that nobody would dare free him. One whose dabbling in dark magic has left him emotionally raw and vulnerable to what I'm going to do. And best of all, he doesn't even realize the crime he committed! He's going to think he doesn't deserve it! What sweet suffering that will be," Noir Weiss exclaims to himself, a hand to his forehead as he shakes his head ruefully.

With a snap of his fingers, a familiar red gemstone falls into his hand, the gem that was once a part of the Alicorn Amulet. The gem that Weiss Noir had discovered and duplicated in order to create his own Relics of Darkness.

The crystal that Sombra once inhabited, before the Umbrum used the last of their power to cleave it free from the legendary Unicorn Crystal, to trick a foolish greedy pony into taking it to the surface, and releasing from it Sombra's fragile, unicorn form into the frozen north.

"I'm not going to kill you, Sombra. I'm just going to send you crying home to mommy." Weiss smiles, holding up the gemstone that the dark tyrant had long since forgotten about. One that evoked true fear in his heart, where the threat of death or torment alone did not.

"You took everything from me, Sombra. So now, I'm going to take everything from you. I can only imagine what the Umbrum will say, what they'll do, when I jam you back into that prison. How will you break the news to them, I wonder, that because of you, I'm going to ensure with every ounce of my power that that entire blasted race of yours remains imprisoned until the end of days?" Noir Weiss mutters, stalking towards Sombra, who is backing away frantically.

Noir pouts, putting a finger to his chin in contemplation. "Of course, you're a bit big for it now. I'll have to cut you down to size, first."

"No!" Radiant Hope finally interjects, leaping between the two.

"He can change! He can make up for what he's done, I know it, I've seen the good in him!" she shouts, widening her stance and preparing to fight off the sage as best she can.

Sombra feels another unwanted emotion rip through him at the sight of this, something that makes Noir Weiss's grin widen, until it seems almost as if it would split his face in half like the Cheshire Cat. He looks at Radiant Hope as if he only just now noticed her. As if until the moment he sensed the vulnerability she represented, that the mare didn't exist at all in his world.

"Oh? So someone does care for him. And he cares for you, it seems. I wonder, would that make my vengeance complete? If I imprisoned you in there with him? Or perhaps it would be complete... If I went ahead and killed his loved ones like he did mine?" the sage muses, setting aside the Unicorn Crystal and holding out his hands.

One by one, an aura of Dark Magic begins to appear around one of his hands, as Noir Weiss begins channeling magic.

Radiant Hope's pupils shrink as Weiss surpasses two, then three layers of spells, one on each of his hands. Four, five and six come quickly after that, as the sage somehow manages to feel not just six ponies worth of hatred, but even housing in his mind six unique parallel tracts of the emotion.

A multi-spell beyond anything she had heard of before, something that defied reason. For Noir Weiss to do so, even his own senses must have been shutting down. Even something as simple as sight or hearing would disturb a layered spell so dense.

With all of his hands lit up in black fire, the only thing left is his horn, which ignites at the tip with a final, seventh spell.

"I almost want to thank you, Sombra. Without you, I never could have invented this, the ultimate dark spell," Noir Weiss whispers.

With one final look at the King of Monsters, Noir speaks one last time. "It's ironic. I'm going to do exactly as the spell demanded of our bond. I will sever the ties that bind us at long last, and I'll do it by taking away your precious Hope," he says.

"My vengence... Ends now."

He throws his hands forwards, unleashing a swarm of seven massive black dragons made of pure hatred, white flames glowing in their eyes.

"Smoke Devouring Hydra!"

Now is his only chance to run. His only chance to try and escape as Noir Weiss wastes his magic destroying Radiant Hope. Sombra is a villain. He cut out his pity, his love, his care and compassion, all of it had to go for him to do his duty. Any vile act was permitted, any darkness churning in his mind allowed if it meant the freedom of the Umbrum Race. His vile habits could all be excused as long as he executed that goal.

But he was too weak, too weak to hold his traitorous emotions back. If only he had a bit longer, long enough to cast some spells to supress the feelings, he wouldn't have been driven to leap in front of Radiant Hope, forced to try and keep the innocent mare from being destroyed just so Noir Weiss could savor his most satisfying, ultimate revenge.

It was so much worse, so much worse than the Revenge Death Ball, as the seven dragons made of black fire tore into him, ripping away at his being, culling him down until he would fit inside the Unicorn Crystal.

It hurt because it was so much more personal, it wasn't just the vastness of Noir Weiss's hatred, but its intimacy. Sombra could sense the years, the decades Weiss must have spent in meditation, the spells he must have used to give himself eidetic memory, for the sole purpose of memorizing every single sight, every single sound that Sombra had ever made.

"You know, this is quite unbecoming of you. Don't you remember what you told me?" Noir asks rhetorically, his eyes glowing with maddening amounts of dark magic.

He could sense the devotion Weiss must have had, to meditate on those memories, and grow within himself pure, unceasing hatred for every single moment of every encounter he had with the tyrant.

It was ripping through him and the paltry barrier he tried to throw up against it, attacking him in his most vulnerable places as his essence was ripped apart by the magic.

"There's no point in being afraid of the inevitable."

Radiant Hope tried to run to him, to help in the act of blocking the mad sage's attack, but a deep blue aura pulled her out of the way before a crackle of black fire could leap from the Smoke Devouring hydra, striking the spot where her head was moments ago, the princess of the night had arrived, but couldn't approach, the magic in the air was too close to perfection, too entangled with fate itself for her to interfere, even as she poured everything she had into trying to abort the seven-pronged dragon of darkness that was tearing through Sombra.

Noir Weiss cackled, laughing in glee as he felt whole for the first time in so long. It was unholy nirvana, the completion of a task one thousand years in the making. It was euphoric catharsis.

Sombra's agony began to fade, and the laughter he heard faded as well, and he suspected that the end was near as he could only imagine that his senses were shutting down..

However, as he caught a glance at Noir Weiss's face, his suddenly slack, uncomprehending expression that he wore as he stared off into the distance, and as he spied the princess and Radiant Hope doing the same, he dared to look behind him while the attack rampaging around him began to grow more and more unstable, losing power as something seemed to be disrupting it more with every moment that passed.

In the distance, they all bore witness to the impossible, a pillar of pure white was raining down from the heavens, and inside it, embers of black began to appear.

The Shadow Realm had returned.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=semcUTqGGss

(Present Chapter 36) Darkest Hour (Part 4)

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"I don't know," Eclipse flash said, crying with fear and despair.

Priss, at the sight of this, ignored the growing pain, and slapped her friend to the ground with a heavy armored hoof.

"Shut the fuck up! You do know! You know a way out of this, so snap out of it and spill it!" she snarled, shaking her friend as the light continued to grow brighter.

"I... I-" Eclipse attempted.

"Are you weak? Did Weiss pick you for nothing at all? Your dumb ass kept bragging over and over how he kept saying you surpassed him! Now save our asses, you incompetent minion!" she shouted, shaking Eclipse a few more times before yanking her to her hooves.

Eclipse Flash felt angry, pissed in fact! She felt confused, angry, terrified.

"I... If we just had a buffer, something between us and it, I-"

"Do it!" Priss screamed as the light became blinding.

Eclipse Flash grabbed at her feelings randomly. All the tension, the confusion, what she felt towards Priss, and her teacher too.

With a scream, she unleashed them, and for the second time in her life, she cast Merciful Bulwark, a snowflake of white crystal spreading from her hooves like wildfire, surrounding her in the material as frozen black fire bloomed inside it like ink frozen in amber.

It felt like eternity, and in an instant, it ended, as she slumped forwards and her head thumped painfully against the slowly decaying shell of magical crystal around her. Around everyone.

The love was gone, and only a bittersweet feeling remained in the air to remind everyone that it was there at all.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Io0zFbQqAUg

I felt something crack in my heart as I stood frozen. I couldn't move. My mind refused to comprehend what I was sensing. What I was seeing.

The pillar of light, the Vanishing Curse, was returning the city it once stole, and with it, thousands, hundreds of thousands of sensations ignited within my senses. So much hated, and so many sources of it.

My arms grew slack and a thrill of horror raced up my spine. The Smoke Devouring Hydra was weakening. My emotions!

"No!" I roared. "You won't trick me with this! I've grown beyond such things! Sombra's soul is mine! I cast aside hope!" I screamed at Nightmare Moon, tearing my attention away from the light and the ocean of dark souls I perceived, screaming as I tried to force more power into the spell before Sombra could slip free of it. It had to be her. It had to be her last desperate gamble to try and stop me. 'Just an illusion' I thought desperately. 'Just another horrible dream.'

Despite my words, I could feel my resolve cracking, my eyes wanted to look, wanted to see it. The emotions bubbling up were ignoring my force of will!

Radiant Hope, the sickening fool that dared stand between me and revenge, actually stood next to Sombra, trying to bolster his shield with her own magic, and I could feel my power waning.

"This is impossible, it's literally not possible damn you!" I roared as I could feel my spell shattering. I had control! My emotions didn't rule me anymore since I used the Devil's Machine! I chose what emotions to act on, and I could suppress the ones that didn't serve me! I knew I could!

Memories flashed through my mind as a sickening theory started to bubble up through the cracks in Magicant. I could feel my nostalgia growing as everything fell apart.

My eyes glimmered with insanity. "I'm running on fumes now... But I've got just enough gas left for this," I said, raising a hand and poising my fingers to snap them, to unleash every bit of Vancian Magic still sealed within my spirit in one final hail-mary.

Discord raised an eyebrow.

"You're bluffing. You're not the right kind of crazy to throw away your life's work on little old me," Discord says, carelessly, waving me off.

I smiled, a slight, small thing. I felt spiteful. Like I wanted to piss him off even if it meant throwing away my life's work. I felt something else, too. A glimmer of desire. Of compassion. I considered the emotion as it prodded me to act.

'Well, I doubt Discord will let me have my revenge anyway. I'll go out on my terms,' I thought, allowing the feeling to guide me in what I thought would be yet another act of spite. The fact that I could go out doing something good... That was just the icing on the cake. Nothing more.

I gasp as I snap out of the memory, feeling my focus fray as the dragons began to shatter apart in bursts of white, and I knew I wouldn't be able to maintain the spell. It required pure hatred, and an almost limitless supply of the untainted emotion. Whatever was happening, it was spreading. Magicant was supposed to be a perfect seal on my emotions. Nothing is supposed to be able to break it, and yet the fractures continued to grow!

With bitter tears of failure burning in my eyes, I let the spell go. If this kept up...

"I won't let you escape me, you bastard!" I roared, leaping onto the barrier the two ponies were creating, slamming my fists into them like a jackhammer, cracks and fragments spewing off of them.

I saw Nightmare Moon out of the corner of my eye, flying towards me in that ridiculous form of hers.

I threw a wild punch that forced her to back off. "Get away from me!"

I could sense the emotions in the distance growing, until I couldn't deny it anymore. It shouldn't matter if they're alive! I'm in control! I threw away what I felt for them!

The barrier shatters, and I leap through the gap, grabbing Sombra's neck and slapping away the unicorn mare with his body, swinging the Umbrum as an improvised weapon.

Another memory shot through me, familiarity rising to the forefront of my mind as another emotion broke free.

As we stood on the Halberd's deck preparing to do battle with Discord, I steeled myself for what was to come.

"...Are you afraid?" Princess Celestia asked, after a moment of silence between us.

I thought about the question, glancing down as thoughts and feelings bubbled up and demanded my attention. Was I afraid? Would I admit it to her of all ponies, even if I was?

"Yes," I said, not realizing it until the word had escaped me. I saw no issue with admitting the feeling, even if I refused to let it control me.

"Why?" she asks plainly. She probably knew the answer already. We knew each other for so long...

I took a breath. One that served no purpose in my Shadow Clone form other than to calm my nerves. "I... don't want to go out like this. Discord has what it takes to put me down permanently, unlike a certain someone we know," I said, squashing the feeling back down and unmaking it within me as I smirked at her with my signature devil-may-care attitude.

It felt good to be in control. I could have moments like this one, where I meted out only the feelings I chose for myself.

I gasp, shaking my head as I'm being pulled through the snow. Nightmare Moon's aura! She's trying to pull Sombra out of my grip! "Don't you dare take this from me!" I snarled, trying to pull Sombra away.

I saw glowing cracks beginning to form along my black hide, white and purple peeking through my form as chunks of enchanted crystal and graphene began to dissolve into nothing from where I had grown it in my skin and fur.

I tried to unleash a portal, but the spell fizzled as I felt Magicant crack more and more. I saw the spires of the Crystal Egg Zone beginning to re-materialize, and it sent a white hot spike through me at the sight of it.

"You think I don't have contingencies?!" I snarled. I don't have time to fight both of them at once, If I waste much more time, the return of the Shadow Realm is going to leave me as incompetent as fucking Sombra!

'I admitted it,' I realized with dawning horror that refused to shrink no matter how much I tried to stuff it down. My emotions were breaking through. My Color of Arms was breaking apart. 'I just had to go and admit that they're back' I thought bitterly towards my own traitorous mind.

Fear shooting through me, I reached into my mouth and pulled out a false tooth containing a modified Hoi-poi capsule. One of the last things I invented before my imprisonment.

Grabbing the Unicorn Crystal off of the ground, I flipped around the thrashing Sombra and grabbed him in a chokehold, before biting through the tooth and crushing the portal inside, snapping it and warping us both away as the spacial distortion swapped us with what was in the Final Boss Room.

As we appeared in the deepest basement of the Crystal Egg Zone, The feeling of emotions above me sent me into another memory, even as I felt Sombra breaking free of my grip.

I read the last page of Sunset's book that she presented to me. The "Equestrian Grimoire Noir", before closing the book quietly.

I kept my feelings off of my face, but inside was a different story. I was still getting used to the feeling of Magicant inside me, or rather, the lack of feeling. I couldn't quite feel out where the enchantment's boundaries were. It was a good sign. The best mind-altering spells are the ones you can't sense, after all.

"Is it up to par?" Sunset asked me with a vulnerable look in her eyes that I could practically taste. If I were a snake, I imagined that my tongue would have been flicking out to sample the flavor of anxiety and weakness that the pony was radiating into the air.

There was an opportunity to be had. Now that I'm strong enough to overcome paltry things like guilt and pity, I wouldn't have a single problem exploiting that. I could string her along, mould her into something more useful to me.

After thinking about it for perhaps a bit too long, I decided not to pursue it, and dismissed the notion. 'It wouldn't do me any good,' I rationalized, and I still felt somewhat bad about the idea. It wasn't as if Magicant erased or weakened my feelings, after all. Growth doesn't work like that.

I decided not to manipulate her because it wasn't worth the effort. That it assuaged my guilt meant nothing. Nothing other than the fact that I was right to not completely erase the feelings, if they so often coincided with the most optimal path for me to take.

I shook my head, and struggled to tamp down on my magical senses. I could sense all the foibles, all the quirks and flaws that I loved about my ponies, and a helping of confusion that had been building up in them.

I have to hurry and finish off Sombra. I have to get out of here before my power fades. I just need a little more time.

I looked down and saw as the white scales that coated my hooves were beginning to retract, and around my chest, white fur was breaking free of my dark self.

Sombra was on the ground, dragging himself away from me. I just need a little more time.

I walk towards him quickly, shoving him on his back and pinning down the unicorn as my grip tightened on the red crystal in my hand.

"Please no," the unicorn whispers, and for a brief, fleeting moment, I can feel the emotions I tried for centuries to defeat quiet, as sadistic satisfaction, my familiar friend, returns to the forefront.

I hold the crystal in front of his face, the glow lighting us both up in the dusty ruined chamber that was meant to house my most powerful defenses. All dust and gone now.

His essence was too weak, I could sense him being drawn into the crystal as his fake unicorn form began to break apart, revealing his Umbrum nature.

There was no reward or punishment. No family waiting for me in Elysium at the end of my task, whether to welcome me or judge me for my sins.

There was only this moment, this sadistic moment as I took pleasure in watching Sombra cower like a child at what I was about to do to him.

"I'm afraid of the dark," he whimpered as I pressed closer to the tyrant, kneeling down with the crystal pressed in his face like a weapon.

For a moment, I could see through our bond the words that he plucked from my mind. Where he had gotten those words to say now, at the end of his freedom.

A memory washed over me, one tinted with realization.

The pod that I had constructed looked exactly like the one from the videogame. Pale, flesh-colored rubber hoses all plugging together into one gigantic machine. The Star Rod of Dreams was plugged into the machine, prepared to seal my soul, to perfectly bind it as it was when the systems detected me awaken.

When I awoke from the dream I soon would have, The Star Rod of Dreams would use its power to finalize my growth. It would crystalize what woke up within me. Whether it was my victory over my hope and justice, or my revenge being quenched once and for all as my love for my friends and family finally abolished my revenge.

I turned to Tempest. She had been so loyal to me, she cared so much for my well-being, ever since I had given her her horn back, and ever since I gave her and her crew a job in my employ. Maybe there were ponies I trusted more than her right now, but none of them were alive to monitor the machine.

"What do you think, Tempest? The last thing I need to do before I make my way to the Shadow Realm to clean up shop," I asked, watching her face to see how she reacted.

Tempest kept her feelings in reserve, a blank mask that I saw through easily. "Is it safe?" she asked. I had already noticed her poring over the design documents for the machine. She knew how it worked, and how to operate it by now.

She knew the truth, so I saw no reason to mislead her, and shook my head in the negative. "If the machine fails, I would be lucky to die. I didn't name it the Devil's Machine for nothing, after all."

"And what exactly do you want that is worth risking your life by using this thing?" Tempest said seriously, turning to scan my face for any sort of doubts. She finds quite a few. She was right to be afraid of the machine.

If I was wrong... If my desire for revenge wasn't my heart's desire, then my sentimental past self would win. The Star Rod would crystalize that moment, and I might never have the power needed to truly make Sombra suffer.

I felt my determination growing. In that machine, I would face my destiny.

"Revenge," I responded to her question.

Climbing into the machine, my eyes met hers.

"Guard the machine. If that light blinks green..." I pointed at the control panel next to the Devil's Machine.

"...Go looking for a new job," I finish, settling in and counting backwards from ten as a needle of slumber-sugar pierced one of my legs, the soporific taking effect immediately.

My eyes began to slip shut, and the glassy dome of the Devi's Machine began to close on me, powerful dream magic worming its way into my mind, and forcing me to confront my inner demons.

As I fell asleep, I saw Tempest approach the control panel with a funny look on her face. I didn't understand it. I couldn't understand whatever emotion she was feeling, I had spent so long twisting my own emotions.

Her hoof reached towards the machine, and began to tamper with it, and I realize only now, as my true emotions threaten to undo everything I've worked for, that the emotion on her face was shame.

Shame for not stopping me from using the machine. Shame towards herself for flipping a little "W" on the control panel around, making it an "M" instead. My own little joke that I added to the machine, a little reference that I had worked into the machine's mechanism for connecting or disconnecting the Star Rod for testing purposes.

Tempest Shadow stopped me from forging the true Magicant within my soul, from crystalizing the feeling of overcoming my emotions, and now that self control was decaying as I faced emotions too great for the unfinished magical structure to hold back. It was never a magical relic that had given me the power to escape the lamp. It hadn't given me the power to cast the Smoke Devouring Hydra. It was just my own fleeting willpower.

Willpower that had just ran out.

My eyes opened, and I saw Sombra, reduced to nothing more than a scared colt who had made so many mistakes. Caused suffering that boggles the mind to even try to imagine. Only a single pony who truly believed he still had the capacity to change, faced down by something truly evil, something that only wanted his despair.

I really did share his fate.

I felt horror when I realized that my friends and family weren't dead, and now I know why. I won't ever be able to face them again, after everything I've done.

He told me he was afraid of the dark. I could tell that it was a reference to OFF, an obscure videogame that I only remembered thanks to the eidetic memory that stolen zebra magic offered me. It felt ironic, and the words came without me fully deigning to say them as I leaned down.

"From now on, there will be no more darkness," I said quietly to the shivering tyrant, before, with a quiet gasp, his form collapsed, and the smoke of his Umbrum self was sealed within the Unicorn Crystal in my hands.

I limped towards where a worn, ancient looking crystal was sitting in the corner of the room. Smacking it a few times, I managed to get it to produce one tiny, flickering portal after pulling up a panel and snapping several of the thin wires inside it, welding them together with hasty crystal growth.

I didn't have time to do more. As I hucked the crystal through the portal, watching it smack into the Umbrum's Prison with a clatter, I blasted it with one last bit of greed, to ensure it was fully stuck back to the giant crystal it had once been hewn from.

As I leaned back and fell onto my rear, I began to notice that the magic that had held me in my own empowered form had failed as well. I looked down at my purple claws, and my plain white hooves. I had shrunk down as well, and the magical armor in my body had dissolved in the face of my wild uncontrollable emotions. My body was swollen and bruised from the damage that the temporary sub-dermal growth had inflicted on me, but it was clear that no trace of it remained.

There was no grand destiny. Nothing to fight for anymore. No more Noir Weiss, the Symbol of Evil, the Anathema of Hatred.

Just me now. Weiss Noir, a pony who traded everything he had...

For nothing at all.

Nightmare Moon, flying high overhead, managed to see the faint shock of his blazing black hairfire as he was galloping away from the Shadow Realm. When he teleported away, she feared the worst, and if it weren't for one singular thing she could see as he ran from her while she glided towards the maddened sage, she would have suspected that he had finally fallen into a darkness he would never emerge from. That he had become Restless under the strain of defeating Sombra, that without an enemy to fight, his hatred would spiral out of control and wash over everyone around him.

She could hardly believe what she saw from the infinitely stubborn, utterly confident pony who she could scarcely remember showing any weakness at all since he had grown so practiced at hiding it. She still found it hard to believe, even as she landed in front of him, and yet, as the unicorn ran into her and she grabbed him tightly with a wing that he snarled at and tried to escape from with weak, mortal blows that she barely felt, she could see it as clear as the dawn that was rising over the horizon by her sister's magic.

Weiss Noir was weeping. His eyes were red with ugly tears, and she watched as his vitriol for once in his nigh-immortal life faded into nothing as he lost the will to resist her while she pulled him closer. She could barely hear his words as they sat in the snow, but he had the good grace to repeat them, over and over, until she did.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

https://youtu.be/F2TASacP2SI?list=PLf8sGPPwWebWuw1-HPINvsrJ66X7_qeFM

(Present Chapter 37) A New World

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It was fantasy. Wishful thinking that Luna held on to as a way of briefly escaping the collapsing realities of the consequences she faced on a daily basis. "What if this happened? What if this didn't happen?" Questions like those were the closest thing to dreams that the princess of the night entertained. Daydreams, but perhaps dreams nonetheless.

Being the princess of the night, and the governess of dreams themselves, Luna was Tireless. For her, her spirit would never tire, and thus, she would never fall into the deep slumbers of those who passed on. This came with certain fringe benefits, and perhaps a few downsides as well. A tireless spirit is one that requires no sleep, and thus, her body and mind were eternally vital as well. Her ponies in the modern era joked about how much coffee she must have consumed, being seen both day and night performing her duties, but the truth was simpler.

Luna didn't require sleep, and when she did, it was to govern her realm in the dreaming world. No sleep meant no dreams of her own, and the void that this caused was filled with idle fantasies. More than a few tomes of fiction were authored by her alone in pursuit of this desire for whimsy, of course, but those were for entertainment. Now she faced an ancient fantasy of hers that seemed determined to make her question reality. "What if the Shadow Realm wasn't truly destroyed?"

Carrying Weiss's sleeping form, and Celestia's own pummeled self as well, Nightmare belligerently carried them back to New Canterlot, while Moon did the work of processing those feelings in the corner of their mind. Something Nightmare loathed doing, as she still held an inordinate disgust towards the unicorn. If it hadn't been for his fervent begging for her to not take him to them right away, Nightmare would have simply thrown him into the middle of the confused, slowly awakening ponies, and left him to awkwardly explain the past millennia to them himself.

"Well, one thing is absolutely certain, your precious Weiss clearly didn't know as much about dark magic as he liked to prattle on about," Nightmare Moon muttered to herself, making Celestia grin in her magical aura, even with the sun-diarch's eyes closed and body suffering as it slowly healed.

She saw her own point. Luna had considered posing the possibility to Weiss before, in times past, but with how deep he had thrown himself into his magic of choice, she trusted his judgement when he told her to drop it. And if not trust, then perhaps she feared what he might do if she insisted on trying to give him hope, when he insisted that there was no way they could have survived. And how could she have disbelieved him?

He showed her the tests. Dipped his arm in a pool of liquid love that the Windego had managed to congeal for him. It was a sight that stuck with her for many decades afterwards.

It didn't matter what spell he used, after that night, his body, he claimed, had partially been transmuted into an ashy, hateful substance, and whether it was Weiss's clever inventions trying to protect them, or even Luna's alicorn magics, he had seemingly proven without a doubt that nothing could hold pure love back from destroying pure hate, as many of his discarded synthetic limbs had proven when they turned to ash in the tanks of love.

So what she once held as possible theories had decayed under his brutally simple demonstrations, until they were nothing but whimsical fantasies she kept to herself. The idle daydreaming was biting her now, certainly, now that reality seemed stranger than the fiction itself.

As she looked back to where her sensory magics could still detect the uncountable volume of life-signs, she couldn't help but agree with the Nightmare. Somehow, in his studies, he must have missed some critical detail. After all, he was wrong. He was wrong for a thousand years, and they had indeed survived.

Celestia's bruised face refused to stop smirking. Her rivalry with and loathing of Weiss ensured no end of teasing, Moon was certain, once everything settled down and the wounds weren't quite so fresh, a few decades from now.

Nightmare Moon noticed Weiss stirring. "Oh dear. We better take care of this before continuing the rest of our internal monologue," they mused, watching as the icy wastes of the frozen north gave way to the endless green fields of Equestria.

Her sister waited patiently while Nightmare Moon continued to fly through the air in a bubble that kept the worst of the winds from slapping the trio midflight. She waited in a way that only an immortal could have, a practiced manner that required the utmost precision, an in-depth knowledge of both psychology and biology, and above all else, a quick wit.

Weiss groaned, and at the exact moment his mind could process words, Celestia released a pulse of healing magic that made her sister frown at the waste as it healed her lungs, her broken ribs, and her vocal chords in time.

"Aww, is the sleepy baby awake?" Celestia had expended magic sufficient to heal the most intense and grievous of mortal wounds in order to say.

"Sister please,"/"Fuck you," Nightmare Moon and Weiss said at the same time. In a way, she was grateful for her sister's snide remark. It awoke some of the fire in Weiss that perhaps kept him from falling apart again upon awakening. Better to see him ranting and cursing, than the alternative of him moping and stewing, as her sister insisted time and time again.

By now, the cold had long since been left behind them, and Nightmare Moon landed with silent hoofsteps on the pavestones of New Canterlot, her charges floating helplessly in her grip.

"Weiss. You're finally awake. We told you we would wait to hear your answer, and now, we think we would like one. Your friends, your very family have been returned to you, and you do not wish to see them," the princess of the night said, lowering the two bruised ponies to the ground. Celestia, who summoned a pillow beneath her healing form, and Weiss, who stood defiantly on his own bruised hooves.

When Weiss doesn't answer, even as panicked doctors and royal guards swarm over the injured Celestia like well-meaning gnats, Nightmare Moon continues. "We understand if you are not ready yet. If we must, we can inform them of what has occurred while you prepare yourself. It has been a very long time, we know. We won't blame a short delay."

Weiss shakes his head. "No, it isn't that. I'm not going to prepare myself to see them, because I won't be going to see them. What I've become is vile, irredeemable. I can't face them, knowing that they will learn what I did without them. They'll be better off without me," he explains sadly.

"What I am in the dark is- Luna, why are you looking at me like that," Weiss says, watching as her eyebrows raise, and her expression grows increasingly unamused.

He takes a step back nervously. "Luna," he says warningly.

"Let me go! I told you I don't want this!" I shout, kicking and thrashing under Nightmare Moon's wing as she teleports to the edges of the Crystal Egg Zone and begins calmly walking into the middle of the city.

"Weiss, we have been very patient with you, but I've had just about enough of that sort of nonsense. We're not obligated to give you what you want, and to be frank, part of us feels some very potent schadenfreude towards what we're about to do to you right now. Besides, if you won't even bother calling us our edgy original-character name "Nightmare Moon", then we see no reason to play along with your edgy character motivation-slash-backstory."

I feel intense regret for ever introducing to her any of the phrases she just said to me as I try to muster up dark magic, rapidly cycling through spells to figure out one that I can cast without my emotions surging up to shatter the entire mess.

If the feelings were stagnant, then Dark Magic could change them semi-permanently, and yet, here I am, proving once again that strong, incorrect, new emotions can shatter a dark spell, as with every flaming pony I spot milling around in confusion among the decaying shards of what I recognize as the Merciful Bulwark, fresh new lightning shoots through the core of my being.

"I will literally explode if you do not let me go right now!" I threaten. Damn it, less than an hour ago I was strong enough to break unicorn horn, but now it's like she's made out of iron, for all I can manage.

She pauses and looks down at me. "Hmm. Fear, guilt, nervousness, and dare I say, a bit of relief and happiness... No, I don't believe I detect any hatred or greed. I daresay we're in no danger of you really doing anything impressive right now, one way or the other," she muses, fangs peeking out as she smirks.

"Luna wouldn't do this, she's always respected my wishes," I attempt, making the alicorn bark out a laugh.

"Part of me loves watching you squirm in fear. Another part loves helping you heal and reunite with your loved ones. We are in complete agreement, when it comes to defying your self-destructive wishes."

My heart is pounding, my breath refuses to come, and damn it all, she will not let me go! I have to get out of here!

"Your Nightmare is showing," I snarl, trying to reach for my talent, trying to strike at her where she's weakest. A moment of distraction, and I can make a break for one of the Arcana Janus gateways, slip into the underground.

She doesn't frown as I predicted, instead, Nightmare Moon leers at me with satisfaction. "For once, we believe that to be a good thing. You are overdue for somepony to take issue with your petty flight from redemption."

I open my mouth to retort, only for the alicorn to throw me bodily to the ground, dust flying as I scramble to my hooves.

"You-!" I begin.

I see ponies around us, ones awaiting the news of what happened after the evacuation. Something that, to them, happened today, as far as they knew.

I see in front of me a group that seem to have been trying to calm and inform the populous of what little they knew.

The leading scientists and engineers, the two senior captains of the guard, and... and...

"Alright everypony! As far as we can tell, we've been transported somehow, and what few systems are reporting at all tell us that there are no longer any signs of love magic or changeling activity in the Crystal Egg Zone! We haven't gotten signals from the surrounding zones, but if you'll all remain calm, we can work on getting facilities up shortly!" Fair Cut, Weiss's personal mathematician tries to explain.

He couldn't really remember much when he awoke, other than the confusion and slight panic he felt when he woke up inside a shell of crystal. Thankfully, Eclipse Flash and her friend had been going around freeing ponies and windego alike, and he was among the first.

When ordered to check the status of the various systems keeping the Shadow Realm running, he was shocked, and more than a little afraid when he discovered the huge swathes of damage done to... Everything. All of the systems that relied on dark magic were completely fried, and all outgoing and incoming signals had cut out completely. That left almost nothing other than basic Dream Crystal functionality, and some parts of the Arcana Liber's communication systems.

His peer, Dr. Absolutely Real Homeopathy, had professed similar issues on the medical side of things. Black Flame Respirators, which were needed for ensuring a supply of clean air for ponies with resperatory issues, Corrupt Crystal circlets, used for keeping mind-controlled ponies asleep and not attacking anypony else, several materia that held dark magic spells required for destroying failed experiments, all of it was defunct after the love blast.

Glitter Miss Priss and Eclipse were critical for keeping ponies calm and gathering them up. Priss's talent towards taunting had helped keep the crowd focused, while Eclipse's utter mastery of the Shadow Realm's systems and spells helped with getting basic facilities up and running, and more importantly, helping to explain why they weren't running in the first place.

There was no signs of Weiss, and ponies were, for lack of a better word, concerned. Last anypony had seen, he was fighting for his life. Now he wasn't, and none of the zones were responding to anything sent out.

As Fair Cut thought about this, Eclipse took the stage.

"I know you're all confused. Scared, even! I am too. Things are confusing, and answers seem determined to evade us... But we're going to be alright! Not because things are fine. Not because things have been fine. But because we will make it so! When we don't like the way the world works, we change it! We aren't defined by violence alone, but by our passion! That's what makes us strong, and it's why we'll make it through this together."

For a moment, she hears the applause start to build up, but before it can properly reach a fever-pitch, Princess Luna trots forward, carrying a screaming load pinned to her barrel with a single immutable wing, and, with a throw that is entirely too rough for what ponies remembered of the calm, collected princess, she flings Weiss into the middle of the crowd, right in front of her and Priss.

"This one was trying to make a run for it," The princess said smoothly, but was ignored by the ponies who knew their lord well enough to be transfixed by his appearance. Eclipse Flash was stunned at the sight.

https://youtu.be/GDTD24KsdGc

He looked awful.

She saw the bruises, Weiss had been in a full body cast before, and then, his complaints were minimal, but here, he seemed utterly beaten in the way he failed to stand tall in front of them.

She saw the bags under his eyes. He had pushed himself too far countless times in the past, through the false sleep of the dream crystals he used constantly, but here, he looked as if he hadn't experienced a restful sleep in weeks, months, maybe.

She saw his disheveled and unkempt coat, and the way his hairfire flickered and sputtered in a way that implied he hadn't touched a liquid bath in a very long time, whether it was water or the molten salt baths that Longma found themselves using frequently in recent times, in fact, he looked as though he hadn't tended to hygiene at all beyond bathing in filth-erasing flames from time to time.

That, perhaps, struck her as the most odd. Ever since Weiss obtained his draconic limbs, his unique expression of greed left him fastidious. Obsessed with aesthetic and appearance, priding himself on his white-scaled 'dress-limbs', on the purple accents of whatever it was he decided to wear, or, in his case, grow ex nihilo over himself.

It was perhaps inaccurate to call Weiss vain, he didn't seem to care about looking good, merely dramatic, obsessed with his own style, perhaps even especially when it looked tacky, and yet, here, the Lord of the Shadow Realm looked less like a master of dark magic, in smug, playful control of the world around him, and more like a scared wild animal.

Had she ever once, in her entire life, seen him look afraid of her? Afraid of any longma?

Iron Diamond was the first to break the silence, walking up to the sage slowly, so as to not spook them.

The crowd waited with baited breath as Iron Diamond started to raise his flesh-and-blood hoof to extend it towards the sage, intent on comforting the tense unicorn.

He looked at the limb dumbfounded for a moment, before suddenly, Iron Diamond whipped his hoof forwards and punched at Lord Weiss.

The crowd gasped as the duo's flames whipped out behind them at the wind from the blow. Weiss's arms held up in an instinctive block that made Captain Iron Diamond's eyebrow raise.

Soon, the two were fighting in earnest, Iron Diamond trying to get in position to buck Weiss through something, anything at all, and Weiss using his six arms to grapple and punch in equal measure as he strafed around the longma-pony.

It didn't take long after that, for the cheering to start, as the respectful silence ponies had for the poignant speech Eclipse had been trying to give devolved into loud raucous cheering, and bets being placed as the Sage of Darkness and the Captain of the Shadow Guard brawled in the streets like a pair of drunkards.

Weiss was crying again as he spit out a tooth after a kick finally caught him in the face, but he did so with a smile.

In Equestria, Celestia's explanation to Cadence about how the events had played out left her aimless. She wanted to fly right away, straight to the Shadow Realm, her parents were there, for love's sake! And yet, something kept her at bay. Something held her back, and she found herself instead wandering to the temporary cell of the Changeling Queen. She saw it prudent to inform the queen of what had happened, and negotiate the terms of her surrender into Equestrian custody.

However, as she approached the guarded tent that the queen was held in, she heard her talking with the stoic drone she kept at her side, and, after a moment, raised a hoof to shush the guards standing by as she approached, and began to listen.

"-don't understand, my queen. What are you saying?"

A bitter laugh rang out. "I'm talking about the twilight of the changeling race, Squiggles. I felt it. The return of that hateful kingdom."

"So that's it? We just lay down and wait for the end?"

"I swore to you all that we would never again fight ponies. Ever."

She sighs. "Perhaps, you don't understand. Your predecessors did not either. Do you suppose I made that decree out of the fear that we might lose? No. I did it because I learned on that day that we will lose. If the world hates changeling kind, we will die, and now, the very heart of hatred has returned from the war we waged on them."

Cadence listens with rapt attention as the queen makes quiet noises, somewhere between chittering and coughing.

"I hoped that if we abandoned the world, and hid from it, then we would be forgotten. Now, the kingdom which tenderly cultivates the hatred of the world has awoken, and it has no surviving enemy but us. Soon they will spread hatred. Not of Sombra, but of us. The Longma do not forgive what has harmed them.

"Isn't that right, Princess Cadence?"

Darn. Busted.

Cadence sweeps into the tent regally, staring at the queen, the mantle of the Crystal Heart still attached to her.

"I think you're wrong about us. Perhaps the Shadow Realm you knew lacked mercy, but I promise you, the one that raised me still had it in their hearts. Weiss can't extinguish that, even if he cannot regain his sanity," she says.

"You seem to believe that strongly. But I have lived through the rise of the Anathema, Princess," Chrysalis responds.

"Don't you mean his fall?" She retorts.

The queen grins an empty grin. "That you believe that demonstrates full well how much of your knowledge comes from books, rather than experience. Do you really think that the loss of his loved ones was the start of his fall from power? The start of his fall from grace, in the eyes of those he governed?

"He was better than King Sombra when it came to poisoning minds, because his thralls were willing. He was so good at it, he even poisoned his own."

Princess Cadence didn't know how to respond to that.

(Past Chapter 34) Mad

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Luna found herself once again alone in Night Court, her thoughts churning with unease. There had been no funeral, private or public. Her sister and herself had of course publicly stated their dismay, and expressed their sympathies to what remained of the Shadow Realm, but Weiss had not. He only claimed that grieving would lessen the pain when pressed. He spat the words out as if the idea personally offended him, as if the pain were indispensable.

She looked to her guards, who sat to either side of her throne. The nights were lonely, in a kingdom of ponies who lived under the sun, but her precious draugr, her 'batponies', were in a unique position to endure the nights alongside her. They made for poor company, perhaps, but company nonetheless.

Next to her, a small table held papers which she dealt with in the long empty silence of the night. She lifted up a stack, and with a flash of magic, pulled a loose feather from her wing, cutting the tip of the feather to turn it into a usable quill. It was budget concerns. Equestria faced a unique problem in economic matters, due to its proximity from the Dragon Lands, and the few hidden dragons who called Equestria home.

The twin diarchs had the power to repel foolish dragons that saw their country's wealth and coveted it, but over time, learned that simple discretion in the concentration of that wealth minimized the need, as fewer dragons found the risk to be worth the reward.

That reasoning was one tool among many that the princesses used to hold the nobility in check. By using the threat of dragon attacks, ones that would certainly target the vaster stores of Equestria's wealth, the nobility saw the utility in spreading out their wealth, and inadvertently letting more of it slip down into the hooves of the peasants who deserved it.

Luna, of course, was the one to offer up the clever idea to her sister that made this work so well. The plan was simple. Simply do not make such a big deal of the fact that they once defeated the Dragon Lord, Torch, a few centuries ago. If ponies thought too hard about that fact, then their confidence in their princesses might grow into overconfidence.

Instead, by simply brushing off the feat for a few generations, it simply fell into one myth among many. Sufficient to bolster the strength of their mysterious mythos, without making it too clear that the feat was more than repeatable, if the need arose.

She finished the last of her writing, and set aside a new tax reform that accounted for some of the changes the world had undergone in the past century. As she did, she felt a pulse that radiated through the court. One almost invisible due to the sheer distance between its source and her.

However, her senses were sharp, and the court was empty of things to pollute them. She could sense, miles and miles away in the frozen north, another massive surge of dark magic.

She was sorely tempted to check up on the sage.

'Ever since then, it's as if he forgot how to act like a person,' she thought to herself, remembering the various times she had seen him since that day.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1icKVqxxSsk

"Weiss?" Luna asked, cresting one of the metallic cliffs of the Shadow Realm. The land was empty, for the most part. The only ponies in the land were those who returned from their travels, or who had failed to evacuate.

When she saw him, her slow trot turned into a more frantic gallop. Weiss was standing at the edge of the cliff, staring out over the cooling rivers and darkening ashes.

"I want to wake up now Luna. I don't like this dream anymore," he said in an empty tone. Something critical was missing from his voice. In fact, nearly everything was. No signs of grief, or sadness. None of his sly or clever turns of phrase. The hatred and anger he expressed had run dry.

He didn't react, even as she sat next to him. His body was cold, and she felt the disturbing texture of ash where there should have been fur.

It was a vast departure from yesterday, when Weiss's anger was so incandescent that he spent entire hours before she eventually left, doing nothing but repairing the damage done to the Shadow Realm and constructing weapons, in complete darkness no less due to the uncontrollable flames snuffing out all the light.

"I can't do that Weiss. This isn't a dream," she said.

"Oh. Ok," he responded emotionlessly. She expected resistance, anger, anything other than bland acceptance. He didn't react to anything she said or did after that, staring out over the smouldering hellscape with no particular expression.

The next visit a few days later was perhaps worse.

She found him in his laboratory, but he wasn't researching, or constructing some arcane device. Instead, he was screaming like an animal, smashing everything around him in blind fury.

"Weiss! What are you doing!?" she yelled. When he looked at her, he didn't seem to recognize her, simply turning on the spot and rushing at her with his claws outstretched.

Shocked, Luna teleported away, and watched as he didn't even seem to process her movement, attacking the blank wall behind where she once was ferociously. He kept casting dark magics, but they fell apart before she could see what they were, Vances erupting from his horn one after another. He was experiencing a magical surge, the emotions flowing through him too unstable and unpredictable to form any one spell, and with the vast empty space in his spirit carved out to house hatred and greed, his capacity for emotion had risen to make the surge incredibly dangerous to his surroundings.

She didn't know what to do, and could only watch as he slowly came down from whatever insane bloodlust had overtaken him, and both his magic and his emotions faded to nothing. She noticed his mane and tail had actually returned to being plain, ordinary hair, lacking the magic to remain ethereal and ablaze. His coat, meanwhile, had seemed to flake in places.

When he began quietly repairing and reassembling the machinery and enchanted items he broke, she tried again.

"Weiss, what was that all about?" Luna asked, and only then did he seem to notice her, giving her a glance before failing to answer.

Again, he didn't respond to anything she said or did from that point forward, and once he completed the repairs, he just sat in front of his desk silently until she left.

While his anger was frightening, the alternative was so much worse.

What few visits she made after that only helped exaggerate how helpless she felt in the face of his behavior. He fell into fewer bouts of bloodlust, and had fewer magical surges, and more of her visits seemed to be to the empty-eyed husk that would just stare off into the distance. The one who, when she forced herself between him and whatever fantasies danced across his vision, would simply squeeze his eyes shut and shiver until she left.

"Begone. We wouldst speak with our sister," Luna heard, shocking her out of her memories.

Her guards looked at her nervously, and she gestured for them to obey. As they left, Celestia came up to the throne where Luna sat.

"He's having another of his tantrums, Luna. Do you plan to scurry off to spectate again? It has been an entire year, and he shows no signs of improving," she exclaims.

Luna frowns. "What can I do? He refuses to interact with me. He pretends as if I am not there when he is aware, and attacks anything that moves when he is not."

Celestia nods, and it's clear to Luna that her sister seems to have come to a decision.

"Allow me to take care of this, Luna. You've informed me of what goes on in his realm. The time has past for silent support. Do you trust me?" she asks.

Luna balks. "Sister, Weiss hates you. And you certainly do not favor him."

"Precisely." The solar princess smiles in a soft way that is uncharacteristic to the normally brash alicorn.

"I am asking for your trust, Luna. Perhaps, if I do not favor him, then if nothing else, I favor the unique challenges he presents to my patience. I would ask of course, that you never mention such a horrific thing to anypony. I would hear no end of it if he thought I considered him a fine rival, rather than a mere annoyance."

Luna tries to consider what it is her sister is planning to do, and Celestia fills the silence, speaking once more. "He is your friend, sister. I will respect your wishes, but at the same time, he needs this."

"...Very well. I don't know what you're planning, but I trust you," Luna finally admits.

Celestia grimaces as she arrives to the site of Weiss Noir's latest gaff. He stands in the middle of the frozen wastelands surrounding the Shadow Realm, silently glaring as energy builds up inside him, hatred potent enough to drive any other unicorn insane in an instant. After a few moments, however, he lets out a bitter tear of failure as the energy and emotions slip away from him.

As she nears, she can hear him muttering a word, over and over.

"Destroy. Destroy. Des..." he whispers, blind to the alicorn's approach.

When he sees her land in front of him, he snarls. "Go away," Weiss growls, black embers escaping him as he tries to fill the hollow in his mind with hatred.

"No. I'm afraid I won't. It's time for you to wake up and face reality, Weiss. I know what you've been trying to do. You're never going to reach it like that, you know." Celestia says, stepping forwards threateningly and transforming as if preparing for combat.

He twitches at her serene expression plastered over her demonic face, before with a scream of rage, he leaps at her, bloodlust in his eyes as his mane and tail blaze wildly.

Celestia just stands there, unmoving as the unicorn wails on her. He throws punches, stabs at her with blades, fires at her with dark curses, and shouts out the names of various Vancian Spells that all splash harmlessly against her.

Perhaps he could harm the alicorn with some clever tactics, but instead he opted to act like a wild animal.

As one of his claws bounces off of her eye harmlessly as he tries to gouge it out, Celestia finally frowns, and pins him to the ground with a hoof.

"You're losing control." the princess hisses, leaning down to the sage pounding away at her legs with a series of daggers that refuse to pierce the enchanted flesh.

She waits until his anger begins to fade, before continuing.

"I use my anger, Weiss. Yours is using you. That is why you'll never get the power you're trying to reach. You're going to lose what little remains of your kingdom. Then, you'll lose your life. You aren't even using the spells that made you strong. You aren't using what made me respect you, Weiss. Your mind," she hisses, feeling Weiss's anger fade away into cold hatred toward her and what she is saying so bluntly.

"I have heard tell that the dragons you frightened in times past have grown bold. Your insanity, and the loss of your populous have made them bold. The old 'zones' you are so proud of are being probed for weakness, and weakness is being found," Celestia states, pushing on his chest harder, until she can sense pain from the thrashing stallion.

She leans in and grabs Weiss's head in her aura, forcing him to look at her. "My sister told me you chose revenge over the failings of mortality. Perhaps I don't approve of that, but it is what it is. You think you can remain sane and focused long enough to slay Sombra? Then prove it.

"If you don't pull yourself together and take care of your ponies, I will conquer your realm and do it myself, before the dragons do so instead. Perhaps you don't care that your precious empire is falling apart to its enemies while you fail to prune your insanity of less-productive outlets, but I do. It's a suitable threat, is it not? You hate me enough to deny me this kingdom, do you not? Make your kingdom strong again. Begin using your mind again. Show me you are prepared for eternity again... Or I will be back, and I will take this from you before you can squander it.

"Are. We. Clear."

Weiss, for a moment, looks absolutely insane with hatred and anger, before in his mind, something clicks back into place, and he smiles, his emotions bubbling into a new, stable configuration. Old feelings begin to emerge into the empty space that the revenge death ball carved into his mind, and he finds the sensation familiar. It reminds him of the day when he stole the limbs of dragons, and his new capacity for greed left his mind decaying, his new capacity for hatred had done the same, until now.

Amusement and annoyance. Those were the two new feelings he felt towards Celestia as she played bad-cop with him. Of course, there was also gratitude, but admitting that would be admitting defeat to the annoying cream-colored crownheaded cheval.

He smiles in a snide, humorous way. "Crystal."

She takes her hoof off of Weiss's chest and steps back with a smile of her own.

"Start using your cowardly escape spell again, Weiss. You're not strong enough to ignore threats to your person... Yet. I will be displeased if your arrogance has you poisoned sufficiently to end you," Celestia muses, turning and wandering off a few steps before flapping her wings and bursting into the sky.

It would be difficult to claw his way out of the yawning hole in his chest and stay out of it, but he had no choice now. She gave him an ultimatum.

With a sigh, Weiss shakes his head with a relieved smile on his face, his head clearer than it was in the entirety of the last year. "God I hate her."

He turned and walked towards the nearest functioning gateway. It was time to begin a plan he had come up with a few seconds ago.

If he was going to fill himself with hatred and somehow endure it for centuries... He was going to need a suitable hobby to pass the time. Something that could let him cope with what he could feel growing inside him.

The next day, Luna and Celestia were invited to bear witness to Weiss Noir's new 'court'. Unlike the sisters, who used their Day and Night court as a way to see to the needs of the common pony, Weiss explained that his court was exclusively for the use of criminals. It was unusual, considering they both remembered Weiss himself complaining that their courts were a waste of their precious time.

"Blister the dragon, you have opted to face judgement in my new court, having deemed for yourself that any fate is a suitable alternative to the imprisonment you were sentenced to, or the tender grip of Tartarus," Weiss Noir said, sitting on a large beanbag chair made of a glowing, magma-like substance.

"Yeah, that's right. I got better things to do than sit in a jail cell dumb pony," the dragon retorts, scoffing.

Weiss smiles, and Luna, in the stands off to the side, is shocked by his new demeanor. He looks almost happy, in some strange, tilted way that makes her uneasy.

"I'm glad. Everyone needs something to do with their time, after all. I won't waste any more of yours, Blister. Instead, I'll ask you one question. You were proven to have violently robbed several Longma in their homes, breaking and entering into the surface outpost above Angel Island Zone. This is indisputable, but, as I am perhaps sentimental, I would like to know something of your motive," he begins, taking a drink from the glass next to him.

"Were your actions born of selfishness and greed, two things I have come to respect dearly? Or did you do it to harm my realm? My ponies? Did you rob them to, in some small fashion, aid King Sombra?" he asks calmly.

The dragon looks confused. "What? I just wanted free gems. They were ripe for the taking, and no little ponies were gonna stop me," he says, unsure where this is going.

Weiss seemingly sighs with relief. "Thank goodness. It does my heart good to know that. Very well. I'll give you two choices. Alternatives to a century in prison. The first option is for me to drain the life from your body until I am satisfied, a fine paid in life-force equal to your sentence," he begins, reveling in the dragon's sudden shift in demeanor. From dismissiveness to fear.

"The other option is to indulge in something I find a bit more entertaining. Fitting with the theme of my realm, you could face a Shadow Game. You will be gifted a curse, a teeny tiny little curse. Just something to help you rehabilitate, and only for the duration of your old sentence. Endure the curse, and you may wander free once more. The prize of your victory over this little challenge. Remove the curse before your time is up, however, and you will instead face a Penalty Game for cheating."

Luna swallows heavily at the polite, playful way that the dark lord put it. She could see his anticipation clear on his face.

The dragon rightfully pales at the first option. "T-the second one, the teeny tiny curse p-please."

Weiss smiles. "Then consider your sentence in prison officially shortened. We'll let you out in a few months after the paperwork is done,"

The dragon starts to let out a breath he didn't know he was holding, before in a brief flicker of movement, Weiss flung a dart of black crystal at the dragon that stuck into his neck and seemed to melt away.

Suddenly, Blister screamed in panic, looking himself over.

"What did you do?! Why am I a pony?! Turn me back!" he shouted, thrashing in the chains that seemed to be holding him far more than they were before, as if something were limiting the dragon's strength.

Despite his panicked screams as the guards came to drag him away, Blister's body hadn't changed in the slightest.

"That's really heartwarming to see," Weiss smiles as the two sisters walk to his throne, Luna uncharacteristically furious, while Celestia merely looked appraisingly at him.

"What have you done, Weiss, that dragon, you put some sort of spell on their mind!" the lunar princess exclaimed.

He waves her off. "I didn't manipulate his mind. Only his perceptions. You know full well how difficult it is to manipulate emotions, and how amoral it is to manipulate a pony's actions and thoughts. All I did was make his senses tell him a fun little fib about his body and strength, is all. Practically a prank," Weiss explained. What he hadn't explained, of course, was that it also made Longma look like actual, far larger dragons to him, to help truly establish the irony.

Celestia raises an eyebrow. "Is this the path you're going to take, Weiss? It may be reserved for criminals now, and perhaps they must choose to face you instead of prison, but you're playing a dangerous game."

Luna glares at her sister. "Weiss! This isn't a game! Perhaps the wicked should be punished, but what I saw was every bit as cruel as it was unusual."

Celestia nods, but her expression is carefully blank, and she withholds any visible judgement. "We cannot allow evil to rule over ponies, Weiss, no matter how well it takes care of their needs. Can you keep yourself under control, or is this merely the beginning of something we should be concerned about?"

Weiss thinks genuinely on this for a few moments, and they watch as he slowly seems to remember himself.

"I..." he begins, blinking as the dubious morality of what he did seems to come to light.

"Weiss, are you alright?" Luna finally asks, stepping forward.

The moment slips away, and Weiss's expression changes to something colder. Something sinister.

"I'm great." he grins widely as his mane turns from its hesitant and hasty flickering to a slow, ominous wave.

He seems to realize something, looking at the two princesses, who feel a chill as he seems to see something they do not. "Princess Luna. Princess Celestia. You are afraid for the future, aren't you?"

He stands from his seat. "Please, would you walk with me, just for a moment?" the sage asks, opening the gigantic doors of his courtroom with a gesture as he looks back to them.

Taking one last look at one another, Celestia and Luna follow the sage as he appears to think over his next words carefully.

"You are worried that I will become a villain, but what if I could be more than that?" he muses.

"A rival. Practice. How long will it be, before your skills grow dull?" he asks.

"What if I told you I've seen what could be? I could never justify the knowledge of course, but I'll claim it nonetheless. I believe one day, your skills may dull. I have seen it, in visions."

Luna's brow furrows. The ability to see the future was dangerous. She was tempted to disbelieve that Weiss of all ponies had it, but she remembered something that appeared to surprise him, long ago.

'What about the Elements of Harmony? The Elements of Harmony, you know, the relics you used to defeat Discord. Honesty, Kindness, Loyalty, Generosity, Laughter and Magic?' she remembers Weiss asking, asking why they hadn't used those so called "elements" against Sombra. She remembers having no earthly idea what he was talking about, and how stunned he was that she didn't.

Before she or her sister can think about this further, he continues, weaving together words fed to him by his talent, as he could see the fear slowly building in the two sisters.

"I could be a practice-villain, Princesses. When the years grow long, and your kingdom grows lax with peace, I could be an annoyance. A foil, of sorts. Something to keep your skills sharp, and your armories from rusting."

He glances back at them. Luna, who seems to be listening out of concern for him, and Celestia, who already quite enjoyed Weiss's rivalry so far.

"A Symbol of Evil," Weiss says.

"I'll put your heroes to the test. I'll dangle prizes in front of them, and I'll roar in anger when they slyly snatch them from my jaws," he grabs at the air with a grin.

"I'll make a nuisance of myself potent enough that ponies throw aside their petty differences to stand against me," he explains, holding out his arms in a challenging manner.

"I'll find the ponies that are teetering on the edge, and I'll scare them so badly they leap the other way," he continues, grinning as his face seems lit from below, and smoke bleeds from his eyes and joints.

"But more importantly, I'm going to make preparations for Sombra's return..." He pauses, staring out the window at the slowly recovering Shadow Realm.

"And then I'm going to murder him."

(Present Chapter 38) All The Buzz

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"Princess Celestia has agreed with our requests. Your people will receive continued sanctuary in Equestria, and, as part of your terms of custody within our care, you will relinquish the Crystal Heart, you will inform the Equestrians impacted by your policy of replacing and raising orphaned foals, and allow them the option of re-homing if need be, and you will make a public apology and reparations to the ponies of the Shadow Realm for what you did," Shining Armor explains to the queen, staring at the wheelchair bound ruler nervously.

With Cadence having flown off to the middle of the Frozen North all of a sudden, it fell to him to relay the princesses' wishes to the queen, who takes a deep breath through her nose when he finishes.

"While I have little recourse, I would like to plead for an alternative. The first condition will kill me, the second one will kill me, and the third one, you might be surprised to hear, will kill me," Chrysalis responds in a dry tone.

"Are you certain I could not opt for a less horrid execution? I've heard good things about Quartering. Ahh, then again, it may not be possible to tie the ropes," she jokes, making both Shining and the Changeling behind Chrysalis wince.

"I'm not at liberty to negotiate, I'm afraid. I am merely passing along her highness's wishes," he attempts.

As the long awkward moment drags on, and Chrysalis fails to react, save for the slow, ponderous, achingly slothful rise of her left eyebrow, the guard captain begins to realize just how much can be communicated in so little expression.

"I-I'll go s-see if her highness is available to discuss the matter f-further," Shining Armor says, feeling oddly intimidated by the queen and dashing out of the room.

Chrysalis glances to Squiggles, her caretaker in this borderline enemy territory, and the latest to bear his name and his precious persona. The little changeling looks concerned for her, but after a few moments, she rolls her eyes. "Poor little fool. Wears his heart right there on his sleeve, wouldn't you agree, little one?"

"Yes, my queen."

https://youtu.be/B4ST20vgwKc

Celestia, sadly, wasn't convinced that Chrysalis would be dead thrice over if she actually owned up to her mistakes and changed her ways. Something that she made perfectly clear to the Changeling queen, who simply let out something between a snort and a sigh.

It certainly didn't help that the princess herself was still very injured from her earlier fight, something that had her somewhere between a better mood and a worse one. Better, because for some ungodly reason the full-body fractures and confinement to a wheelchair of her own for the day made her reek of nostalgia of all things, and worse, because the pain apparently wore away at her patience like nopony's business, as far as the queen could sense.

Waving her lack of a hoof irritably in spirit, Chrysalis groaned. "Fine, let's get on with it then."

"Don't be so bitter, my fellow chairbound regent. Pessimism, as they say, is a fun diversion from reality," Celestia said with a smirk, before lifting Chrysalis's mantle up off of her with a simple telekinetic aura.

With that, the thin shell of love that kept her isolated from the world around her was banished, and she prepared for the bitter sting of disgust and other unsavory things long since pumped in the air towards changeling kind.

After a few moments of holding her breath, Queen Chrysalis let out a puff.

"My. That's got to be the oddest death knell I've ever heard. She is dead, yes?" Celestia says to the changeling pushing Chrysalis's wheelchair. They attempt to remain stoic, even as Celestia's own guard twitches.

"No, unfortunately, unless my penance in Tartarus is to hear more of your mockery. Sadly, I fear only life could be that cruel with its punishments," Chrysalis retorts. The disgust towards changeling-kind as a whole is undoubtedly there, in the background emotions of the world, but either she has grown healthier over the past few centuries, or the disgust has faded into mere disdain when she wasn't looking.

"Well, since this execution didn't stick, let's move on to the next, yes?" Celestia mocks, ordering her guard to begin wheeling her to the train station after floating the mantle of the Crystal Heart over to another guard, who takes it away.

Chrysalis is carted along dutifully, and the princess begins requesting the location of one of the 'Communities'. One of the places where a changeling had been living disguised as an adopted foal.

"It's important to get a very good idea of just how this 'process' of yours is executed. Even if everything is fine, the parents and foals should still be given the truth," she explains as they are wheeled onto the train, followed by a small retinue of guards.

Chrysalis grits her fangs as little as possible. "And when they blame me for all the woes that come with parenthood or foalhood?"

"I love my subjects, but you've clearly spent a bit too long fantasizing about them having far more complexity and stubbornness in the manner to which they arrange their emotions. We are a flighty lot, Chrysalis, but it isn't impossible for us to adapt," she muses as the train begins its journey to Manehatten, where a young idealistic couple of pegusi took in an antisocial teen who had little chance of being adopted anywhere else.

"Are you always so insufferable?" Chrysalis asks, frowning at Celestia's lighthearted laughter.

"Not always. It took time and dedication to perfect the art," she responds with a serene smile.

Pie Sky and Rose Tint were pegasus ponies who always wanted to see the best in others. It was something that eventually led the couple to adopting Bittersweet, a poor young colt who seemed to not care about much other than candy and complaining. At least, at first, that's all he cared about...

"Rose, dear! Sweetie! breakfast is ready!" Pie Sky announced, flipping another pancake onto the large plate where the others were sitting.

Pie always made a point of putting a little dab of butter between each pancake while they were being stacked up, rather than simply putting it all on top at the end. A little bit of extra care that seemed to delight their adopted son.

Rose Tint flew into the room, plopping onto a large cloudy mass at the table. Hardwood was tricky to bring up into a cloud home, but the table had belonged to Rose's grandfather, who gave it to her as a gift long ago.

"He's still getting ready," she said with a smile that he matched, as they both heard the loud clatter of Bittersweet scrambling to get out of his cluttered room and over to breakfast.

It made the stallion laugh a bit. He might have opened up a lot since they first adopted him, but some things never changed. Not least of which was the sheer clutter of the young colt's room, packed with "Heavy Metal" and "Rock and Roll" paraphernalia.

Soon enough, though, Bittersweet scrambled in, eagerly taking his place at the table while Pie set the plate of pancakes in the middle for everypony to pluck out their own.

"Thanks dad," he said, plucking exactly two pancakes off of the pile. They encouraged him to eat plenty, with all the flying around he did with his friends, but sadly, the poor thing just didn't have that much of an appetite, despite his swearing by their homecooked meals.

As the two adoptive parents started drizzling their own pancakes with syrup, Bittersweet opted to simply tear into the pancakes with butter alone.

It was another little oddity that the couple had learned, taking care of him, that he always seemed to take his food as it was given, not adding or removing anything, nor using any condiments.

"Looks like you put extra love into these ones, Pie," Rose said with a smile. It was a joke they always said, when they realized how embarrassed it seemed to make Bittersweet, the first time she said it. Over time though, he flinched less and less at mentions of the 'L' word, and it became their own little in-joke.

"Yeah... It's really good," the colt said quietly, managing a bit of sheepishness at how fast he ate the breakfast.

"And you're sure you wouldn't like more, Sweetie? You polished those off rather quickly," Pie asked, brow furrowed with concern towards the little pegasus.

Bittersweet seemed to look inordinately happy, and shook his head. "No, I'm good, but thank you. I gotta go, see you after school mom. Dad," he nodded to each.

"What, no hug?" Pie asked with a raised eyebrow.

Bittersweet seemed to put on a calculating look as he rubbed his chin. "I suppose I could allot one for the day," he jokes, before giving them both a big hug that they return twofold.

"Have a good day," Rose says, giving the child one last squeeze before letting him go.

He nods. "See ya then!"

As he turns to leave, suddenly, he freezes, and they notice his eyes widen as something spooks him.

The doorbell rings.

"I'll get it," Pie Sky says, trotting over to the door of the cloud home.

"Dad, wait-!" Bittersweet attempts, snapping out of whatever shocked him, but by the time he does, the door is already open, and he spots Princess Celestia cracking her neck as she gets up out of a wheelchair, stretching like a cat. Next to her, the queen of the Changelings, Chrysalis.

Cicada, or, better known as Bittersweet, was on the verge of having a heart attack.

'And today was going so well too,' they thought through the mindnumbing blend of confusion and fear that came with a visit from both his Queen and ruler, and mother-faking Celestia!

And it really had been going well. Cicada was meeting their quotas, albiet barely. Compassion, sympathy, care, and no less than three kinds of love! Sure, he was maybe slacking off a bit, but what changeling on foal-duty didn't? You have to spend love to get love, so what if he spilled some emotions here and there giving out hugs and smiles to friends and family, he was still meeting quotas!

"Uhh, w-who's- uhh, Your majesty!" he muttered, almost bowing to the wrong ruler. He was Bittersweet, and Bittersweet bows to the pony, not the Changeling Queen!

"Princess! Oh my gosh, please, come in, what brings you here of all places?" Rose Tint exclaimed, hurrying to greet the ruler.

"I'm just here for a wellness check. This wonderful mare is Chrysalis, and she and I wished to ask some questions, and then give you some very important news," the princess said in a soothing, lovely tone that kinda scared the resin right out of Cicada.

When none of the guards outside, his parents, or Princess Celestia were looking at him, he glanced at his true Queen with a panicked stare that begged to know what in the name of grub was going on here.

She gave him a slow, laboriously exasperated look in return that responded 'Language, child. Calm down.'

Ignorant of the silent conversation being conveyed between drone and queen, Celestia was given a cloudy seat at the table.

"Before we begin, I'd like to speak to Bittersweet, if that's alright with you."

At the sound of his name, Bittersweet jerked to attention. At this rate, he was going to run completely out of fear, it was slipping out so obviously.

"Y-yes ma'am- I mean, yes your majesty," he responds, whirling to face her.

She titters softly, and he can taste the genuine amusement she expresses towards him.

"I simply wished to know, do you enjoy living here? Are there friends you have made that you hold in high regard? I assume you've been fed and watered appropriately, yes? Do you care for your adoptive parents?" the princess asks, taking a cup of tea from somewhere that nobody seemed to notice, and sipping at it politely.

He pauses, unsure of what to say.

Chrysalis frowns. "Answer her truthfully. There's little to be done about this situation, child," she responds.

Swallowing, Cicada nervously stammers. "W-would it be alright if I answered that p-privately?"

She shakes her head. "I'm afraid not."

He rubs the back of his head, glancing at his confused adoptive parents nervously.

"Y-yeah? I like living here, I've got a garage band with some friends at school, I get plenty to eat, and uhh, I show mom and dad plenty of love, uhh, even when I don't need to?" he trails off, now glancing fearfully at Chrysalis, who thankfully doesn't immediately respond to the wasted emotions. Discipline was hard to maintain in long term circumstances like these, and it was easy to forget to hold in feelings like that from ponies who took care of all your needs.

Or at least, that's how Cicada rationalized it.

"I see. Has Bittersweet given either of you any trouble? Undue strain, or perhaps he does things that strike you as odd, or uncomfortable to deal with?" she asks the couple.

They look utterly bemused by this entire exchange.

"No, of course not, your highness!" Pie Sky exclaims.

"He's an odd colt, yes, but he's really come out of his shell in the last few years, we don't have any trouble at all with him, princess," Rose Tint says, making Bittersweet wince hard at the wording.

Celestia's faint smile widens into something more whole. "That is good to hear. Bittersweet, I have spoken with Queen Chrysalis, and, as part of the terms of our truce, I have asked to see what she has done to ensure the prosperity of her ponies. We have sworn to help them integrate, and to protect those who are innocent, however, that trust comes at the cost of truth."

"Princess?" Rose and Pie ask, unsure of what is going on, or who the weird bug pony next to her really is. What's all this talk about changelings?

"If you would, I would like you to be honest with them, as you were with me. Explain the truth in your own words, where I cannot," she asks, standing up and backing away to give the ponies space.

Cicada gives his queen one last nervous look, and when she nods blankly, he swallows.

"Uhh, mom, dad..." Bittersweet begins.

With a flash of emerald fire, he reverts to his true form.

"I've secretly been a changeling. The whole time," he awkwardly says in a jerky, jumbled up way.

"Oh," Pie begins, looking unsure of what to say.

"Is there... a problem with that? I would hate to hear that this has been causing you problems," Rose says leadingly, unsure of the issue.

"No, ugh, look, I'm not Bittersweet, my real name is Cicada, I've been feeding on you two for years, disguised as an orphan to gain your sympathy, in the service of Queen Chrysalis."

"I don't feel fed on," Pie Sky muses, receiving a sharp elbow from his wife.

"That's in poor taste, Pie," she responds, before returning her attention to Cicada. "I'm afraid we don't quite understand. What exactly have you been feeding on? I hope you aren't trying to convince us that there's no love in this relationship, we didn't exactly go into this expecting you to be our own flesh and blood, sweetie."

Chrysalis interjects. "My changelings cannot make emotions of their own. We must feed on the emotions given to us by others. The most important of which is love, which we require to survive. We do so by being the target of expressions of those emotions, and when we express feelings in those ways, we release, expend, and waste them. Your 'Son' has been funneling excess emotion to my hive. His true family." she explains blandly.

The teenage changeling watches as his adoptive parents try to piece together the queen's words, and with a glance at each other, start to break out into little tears that make his insides clench with internal guilt.

"It's like a fairy tale..!" Rose Tint says, smiling and making Chrysalis recoil with confusion.

"Pardon?" Chrysalis asks outright.

Pie Sky nods. "It's actually quite sweet. Here we thought he was a shy colt with an odd obsession with that rock and roll instead of getting a good job when he grows up, but now we hear that he's helping to take care of his family, coming to live with us. It sounds like he's doing a very important job after all!"

"I don't understand, I barely showed you any love at all, I fed on yours and I only ever showed you anything back to grow the relationship, I lied to you, and my friends too!" Cicada admits.

Rose Tint rolls her eyes. "Sweetie, you're saying you showed us affection so we would show you some in return, accepted our love for you, and when you had more than you knew what to do with, went out and shared it with others? You held a few secrets, and came from odd circumstances? We adopted you to take care of your wants and needs, even though you had another family somewhere far away?"

She can't help but laugh. "Ponies do that too, I'm afraid."

Pie Sky's face scrunches up. "Sweetie, are you certain your friends are really going to be that torn up about it? I don't mean to get on to you about it, but I would think they would be 'stoked' to find out about this. You make it sound so grim, and they seem to adore that sort of thing,"

"Wh- Dad!"

Rose Tint giggles. "Remember that filly who came by, the one with the plastic vampire teeth? Oh she acted so spooky and broody!"

'Interesting. I wasn't aware that changelings could blush,' Chrysalis thinks to herself at the sight of poor Cicada, dread dawning on her as to just how little bitter resentment is wafting off of the embarrassingly sappy couple towards her for orchestrating this entire farce.

She was expecting to see the two ponies quickly turn to her as the cause of all their woes and express some very negative opinions to her face, something invariably fatal in her weakened state, and yet, it seems they've taken the revelation in stride, whether by strength of character, or just plain naivete.

Looking over at the princess in the corner, who has somehow managed to make her presence forgotten through quiet stillness, Chrysalis watches the princess give her a look of smug satisfaction.

"I told you so," Princess Celestia mouths, cracking her neck with relief as her bones appear to have fully healed. She begins charging her horn, preparing a spell now that her horn is in full working order.

Chrysalis twitches. "Oh blow it out your-" she begins as Celestia teleports her, Squiggles, and the entire guard accompanying them all the way back to New Canterlot.

As they reappeared, Celestia immediately began preparing another chariot.

"Now, it seems one half of the equation has proven to be to my liking. Now for the other side. I want to see the foals you replaced with your own. The ponies tricked into adopting changelings might be satisfied with the truth of the matter, but if I discover that the foals haven't been treated with proper care..." Celestia trails off, grabbing a map of the badlands and hastily loading up Chrysalis's wheelchair onto it, Squiggles scrambling on behind her.

"Please cease with the pointless threats. If I had been mistreating them, the Crystal Heart itself would slaughter us," Chrysalis retorts, rolling her eyes.

"Perhaps my standards are higher than those of an artifact of love. You still outright kidnapped who knows how many ponies. What you've done is on the edge of horror, and I promise you, if anything is out of line with the ones your hive 'adopted', you may yet get your wish for an execution," she explains, hitching herself to the chariot.

"I'm offering you the benefit of the doubt Chrysalis. Never before or after your unprovoked attack on the Shadow Realm have I ever heard tell of Changelings making waves. No attacks, no lovers disappearing into the night, never to be seen again. No pods, or green slime in places I did not expect to find it. I'm being open-minded, and that is as challenging for me as suffering my smarm is to you."

She glances back towards the queen as she pulls the chariot to the edge of New Canterlot's runway. "I have been burned dearly by trusting those who are clever, sneaky, and slow to enact their plans. Do not serve as another lesson to me, that I should know better next time."

With that, she flaps her wings, and blasts off towards the Changeling Hive before her guards can think to follow.

She already knew where it was, having retrieved gigantic insulting statues of herself from it once before, and in no time at all, they were gliding down towards the hive.

"Over there. That town near the hive," Chrysalis points out with her jagged horn.

In the distance, Celestia saw a large, seemingly ordinary looking town. One packed with disguised changelings, and containing a variety of foals and young ponies.

Soon, the truth would come out, and new choices would be given.

(Present Chapter 39) Afterparty

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"I will erase from this world everything that would threaten them."

"-Huh?" I said, blinking as somepony tried to get my attention.

"You alright? I hit you pretty hard there," Iron Diamond asked. I shook my head, focusing on some of the readouts I had been given by Cabal Counter, Fair Cut's kid. After the excitement faded a bit, longma and windego, both in and out of their pokemon forms were ranging somewhere between elation and panic, and getting a headcount of everyone here was important.

My eyes glazed a bit as I looked at the crystal screen that had been enchanted to show the list of 'Missing' ponies. I would have to check later to see if any of the Shadow Realm's systems were intact enough to distinguish which ponies and windigo were genuinely missing, and which ones had been left behind in the ancient past.

"Don't worry about it, man. I'm good," I responded, plastering a smile on my face at Iron's question.

"That's a bit scary, I won't lie. Last I checked, a buck to the head should have knocked you flat. I've never seen you fight like that before," he admitted with no small amount of respect.

I kept my smile. Our impromptu brawl had certainly given the Shadow Guard Captain pause, with all the practice I got in while they were gone, I proved to be more skilled than he had been expecting, and perhaps some of the disturbing ways I had found to maximize the amount of force I could exert with my body alone contributed to the uneasy caution he had been forced to take while we were sparring. It was a bit funny, watching his scowl turn into shock when I did a frontflip, only to kick him straight in the head right afterwards.

"Yeah. I learned a lot since we last spoke," I answered honestly.

He stood awkwardly by while I pretend to look over the data that several other Longma were also poring over.

After a moment, he continued "So, a thousand years, huh? How did you manage it?"

I swallowed involuntarily. I didn't want to think about that.

"It was bad, Iron. It was really bad," I eventually managed.

"But hey, now I can put it behind me! I've got a chance to change for the better now."

I awkwardly toss an arm over his shoulder. "I'll talk a bit more about it later, alright? It's... It's really hard for me to get it through my thick skull that you're all really here. I didn't..."

He nods understandingly. "Understood. I'll leave you to it. I'm looking forward to seeing how strong you really are, now," he says invitingly. It felt weird, how hard he had tried to pound effective close-quarters-combat into me over the years we knew each other, only for him to be genuinely impressed with me now.

As he walked away to order more troops or do whatever it is guard captains do to get out of an awkward conversation, I set aside the crystal, turning to Luna, er, Nightmare Moon. She had simply been observing from afar while I played up the crowd and kept things civil, trying to dig up old memories of actually being sociable.

"So, not that I'm complaining about how unfair it is that you're even taller than me now, but... There a reason you're keeping the Halloween getup?" I asked with no small amount of concern. I could sense the literal demonic parasite melded to her, or, I suppose would be more accurate, I could sense them both melded together. Equal parts in a cohesive whole.

'Oh, right, I gave the Nightmare a physical body to punish it for trying to get a physical body out of the Shadow Realm ruins... Man, I overthink shit when I'm angry.' I realized, after a moment of considering why their union seemed more equally balanced than it should have been.

Nightmare Moon pawed at the ground awkwardly. "Well, this is awkward to admit, but we're in a bit of a Mexican Standoff, whatever that means."

She shook her head. "We combined our physical and magical might, so if we pull apart now, either Nightmare returns to being a measly worthless filly as Moon unfairly reclaims her rightful form, or Moon has the lion's share of her power greedily stolen from her in the separation, merely to give Nightmare a more dignified height. You could say we're of two minds on the matter," she answered, wincing at her own joke.

I raised an eyebrow. Well, there's one easy way to solve that problem. "Right, I'm going to go get the elements," I said, whirling on the spot and wincing as I felt her grab my tail in her telekinesis to stop me.

"Do not!" she shouted fearfully.

After a moment, she collapsed into mist, and I watched as the mixture separated out. It wasn't perfectly clean, I could tell, and there was blending around the edges that intrigued and piqued my interest. Something about the way they had combined together seemed downright masterful, in terms of magic.

I smirked as the pair finally disjointed, and Luna, at her full majestic height, stood over the snarling little pseudo-synthetic filly.

"That was a cruel trick," Nightmare snarls impotently.

Luna is frowning slightly as well. "That was not based."

I shrug, shooting Luna a look, "Look, it worked, didn't it? It's just your basic convoluted scheme. Both of you are clearly scared of the elements. If you didn't unfuse, Elements, if you unfused, but Nightmare stole your power, Elements-"

"It was cringe, Weiss," she interrupts.

My eye twitches. "The only logical option-"

"cringe," Nightmare parrots, having noticed my reaction to Luna's words.

I grit my teeth as, for a moment, I could almost swear I feel steam hissing out of my nose as I let out an annoyed breath.

"Right. Killing you both," I announce, holding up a palm towards them as I crackle with electricity.

After a moment's stunned pause from everyone, both me and Luna burst into loud, boisterous laughter, Nightmare blinking out of her fearful paralysis as she realizes I wasn't serious.

Our banter doesn't go unnoticed, however, as Eclipse and Priss glance towards each other with concern. I wonder what set them off?

I frown slightly as they mutter something to each other, before walking towards me intently.

"It's really you, right?" Priss asks, looking me up and down. The question hurts, but I try to smile.

"Yeah."

Eclipse comes closer, and looks me in the eyes, clearly seeing something in me judging from her gaze.

"You've changed, haven't you?" Eclipse asks sympathetically.

My smile becomes a bit wistful. "Yeah... I'll have to show you some of what I learned while you guys were on ice!" I say.

I scratch my arm nervously. "I hope you guys can help me get back some of what I forgot. It's been a while, and the old memories are a bit fuzzy, you know?" I lie. Eidedic Memory via ritual magic ensured that all the memories were painfully clear, if perhaps a bit jumbled up and confused in their order.

I snap my fingers. "Oh! Perfect example. Hey, Iron Diamond! Come here for a second!" I shout over to the captain, who approaches dutifully.

"I can't believe I forgot about this! Ok, so, could you take off your cybernetic leg for a second?" I ask, grabbing my head and cracking my neck as I shake myself loose and start clearing my mind.

He frowns, and I notice Eclipse and Priss watching intently as he removes the mechanical foreleg. I remember how he lost it during our first battle against Sombra. He was piloting the Heavy Lobster, and when it was destroyed by a pillar of black crystal, he was pretty grievously injured.

Back then, my options for prosthetic limbs were limited, but now...

"Alright, watch this!" I say happily, excited to show off one of the few good things to come out of this mess.

My horn begins to ignite with the three spells I'll need. First, the desire to dominate life, completely and utterly, intermixed with the desire to breed fear, to make an eternal example, and the fear and uncertainty that comes when one considered taking a life.

Everyone except Luna gasps as they recognize the spell I appropriated for my own unique twist on the magic. Sombra's Crystal Curse.

Next, a spell of greed, of a lust for material wealth that rises up and demands the creation of beauty and treasure from nothing at all. The desire for all the greatest things in life, and to exact them from crystal. Royal Crystal Growth.

Finally, the third layer of my spell. A hatred that burns deep. A hatred of everything Sombra is, the desire to defile everything he holds dear, to destroy everything he would erect. The desire to erase from this world any monument to his fear. The Black Flame.

Priss looks like she's about to say something as smoke bleeds from my eyes, but Eclipse holds her back, watching me carefully as I aim my incandescently dark horn towards Iron Diamond.

He looks at me with trust in his eyes, and I nearly lose control of the spell as hope for the future tries to bubble up in response to his genuine trust.

Blinking away the feeling, I fire, and with a blast of magic, three things begin to happen to my guard captain.

Black crystal begins to spread over his body, and in moments, he's petrified into a statue of the same crystal.

Then, where his missing leg was, vivid purple crystals begin to grow, his petrified status allowing me to heal his body using crystal magic.

Finally, my black flames tear away at the curse, and through my hatred, twist and corrupt Sombra's ultimate magic into something of healing and goodness.

With a burst of ash, Iron Diamond stumbles forwards, all four legs intact.

He looks down in shock, noticing the odd leg out, where his lavender coat turns a rich royal purple at the seam between true flesh and healed flesh. Already, bright pink scales the same color as his cutting-torch-like pompadour begin to spread up the new limb.

"That's... Wow," he says, testing his weight on the hoof and finding it to his satisfaction. "I'll have to break it in, I can tell, but still, that's incredible!"

Eclipse's jaw is dropped. "You've... I've never seen you cast that spell on a pony before," she says slowly, and I can tell she's referring to Sombra's curse. What was the problem? I've turned countless dark spells to the side of good before. This one is practically my greatest example of it!

I give her a genuine, proud smile. "It was thanks to you, my student. When I thought I lost you, I felt so much hatred, I wanted to ruin everything for that fool. I wanted to taint his legacy forever, and when I realized that, I was able to break his curse."

I flush, embarrassed. "I even named it in your honor. A Dark Magic born from the desire to do good. I call it 'Merciful Flash'."

At her stunned expression, I smirk. "You've got some catching up to do, my least traitorous student. This old dog pulled ahead in the tricks department!"

It's hard to tell what she's feeling, but when Priss smacks me on the back with a beaming smile, I feel aches shoot through me as the hope burns in my chest. It's a good pain.

I look around. I can see them all. Queen Cold's cautious acceptance as her tiny Togepi form stands on top of Drop Kick, the barmare. Iron Diamond stretching his new leg, arguing with Helmsplitter that it's only going to increase his combat potential. I see the dragon trio, Ruby, Sapphire, and Padparadscha, my little 'nephews', reuniting, and spot Cadence flying in from the south, landing and trying to explain herself to the dragons who had been some of her closest friends, and the two ponies who had been her foster parents for the earliest years of her life,

I hear Priss cracking wise about how I've gone completely soft. Eclipse Flash smiling, really smiling at me for the first time since she came back, having apparently finally seen something worth smiling about.

I see Luna, watching from afar, holding a disgruntled Nightmare under her wing, and watch as she approaches me and stands by my side.

'Maybe I can still change. Maybe this is my second, and last chance. I've managed to pull myself back from the dark so many times when I had all of you with me. I have to give it my all, I have to pull myself back together one last time.'

'For all of your sakes.'

I take a deep breath, and pull away. There's still work to be done.

"Listen, everyone. I've got to take care of something. I'll be back shortly, but until then, behave, alright? Technically, the Shadow Realm is still ruled by Her Highness, Princess Luna, so we'll deal with that awkward mess when I get back," I say, backing away from them and leaving them with that little nugget to chew on.

Luna looks curious and a bit surprised at my proclamation, and as I wander off to take care of this, I note Cadence watching me, her crackling, lightning-like mane rumbling as she begins to follow after me.

When we're far enough away, she finally speaks. The first words I've heard from her in a thousand years.

"When are you going to tell them the truth?" she asks. Jeeze, at least wait for sentence number two before jabbing the knife in...

I swallow. "I'm not. They'll find out no matter what, you know that. Chances are, they'll probably abandon me after they figure out what I did way back when. Let me ride this out for a little bit longer. Just until they figure out on their own what a piece of shit I am."

I look at her with tension in my muscles, trying to figure out what she's thinking.

"You were imprisoned in the lamp for a good reason. They deserve to know why," she says hesitantly.

"If I've got some time, maybe I can make this work. Clean up my act. Please," I beg.

She looks at me and I can see how she pities me as much as I seem to disgust her in a vague, restrained way. It's bittersweet, what few negative emotions I can sense from the princess of love.

She sighs, conflicted. "You know it won't make this easier."

She looks away. "Fine. Don't tell them. Aunty Luna thinks you can pull through this. I think they need to know the truth. But I also know that it needs to come from you. Promise me you'll tell them the truth, when you're ready.

"Promise me, Lord Uncle."

I flinch at the name. At the undeserved trust, and the memories of a better time.

"I'll try. I promise," I say before teleporting away in a flash of lightning, leaving her to walk back to the rest of the Shadow Realm.

https://youtu.be/wGIx4Pddc3U?list=PLz53LvcQUa3HeT0BfHSoA1LfUQMvDNbXU

I arrive to Appleloosa, and make my way to a bar called "The Salt Block". It was time to close out my revenge once and for all, and come to the afterparty.

After we spent so much time around the Tree of Harmony, we both got the vibe that things were going to turn out a certain way. The tree always made sure that certain odd things were kept in line, so we agreed. Once I beat Sombra, we'd meet here, and share one last drink. We both knew the place would be built by the time he got back, and if it wasn't, there were a few other places we could have it.

As I walked into the saloon, I noted that everyone in it was asleep, aside from the Zebra at the bar, nursing a small block of salt and a glass of something strong smelling.

As I sat at the bar, she turned and smiled. "You finally did it, didn't you?! You licked that idiot but good!"

I laughed. "Yup. I did it, Malusi."

Her smile turns a bit sad. "So, now you're going to tap out, huh? You finished salt you had left to do."

With a sigh, I decide to give her the truth while I've still got the strength for it. Practice for the worse admission looming in the future. "Nope. The whole plan's a bust. A thousand years down the drain."

She looks confused, and afraid for me.

"What happened," she demands, dropping her usual habit of puns.

I look down, leaning my head on the bartop as I gently push the unconscious barkeep to the side.

"They came back. They're alive, every last one of them. The Shadow Realm. Now I don't know what to do."

I shrug heavily. "Guess now I'll have to live with my mistakes."

She blinks. What could she possibly say?

"Heh. It was a hell of a ride while it lasted, wasn't it?" I asked, throwing an arm over the mare and trying to lighten the mood.

Malusi manages to smile. "It was a trip, my lord."

She rummages around in her cloak.

"I had been saving this for you, sir. Something I know you wanted since the day you came to this blasted place," she explains, pulling a bottle from a hidden pocket.

I stared at the bubbling, neon-green liquid, and watched as she popped the metal cap off the bottle, letting fizz hiss out of the top.

"Go ahead. I wanted it to be a surprise. Guess there's no better time than now, is there, my lord?"

Scrutinizing the liquid, I picked up the brew and took a sip, then another.

My eyes widened. It was sweet. It was tart. It was disgustingly syrupy and as fizzy as can be, and had the distinct taste of citrus... lemon... lime? Some orange, definitely.

The green soda was exactly like I remembered it.

"Thank you, Malusi," I said, setting the half-empty bottle on the countertop, smacking my lips loudly.

"All is for my lord," she responds with a demure nod.

After a while, we finish our drinks, and she finishes her weird-ass salt block thing.

"I seriously don't know how you idiots get off on that," I chuckle.

"You're one to talk, caffine addict," she retorts, and I just chuckle a little bit more.

"It's a fair cop," I answer with a nod. As we stand up, the residents of the bar begin to stir, her sleeping potion starting to wear off on the crowd.

"Oh, Malusi, you should probably remove the curses you put on Ponyville," I suddenly realize.

She shakes her head. "I ended them the moment you were freed. There wasn't a point continuing to empower them after that."

I slump a bit as we make our way to the middle of town "Right. Good call. I should probably head back now. You want to come with, get in on that redemption-arc action?"

She smirks. "If I didn't have a du-tree to fulfil, I'd say yes in a heartbeat... But our paths branch here. I've got to leaf, go spread some Harmony, teach some lessons. Boring stuff, really."

I nod. "In that case, until we meet again. Sorry we couldn't close out our grim fable properly, but it looks like it's blue skies and sunshine for us unfortunately," I smile ruefully at her, and she has the decency to snicker at my joke.

I don't have any Vancian Spells, but out of habit, I throw my horn to the sky, and shout.

"Avidus!"

Another flash of lightning, and I'm gone.

Celestia smiles as the foals scramble around her, and the older teens watch the alicorn in awe. Many of them had never seen her before, and were all abuzz with questions, ones that seemed to range from how being a princess was, all the way to whether she or her sister would win at hoof-wrestling. (her, of course!)

When she inquired as to their emotional state, they all seemed to answer mostly positively, and when she began to ask the foals how they felt about living here, and how they had come to be here, the answers followed the same general theme.

A mysterious pony in the night, coming to the "unadoptable" foals and asking them if they wished to come live with a family. Those that answered yes, (All of them, considering those that hadn't weren't here in the first place), had woken up the next morning in this town, and had slowly been introduced to the idea of their new disguise-wearing, shapeshifting caretakers.

"Some ponies, upon reaching adulthood, chose to stay. Others chose to leave. We try to instill a respect for trust in them, and we haven't yet had a problem with a pony spoiling the secret," Chrysalis explained.

"We use our abilities to choose ponies that seem receptive to coming here. By using spells to banish short term memory, we can reveal ourselves to a child to see how poorly they respond to the sight of us. Ones deemed untrustworthy, fearful, or hateful towards us are simply made to not remember the brief encounter. Those that are receptive, and who accept our offer are brought here, and replaced with one of our own to double the net-love we can extract," she continues.

"I see. How are they fed? I see no farms or groves," Celestia asks, looking around the town in the badlands.

Chrysalis smiles. "Have you ever heard of Rock Soup? We have the older Earth Ponies manufacture the dish, while Pegusi and Unicorns who choose to stay with our hive acquire more delicate or pleasing snacks from nearby towns, for use in celebrations, rewards, or simply the occasional treat. It's disingenuous, perhaps, but Rock Soup, made with a bit of love and Earth Pony Magic, is at least agreeable, or so I'm told," she explains.

Celestia's eyebrow raises.

"I see," she responds blankly. If Chrysalis didn't know better, or didn't have the wit to carefully watch the princess as she scanned across the ponies for any signs of malnutrition, she would have assumed that the alicorn simply brushed it off.

"Very well. In that case, I see only one course of action that needs to be taken before we can move on. We shall inform the ponies of this town that if they wish to reintegrate with Equestrian Society immediately, or any any point hereafter, that they shall be given my full support to do so. You shall aid me in explaining this, and we shall make it absolutely clear that the choice is theirs, and what the full ramifications of that choice is. This choice shall be offered in perpetuity."

She uses her magic to summon a blank piece of parchment. "Secondly, though less critical, I will see to it that official channels are made for you to fill out paperwork for a new venture."

Chrysalis frowns, releasing a rather gummy bit of displeasure that had been floating around inside her for a while.

"What venture is this?"

The princess smiles. "You've been running an impromptu orphanage-slash-foster-home for millennia now, in the service of Equestria's own abandoned foals. It stands to reason that in the pursuit of truth and honesty for our truce, that this capacity of your hive be left un-official no longer."

Chrysalis sneers. "You really have lost it now. What ponies would dare leave orphans with us willingly."

The princess merely offers a disgustingly lovely expression of utter calm and serenity. "Please, think for a moment. You've been successfully running this shell-game for centuries, by, for lack of a better way to put this, coming into very young ponies rooms at night as a scary chitinous figure and asking them if they wish to be swept away to more scary and mysterious chitinous figures, and somehow you've managed to actually convince some of them. Not that I blame them, of course. This is actually quite a lovely place you've put together."

She furrows her brow, and lets out a distinctly unladylike snort. "That said, what on earth makes you think you can't do any better than that through official channels? Can you imagine the turnout if foals knew what they were getting into?" she asks rhetorically.

She waves her wing dismissively. "Besides, you don't have a choice, I've already written the letter and sent it," she lies, continuing to write the letter for several seconds longer before sending it off in a flash of light.

It took time for the two to explain the options that the adopted foals now had, and a few simply didn't understand the question. It would take time and likely more ponies to help them all understand where they could choose to go from here.

"Hmm, well, with that said and done... You still seem quite alive. On to the last execution, then! Princess Cadence is waiting for you at the site of the Shadow Realm's return, where I will be taking you for a formal apology, and a full explanation of your actions to them," Celestia explains.

"All jokes aside, you know I can't survive hatred as intense as what the Anathema and his cohorts can muster up. You've stripped me of the Crystal Heart, and now you plan to bring me there? To the eye of the storm?" Chrysalis demands, leaning forward precariously, only for Squiggles to gently push her back into her chair.

"Yes, your so called Anathema, on the day of the single happiest moment of his life, surrounded by a loving family of friends, and accompanied by the Princess of Love herself," Celestia says firmly.

"Prepare yourself, Queen Chrysalis of the Changelings. The last trial is at hand, and I promise, you will not die for your mistakes," she says, surrounding the queen, her cohort, and the chariot Celestia brought them here on in her golden glow as her magic power fully returns.

"We living are rarely so lucky," Celestia muses, before teleporting them away in a flash of golden sunlight.

(Past Chapter 35) The Enemies of Their Enemies

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https://youtu.be/5YHE_n93dmo?list=PLOhUeZmJsfpPN0ORri9QWCRwGTD9Wzh_Q

Chrysalis coughed up more precious mass as changelings dragged her into the hive, dunking her in the largest pod of love they had.

It was nothing short of horror. The wave of hatred had slain every single changeling in the frozen north. But what was worse, what was so much worse by far, was the pain with which they left. She felt their ragged personae flow into the hive, ready for the next generation of changelings to adopt, once they came of age.

When a changeling dies, they don't truly die. Their spirit may pass on, and their body may fail, but their memories, and personality, the sum of what they are, is kept. Where ponies stumble through life trying to assemble for themselves someone to be as they grew, her precious changelings had no such problems. When the time came, and they were ready to ascend beyond mere nymphs, they would begin the process of choosing from the hive one of the countless personalities of those yet to be reborn.

From time to time, a personality may have muddled with another, and a young nymph would one day take up the challenge of bringing them together, or perhaps untangling them apart. From time to time, a personality might split. It was rare, and required the Queen's express permission, but sometimes two nymphs would take up the same persona. The famous pair of "Brother Changelings" were once one such personality.

She imagined the afterlife must have been odd for her kind, when she mused on it. To meet so many of yourself, some so different as to be unrecognizable, others, practically identical.

In any case, what others considered death, Changelings considered inconvenience. There was no perception of it, and no fear of what lay beyond for the spirit and body, if the mind perceived eternity.

The Revenge Death Ball had changed all of that.

None of the personalities who came with her to aid in the invasion, not a single one was fit to be housed in a nymph. One so young could not be allowed to take up the challenge of coping with the trauma that came with being erased from the world so painfully. Of being hated to death. They would remain in the Archive-Mind for a very long time. Possibly forever.

She was alive, barely. A queen filled with enough love to fight two alicorns and push towards victory was hardy enough to not die outright, but it was fragile survival. Her limbs, and much of her body looked more like wireframes and spider-webs than they did hooves, such was the sheer loss in mass she had suffered.

In spite of this, she pressed on. She ranted and raved, screaming inside her pod about how she would destroy everything that sage held dear. If she weren't immersed in liquid already, one might imagine her filling a pod through flying spittle alone.

She released all the hatred she could, expressing as much of it as possible to burn it off before it could poison her further.

After a while, she had finally run out of hate. There was no more of the emotion left inside her, and she could simply rest, floating in the thick green sludge of refined love.

A changeling approached her. Squiggles, the one she recalled who was so loyal and perhaps adorably determined. She wondered where he could have harvested all of that without her noticing, every once in a while.

With the Crystal Heart, she had been able to take changelings out of their pods, the shield of love around them keeping them safe from the miasma. Squiggles took to his new duties with fervor, and now, it seems, his duty was as her caretaker.

"Are you ok, my Queen?" Squiggles asked, tilting their head almost like a puppy.

'Don't waste your sympathy. I'll live,' she responded with a mental pulse

Squiggles awkwardly scuffed the ground.

"Are we gonna have to fight those ponies again?" he asked awkwardly. On some level, he must have known what it meant for her to be the only changeling to return from the battle.

Chrysalis bit her tongue. Of course they would need to fight again. This was war, and soon, changelings would be hunted. Her scouts already told her what happened with the spell Sombra tricked her into assisting. The Shadow Realm was weak, its population depleted, and what few creatures had emigrated there in response were unfocused. With love refined through the Crystal Heart's power, it would be child's play to mop up what remained of the place, to extinguish the Kingdom Heart, and forevermore protect her changelings from it.

She felt a stabbing pain shoot through her, and looked down with a gasp.

The Crystal Heart had cracked. It had somehow cracked itself. Moments later, she heard the mental call from the rest of the hive. Changelings complaining of a splinter through their shell, a tiny breach in the shield of love that allowed a lance of hate through.

The ultimatum was clear. The artifact, like many of the strongest magical relics, had in some sense, a will of its own. One that had in one subtle threat, conquered her people.

'If I can't protect ponies,' the heart seemed to say without words.

'Then I won't protect you either.'

And with the miasma of hate so much more aggressive, and now directed towards changelings instead of Sombra alone, there was only one possible result if the Crystal Heart refused to help any further. It had wised up in the face of Sombra's spell that manipulated it, and would no longer permit love being used as a weapon.

And without the heart, Chrysalis knew there was no hope. She had seen what ponies could do, if pushed to hate instead of love.

She looked at Squiggles, who was scratching his chest idly, still waiting for her answer.

'I promise you, on my honor as Queen, Squiggles, that we will never fight ponies again,' she thought at him clearly, and calmly, only a small movement at her throat as she swallowed implied any emotion at all.

"Oh. That's good. Thank you, my queen, I was really worried!" he says, moving to hug her pod before rethinking the idea in response to her glare.

'Return to your duties,' Chrysalis demanded.

"Yes my queen!" he shouted with a salute, before continuing to stand there and watch her.

'Oh, right. He's been assigned to caretaker,' she realizes, rolling her eyes internally.

The hive was awash with fear. Sombra's time spent there had left the supply of the emotion in vast surplus. With that in mind, Chrysalis felt little shame in expressing the emotion. Expressing fear for the future through her downcast eyes and deep frown.

There was plenty of fear to go around, nowadays.

Parboil bowed deeply, staring out over the caldera before him. As he did, he saw the cloudy orange eyes of the Dragon Lord leering out from under the lava.

"We have yet to discover if he plans to do this to any others," Parboil finishes, bowing once again.

The mountain rumbles, and lava begins to bubble up as a figure rises from beneath it. Like molten glass, the lava sloughs off of the figure in thick gobs, revealing dark, heavily scarred scales.

The new dragon spreads his wings, towering over Parboil by more than double his height. Leadership required personal strength, first and foremost. Without it, one could not lead and command dragons.

"Is he mocking us? Playing tricks on the mind of a dragon. Making them think themselves lesser than a mere pony... It's disgusting," Dragon Lord Torch says with a snarl.

"But what exactly do you expect me to do about it, Parboil. We dragons of Equestria are mightier than that little puny pony, but the alicorns, those are a different story. Why should I provoke them over one careless whelp who bit off more than he can chew?" Torch demands.

"Answer me! Is this another of your little games? To make me seem weak?" he shouts, waves of molten rock rippling around his form as he roars.

Parboil frowns. Torch may have been younger than him, but in terms of strength, there was no comparison. To insinuate such was a fantastic way to prove exactly why Torch was not weak.

"No, of course not, Dragon Lord. Rather, it is simply different from what you suspect. The Shadow Realm, as they call it, is separate from Equestria. They are close, yes, but perhaps not as close as you might think. Do remember, their pony master has shamed dragonkind before," he says calmly and factually. The two things required for a steward to such a violent class of ruler as the Lord of All Dragons to speak to him of things he doesn't enjoy.

Torch pauses, his crooked, ragged-looking lips twisting as his expression turns thoughtful.

"He thinks himself fit to institute his own justice over that of the Dragon Lord. To make a dragon think themselves his lesser through pony magic. To claim part of a dragon for himself, without the lust for wealth, for power, that makes us worthy of the name!" Torch growls, as angry as he normally is when made to think particularly hard on anything.

"It's arrogance, pure and simple."

Torch scratches his chin with a single razor-sharp claw. "But ponies are not afraid of threats. They frolic and play or whatever it is they do, even when dragons such as myself exist a mere flight away. They only fear what is right in front of them. I will make him respect a real dragon, Parboil. Now leave me," he says, sinking back into the bath of boiling lava.

Parboil pauses. "What of the alicorns?"

He waves off his steward. "What about them. They have no reason to care, if I teach one single whelp respect. A pony arrogant enough to fancy himself a dragon will come alone, if I demand it."

There was a lot of cleanup to do, and not a lot of ponies to do it. No outsiders could be allowed to even do the cleanup, in a lot of these places. If you weren't a Longma, the Wacky Workbench Zone was little more than a rumor to you.

To Bruto, however, it represented an opportunity.

Practically an entire zone to himself, and all he had to do was tap a few buttons to sign up as a janitor via the automatic systems, ones that were too automatic, and staffed too poorly at present, to scrutinize him beyond checking if he had the prerequisite burning head and scale-covered hooves that marked one as a Longma.

As he swept the empty silent halls, he watched an entertaining little cartoon, projected by a nearby golem floating alongside him. It was one of those shows that Lord Weiss Noir had transcribed and released to the public.

"You know, it's funny, in a way. So many of these stories are about fighting, but so few of them express the real righteousness of violence. Friendship, Love, Trust. So many redundant reasons to fight," he mutters to himself, adjusting the janitor's cap on his head. He opens a door that slides open at his command, slipping inside one of the most important rooms in the Shadow Realm.

Possibly even more important than even the Chamber of the Kingdom Heart itself.

Bruto smirks at the server room. Dream Crystal Fragments were everywhere, smashed apart in a hasty bid to keep the precious data within out of enemy hands. It would probably take years for Lord Weiss to regain the knowledge that lay destroyed in this room.

Blueprints, secrets of magic, secrets of the Shadow Realm's operation. Even recordings that perhaps implicated him. It was certainly a lovely consolation prize for the disappointing showing that the changelings had given when they invaded. Bruto barely got to fight them for an hour before they had been wiped out. The few he slew had hardly been worth implicating himself to give them little hints to get in.

The stallion walked over to where some of the crystals yet remained. Lord Weiss was still screaming his head off on the surface, Bruto could tell. It wouldn't take long for the sage to make his way down here, and begin repairing what he could in a mad scramble to prepare for war hundreds of years in the future.

With a whistle and a hum, Bruto grabbed the remaining crystals in the server room, and swept up the fragments that remained into a bin. Perhaps whoever broke these was in too much of a hurry to destroy them properly, or maybe they didn't know how to properly dispose of a magic crystal. Either way, Bruto could tell just by looking at the pile of fragments that he placed into a little silk satchel, that it would only take a trip to an unscrupulous Equestrian Jeweler to fuse the shards back together, and he would have a collection of the Shadow Realm's darkest secrets at his disposal.

"Strength to make the most learned techniques outmoded. That is strength absolute." he heard the cartoon character say in one of the scenes. His ear twitched towards the golem projecting it, and he smiled.

"Maybe there's something to these shows after all..."

(Present Chapter 40) The Friends of Their Friends

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"Alright, you're free to go," one of the guards says, backing away from Tempest Shadow after unlocking the manacles.

She rubs her wrists with a frown, and awkwardly lopes over to the rest of her crew. She hadn't technically been arrested, but the Equestrian Government made it very clear that she and her crew were going to be detained until Weiss's lamp was reclaimed.

'Can't really blame them. I do work for the guy,' she thinks distainfully, leaning up against the wall of the Halberd for stability. Ever since she got blasted by the Staff of Sacanas, she had been saturated with Storm Magic. It was annoying, considering how long she managed to live in Storm Country without being hit by the stuff.

Hands were a strange trait of creatures living there, something about the magic of the Storm Country just demanded that your limbs branch out into little spindly things, and bipedalism was an equally annoying consequence, throwing off her balance as the storm magic left her like the hedgehogs under her command, upright and more resistant to electricity with the added height to better harness it.

Hooves aren't meant to deal with either change, and it showed in her difficult adjustment to the altered form. She could hardly wait for it to wear off, but, knowing how long it took for sympathetic metamorphosis to wear off, it would likely be months or longer.

It wasn't nearly as much of a problem as her boss blowing himself up, only for an insane cultist to literally steal him.

"So, what happened?" she asks coldly, glaring at one of the nearby Royal Guards for more information on why exactly she and her crew were being let go now of all times. She could only assume that they had recaptured the sage. If he were free, then they would probably try to keep her longer so she couldn't rush to his aid.

The Royal Guard was stalwart in the face of her glare, and answered curtly. "The situation has been resolved," they answered uselessly. It was clear that the guards, several of which she distinctly remembers beating up with fireworks, were not going to be forthcoming with her.

She sighs with frustration, pointing at her crew. "Grubber, get everyone aboard. We're out of here," she orders, stalking after the scrambling band of hedgehogs.

'At least now I don't have to worry about that idiot for a while,' Tempest thinks, grimacing at some of the more unfortunate things she did to try and steer Weiss Noir away from what he had been planning.

All of it rendered moot, if his lamp had been reclaimed. He'd just sleep through the whole Sombra mess, and then the princesses could deal with putting his crazed psyche back together afterwards.

"What now, Captain?" Grubber asks as she makes her way to the top deck of the airship, watching as the wings flare and the Hellfire Engines open to full bore.

"I guess we figure out what's going on. See if anyone can tell us what happened with the Weiss situation. Then we do what he told me to do if his plans got ruined."

She answers Grubber's confused look with a shrug, something admittedly made easier now that two of her legs were off the ground.

"We go looking for a new job."

Sunset closes her journal, the magic in it allowed her to communicate with Princess Celestia, and what she had read was stunning. In all honesty, it was impossible. Most importantly, it demonstrated just how... Bafflingly unintelligent, or perhaps how crippled with despair Weiss must have been.

"He had a time machine. A Time Machine! And he never bothered to... to even check?!"

Trixie frowns, turning away from her hay-shake. She and Gilda had been in an entirely different city when all of this had happened doing one of their shows, leaving Sunset as the only member of their little group to run off with the Elements when Malusi started causing problems.

"To check what?" she asked, as Gilda returned with a drink of her own.

"To check if they actually died! They didn't! I just got a message from the princess saying that the Shadow Realm has returned! It just popped up out of nowhere a few minutes after he was freed!" she shouts, throwing her hooves up.

"He's an imbecile! He had time travel for centuries, and apparently, he had never bothered to check the one thing that made the most sense to check, namely, if the Vanishing Curse had actually failed to vanish them! He had access to Sombra's journals, his notes, he had to have thought that the slimmest chance existed, right? He couldn't have been that stupid, right?! But he was!" she shouts, petering out with a groan.

"If I ever see that idiot again, I swear, I'll uhh," Sunset frowns, exhausted from trying to imagine the mental gymnastics that that lame-brained dark lord had to have gone through to just assume for hundreds of years that they were without a doubt dead and gone.

Gilda waggles her talon, summoning the Master Sword in a flash of light. "I could poke him with this. He's definitely got it coming," she offers.

Sunset laughs, taking the joke for what it is. "Ok, maybe I won't have you stab him. I just... Look, I read the history books, to think that everything, from the war machines all the way to the Weapons of Light themselves was all a consequence of him making one faulty assumption... It makes my intellectual mind ache at just the revelation. Entire history books worth of his swan dive into the deep end of insanity, all because he made an assumption."

Trixie raises an eyebrow. "Trixie seems to remember you telling us that you fled to another dimension and swore revenge on the princess because of some assumptions of your own."

"Wh- That was different! I was right, for one, as a student of Celestia, my job was to learn magic, not to prance around and waste time with friendship!" she pouts.

"Personally, I don't get why you're torn up over this. You know he tricked me into drinking hate poison and probably would have kidnapped me if Rainbow and her friends didn't come through for me, right? If he did a bunch of messed up stuff, at some point you gotta ask if he's even right enough in the head to think of what you thought about." Gilda asks with a raised eyebrow of her own.

Sunset sighs. "I guess you're right. He absolutely hates time travel. Maybe I'm just overly invested, I mean... He saved my life with time travel. It's hard to get over the fact that he did that for me, but not for this."

"Perhaps he knew," Trixie muses.

"What?" Sunset responds with confusion.

She shakes her head. "Not on the surface of course, but maybe he did think it was a possibility deep down. Maybe he was afraid to find out the truth. You know, Trixie isn't totally ignorant of that history. She learned her juggling through dark magic invented by him. Prestidigitation is a mainstay of any magic user, after all, and you can hardly deal with Chapter Black's stooges without hearing a lot of melodrama like that," she muses.

"If you thought you lost everything, truly lost everything... Couldn't it be even more frightening and painful to know that for sure?"

Gilda frowns. The mood had grown tense beyond what mere milkshakes could remedy, no matter how much extra hay was in Trixie's. "Alright, enough of that mushy stuff. We gotta lighten the mood here. I heard Twilight snagged some kind of Rainbow Dash Robot from that moron. Want to go check it out, egghead?" she asks, smirking at Sunset.

Sunset scoffs. "I guess. Who knows how badly Celestia's 'Most Faithful Student' will bungle up tampering with one of his projects."

Metal Dash OS 1.58

>Drawing System Specs... Nope.

>Attempt 2. Drawing System Specs... Nope.

>Skip.

>Drawing Miltek Specs... Nope.

>Attempt 2. Drawing Miltek Specs... Nope.

>Skip.
//Two bits got skipped. Fair warning, continuing startup will cause problems.

>Sensory Suite Online.

>Emotional Suite Online.

>Regulatory Suite Offline.
//Fair warning, the golem will be aware of overrides without this, if they work at all.
//You want a crazed golem, that's your business.

>Autocamo Disabled

>Collating Miracle Matter Data... Good.

>Collating Life Data... Good.

>Collating Memory Data...

>...

>Sort of? (Succeeded with Errors)

Shadowcorp Dual Golem Core, Shadow Realm Year 262.

"You don't understand, Spike, this is... If I wasn't looking at the readings right this minute, I'd think it was impossible. I still think it might be impossible!" she says, rifling through a long paper scroll covered in small dots and symbols.

'What? Twilight? Where am I?' Dash thought to herself, trying to open her eyes. Something felt wrong, like her eyelids just weren't responding. Her body ached all over, where it didn't feel numb, and for some reason she felt as if something horrible had happened, but it was fuzzy and indistinct, like it hadn't really happened to her.

"The things packed into this golem look like they belong in the next millennia, not the previous one, and that's what little I can understand from this thing!" Twilight throws her hooves up.

Dash tries to move, but a horrible pain shoots through her joints when she tries, and she hears an ominous squeak that Twilight doesn't seem to notice. She still can't see.

"Most of it, he seems to have cobbled together from spare parts. A lot of these enchantments are Earth Pony ones, so he couldn't have done all this work himself. It's more likely that he had commissioned the original parts from various Longma with narrow special talents in crystal enchanting and metalworking, and he only provided the general outline, and possibly assembled it. He must have had the Againte Core in storage, and built around it. That's the only irreplaceable part," Twilight mutters, the sound of her hooves clip clopping around as she paces.

"Uhh, Twilight, what are you going to do when she wakes up?" Spike asks nervously, but Twilight seems to be totally engrossed in whatever it is she's talking about.

"The only question is, where could he have possibly gotten the power? Celestia, it's insane to contemplate, Againte is capable of it, yes, but to expose two pieces to that much of Rainbow Dash's magic at once..!" she continues pacing as she speaks.

With a phenomenal force of will, Dash forces her mouth to move, a disturbing grinding sensation making her almost immediately regret it.

"Twilight... I can't see," she mutters fearfully and as she does, she notices something about her voice sounds wrong. Not all there, and whistle-like, almost.

The unicorn gasps. "Oh my gosh, uhh, hold on!"

More scrambling, bits of metal and piles of paper rustling, and then a faint spark followed by blinding light.

Dash tries to close her eyes shut, but it doesn't work, and she has no choice but to withstand the brightness until her vision adjusts.

When she sees the mechanisms and machinery strewn about on the table in front of her, she looks around frantically to figure out what's going on. She can't move her head, but she sees glowing wires everywhere, weird bits of machinery she doesn't know the purpose of, large cyan chunks of metal covered in a grey goop, and a jar, filled with more of the same goop.

In the middle of the table, a gigantic pair of gemstones, like an interlocking yin-yang, flicker and glow brightly with a shimmering rainbow light, wired into everything else.

"W-where am I? Twilight?!" she demands, looking to the nervous unicorn.

"What is the last thing you remember?" Twilight responds in lieu of an answer, sitting down in front of her with a look of concern on her face.

"I... I was at the Cloudsdale Colosseum, doing a stunt for the Best Young Flier's competition! D-did I crash? I did the Sonic Rainboom, and then-"

Suddenly, at the ragged edge of where her recollection of events ended, she was frozen as sights and sounds rushed through her mind, and one of the crystals on the table began to glow brightly.

The crude enchanted recordings run through her, forcing events into her short-term memory as if she had re-experienced them, but even as they do, they begin to slip away as they move chronologically forwards, lacking any outlet to assimilate into her thoughts properly. One scene slipping away as the new one comes to the forefront.

Eventually, some part of her outside of her control settles on the scene with the most utility, as judged by subtle parts of herself, and she feels as though what happened... days ago? Moments ago? However long ago, it feels as if she's part of that moment, the transition from past to present seamless from her perspective.

She tried to use the element of Loyalty, but it messed everything up. That jerk manipulated her, and now he's out running around terrorizing everypony!

Then he...

He...

"I'm not real," Metal Dash says quietly, realizing that the scattered mechanical parts on the table are her. They're it.

She lets out a low keening noise that makes Spike back away.

Twilight suddenly wraps a hoof around her head, and hugs tightly.

"That's not true. Look, see that?" the unicorn says insistently, jabbing a hoof at the rainbow gems on the table.

"Robot parts," the golem mutters.

Twilight sighs. "Firstly, none of these parts are robotic. I would know. Secondly, this is you. I don't know what exactly you are, but it's you, and it's real. Those are real emotions, not fake ones. Everything that makes you who you are is in that reactor, and only real things went into it."

Dash grits her teeth, staring at the core and watching the mesmerizing lights trapped inside. "I'm not Rainbow Dash. I'm just a hunk of junk," she says stubbornly.

Twilight growls with frustration. "That isn't how magic works. You might not be her, but you're a part of her. For Celestia's sake, I don't know how, but you're almost all of her, as impossible as it sounds-!"

She lets out a long-suffering sigh, forcing herself to get back on track. "Look, the point is, I'm going to help you. Maybe you're not Rainbow Dash, or even a pony, maybe you can't remember five minutes ago, but you can feel, and you can hurt, so you deserve sympathy,"

She gives the golem one last tight hug, before lighting her horn and starting to cast a variety of spells.

As she moves parts around and mutters to herself, Spike approaches meekly. "So, uhh, is it weird?"

Metal Dash frowns. "Is what weird?"

Spike waves at her, disassembled and spread out over the table. "Being uhh, you know."

Metal Dash froze, recording crystal flashing as it stitched together a hodgepodge of recordings and ran her through them to mimic recollection. Spike looked unnerved at her suddenly blank expression before her eyes blinked back on.

"It's weird. I think there's something putting stuff in my head. I can tell it isn't true, but it feels like one minute, I'm doing the Sonic Rainboom, and the next, you're asking me if it's weird being a robot," she explains, swallowing heavily.

"Golem," Twilight corrects.

She rolls her eyes, distracted by Twilight's interruption. Noticing Spike's inquisitive look, she again pauses briefly, a different set of recordings trying to let her mimic continuity.

"I think it'd be scary if I thought about it too much. It feels like everything's happening all at once, like one minute, I'm doing the Sonic Rainboom, and the next, you're asking me if it's weird being a robot."

She swallows heavily.

"You can fix my head, right? You're like, the smartest egghead I know!" she asks as Twilight manages to repair and reconnect two of the joints, casting a lubricating charm on it.

"I can try, but... The fact that you can even hold a conversation, it's mindnumbing, enchanted items don't do that," she explains, wheeling over a whiteboard and uncapping a marker.

"It's like this, ok? When a pony makes an enchanted item, they're pouring their magic into it, basically casting a spell, but one that lasts forever. The spell is able to feel whatever emotions are needed to cast the spell, and thus, most enchantments are self-sustaining," she explains as she begins covering the board in complex diagrams, only to notice Spike and Metal Dash's blank stares.

With a slightly sheepish smile, she erases the complex notation, and replaces it with a simple picture of a pony and a necklace, and inside the necklace, there's a tiny pony that looks identical to the larger one.

"But it's a snapshot, the spell is like a copy of the pony at that exact moment, maybe a tiny second before or after as well. Even the strongest magical items, if put in the exact same situation will react the exact same way. Most don't even truly remember what their creator remembers, even if they act on ingrained habits or information at their disposal," she continues, drawing out another little scene.

In this one, the pony is shooting a basketball through a hoop, and there's a little thought bubble of them remembering practicing it. Next to that, there's a robotic-looking pony doing the same shot, but without the thought-bubble.

"There's an exception of course, with magical computers, but those are like a Chineighs Box, the owner's snapshot and the processes done by that snapshot are isolated informationally from one another. If you write out a math problem that describes a smile, you don't necessarily know what it means."

She throws her hooves out animatedly.

"But somehow, you're nothing like that! You remember Rainbow Dash's entire life, beginning to end, and you even have short-term memory comparable to a real pony! Better, even, I'd argue. Based on my readings, you could remember events as far back as forty seconds or longer!"

Metal Dash frowns. "Thanks..?"

She nods, hooking together more components with her telekinesis, before lifting up Metal Dash's core.

"And it's all thanks to this, this is, as far as my tests show, a pair of gemstones made of pure Againte. Againte is a magical agate found all over Equestria, whenever magic touches this stone, it copies it, and radiates it out. It's actually illegal to mine the stuff, because of how important it is to the natural order of Equestria. Without it, magic wouldn't be able to seep into the land, and Earth Ponies would have to change the seasons completely manually. With these gems in the land, however, magic can spread beyond where it starts!"

She scratches her chin. "It makes sense that he would have access to so much information on it, honestly, The Crystal Empire was built on one of the single largest veins of Againte in the entire world, that's how it was able to spread Love, and later on, Hatred, all over Equestria, or so the legends go."

She shakes her head. "Anyway, it also makes sense that the Rainboom was the last thing you remember. It's one of the most magically potent things I've ever seen. Weiss must have used it to activate your core. Right now, your core is radiating magic as strong as the Sonic Rainboom, constantly sending it back and forth between two pieces of Againte, and it's incredible!"

With her exposition exposited upon, Twilight finishes putting together Metal Dash's body, all except for her head and core, which trail glowing wires to the structure.

Metal Dash grimaces at the sight of the mangled machine. The cyan plates are ragged and wrenched with dents, four sockets around her barrel look as if they were meant to have something plugged into them, and the structure doesn't even have wings. Exposed parts of the metallic endoskeleton can be seen underneath it, reminding Spike of the "Exterminator" from his comic books.

"Don't worry, you should look pretty much normal once I put this on," Twilight says, holding up a jar of grey liquid.

"I have no clue what it is, but this gunk is what made you look and feel like an ordinary pony. I had to remove it to get at your components."

With a lavender glow, Twilight uses her horn to uncap the jar as she reattaches Metal Dash's head to the body, and inserts the Againte reactor into the battered chest of the machine.

Dash shudders as the grey liquid is poured over her, and in moments, begins to bond to her frame, shifting in both shape and properties until she looks exactly like Rainbow Dash again.

She shudders even more, several seconds after it ends. What makes terror shoot through her is just how imperceptible it is. She can just tell, if she doesn't keep it in her mind, if she isn't focusing on it, how easy it would be for her artificial status to just slip her mind.

A recording runs through her at the thought, filling her with a quick recap of what happened right after she found Zecora. She didn't perceive anything wrong, she just felt confused.

She freezes again, recalling Weiss manipulating her to fight in the Dark Tournament. She didn't remember what he said, outside of a vague sense of what needed to be done, and in the moment, all she thought about was fighting the "faker".

Even after Twilight helped her off the table, and ushered her out of the lab and onto one of the couches in the library, she tried her hardest to not forget that she wasn't just a confused pegasus who was just about to win the Best Young Flier's Competition. Trying to somehow force it through her head.

"Twilight? Are you there?" she hears a meek voice announce as they enter.

She snaps out of her half-meditative stubbornness as she realizes who it is.

"Oh, hey Fluttershy!" she waves to the pegasus, who looks at her curiously.

"Rainbow Dash? Have you seen Twilight?" the butter-yellow mare asks. Spike looks like he's about to interrupt, only for Dash to squint in confusion.

She blinks. "Uhh... I don't remember. Maybe down there?" she points to the basement, which seemed important for some reason.

Fluttershy and Spike give her a strange look as Twilight trots down the stairs, carrying a variety of books in her telekinetic grip.

"Are you alright?" Fluttershy asks Dash.

She freezes again, and Spike belches up a letter as Sunset and her friends enter.

When Weiss leaves, Priss and Eclipse both turn to each other immediately.

"So did you get a seriously creepy vibe off him, or was it just me?" Priss says nervously.

Eclipse nods. "He said we were gone for a thousand years. Do you think..."

Priss shakes her head. "Think nothing, something definitely happened. Did you see the way he acted around Princess Luna? He looked genuinely angry, like, he just turned the crazy on and off like it was nothing."

Eclipse nods nervously. "I felt it, his emotions were all over the place, and then when he threatened her, it was like he was ready to do it. Everything else was smothered for a split second, except for bitterness and greed. I could tell he wasn't using Dark Magic to force the emotions, either," she attempts to explain.

They both tense up as Luna herself approaches them.

"Please, be gentle with Weiss. He lived for a very long time trying to avenge you all. It did warp him, but I do not think it broke him. He will need you all now more than ever before," she says quietly.

"Your highness, did- He said you were our ruler. What happened?" Eclipse asks, but from her tone, the question is merely the closest average between all her other questions. Questions which were legion in their quantity.

"Near the end, he was not fit to rule. He gave us control over the Realm for a time after that. Yes, perhaps technically, the Shadow Realm is still a part of Equestria, but..."

She shakes her head. "I will not bend the truth, but I also do not wish to speak of this further. It is still somewhat painful to remember," Luna answers quietly.

The two mares share a look, before bowing. "I understand, your highness," Eclipse responds respectfully. She was intelligent. Intelligent enough, at minimum, to realize that there was nothing surrounding them where they reappeared, much less a thriving society.

'If I want the truth, I'm going to have to get it myself,' she thinks before the two of them rise, spotting Cadence walking back from where she followed Weiss out of the city limits.

Off to the side, Padparascha, Ruby and Sapphire crowd around the returned Cadence.

"Did Lord Uncle tell you where he was going?" Sapphire asks calmly.

She shakes her head. "No. He didn't say."

"W-well, what did he say?" Padparadscha asks, peeking out from behind Dr. Real, who looks somewhat flummoxed by the size of the princess.

Cadence doesn't immediately answer. "Listen... Weiss is probably going to explain some things to you eventually. Knowing him, it'll take him a really long time, but when he does, you should listen, alright? I told you all how I became the Alicorn of Love, right?"

"You put an evil pony in a chokehold!" Ruby shouts

"And yelled about how love really worked until she became friends..!?" Ruby poses in slight confusion.

Cadence's shoulders slump, and she sighs. "That is not what I said happened," she can't help but chuckle.

She shakes her head. "Look, the point is... Weiss spent a lot of time pushing away love. Seeing him now, though, I'm beginning to think I didn't do my due diligence. It's his story to tell, but if and when he tells it, just keep in mind it's going to be rough," she explains.

Ruby goes silent and still for a moment, before sweeping the slightly smaller princess up in a big beefy hug.

"You got it cuz!" he shouts.

She smiles. "I really did miss you guys... Cuz," she says as the other dragons join in.

After a moment, she pulls away, and turns to her first adoptive parents. Both Longma, a mare named Emerald Eight and a stallion, Sliver.

"Sorry for the delay. Mom. Dad," she nods to them both, feeling as much love for them as she did for all of her gigantic, incredibly odd family.

Today seemed to be the kind of day where she had a lot of catching up to do before she could meet back with Shiny.

"What's got you so tense? We won, didn't we?" Drop Kick asks the little pokemon on her back. That little pokemon was the callous Queen Cold, the Elder Windego, and their ruler.

"Something is wrong. Deeply wrong. I know you didn't sense it, but I did," she muses in her usual high pitched gravely tone.

"It's fading fast, but I can taste old emotions on the air. It's like a book where all the pages are written in powder instead of ink. Whatever was here today, it was..."

She frowns, trying to find the words.

"Immense."

Drop Kick sits down, her brow furrowing in confusion. "I don't get what you mean. Like, a big monster?"

"Maybe. Or maybe just big on the inside," Queen Cold muses.

"How exactly did Lord Weiss Noir defeat Sombra? That's what I'm wondering. It's clear that Weiss did it, I can sense King Sombra having a mental breakdown merely a few miles below us at that fact," she explains.

"I know Weiss, he's always been crafty, enough that many mistook him as being strong, but Sombra got to him. Every time, he always was on the backfoot, even when he was winning."

Drop Kick shrugs at the little eggshell-shaped queen. "I mean, they said we've been gone a thousand years, maybe he had time to get jacked."

To Windego, a pony is much like a flame. As they hate, the flame grows, and as they love, the air around them becomes toxic.

Weiss, to her kind, was more akin to a tank under pressure. Deadly silent, save the occasional lance that erupted from the seams, or the rare few explosions that ripped their way free.

Now, however, he was utterly invisible to Queen Cold's senses. Something in the pattern of his emotions was different. When he grew stressed, he did not radiate stress. The air around her, and the roots of her teeth did instead.

He had become something. Or perhaps, considering he wasn't sporting a pair of wings, he had almost become something.

She just couldn't perceive what it was.

I return mere moments before Celestia shows up out of nowhere, a big fat chariot befitting her in tow.

"Ha, got here first," I say, smirking at the princess, who shoots me a look that promises pain in my future. Ha, as if I give a shit about physical pain anymore.

"Yes, well, the second mouse gets the cheese, Weiss," she says, levitating two familiar hole-filled figures out of the chariot.

My eyes widen in delight. "Oh it really must be my birthday! Two! For the price of one!" I shout with glee, hopping in place.

Chrysalis looks disturbed at my joyous expression, while the changeling tagalong looks like he's scared shitless.

Celestia turns to address the crowd, and I settle in for a good old fashioned Celestia-brand speech.

"Greetings, everypony. I hold before you Queen Chrysalis. In a time long since past, but so close to you all, she attacked your home unprovoked, and was cast out by your ruler..." she begins.

'Oh, this is going to be so good! She sounds like she's going to go ballistic! And for once, it won't be on me!'

"...She is here today, to explain the events of that day in her own words, and to apologize for the grievous harm she has caused. It will not undo the tragedy, nor the harm, but I would have her do it, as she has turned herself into Equestrian custody, and has accepted our terms therin."

What.

She sets the queen down, while Cadence casts some kind of spell that surrounds her and her little companion in a bubble of protective love.

Chrysalis glares heatlessly at Cadence. A gut reaction to the princess's assistance.

https://youtu.be/C4Wv5M9JPao?list=PLpJl5XaLHtLX-pDk4kctGxtF4nq6BIyjg

After a moment, she begins to speak, and her first two words surprise me, somewhat.

"She's right."

Chrysalis makes a point of looking in the eyes of all the Longma in the crowd around her.

"There came a time, after Sombra conquered your kingdom, when love grew scarce in the land. As we live by consuming love, I knew it would be a hard life, but I believed Changelings could prevail. Then came Weiss Noir. The Anathema. The antithesis of my people. He came, and he taught you all how to hate. King Sombra had taught you all how to fear, where you once loved. Then, Lord Weiss Noir came, and he taught you how to hate, where you once feared," she begins.

"The hatred of the Kingdom Heart represented the end of our way of life. Where once, your kingdom's treasure enriched the love of Equestria, and gave it nuance and depth, where it turned schoolyard crushes and puppy love into adoration, into bonds deeper than they could ever be without it, the cold iron tool you had wielded against your dreaded foe did the opposite," Chrysalis explained.

"As the Crystal Empire was filled with hatred, so too was Equestria. Feuds which once meant two ponies would never assist one another out of spite bloomed into grudges of great complexity and care, with rules and lines that would not be crossed between them. Rivalries were born that pushed ponies to grow beyond what they could have ever done alone. Groups came together and bonded, not over such paltry things as friendship and empathy, but to prove their superiority, and through mutual respect of their boundaries, come closer together," she continued.

She watches as the Longma first grow incensed, and slowly, confused as she continues explaining things that seem to have no relevance.

"That hatred poisoned Equestria for all Changeling kind. Perhaps we could have survived it, given time, perhaps there was another way, given thought. It was a slow poison, and what little love we gathered had to be stored with care, to prevent it being poisoned as well by the miasma of dark emotion that fogged the land. It was at our direst hour that King Sombra came to my hive. He gave us the Crystal Heart. He told me he knew how to extinguish your Kingdom Heart, and how to erase your Lord from this world."

She shrugs as best she can.

"So I said yes. The rest, as you might say, is history. With the heart, my changelings were safe from your hatred. With Sombra, we could extinguish the Kingdom Heart. And through his treachery, he tricked me into bringing the Crystal Heart to the seat of the former Crystal Empire, and through it, erasing your country from the world."

By now, most of the crowd is openly scowling at her, and she can see as the flames replacing their mane and tail grow and whip around wildly, as the scales around their legs spread in response.

'Well, I have to give her props, if she's trying to get herself killed before I can get my hands on her, she picked a fine way to do it,' I acknowledge lazily.

"It was the greatest mistake I had ever made in my long life."

This gives the crowd pause.

"I'm sorry. I never meant for things to turn out this way. I wanted to conquer your kingdom. I didn't want to erase it. For that mistake, I paid not only with my own body, ruined through the flames of hate, but with my precious changelings. Your Lord ensured that for every one of you caught in Sombra's curse, one of my own suffered equally, if not greater."

"So do what you will. You've won, all of you. I could not, and cannot defeat you. I will no longer fight ponies, if this is the consequence. I am sorry I ever tried to," she finishes.

I reflect on her words quietly. I could probably kill her. Cadence or no, she's on her last legs, or lack therof.

My eyes are drawn to the others, however, and I can see that they are unsure. Longma, born from the passion to fight bitterly to the end, weren't quite equipped to face this meek, blank-faced creature, who seemed prepared to quietly and pitifully accept whatever torment, just or unjust, that came next.

Perhaps it was a bit too familiar to the ponies of the Shadow Realm. All of the Longma here remembered Sombra's rule keenly. They remembered what that felt like.

"Ooh! I have an idea," I exclaim, holding up three fingers.

"The three curses! Remember that, Luna? If we aren't going to execute her, we could do that instead. I'm sure I still know how it's done," I muse with fond memories welling up. Everyone looks confused.

She shakes her head. "Not now, Weiss. Put that behind you, please."

Surprisingly, it's Queen Cold who speaks next.

"Everypony, I think she deserves mercy," the famously cold and calculating ruler says, and I suddenly find myself stepping back in abject shock, especially when I see the others, who seem to be listening to her.

"I still remember when I and my own came to your land. We wanted to feed endlessly on your hatred, and we had no intention of heeding your wishes as we did so. To turn this realm back to ice and snow as we gorged ourselves on what you had built," she says, causing many of the other Windego to perk up and pay closer attention.

"Do you know what the difference is, between we Windego, who you accepted as your own, who you took in, and cared for as if we were your brothers and sisters?" she asks.

"We failed. Perhaps that is the only difference between then and now, in my eyes. Here sits before you a creature that preys on ponykind. One who, rather than by force, but by surrender is given to your judgement. Did my clan do something different? Was our invasion poised to be any less callous? No. If anything, the key difference is that we were unrepentant when you brought us in. Even after we were allowed to stay, I showed Lord Weiss nothing but suspicion and treachery. We were together by force, and yet here we stand, together," Queen Cold states as firmly as her adorable little vocal chords can manage.

Cool Spot, one of the youngest and smallest Windego, is weeping, his own little biomechanical body shivering with emotion near several others. Ponies like Oil Slick, and Cabal Counter, who were among the first to welcome the Windigo into their circle.

"I am old, and perhaps even cured of restlessness, I do not get as much sleep as I need to think clearly on such matters. If that is the case, then do as you should, and ignore my words. But if you ponies have the strength, the strength to accept the predator that did not ask forgiveness, then perhaps I believe you have the strength to accept the parasite that did."

I don't understand. Their hate, the hatred that the crowd was feeling, I can sense it diminishing. Fading away.

I see Priss and Eclipse Flash, and the others, who seem to be looking at Chrysalis's shocked, uncomprehending face with contemplation instead of resentment.

I can see the queen's expression grow even more shocked as Cadence removes the barrier protecting her from the crowd's emotions, and nothing seems to happen to her.

I frown. Don't I hate Chrysalis? I could have sworn I did. I don't understand. I can't understand.

I just can't understand.

(Past Chapter 36) Three Curses

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"Go away!" Blister shouts, huddling in the corner of his cell with his eyes shut as two confused guards try to push a tray of food under the bars.

'That dumpy fake-dragon pony said I'd be out in a month after they did "the paperwork," but who cares! He turned me into a pony! It's not like I can just leave like this!' the dragon growls as his stomach growls.

He glances at the tray. Not a gemstone in sight, instead, the tray is covered with a little carton of rainbow-colored juice, a bunch of smiling flowers, some bright pink mushrooms, and a cookie with fruit in it. To the side, there's a bowl of thick-looking hay stalks.

He grits his teeth, and glares at the guards, but he doesn't feel very intimidating. "I said bring me some gems, I'm not eating your prissy pony food!" he shouts, turning around with a huff. He doesn't notice the two dragon-like guards looking at one another in abject confusion.

"You want to tell him, or should I?" one of em says.

"He'll figure it out," the other one shrugs, before walking over to where he was sitting before, the faint clip-clop of talons echoing out as he settles down and grabs a crystal, swiping across its surface to see if there's any good news on the network.

Blister ignores the dumb ponies, being exactly the sort of dragon who is young enough to ignore whatever he's told, and old enough to only believe what he sees with his own two eyes. He had no clue how all the ponies around him ended up looking exactly like real dragons, but he was sure it was some kind of trick. Maybe they got some prissy dragons to pretend to be guards for them or something.

His stomach growled again, and the sickly sweet tray of pony food started to grow tempting.

He refused to look at the two guards as he approached the tray clumsily, like his legs weren't the length he thought they aught to be.

"Just pretend you're taking a big bite of diamond," Blister mutters quietly, so quietly that he's sure those guards don't hear him.

Closing his eyes tight, he leans down and takes a bite of a random item on the tray, preparing for the horrible taste of-?

His eyes shoot open. This stuff tastes amazing! It's spicy and salty and as savory as can be!

A sample of the rainbow juice reveals that it's some kind of warm, steaming and salty beverage, and a bite of the cookie unleashes little explosions of fruity flavor with every chew!

The two Longma guards look at the dragon prisoner chowing down desperately on the tray of food. It was the same thing they brought him yesterday, rose-quartz, pink opals, a thick graphite crucible of molten salt, and a bowl of red-hot Longma-style rebar, all of it deep fried and enchanted until any creature could feasibly consume the normally inedible meal, so long as they had the heat tolerance for it, at least.

As soon as the prisoner finishes voraciously devouring everything, they look at the guards, their eyes unconsciously sliding up to some random spot above the two Longma, and fear and shame both crop up as the dragon turns away with an annoyed huff of fire, crawling awkwardly back onto the cot in the corner of the room.

Sure enough, a month later, Blister was released, and when he looked hesitant to go back to the dragon lands as a "pony", a suite was assigned to the drake, much to his begrudging consternation.

He wasn't able to see the golems that followed him everywhere as he aimlessly wandered around the mostly empty halls of Hidden Palace. Even when spying on him, sometimes right in front of his eyes, he wasn't able to notice them and whenever he heard the humming from their levitation, he attributed it to a fly or some other kind of bug.

Weiss chortles through a mouthful of popcorn. "Oh, oh, he finally found some 'gems', Luna, watch this," the sage exclaims over the screen he uses to display the dragon's punishment to her on one of her visits.

She watches as the dragon tries to quietly approach a crate filled with hay, one of the old shipments from Equestria. Princess Luna suspected that Weiss had intentionally left it there, considering its unusual location in the middle of one of the tunnels.

"Weiss, this feels a bit wrong," she muses quietly, trying to get his attention, only to get the bag of popcorn passed to her.

Weiss smiles, and cuts her a look that is filled with a twinkling light of mischief. "Come on, he broke into a pony's house, screamed the two mares living there out of their home, and then tried to rip up the walls for his little horde. He'll learn his lesson fast, and he'll never forget it, doing things my way."

His tone turns a bit darker. "Besides, it's good fun. Nobody's getting hurt who doesn't deserve it, after all."

Luna withholds her comment as she watches the dragon glance from side to side, before grabbing a clawful of hay and stuffing it into his mouth, chomping down hard.

Weiss laughs uproariously as Blister over the golemic recording spits out the hay and looks at it like it betrayed him, rubbing his jaw with slight pain over how hard he chomped his teeth together, and how terrible it must have tasted to him.

As the dragon stomps away in frustration over the 'gems' that his 'pony teeth' couldn't bite through, and how awful they tasted, "dry and chalky", Blister complained, something about the mood strikes Luna in an odd way, and she supposes, perhaps, it's a little funny.

At least Weiss seemed happy, even if he was clearly trying to hide his true dreams from her lately, and only using heavily isolated dream crystals for their nightly talks when he was in one of his artificial dreams.

With an internal sigh, she laughs a bit, if only because Weiss is.

Weiss Noir awoke with a strangled scream, magic flying from his body as he blindly attacked everything around him. The steel tomb he was sealed in began to deform and black smoke rose from the cracks and seams, before slowly unlatching with a hiss.

As it opened, Weiss was revealed, his ever-present smirk a mainstay of the new and improved dark lord, who walked out into the vast, opulent room he had made his own as if nothing was wrong. He told Luna that it was for the aesthetic, that the steel tomb and the large, cathedral-like bedroom were for ambiance, and to a degree, that was true.

However, to a more important degree, the room was a deception. Its size served to hide in some respect the sheer amount of dream-crystals embedded in the walls, ceilings, and floors. He refused to sleep outside of a virtual dream nowadays. Nightmares were a nightly presence, and Luna had proven to be a potential threat to his mind and plans, with her intense and constant scrutiny of his behavior and moods.

Both were problems solved with some cleverly designed crystals. Ones that both sealed his dreams off from the outside world, but more importantly, were able to give the illusion of peaceful, if particularly deep sleep. She was no fool, but she was unwilling to confront him about it, even if she suspected that the placid dreams she detected on her nightly prowls were a falsehood.

Likewise, the tomb-like structure of his room was important as well. In order to live an exceedingly long time in pursuit of revenge, the most important thing was of course, to survive. With the Shadow Guard abolished due to a lack of members, he found himself with no other option but to increase his paranoia even further. Air, food and water were now isolated systems inside his room, and a Shadow Clone was used before his one and only meal each day to check for whatever poison could somehow make its way into the carefully sequestered meals and water supply.

He rarely left it physically, at this juncture.

Weiss cracked his neck with a smile. Today was a very good day indeed. It was the day he would capture "Mercy", Sombra's mysterious ally.

All thanks to one very treacherous pony, who saw fit to tell him where to go.

Bruto smiled as he bowed before Lord Weiss. "Of course, my lord. If there is anything you can trust, it is that I have taken to live in your kingdom perhaps the best of all. I revel in the tenants of this society, and wish only to see it become what it could be. I know Longma, and thus, I know when someone is merely pretending."

Weiss nodded, chin on his hands as he eagerly listened to Bruto explain how he found the location of Chrysalis's hive, and by extension, Sombra's cohort.

"It was simple. I just looked for the most placid Longma in any given place, and... Maybe it's a bit crude, but I beat them nearly to death. A true Longma is filled with joy and happiness in such a conflict, and a pretender... Is not. It was of no consequence, to get them to confess the location of the hive, and, with a bit of digging of my own, I confirmed it," he explains with a placid smile.

Of course, what he didn't mention was the fact that he was lying through his teeth. It was a shard of Corrupt Crystal, and a healthy dose of mind control from it that gave Bruto knowledge of the hive's location, and a tracker, something he wouldn't know how to make without the data he stole, was the method by which he confirmed it.

"I see..." Lord Weiss muses, scratching his nose idly.

"My lord, I would like to ask a favor of you, if I might," Bruto interjects, bringing the sage's fleeting attention back to him.

"Let me fight them, when you go to finish this gruesome task. Let me join in the battle to come," he says with a malicious smile.

Weiss smirks. The auburn longma is many things, but difficult to read... is not one of them. Weiss Noir's talent allowed him to sense the weaknesses of others, their darker aspects, and to him, the brutish Longma was practically an open book. He radiated deceit, treachery, and bloodlust into the room, until the sage could practically smell it.

That besides, Weiss had already checked the pony's browser history, as were the benefits of a technology driven dictatorship, benevolent or otherwise. The pony was obsessed with the sort of sneaky ploys and mindgames that worked oh so well in fiction, something which seemed contradictory to his Cutie Mark, a pair of hoof-fitting boxing gloves.

At least, until a cautious eye was able to spot the imprint of metal horseshoes hidden inside the gloves.

"Bruto, come now. I have so few of my precious ponies. I cannot risk a single one," Weiss croons sweetly.

"And with a pony of your loyalty... I need you here, where I can keep you safe," he finishes, feeling Bruto's emotions go from eager bloodlust to pure disgust towards him.

'I wonder what I'll learn, when I decide to take a closer look at your actions, my little pony?' The sage wonders, dismissing the angered stallion, who silently leaves, presumably planning some sort of revenge.

Weiss smiled at the memory. The schadenfreude was delectable, and the knowledge? Exquisite.

He watched as, with a hiss, several bottles began to float out of one of the nearby walls. Each one was filled to the brim with Vancian Magic, painstakingly stored night after night in virtual dreams. Now, however, he had taken to storing spells even during the day. Any day when he wasn't directly needed to assist in a matter, he was storing spells in liquid time extracted from Frozen Stone, a magical type of rock found deep underground, and any night he wasn't sleeping normally to give his mind rest, he was in a Virtual Dream, storing even more spells in his sleep.

He rarely drank them anymore, either. The fact of the matter was, Weiss Noir didn't need them on a day to day basis like he did while Sombra was free and stalking the land in the hunt for his realm. It meant he could store even more spells away, only using the Shadow Clone technique to keep him protected from whatever would threaten him on a day to day basis.

Assassins didn't bother to try their hooves at getting into his inner sanctum when their target walked around arrogantly without so much as a guard to protect him during the day, after all. They just needed to find a way to kill him before his 'Emergency Teleport' whisked him away from whatever deadly act befell him at any given moment.

"I should send Pure Platinum a fruit basket some time," Weiss mused to himself as he drank the last bottle of Stoppered Time, and absorbed the last spell into himself that he would need for the day.

With that done, he walked to the vault doors, and began to slowly open them, one after another, brushing thin chains out of the way as he walked across the room. Anti-teleportation wards were expensive and unreliable, but physically blocking the end-location of a teleport? Far more effective, and achievable by simply filling the room with something durable enough, hence the thin chains draping from every inch of the ceiling in his little bunker.

With one last hiss, the door opened, and Weiss's Shadow Clone exited it, prepared to make today a rather productive one.

Today, he would be turning over a rock, and seeing what skitters out from under it.

A variety of artificial entities followed behind him as he calmly walked up to the towering hive. All of the entities were modeled after various suits of armor, or thin, silken sacks of squirming bugs. These were his new replacement for the Shadow Guard. He refused to let any Longma take up guard duties now beyond managing prisoners and keeping the peace indirectly, so something had to come to replace it.

That something was Wannabeetles and Golems. The latter, he was able to maintain production of by bringing on some Earth Ponies from Equestria, and selling them secrets of crystal magic in exchange for labor to supplement what few Longma there still were. The latter, likewise, were garnered by selling the secrets to breeding the Wannabeetles to a select few members of the nobility, in exchange for a constant supply of the magical mimicry bugs.

The thick fog of love that Weiss had expected to come in contact with wasn't there, or if it was, he couldn't sense it. In fact, he couldn't sense any changelings at all. His golems, which he personally had control of through his Corrupt Crystals, also failed to see any of the bug-pony monsters as they flitted through the hive.

What they did find, however, was exactly what he had been promised. Revenge, in some small part.

On one of the floating view screens, he could see objects flying around Mercy, the Great Snake that served as Sombra's royal doctor and scientist. An individual Sombra had only recruited after he summoned Weiss, and began being influenced by the sage's ideas.

The snake was stuffing bags with notes, instruments, and more, and somehow, through a process Weiss wasn't quite sure of, the objects almost seemed to move of their own accord, and his eyes slid off of them when he tried to focus too hard on what was allowing the snake to seemingly levitate the things she scrambled to pack.

Shaking his head to clear the small confusion, he felt hatred boiling up inside him.

"It's incredible... I'm finally beginning to understand hate on an entirely new level," he mused, realizing that this hatred was entirely unlike the other forms he experienced. This new flavor of hate was almost like anticipation, or perhaps even happiness.

Without a doubt, it felt good, imagining what would come next.

With a finger raised to the sky, and a careful eye on where his golems were marking Mercy's position, he flicked his index finger down, and uttered a single word.

"Meteor."

Inside his spirit, an A-Tier Vancian spell was unmoored from his tight mental grip, and the spell resolved itself, tugging at something so high above the blasted wasteland that it couldn't be seen.

While calling down an actual meteor was beyond his power, a false one was well within his means. A small enough golem, given a strong enough enchantment, could be lifted up into the air, and with a portal, a trickle of spellcraft could be sent through it to grow crystals around it.

Given a month, the resulting mass would hang in the sky outside of Equestria's bizarre gravity well, as frozen and unmoving as any other celestial body not piloted by an incredible active force, though still immeasurably tiny and invisible from the ground.

Likewise, while moving any celestial object, however artificial, was far beyond what he could do using telekinesis, or even prestidigitation, there did exist a rare few Dark Magic spells designed to wrench control over a celestial body. Ones that were of course, forbidden, until Weiss talked Luna into giving him access to one such spell.

But none of that was important. What was important right now, was the white bolt that shot down exactly a minute after Weiss spoke, the one that smashed open a gaping molten wound in the mottled brown hive, and gave him access to it.

He grinned as he saw Mercy staring out where light was shining into the room she was in suddenly, the strike had been lose enough to nearly hit her.

"It's odd," Weiss thought aloud as he stepped up onto a golem, and passed into the antimagic field of the hive. None of his spells could be cast here, so close to the magical throne that sat at the center of the Changeling Hive.

The throne did not prevent ongoing magic, nor did it prevent certain internal spellworks from functioning. If it did, anything that entered would grow sickly ill as their own internal magic began to fail.

Only as he threw open the resin door and faced the snake did he finish the thought. "Where are all the changelings?"

She opened her mouth and began to speak, but as she did, something fuzzy seemed to overcome him, and he shook his head to banish it.

"Nevermind. You're the one I'm here for," Weiss says, stepping towards her.

He saw her looking around the room, saying more words, but as he looked to where she was staring and shouting, he heard and saw nothing out of the ordinary.

As he continued to approach, Mercy finally snapped, lunging at him with her fangs outstretched.

In a single motion, Weiss stepped to the side, and his claws lanced out like knives, grabbing her by both her upper and lower jaw, as well as the snake's neck and head. The fangs failed to pierce the black hide of the limbs, and the teeth around them fared little better.

Weiss felt somewhat ill, like he was being driven to leave the place, but in a moment of clarity, he felt a lance of black fire erupt from his body, striking a seemingly random spot, and the feeling faded slightly.

He wasn't sure why, but as he held the writhing creature that served as Sombra's right-hoof snake, he began to speak.

"I'm going to pretend I don't know where this place is. I'm going to pretend I never found it, in fact. I'm going to leave, now that I have what I came for," he muses aloud.

"There's only one reason I would have, to come to this pitiful, wretched place. Only one."

"And it's if I had unfinished business," He finishes with one last burst of hate, turning and walking away with his golems in tow. As he leaves the hive, he feels the potent magic begin to fade. Magic only potent enough to drive him out, and keep him away once he had no business left there.

In the end, the changelings were mere pawns, pawns that he had utterly abolished from his realm already, in the most painful and final way he had at his disposal.

In some unconscious part of himself he hadn't suppressed, he still could remember vague impressions of what this feeling, what "mercy" meant, what "forgiveness" felt like. He was quickly forgetting such things as his lust for revenge and penance grew with each passing day and each fleeting nightmare, but he hadn't quite forgotten what they were.

Yet.

Mercy writhed in the chains clamped around her entire body as she was hung suspended over the middle of the room in a spiderweb of black metal.

The two Diarchs were in the room as well as several other audience members, sitting in a variety of luxuriant seats.

"Greetings, Mercy. According to Sombra's journals, you were perhaps his most loyal servant in his crusade to dominate the Crystal Empire, and later, the Shadow Realm. You are charged with illegal and unethical experimentation, torture, and crimes more horrid than even those," Weiss says calmly, resting a cheek on his fist as he sat on a large, simplistic throne, the metal seat surrounded by a large wooden desk.

"And, much to my relief, you have chosen to appeal to this court, instead of accepting your execution for it. What would you say, then, before I offer you your sole alternative? Your 'Shadow Game'?"

Mercy stares at the ruler with unabashed disgust. "You are nothing more than a husk, a facsimile of what could have been. My research with King Sombra's backing uncovered secrets of biology that would boggle your puny little mind. The only reason I'm here is to make that perfectly clear to you. You're nothing more than an allegory taken to its logical conclusion, a dullard. Nothing you do or say will cow me."

Weiss smiles.

"Very well. One final question, before I grant you... mercy. Were your actions born of selfishness and greed? Two things which I respect dearly? Or did you serve Sombra because you believed in the righteousness of his goal? Because you wished harm to the Shadow Realm, and the ponies in it?" he asks curiously.

The snake simply hisses at him.

He nods in response. "I see."

With that, Weiss rises up from his throne, and those watching observe nervously as he breaks protocol to approach the prisoner.

"Whether or not you care to admit it, you came to this court because you did not wish for death. So, I will sentence you to life, until the day Tartarus claims you," he says, holding up three fingers as his expression grows gleeful, like a child about to tell a joke they had been planning for oh so long.

"The three curses of life, in fact."

He ignites his horn, and before long, a vial filled with black liquid is created from nothing, and, uncorking it, he allows the liquid to turn into a thick smoke that wafts around Mercy, who is cursing and thrashing in her bindings.

"May you be recognized by those in high places," Weiss says with a crack of thunder. The smoke is forcing its way down the snake's nostrils and mouth.

"May you live in interesting times," he says with another rattling bloom of electricity and sound that flows through the black substance and echoes through the courtroom.

He pauses, and a grim facade falls over the sage as his smile reaches its widest point. The room is growing darker, as the lights begin to dim.

"And finally..."

With a final roar of thunder, the smoke has entered Mercy's body completely, and she hangs limply in the chains.

"May all of your wishes come true."

At first, it seems like nothing happened, or worse, that the snake had simply been killed in a rather frightening way, but those thoughts are abolished from the audience's mind as her eyes suddenly open, revealing the total blackness that fills them.

With a movement, Mercy breaks free of her chains, the augmentations in her body finally giving her enough power to snap them.

"You're a fool, little replicant, and now you'll die like one!" she roars, leaping up and biting Weiss Noir in the neck.

Immediately, he jerks back with a scream, clutching his neck even as it begins hissing and spurting with her own personal blend of neurotoxin and acids.

She glances to where the two alicorns are sitting, both of them suddenly leap up and gallop towards her.

"Get away-!" she begins, prepared to follow it with a threat to Weiss's life, but before she can insist that only she has the cure, the two alicorns disappear like soap bubbles popping in the wind with expressions of shock.

"W-what?" the snake muses, shaking her head. With a glance at the fearful crowd of those who agreed to bear witness to her sham of a "trial", she whips past the two guards and escapes into the tunnels, prepared to escape, and get revenge on the Changeling Queen who refused to protect her from the dead imbecile she left steaming on the ground.

Luna and Celestia step back from the prisoner in shock as she begins to cackle in her chains.

"I can't believe it was that easy! The fool fell so easily, he wasn't expecting it at all!" the snake gibbers in their bindings as two guards begin to unlatch her from the shackles and cart her away, her black eyes seeing something that nobody else did.

Weiss watches with a satisfied grin.

"So... Wanna watch?" he asks, pulling out a little pad covered with buttons and dials, shaking it merrily. On the screen, they could see a snake making its way to the badlands at speeds that seemed impossible.

With the push of a button, however, the events on the screen became... Interesting.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1YrcyJGJsg

(Weiss Report) Statistics on Cruel and Unusual Concoctions [Black Water Mist]

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Entry Number One-Hundred and Nine, Year Eleven.

The fact of the matter is, it probably won't be long until I'm wholly corrupt. Much like Dark Magic itself, my current form as a metaphorical incarnation of Sombra's flaws is a threat that grows with every precaution I fail to take. But, much like Dark Magic, I believe there may be solutions. And if not solutions, then ways to mitigate the effects.

There's a quote that stands out to me, as I contemplate ways to prevent the slow decay of my own morality from harming those around me. I'm certain the game didn't invent the quote, but I remember it from one of the X-Com games nonetheless.

“Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.”

It's poignant to my circumstances, and it represents the danger of what I will need to do to steer my fate. The magic that binds me to Sombra demands that as time goes by without one of us slaying the other, we will become more alike. Thus, I have no choice but to preempt this. To prune away what isn't useful, and grow what is. Villainy in name only, or, if that is impossible, then villainy of the most restrained variety.

I've revisited Sombra's Corrupt Crystal Creation, and one idea I jokingly posed at one point about it. When it is used, SC3 creates a shadowy crystal, one capable of controlling the minds of others. It's the backbone of Sombra's ability to rule the Crystal Empire, when he was still in command of it.

One unique quirk of the spell is that, when used on a particular crystal, it can grow that particular crystal. By using the spell on ice, corrupt ice crystals can be generated. Those ice crystals, then, can be melted down into a foul liquid, infused with the power of domination and the desperate hunger for control.

On its own, this liquid isn't quite as horrific as one might imagine. Even ignoring how quickly living things can cycle water out of themselves, purge toxins, and attempt to fight off dissolute magics, at the end of the day, this "Black Water" is still just that, water.

Minor tests done on wannabeetles and other small animals indicate that, in liquid form, the Black Water is unsuitable for many of the same tasks that Corrupt Crystal excels at. As it isn't a crystal anymore, it isn't suitable for many types of crystal magic that normally allow one to adjust its effects on the fly.

This is why a second component is required to truly make use of it. A component that can return it to a usable form.

That component is greed.

By utilizing the Black Water as a gas, I'm able to get a large amount of it into the body, and then, by using greed-infused Dragon Lightning, I'm able to grow microscopic crystals inside the liquid, saturating the body with uncountable, immeasurable amounts of tiny magical crystals, each one too small to do harm, but sufficient in the quantities made to prevent them from being easily removed. Without a method I've developed to potentially cure the effects, they are likely impossible to remove.

Once the body is saturated with Greed-Grown Corrupt Crystal, I'm able to control the subject in incredible ways. Their mind, their body, their perception of the world around them. With so much corrupt crystal saturating their soft tissues, I'm able to access and control these things directly.

This will be the first, and most important method I use to satisfy the conditions of my curse. If I have to become like Sombra, then I'll do so on my terms. He used mind control. I'll use it too, but in a manner of my choosing.

It'll be fantastic to use on criminals. Never on the innocent. Using this Black Water Mist, I can take a criminal who petitions my court, and make it impossible for them to harm my ponies ever again. The potential for rehabilitation is through the roof as well. When it comes to Illusion Magic and Mind Manipulation Magic, I don't need to rely on Dream Crystals for calculations or processing nearly as much, as the subject themselves does most of the processing for me.

People, the world around them, physics and logic. Most perception-altering spells allow the user themselves to handle deciding what is believable to them, almost like a dream. Depending on how much direct influence I institute, the effects could be as subtle as removing things like monitoring golems from their perception, all the way to making them see and experience a complete fabrication.

Paired with my unique talent for picking apart weakness and manipulating others, I could stand to do a lot of good with this.

It's important that I remain unbiased when doing so. I suspect I won't be able to help myself from indulging in the technique, using it as a way to entertain myself, but, so long as I restrain myself to criminals and enemies of the realm, and only manipulate their senses, rather than their thoughts, I may be able to satisfy some of the subtle urges that are being forced upon me without actually committing any unacceptable evils.

That said, I would be an idiot if I invented a truly inescapable curse. The cure to this illusory hellscape is both simple and immensely challenging. Replace every single tainted cell in an organism affected by this substance. At present, the method I have for this is to use a combination of Black Flames and Full-Body immersion in enchanted molten salts designed to heal and rejuvenate the body.

It's inefficient, and would take far too long for my liking, but at present, I have yet to figure out another method of replacing a person's entire body. I've continued looking into the matter, however, and have noted some promising spells that utilize Dragon Magic to alter a creature's metabolism and ability to heal.

As you can see, Princess, this may have been the origin of Weiss's idea to use lacursurgy to heal me. To think that this is how he inflicted his curses. It's pretty haunting to imagine, and almost as bad as the ailment is the cure. I'm glad I didn't have to go with what he described here, I don't think I'd survive having to bathe in molten salt, no matter how much healing magic was pumped into it.

It's actually quite pleasant, as long as you're not sensitive to the heat. The real problem is when it cools. Nopony likes having to clean crusted salt off their coat, believe you me. In any case, I'm a bit... Stunned, perhaps is the best word. To think that this was part of his rationale for the decisions he made. He knew he risked corruption with his indulgence, and yet seemed intent on meeting that fate on the path to avoid it.

I only wish I had known that this is what he was thinking, so I could have knocked some sense into him sooner. Though, if Luna had known, I imagine she would have done it herself.

(Present Chapter 41) Cognitive Dissonance

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https://youtu.be/4ow_VtpKxms?list=PL7C116DA2E46BBFD7

Celestia carted off Chrysalis before she could wear out her newfound welcome, and as she did, I began to grow nervous. Something was clearly wrong. Had I lost the ability to hate? I always knew I might become Restless, and I knew losing the ability to feel hate was a red flag of the highest order. I had plans, of course, to mitigate the effects, but-

I thought about Celestia's serene smile and laughter, and warmth bloomed in my chest. Good, I hadn't lost the capacity to utterly hate someone.

"Luna, do you sense that?" I say quietly to the Lunar Diarch, who shakes her head.

"Exactly. Something drained the hatred out of the area. They should have torn that bug apart, and yet..."

I growl. "It doesn't make any sense! What happened?! Why did I stop hating her? Why did the others?"

Luna's expression turns into a mix of surprise and... Disappointment?

"Please tell me you're joking..." she responds.

I return her incredulous look with one of my own. "I know hate, Luna, it doesn't just disappear, stop dodging my question, we need to figure out what's happening, maybe Queen Cold did something, some kind of Windego spell. I thought I knew them all, but..." I trail off as I note the princess's expression.

Luna looks into my eyes searchingly, and that feeling of disappointment, of pity, only seems to grow. "You've really forgotten what it feels like to forgive?"

The word feels like a missing tooth, an irksome gap with something hard peeking out from the vacancy it left in its wake. I know what the word means, of course, but I only ever remember using it in the way that things are said when they lose all meaning.

"Good morning", "How are you?", "Forgive me",

Just words meant to put together a dialogue. To push along a conversation. I tried to think to the last time I had felt something like this, hate towards someone disappearing. There were many times I chose not to hate someone who wronged me, and many times I got my revenge and satisfied my hatred towards an enemy, hatred could disappear then, of course, surely there had to have been a time when revenge wasn't a necessity.

I force out a laugh to break up the long silence between us. "Of course not! Ha! Just, slipped my mind is all," I grin, scratching my neck casually.

It was the wrong thing to say, I could tell by her reaction. The look in her eyes, she was deciding whether it was worse for me to be lying, or worse for me to be telling the truth, that something like the sensation of forgiving another person had just 'slipped my mind'.

"Stop looking at me like that," I say, breaking eye contact with the princess. It didn't help in the slightest, as I could still feel the pity in her expression.

After a moment, it hits me, the sheer ridiculousness of it all. Here I am, trying to convince Luna of all ponies, that I haven't become so corrupt that I can't recognize forgiveness when I feel it.

'It's almost comical, how edgy it sounds, when I put it like that,' I think bitterly to myself.

Turning to the others, I cracked my neck and began to speak. I needed to abort this horrible interaction, and there was no better way than to move things forward.

"Alright everyone! Time to lay down some ground rules! We've got too many ponies in too little space, nearly everything here is busted, and I haven't been a ruler for the last seven-hundred years! Needless to say, things are going to be a bit rough until we can get you all settled and homed!" I shout, getting everyone's attention.

I wave to Luna. "In the time you all were gone, there was some major problems that went on, and Luna, as I planned, was given the Shadow Realm as an Equestrian Territory! Obey her as you would me!" I announce.

I turn to Luna. "You're going to want to get your ponies here to establish order. They're going to need shelter and supplies, and to be frank, the only functioning Magitek I've been able to scrounge up is all a million miles thataway in my various dungeons and temples," I point in the general direction of the Everfree Forest.

Luna listened as I explained and tried to establish a plan, but every time I glanced at her, I could see her staring at me in a way that hurt to experience.

"I believe there are some airships I can have brought here to help ferry ponies to shelter. Can you call for your own?" she asks quietly, distracted by something, and unnerved by the things I've said.

"Good idea. I'll try to get ahold of the Fizz Guard. Tempest'll be here in short order."

I spot Priss approaching as we gather up some of Luna's fastest guards and mingle them with the Shadow Guard to establish a plan of action. Eclipse is still over in the crowd, discussing those plans with several others.

"So, uhh, why not just get the Kingdom Heart up and running again instead of leaving home? We've got enough ponies to ignite it again," she asks.

"No!" I shout instinctively before I can catch myself. I let out a shaky breath.

"No. That wouldn't work out well for any of us. With Sombra defeated, where exactly do you think the hate for it is going to come from?" I demand, more sharply than I meant to.

Luna interrupts, laying a wing across my shoulder.

"In my brief time ruling the realm, I abolished the Kingdom Heart's formation. It is as Weiss said, without a single enemy, the heart lacks balance. However, Weiss, with the Crystal Heart, and Princess Cadence at our side, we may find a solution, given time."

Priss thinks on this. "Alright. But I've spent more than long enough away from home already. I don't think ponies will be satisfied if we can't come back here, Princess Luna."

Luna simply nods. "I understand. Once we find a way to stave off the cold and establish livable homes, I will personally see to it that you all reclaim your land."

Nightmare, who had simply been watching and sneering in Luna's grip up until now, suddenly sneers even more than before, a feat that I'm certain I didn't build into her form's capabilities. "So can we leave now, or what? I'm sick of this place, and the miserable company I could certainly do without," she says, shooting a glare at me.

Priss raises an eyebrow. "So, is this your little crotchspawn, Your Highness?"

"WHAT DID YOU JUST CALL ME?!" Nightmare squeaks, igniting her horn in a flurry of sparks as she snarls at the snarking Longma.

I can't help but grin, silent chuckles wracking my form as I cover my face with an inconspicuous fist.

How did I ever do without Priss's wonderful prose?

Luna tries to hold back her own laughter "Well, technically from a certain perspective, Weiss is the one responsible for this particular filly."

And now it isn't funny anymore, no matter how loud Luna's laughter is.

Tempest was shocked when Weiss called her. It was a bad sign, up until Luna joined the call and informed her some of what had happened. The Shadow Realm, the loss of which was the reason for Weiss's descent, had returned in its entirety, and her ship was needed to help ferry them out of the blasted wasteland of ice that was the Frozen North.

It was with an odd sense of confusion that she ordered the Halberd to turn to the heading she received from the princess, but what sent chills running up and down her spine was Weiss's last ominous words towards her before ending the call.

"When you get here, we need to talk about what you did to the Devil's Machine," he explained in no uncertain terms.

As his dispassionate face blipped off of the Halberd's central screen in the command room, Tempest collapsed back in her chair with a shudder. She knew what he did to ponies he thought had wronged him.

Grubber, as always, was snacking on something. A sleeve of cookies that he was steadily chowing his way through, making jokes and bumbling around. The little hedgehog wasn't much for a lot of the work that an airship crew needed to function, but what he did do was critical. He entertained, and when he saw someone down, he noticed.

"Hey, Tempest, what's up?" he asks, hopping up onto the armrest of the captain's chair.

She groaned. "Weiss Noir. That's what's up. He wants to 'talk to me' about a machine. I tampered with it without his knowledge."

Grubber shrugs. "Well, whatever it is, I doubt he's that torn up about it if he told you about it. If he was, he'd just show up out of nowhere and do something horrible."

As he munches a cookie, he clarifies. "That said, if I spot a big eight-armed dragon flying at us, I'm hiding in the broom closet."

Tempest rolls her eyes and suppresses a smile. "Of course."

He holds out a single cookie. "Want one?"

Making sure to give her crew a very brief glare to forestall any overdramatic reactions, she takes the cookie and eats it.

She needs something to go her way today, damn it all.

She was shocked at Weiss's ultimate reaction to her treachery. As soon as the Halberd landed alongside several other airships, and she made her way down the ramp, the sage ran towards her, and wrapped the mare up in a six armed hug.

It was brief, but shocking, and as he let go, he only had two words for the captain, in response to her earlier actions.

"Thank you," he says.

Tempest blinks. "Is... Is that it?"

Weiss only smirks as he saunters off. "Well, I had to scare the piss out of you somehow. Tampering with my precious Relic of Darkness... For shame. I'd be pissed if you weren't completely right to do it," he muses, shaking his head as he leaves.

As she manages her crew and helps shuffle families onto the oversized airship, she thinks on what she saw in her brief meeting with the sage. Something had changed in the way he carried himself. Hope seemed fragile, but growing in the way he spoke.

Once the ship is ready to take off, she approaches one of the hollowed out buildings that had been turned into a temporary point of organization for the leaders, and as she does, she hears the beginnings of a conversation.

"You shouldn't have just out and said that. You're lucky I'm here to take on some of the load," Princess Cadence's muffled voice says.

Weiss's own voice retorts harshly. "Well, it's the truth isn't it? These ponies aren't under my rule anymore. Luna's the one with that job."

"She can't do that job for them. It was always supposed to be you. Having to try and clean up your mistakes, and having to fail without you there hurt her," Cadence retorts as Tempest sidles quietly up to the window.

"...I'm sorry. I'm trying to change for the better, but I'm not fit to lead anymore. But I know someone who can be."

"Eclipse Flash, right? Do you think she's ready for that?"

The response comes immediately. "No. I think I can get her ready, though. She was almost ready before everything went wrong. I can teach her what I know. Finish out her final lessons and get her up to speed on the modern era. She'll lead the Longma in ways I never could."

"Are you sure?"

This time, it takes him longer to respond, but when he does, Tempest can hear the conviction in his tone.

"I'd bet my life on it."

A long silence fills the gap after this statement, before Cadence suddenly interjects one last time.

"Also, no way in hell are you getting out of leadership duties. You will be taking on some of the burden here for organizing these lemmings, or I will strangle you. We need all hooves on deck, so you're out of luck Lord Uncle, you emo sad sack."

"Yes ma'am?" he responds in a tone that lies somewhere between thick sarcasm and incredulity.

Tempest starts to walk away, thinking about what she heard. As she does, she hears Weiss fire off one last retort.

"Remind me to send Shining Armor an apologetic gift basket. A Longma Alicorn of Love... Poor bastard's probably-"

'Thwack!' goes Cadence's wing as she slaps him over the head.

Queen Chrysalis sat in her little wheelchair, trying to somehow fit the impossible in her mind.

The Longma, creatures born of pure hatred had forgiven her.

The Windego, creatures born of pure hatred, had stood up for her.

Weiss Noir, the Anathema, the one living thing on the planet who reforged himself into a thing of pure vengence...

Had spared her.

It was an impossibility, there was no getting around that, and yet it happened. It happened because of a simple apology. Words alone!

A changeling had overcome hatred.

"My Queen, are you alright?" Squiggles asks, noticing her growing still.

Celestia, who had been dragging the chariot behind her, glances back. "Is something wrong?"

With a dry, papery noise, a seam had split through Chrysalis's body, as the light in her eyes grew dim and dark.

(Present Chapter 42) Forget-You-Not

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Gilda came in like a wrecking ball, tossing the door open somewhat carelessly as she and her friends came in.

"Yo, dork, where's the robot!" Gilda howls with a talon to her beak. Immediately, her friends shush her with looks of exasperation.

"Gilda, this is a library," Fluttershy quietly admonishes, sitting on the couch nearby, comforting what appears to be Rainbow Dash, with Spike awkwardly standing around, trying to look like he's just there by happenstance, reading a comic book.

The pony in question just raises her hoof. "Robot present," she says self-deprecatingly.

Sunset immediately sets to studying her in a way that seems all too like Twilight's own studies, the main difference being the slightly less rational bent to her expression as she does so. Something a bit more emotional and less logical in the condiment-colored unicorn's gaze as she examines every inch of the golem.

"I've been talking to, er, Metal Dash, and she's nothing like what you might be thinking," Fluttershy attempts as Sunset lifts one of Metal Dash's wings with a telekinetic tug, prompting a confused look from the golem in question.

"Oh, wow. Well, that's impossible," she muses, poking Dash's leg.

"What?" Dash responds self-consciously.

"Feel that? I read your design document, there's supposed to be an Orichalcum frame covering your entire body, but whatever this stuff is, it's somehow emulating not just surface details like fur and skin, it's actually defying the physical composition underneath as well. It's not just covering it up, it's like it's... Superimposed over your physical form, forcing it fractionally out of reality. Like a physical transformative magic," she explains in a tone that makes it seem like she's answering for her own benefit first and foremost.

Gilda tugs away Sunset. "Sorry Robodashie, I brought her over cause she was in a funk. Thought it'd be cool to see what your deal is," she says with a shrug.

Metal Dash waves it off with only minor discomfort. "It's cool. Just go easy on me if I act weird. I'm..."

Trixie and Gilda look confused at the pause as she freezes up.

"...Twilight could probably explain it better. I can't remember things, and it's hard to think," she finally says.

Sunset nods. "She has Rainbow Dash's memories up to a certain point, but everything after that? Weiss had to do some incredibly hacky things to emulate long-term memory retainment. She can only remember so many things at once, if the notes I read are correct. Is that right?" she asks Metal Dash, who just nods.

"So you know what I'm... Made of? Twilight is kinda going crazy trying to figure me out," Dash murmurs, looking down.

Sunset thinks about this. "Well, not exactly. I have your blueprints, but I don't know what Weiss did to your design after that. You could be completely different, for all I know. I probably know the rough strokes, though. Is there something you want to know?"

Dash just shrugs with a frown, but some fear runs through her at the mention of Weiss's name, something she shrugs off with stubborn resentment. "Doesn't really matter, does it? I'm just going to forget whatever you said in a few seconds."

Sunset raises an eyebrow. "Well, if your recording crystal isn't broken, you technically have eidetic memory. I don't mean to try and give you the "It's not all bad" garbage, I get that this is probably really bad, but you've definitely got a few advantages."

At Dash's raised eyebrow, Sunset hums. "How old were you when you lost your fifth tooth?" the unicorn asks.

"Two years and nine months old. I lost it after running headfirst into a tree," Dash instantly responds.

"See? I bet even Rainbow Dash doesn't remember that," Sunset retorts.

Trixie interjects. "Trixie doesn't mean to be a bother, but where exactly is Twilight?"

Fluttershy blushes. "I told her to go calm down. She was getting..."

Spike raises a claw "Totally neurotic? It was really starting to freak us all out, but she said she'd go get her thoughts together. She really wants to know what makes her tick," he jabs a thumb at Dash.

"Yeah... Look, uhh..." Dash begins, before freezing.

"...Sunset. I get that it's probably a good party trick, but they aren't even my memories. Does it really matter how well I remember those? I'm still just a fake with nothing to call my own," she frowns.

"How many times did I use the letter 'A' in the last sentence I said to you?" Sunset retorts.

Dash freezes, but the period is shorter than a second. "Three times. 'Rainbow', 'Dash', and 'that' all had the letter 'a' in them," she responds.

She blinks. "Wait, how did I know that?"

Trixie and Gilda both look intrigued at this as well.

Sunset smirks. "Like I said, eidetic memory. Just because you can only remember so much at once doesn't mean you don't remember. Half of your 'brain' is a powerful, if fairly outdated magical computer. The memory crystal alone, if you have the one I read about, could hold a century of video and audio recordings. More if Weiss used some modern downsizing tricks when he put you together. Albiet, most of it was meant to hold commands, but eh. His redundancy is your oyster."

She gives Metal Dash an excited look. "If you want experiences of your own to treasure, you could go out and get them, and you'd remember it for the rest of your life, even if you needed to be reminded of them. The rest of us fleshies have to make due with pictures, usually," she says insistently, making Dash blink a bit in thought.

Gilda interjects. "So basically, all we gotta do is get her some new happy memories, and she's good to go, huh?"

The griffon gets a calculating look in her eyes, like a golem being asked obscure questions about sentence structure.

"You thinking what I'm thinking?" she muses, looking to Trixie and Sunset, who nod. Fluttershy and Spike, meanwhile, just look bewildered, not injected into the trio's friend circle deep enough to read minds like they seem to be able to.

Suddenly, Gilda grabs Metal Dash around the waist, hefting her up off the couch. "Alright dork, you're coming with us," she says, holding up the surprised and squirming golem as she turns to leave with Trixie and Sunset.

Spike hops up in shock "Uhh, Twilight wanted Metal Dash to stay here until we could figure out if she's-"

"Bah! We'll bring her back, don't worry!" Gilda waves the little drake off.

Fluttershy stands up and gives Spike a sympathetic look. "I'll go with them to make sure they don't get into any trouble, alright? Tell Twilight we'll just be in Ponyville, alright?" she says, turning to the trio with a meaningful look.

"Don't worry, we just gotta turn this hunk of junk's happy circuits on, we'll be right back," Gilda smirks.

Sunset sighs. "You know she's not a robot, right? Robots are strictly mechanical, or at minimum, they're mostly mechanical. Her body doesn't even utilize electricity," she explains.

Gilda flaps her talons like a mouth. "Blah blah blah. Let's quit with the nerd talk and get this party on the road!"

Trixie nods. "If there's one thing Trixie has learned, it's that pedantics and entertainment do not go well together, Sunset."

Sunset grumbles as the ponies leave with Metal Dash in tow. "Being pedantic can be perfectly entertaining," she mumbles with displeasure.

"So, there a reason you dragged me all the way out here?" Metal Dash grumbles as she's poured out of Gilda's grip onto the grass, flopping over in the process. She had carried them all the way to the edge of Whitetail Woods, where the spring season had made the place a muggy mixture of pristine grass and trees that had yet to fully wake up from their yearly winter slumber.

"Like I said, we're going to have some fun. Unless you're too scared to have a little race?" Gilda taunts, crossing her arms as she looks down at the golem.

Metal Dash grimaces, hopping to her hooves and flapping her wings. "As if!"

Gilda smirks. "Good. I'll put together something. Give me a minute."

With that, the griffon takes flight, zooming around to gather stray clouds to mould together into bits of racing props.

As she did, Metal Dash tried to take flight, flapping hard with wings that seemed intent on obeying all known laws of aviation rather than letting her ignore them.

After a few moments, she slumps. "Oh. Right. Fake wings," she murmurs sadly.

Sunset approaches, feeling somewhat sad as well. "Hey, don't worry, I'm pretty sure you can fly, you should have the ability to produce a set of reactors for it, try to think," she says, laying a hoof over Dash's back.

Dash goes through a swathe of memories, from her earliest to latest, parts being picked out as she recalls the four massive engines that were strapped to her at one point. Hellfire Reactors.

With a flash of magic, a portal rips open next to her, and four rockets fly out of them, swirling around with blasts of cherry-red energy.

She feels the Miracle Matter comprising her body melt around her barrel, the fake wings she had before disappearing to reveal four ports, each one having a reactor clamp itself into place, pinching the false skin and fur around the ports a bit as they did.

For several seconds, she just stands, awkwardly trying to reconcile the strange sensations, things brushing up against her mind as parts of Metal Dash automatically prodded and pulled at her for answers, for logic to feed to the four engines to control them.

When she still thought she was real, she didn't bother to think about the strangeness of the four alien appendages. She had more important things to do.

Now, however, with nothing at all to do...

"This is... Weird," Dash deadpans, waggling the four rocket-nozzles, feeling the bulbous metal structures deform and bend like rubber, whatever they were made of, it didn't feel like hard metal, but more like a plastic bottle. She could even curl them around like mittens.

It wasn't at all like wings, and having four of them was something that seemed to rub at her mind like itchy cotton, with the way they seemed to move the way she wanted them to, without knowing what it was she even wanted in the first place.

She swallowed as she got the faint idea that parts of her mind, things in her head were just... doing whatever they wanted without her say so.

Gilda swoops down, landing in front of the quartet. "Alright, I think that should do the trick. You ready?"

She tried to consciously control the rockets, Fluttershy, Sunset and Trixie backing away as she did.

'I can't make them move right. They just-' she thinks, only for them to move on their own, angling down as she suddenly shoots up a few inches above the ground on jets of magical flame. Fluttershy's eyebrows shot up at the sight, while Trixie simply looked impressed with the visual flair.

"Wow, that's wicked," Gilda says.

"I can't make them do what I want, they just take me wherever I think of going," Dash attempts to explain, the creepy feeling not going away without her intentionally trying not to think about it.

If she let her attention drift, she started to not even notice them, as if she was just flying normally.

"Alright, enough navel-gazing, nerd. See those clouds? On three, we go through em, first one to go through em all and get back to the cloud up there wins," Gilda interjects, pointing to where she made a bunch of rings out of clouds, each one floating quietly through the skies over the forest, meandering around to a larger cloud platform above them all.

Metal Dash nods, thoughts slipping away as she focused on the challenge here in the present. The exact reasoning was getting fuzzy. 'Gilda wants a race, that's all the explanation I need', she thought to herself, cracking her neck and widening her stance.

"Three... Two... One..." Gilda counted down, lowering to the ground as she spread her wings.

"Go!"

The two shot off, one metaphorically like a rocket, and the other literally like one, scarring the grass with a burnt starburst where she took off.

The first ring was passed in a second, Gilda a late second to Dash's incredible top speed.

She smirked triumphantly, turning to go for the second ring, as she did, something sapped her grin as it took an obscenely long time to actually adjust her course.

It was like trying to run on ice, but in midair, her thrusters trying to cancel out her current vector to replace it with the next one.

Gilda had no such problem, turning on a dime with a flare of her wings and another flap. She was still behind, as Dash managed to get heading in the right direction fast enough to return to her top speed, but the gap had shortened, sending a thrill of fear down the automaton's spine.

The second ring, Dash managed to get through in time, and the third one wasn't in too horrible a direction, letting her mostly keep her speed and pass through that one as well.

The fourth, fifth, and sixth rings, however, were in a narrow zig-zag that rapidly lost her all the ground she had gained over Gilda's greater maneuverability.

Inch by inch, Dash was losing, and with one final burst of speed from Gilda, she overtook the golem and won the race.

"Dang it, what happened, I haven't sucked that bad at turning since-" Dash grumbles, looking back and recalling where she was and why.

"Oh. Right."

Gilda laughs. "Wow, you would have had me beat no problem, you're crazy fast for a bucket of bolts," she says, clapping Dash on the back and hopping back with a squawk at her bright red talon.

Dash looked back at her engines, which were glowing red from heat.

"Well, that's what you get for calling me a bucket of bolts," Dash smirks, crossing her forelegs smugly.

Gilda scowls good-naturedly. "Yeah, well, I still won, so there," she says, sticking a tongue out at the golem.

As they hop down from the cloud, Fluttershy is the first to congratulate the two, albeit quietly. "You both did really well. That was fun to watch," she said.

Metal Dash frowns after a few moments, however. "I don't think I'll have much fun racing like this, sorry," she says.

Sunset interjects. "Well, the day is still young. I have an idea for something fun you could try."

With a flare of magic, she slices one of the nearby trees to pieces, levitating a bunch of disks of wood around, affixing them to the surrounding trees and coloring them with bullseyes.

"You might not know it, but based on what I've read, you were originally built as a weapons platform. I refuse to believe Weiss didn't equip you with some truly impressive armaments!" she says.

Admittedly, Dash is somewhat intrigued by this. She's read comic books like any other filly, so the concept of being a badass gun-toting cyborg from the future isn't unknown to her, even if she's technically just from the present.

The thought causes another flash of magic, and the two Hellfire Reactors on her upper back disconnect, slipping into portals as two other devices replace them, ones that look similar, save for the long tubes where there were once thruster nozzles, and the bright blue light glowing from within them.

She looks at them with surprise, and once again, feels something poking around inside her mind, as if she's asking herself questions for her to answer.

"Oh my," Fluttershy muses, watching the odd objects cautiously.

Sunset beams. "Now try shooting those targets I set up!"

With a grin, Metal Dash focuses on one of the wooden disks, and feels the things on her back shift around.

With an anticlimactic "whuff", the two guns fire twin blasts of bright blue compressed air, smacking down a branch off of a tree with one shot, and blasting the cloud above them with the other.

"Uhh..." Dash frowns.

With a glare, she focuses harder on the target. 'Come on, hit it!' she screams in her head.

The two guns hit the exact same spots they hit before, blasting apart the cloud and knocking down some leaves.

Sunset hums thoughtfully. "You might not be calibrated correctly. That would explain the aiming problems."

Metal Dash sags. "So I'm just useless, then,"

All the ponies and griffon flinch at this.

"Girls, why don't we go get a snack? It always cheers me up when I'm down. Maybe some milkshakes at Sugarcube Corner?" Trixie offers.

Metal Dash perks up at this. "Oh, yeah, that sounds good actually!"

She had been feeling a little bit hungry, after all.

They arrived at Sugarcube Corner to some rather awkward company, Pinkie hopping to greet them all and welcome them, but as she did, they saw over at one of the tables, another rainbow-mane'd pegasus was drinking a milkshake and nursing some cupcakes of her own, a worthy treat after getting let out of the hospital for head trauma from a bottle being smashed over her head by a certain zebra.

Metal Dash and Rainbow Dash's eyes met for an uncomfortably long time, before Metal Dash was the first one to break eye contact, looking down ashamed of herself when she had gotten enough time to actually remember the circumstances.

"Yeah, that's what I thought," Rainbow Dash grumbles, scratching her head where the bandages were still covering them as she quietly returns to her own snack.

Gilda frowns. "I'll talk to her, you guys get me something good," the griffon says before taking a seat next to the mare.

As she started explaining Metal's situation, the remaining four sat down at their own little table.

"So, whatcha want?" Pinkie asks exubrantly, bouncing towards them with a little notepad in hoof.

"One milkshake with extra hay," Trixie orders.

"I'll just have a small vanilla cupcake," Fluttershy asks demurely.

"Just water please," Sunset asks, stomach grumbling at the memories of the last time she ate here.

"And maybe a slice of chocolate cake," she appends after a moment.

"Just the usual for me, Pinkie," Metal Dash says without thinking.

To her credit, the mare just nods, bouncing away to whip up the orders.

Fluttershy smiles at Metal Dash, laying a hoof over hers. "It's alright. I know today hasn't been the best, but I think we can still end it on a happy note."

Metal Dash simply covered her head up as she groaned into the table. How could it possibly end on a good note? Seeing Rainbow Dash, the real one, had reminded her of the truth even more horrible than the fact that she was a fake pony.

That sense of wrongness that seemed to poison all the good parts of the day finally had a cause to append to it. She wasn't just a useless pile of enchanted garbage, she was made to be like this.

Their orders arrive, and Metal Dash takes a bite from her own cupcake. Devil's Food with buttermilk frosting and as many sprinkles as would fit.

She tasted nothing. It was just dry mush that she chewed on.

It was the last straw for Metal Dash, who spat the tasteless confection onto a napkin.

"Look, I know you guys are trying to be my friends, ok?! I get it! I get that you're trying to cheer me up, to help me be happy with all of this, but I can't be! This isn't good enough!" she shouts tearfully.

"I don't want you all to cheer me up! I don't want to feel like a real pony, I want to be one!" she says viciously.

"I thought I was Rainbow Dash, the Element of Loyalty for Celestia's sake, but I'm not! I'm the exact opposite!" she says, pulling her chair out with a squeal.

"I was literally built to betray everypony," she says, stalking out the door with the grim knowledge that her sole purpose was to bunk up using the Element of Loyalty with her treachery.

She glares as Rainbow Dash tries to stop her from leaving, standing between her and the door with a guilty expression on her face. Guilt at her reaction to the golem.

"What do you want? Want to rub it in? Fine! You win! You were the real one this whole time! I'm just a broken piece of outdated junk, a big bad robot sent to ruin everything! Now just get out of my way!" Metal Dash says with a stomp.

"I'm sorry," Rainbow Dash responds apologetically.

Gilda stands next to Rainbow Dash, speaking in response to Metal Dash's demand for her to move. "Not gonna happen bub, I know a thing or two about running away from my friends, and I'm not letting you make the same mistake. If you're scared, don't be, got that?"

Trixie nods, standing to one side of her. "Gilda is right. Everypony makes mistakes, but you haven't made any yet! It will be hard, but you can still follow your dreams, find what makes you happy in spite of it all."

Sunset stands to the other side. "You didn't want any of this. It doesn't have to be your destiny. Whatever it is you do want, we'll all help you get it."

"What I want..?" Metal Dash says quietly, hanging her head.

"I just want to be somepony real. What's so wrong with wishing for that?"

https://youtu.be/K45QJawaQW8?list=PLO1Tb0ibatGMZZWoOOoZY_PHWzXkz7kFe

Fluttershy gasps as a flash of light marks the arrival of her Star Rod.

Everyone glances at her, but she is just as confused as everyone else. It had appeared on its own, this time.

Following the bare hint of intuition, Fluttershy approaches Metal Dash with the rod in hoof.

"I don't think... I don't think there's anything wrong with wishing for that," she says hesitantly, holding out the magical relic.

Sunset realizes her plan. "Are you sure, Fluttershy? It might not work like you think," she warns.

The warning is moot, however, as the relic itself suddenly lights up, and a voice can be heard echoing within it, a reprise of the words that once created it.

"When "Wish" is spoken with panache
By those whose heart and wish align
Let not their hopes and dreams be dashed
But manifest by their design."

With a shiver, Metal Dash slowly reaches out, and takes the Star Rod of Wishes from Fluttershy.

Everyone watches with baited breath as the relic's glow increases in brightness, and the magic flowing through it seems to surge with renewed vigor.

She closes her eyes tightly, false pulse pounding in her chest.

"I wish..." Metal Dash says desperately, begging with all her heart for it to come true.

And like the best wishes sometimes do, it does.

She blinks several times, feeling oddly unbalanced.

"What happened?" she asks, jerking up from the couch she was laying on. Memories came slowly as she woke up quickly. Something about her voice sounded different. Chirpier, a bit smoother and crisper than she was used to.

As she leans up, she winces a bit at the feeling of her wings getting pinched by her ribs, and looking down, notices something a bit off.

Fluttering around her belly, where the engines used to be, are two distinct pairs of feathery blue pegasus wings.

She looks around, and notices that she's in a small, but exceedingly fancy looking house.

Gilda walks in from the kitchen nearby. "Oh hey, you're up. We had to haul your butt over here after you passed out. Welcome to my place. Fair warning, last I saw, Sunset told Twilight about what happened, and I saw them stapling notebooks together for 'extra room'. Pretty sure they'll be hounding you for a few decades of questioning after this," she smirks.

"Mirror?" Metal Dash asks, feeling and looking a bit weirder than she usually does.

"Yeah, pretty sure I've got a few dozen laying around. It's crazy what they try to talk you into buying when you're loaded," Gilda mutters, helping her get up on her hooves and walking her over to a large ornate-looking one in a dusty sitting room.

The first thing she notices is her hair. It's weirdly different, but not necessarily in a bad way. It was a sort-of crew-cut, for one thing, and rather than being red, orange and yellow, it was red, yellow and cyan. Her tail was different too, shorter, and it had fewer colors. No deep blues or greens, just more of the same as her mane.

The second thing that confused her was the beak. It took her a moment to realize what exactly she was looking at, but when it clicked, it suddenly made a lot more sense. She looked more like she did without the disguise. Like some kind of blend between the fake pony disguise that was around her before, and her true, metallic self underneath.

Her muzzle was a victim of this, and some yawning and looking inside it revealed that she still had teeth, just hidden underneath the hard-yet-flexible blueish beak that covered much of where her muzzle was.

She turned to the side, and got a better look at her wings. Sure enough, there really was four of them, two poked from her barrel, while two were where she expected wings to be, poking up from her back.

Poking and prodding at the limbs revealed odd, hard ball-socket joints, and that led to her finding the same kind of joints where her hips and shoulders met her body. Where there should have been a heartbeat, she felt a strange humming fluttering in her chest. She felt some kind of power inside her body, and with that feeling, a small yellow star appeared, embedded in her chest just over her heart. As she relaxed, the star disappeared back where it came from.

On her flanks, her Cutie Mark was simply a big yellow shooting star, like the one that had shown up on her chest, and with trails of the same colors as her mane and tail.

She wasn't Rainbow Dash, or Metal Dash. She wasn't even a pony, that much was clear from all the odd little quirks she had now.

She was just... Her.

(Past Chapter 37) Enemies Closer

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It took an embarrassingly long time for Mercy to realize the nature of the twisted world she now inhabited.

She didn't realize it when she struck out at Weiss Noir, and watched him fall like a common pony to her venom. He was unprepared for her to actually shatter the chains he put her in, and the blow was too quick for anyone in the room to have possibly stopped her.

She didn't realize it when the princesses disappeared as soon as she spoke. Adrenaline could excuse many things, and she had more to worry about than what could make two alicorns suddenly disappear.

She sensed that something was wrong when, after escaping through the tunnels and murdering her way through what few guards remained there, she encountered gigantic random beasts roaming the frozen north, in quantities far greater than normal. Was this a ploy? A contingency by the mad sage, to unleash monsters upon his demise?

No matter what it was, it meant she had to be careful, she snuck and slithered and hid, coasting on her internal reserves to get her through the north at a reasonable pace, and then, into the badlands from whence she came. Back to the Changeling Hive. She strongly suspected that the foolish unicorn hadn't told anyone of the hive's location before his death, if he had, his pathetic 'mercy' would have been meaningless. The Princesses, the Longma that remained, they would swarm towards the location of the hive and scour it clean of all life.

She knew something was very wrong when her demands to see Chrysalis were met with immediate obedience from the changelings at the hive's entrance. She knew something was terribly wrong when the changeling queen, upon hearing her ranting and raving at the betrayal of handing her over to the mad sage, ceded command of the hive to Mercy, and offered her the full resources of changeling kind in a tearful admission of guilt.

But all of that paled in comparison to what had finally made Mercy realize that none of this was real. One simplistic thing that finally broke her suspension of disbelief, something that no convoluted blend of magic and pure luck could have possibly made reality.

She had begun testing once again, cutting into cadavers and live subjects alike to further her knowledge of biology, chiefly the strange and bizarre creatures that constantly attacked the hive and herself on a daily basis. She investigated odd ruins that had not been there before, and sought out solutions to the dark problems that threatened her from within them.

As she studied these things, she finally realized the falsehood of her senses, for the simple fact that she experimented upon things to learn their nature, and every theory she made was proven correct.

Science was Mercy's deity, and she knew well the foibles of her chosen idol's mythos. The eyes and ears of a snake were tools for the discovery of truth and knowledge, not arbiters of what it was. Only by proving theories wrong could one discover the theories which were closest to correct, and, on rare occasion, discover which theories were so close to correct as to be indistinguishable from it.

Was this dragon-like creature that belched elemental fury at her army of changelings a creation of the Shadow Realm? "Sure!" her tests answered merrily.

Was this ancient relic that she found in an underground temple secretly tied to the changeling race in some way? "That sounds about right!" a cursory examination dictated.

She couldn't find a way to break whatever illusion she was under, any words she spoke were fact in this twisted realm, any assumptions she made were law. The only things that seemed immune to her newfound ability to simply wish into existence or out of existence whatever she so desired were subtle things, no matter how often she said it, she could not demand her own death. She could not demand a total cessation of this false reality. She could not influence the odd beasts and quirky events that befell her constantly, until she had resolved them through murder or pointlessly clever puzzling.

She found that she could wish to see reality, but it was fleeting. To make that wish would place her in a cell, where she was embedded in a sculpture of a tree, gazed upon by pitying ponies. A tube quietly fed her a thin trickle of nutrient-rich fluids.

But this too, was an illusion. It took moments for her to find a way to escape, when she did make such a wish. At first, it was subtle. A guard's inattention left her time to slowly wiggle her way out of the sculpture over a period of weeks by shedding her skin and rapidly accelerating her own metabolism. It took a month for her to even suspect that she hadn't truly escaped that time, and another week before she was driven mad with the desire to see reality once again.

Now that she knew the fleetingness of that particular command, the illusion grew less subtle in its methods by which to cast her out of her prison and back into perceiving her total domination of the world.

A guard slipped and smashed into her prison. Suspicious of it being another illusory trick, she allowed herself to be recaptured.

A dragon attacked. Weiss's blatant punishment of whatever dragons broke into his realm caused a war, and in the frantic battle, her prison was ripped apart, and she fled. It took a week for her to realize it was another lie, and to wish her way back into the tree-statue.

Sombra returned, and demanded she return to his side, ripping his way through everything with disgusting ease.

Now, the illusion had abandoned all subtlety, and simply used the same excuse each time. Within a week, Queen Chrysalis's mind magics would, as far as she could tell, breach her mental prison, insisting that she had found a way to get the snake out of the illusory world, by transferring her mind to a changeling using the Archive Mind, the magical web of changeling personalities that they kept their minds in when their bodies and spirits failed.

It took Mercy a very long time to attempt another 'wish', the first time this had happened, but with but a single demand to see reality, an entire year after that, her new life as a changeling queen at Chrysalis's side was abolished from her sight, and the cell her crystalline tree was planted in was her world once more.

She had been placed in her own personal hell, a world in which science and truth did not exist, only hedonism, excitement, and theorizing in ways that held no meaning.

With a grimace, she ignored yet another "psychic broadcast" from Chrysalis, begging her to allow the queen to free her mind from her imprisonment.

She blankly stared at the guards watching over her cell. How long would it take this time? How long would she be able to see the bland reality of a few punch-card officers trying to while away their shifts, before her existence bled back into vivid, colorful falsehoods?

She noticed something in the corner of her cell. A spot that seemed darker than the rest.

As she observed, the spot began to grow, until none other than the Sage of Darkness stood before her. His arms were crossed, and he had a self-satisfied look on his face.

"Power is an illusion. Absolute power... A seamless illusion," he began by quoting.

"Go away," Mercy snarled.

Weiss's smirk turned into a grin, even as he appeared to melt before her eyes in a way that looked utterly agonizing. It would have been a delight to the sadistic snake if it had been real.

"That's fine. I can see you aren't ready for my offer. I'll be back in a decade or two," he says in a burbling tone as he dissolves into a puddle of molten pony.

A decade? She would be mad by then. (As if she weren't already insane from this sisyphean torment)

"Show me the real Weiss Noir," she demanded suddenly.

Suddenly, it was if nothing had happened, he stood in front of her once again, in the exact same pose, with the exact same cruel smile.

"Ahh... Perhaps you are ready, then."

Mercy dearly wanted to say 'get to the point,' but held her tongue out of fear for what hallucinations would come if she spoke a command. She didn't want to believe that this was real either, but Weiss had never broken character in any of her dreamlike fantasies before. If it was a new trick to fool her back into the sludge of unintelligent complacency, then she lost nothing by engaging with it.

She wouldn't be able to tell if it were true or not, after all. Even if she tried.

"I'll begin with the stick," he said conversationally, looking around and waving to motion to everything around her.

"This is your existence now. Forever. You are forever banished from reality, doomed to persist in this new world of confused dreams and entertaining nightmares," he explained simply.

"Did you like the one where I had a meteor crash into the planet, and your changeling scientists figured out how to use its cells to make supersoldiers? I stole that little idea from a videogame, but it was still pretty fun to watch," he said, slowly drifting off-topic.

Weiss shook his head, returning to the subject at had. "But then, I wouldn't be here without a good reason. You see, I've found myself in need of something. Something critical to my revenge. Something you helped take away from me."

His grin reminds her of Sombra, in the worst way.

"Talent."

He looks up to the ceiling, and his smile fades as his hands clench into fists.

"This place... These immigrants that I've allowed to become new citizens of my realm... The quaint and curious things I've done to entertain myself... They're all means to an end, and yet, they just aren't enough. I can't trust all of these strangers, all of these random individuals, with their own wants and needs, with their own allies and friends. I'm losing the ability to understand them. But you? I can understand you. I've decided to form a Council, with you as its first member. A council of trusted individuals with talents I can use, who can advise me in ways friends and strangers cannot."

He smiles.

"You killed my best doctor, so there's a position open. I've gotten quite a bit of enjoyment out of reading some of your notes, and you're perfectly qualified," He says in a detached, unhinged way that manages to disturb even Mercy.

He holds out two of his hands, and slowly opens them, revealing two pills.

"You take the blue pill, and the story ends. You go back to Wonderland, and I stop letting you have these little conjugal visits to the real world."

Mercy would quite literally choose anything else.

"But, take the red pill, and..."

He pauses, trying to think of something clever to say.

"Why are you doing this? Even you can't be so idiotic as to think it's a good idea to try and recruit me, even if you know I will say yes," Mercy demands insistently.

He chuckles. "Wasted opportunity," he mutters as she interrupts him trying to think of a quip, before considering her question and responding with a shrug. "Come now, Councilman 'Oh Goodness', you know what they say," he begins, stating her new codename.

He continues to hold out the two pills. "Keep your friends close..."

Weiss bows remorsefully to Celestia and Luna as guards carry away the tree containing Mercy, hauling it onto an extremely large chariot.

"I had no idea what she was capable of. She was somehow able to poison herself with a drug I suspect was smuggled into the prison, and I only just managed to prevent the worst with some hasty action on my part. I can't afford to try and keep her imprisoned any longer, and I dread to think of what would happen if she refuses to pass on to the next world. The contingencies in her physical body alone..." he shudders.

Luna shakes her head. "You couldn't have known. It is unusual to imprison a criminal in Tartarus while still alive, but it is neither the first nor the last time we have done so. You did the right thing, coming to us, Weiss."

Weiss rises, blinking a few tears from his eyes. "Thank you, Princess. It's... hard for me to accept help from others. I didn't want to do this, but this had to be done," he says quietly.

Celestia nods. "You may have your 'polls' and 'votes' to act as tools in steering your realm, Lord Weiss, but there is no shame in asking for assistance with things beyond your means. If there is a criminal or foe beyond your ability to contain, then we are more than willing to aid you in keeping such evil at bay."

He sniffs a bit, and rises to his full height. "You're right, princess."

After a pause, he manages to smile, his malicious, knowing smirk a familiar sight for the two princesses by now, the expression failing to evoke unease in the pair like it perhaps should.

In one of his claws, he palms a small trinket idly. A Black Materia that the princesses don't pay much attention to, one containing a special, unique version of the Shadow Clone spell, keyed to a single individual. A new form of hatred had bloomed inside the sage, incomprehensible to anyone but himself as he held the orb.

"I'm going to need all the help I can get."

(Past Chapter 38) Straight to Tartarus

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The walls had been welded shut, and with portals used to test the air flow, even that was restricted. The laboratory wing that was once meant to have researchers going in and out at all hours of the day was now uninhabitable, owing to the staleness of the air inside.

Shadow Clones did not require fresh air.

Weiss held up a Materia, and with an uttered word, cast the spell contained within it.

"Summon"

He felt his emotions shift, the pattern of his thoughts changing as he briefly experienced feelings and a mindset that were not his own. Self-Loathing, Arrogant Egotism, and a hint of Fear.

Magic warped, and with a bubbling aura of smoke, he summoned a Shadow Clone of a being other than himself in the middle of the laboratory.

Mercy's body was different from a normal Shadow Clone. Imperfect. Instead of a light olive color, her body was entirely black, and her eyes a piercing lime green. It was the same effect of color that his own shadow clone technique expressed when he took on a form other than his original one.

"So, you weren't lying. You can defy even death," she mused, looking down at her shadowy form.

"You're not quite dead yet, Councilman Oh Goodness. Of course, with you in Tartarus, the difference is academic at best. I can summon you whenever I want, and I can dismiss you just as easily." he intoned slowly.

"Even if you tried to harm me, it's only through my active magical focus that you remain tethered to this world. Erase me, kill me, give me a pillow and a mint and send me to bed. Lights out for me is lights out for you too, so don't test me, or I might decide you're not worth summoning again," he finished seriously.

Mercy nodded as if this were obvious. "Of course. What would you have me do, then."

The snake knew she had no other option. No recourse but obedience, for now.

Weiss smirked, and jabbed a thumb behind him to a large terminal, and a variety of holographic displays.

"While you can't use the Arcana Nox for a few obvious reasons, you can still access certain systems. Your task is simple, I want to know everything there is to know about dragon biology. Again. Sombra's little attack resulted in the destruction of all my research data, so you'll be building this part of the tech base back up from scratch, under my supervision."

Mercy slithered over to the terminal with a hellish new light in her eyes. "So, I'll finally learn how you were able to create all of your wonderful little creatures. You know, Sombra was desperate to suss out that particular secret. I was more than a little curious myself."

Weiss approached her from behind as she used her tail to begin flicking through the corrupted files with disturbing familiarity. Just how much did she already know about the Shadow Realm's technology?

"All that and more, if you stay in line. I'll give you a hint, to help you get started..." Weiss said, leaning in next to the snake.

"Dragon cells are biologically immortal," he whispered, laughing quietly to himself as if he had just shared a bit of juicy gossip.

The snake froze, before returning to her task with an almost frantic, desperate air, scrambling to familiarize herself with the systems.

Weiss looked pleased. Individuals were so easy to manipulate when he could get them all alone like this. He may not have known precisely how skilled Mercy was at the art of biological research, but he knew just how vulnerable her obsession with it made her.

It took so few threats to keep her in line, when what he wanted, and what she wanted, were the exact same things.

Luna knew that Weiss feared sleeping now. It didn't take long at all for her to come to this conclusion, judging from the false dreams he used as decoys to foist off her probes, and the ever shifting clock of his periods of wakefulness as he pushed slumber back further and further. It was this fact that made it all the more shocking when she caught him sleeping outside of a dream crystal. Something she only noticed due to the sheer intensity of the nightmare he was experiencing.

She could tell a lot of things from what the cloudy outside of a dream looked like, and where it was in relation to the physical world. He had fallen asleep in the Wacky Workbench Zone, he had done so from exhaustion, judging from the ragged edges of the dream. Something had made him forgo sleep in favor of work, and exposed him to natural sleep.

With a mental push, she threw herself into his dream, and calmly examined the horrors that his mind had conjured, ones that were prime vessels for any number of nightmare creatures to embody.

It was only through her magic that she was able to bring the dream into contrast, to turn the shadowy figures and swirling darkness of the mind into a vision of what he himself saw.

And it was shocking to her.

Eclipse Flash, and many other ponies were standing before Weiss, and they all hated him.

"I was right about you," she said with bitter tears dripping down her face.

"Why? Why would you do this?"

"Was it worth it?"

"Hypocrite."

This and many more statements were directed towards the figure of Weiss, cowering from them on the cold ground. He had his hands over his face and ears, as if their words were physical blows raining down on him.

As he burned, the black smoke from the white flames of self-hatred seemed to grow, and take the form of something else above the sage, something with a fanged grin, and glowing green eyes that chuckled at the amassed crowd with utter apathy.

Luna stepped forwards, using her magic to sweep away the angry figures.

"Weiss!" she shouted, making her way towards him. As she did, he looked at Luna with naked fear.

"No, not you too, please not you,"

She shook her head. "This is a dream, Weiss, none of this is real, please, calm yourself!" Luna insisted, approaching the sage and igniting her horn.

With a blast of magic, she intended to eradicate the last vestige of the nightmare before it could be possessed by anything, firing her horn at the mass of grinning, malicious smoke above Weiss.

As she did, however, she realized her mistake too late as the dream began to collapse. The cowering white unicorn she had thought to be the dreamer, was instead merely another facet of the dream, and what she had thought to be part of the nightmare was in truth a representation of himself. Weiss had already seen himself as not the pony, but the black entity feeding off of his guilt and shame.

With that misplaced attack, Weiss woke up with another scream, magic surging through his body as he narrowly avoided destroying the precious research he and Mercy had obtained.

He slowly got control of himself, and realized what had happened.

"I fell asleep as a Shadow Clone," he realized.

Looking around, it was obvious what had happened. He had worked for too long, had become too invested in the research to realize the time, and eventually, he lost consciousness here, in a room lacking any and all Dream Crystals. An intentional measure to further control Mercy.

"How much did she see?" he growled to himself, rubbing his face to stave off the headache that came with being forced out of your own dream.

"I saw enough," Luna said, approaching him with the fading flash of a teleport behind her.

Weiss stood stiffly as the princess approached him and offered her wing to the sage. "Is that truly how you see yourself? How you see them?"

Weiss felt relief. She obviously didn't see enough, if that was her reaction.

"Of course it is," he responded bitterly. "You should know that more than anyone."

She shook her head. "Weiss... You did everything for them. You were prepared to sacrifice even your own life if it meant their happiness. Come with me," she said firmly, teleporting the pair away.

Weiss blinked, looking around. They were in the crowded streets of Equestria.

"What? Why are we here, Princess?" he asked as she ferried him towards a theater.

"You spend too much of your time alone in these tunnels, Weiss. Forgive me for the suddenness of this excursion, but it cannot wait another moment," she said insistently, pushing him along when he moved too slowly for her liking.

"You are losing touch with the truth in your singleminded isolation. When was the last time you truly spoke to another pony besides me or my sister?" she asked, as Weiss tried to get a grasp of the situation. He watched as ponies seemed to not notice him or the Lunar Princess, when they saw the pair, they were ignored, and those who stared too much found their eyes sliding off the duo as they made their way into the theater's uppermost balcony.

Before he could properly conclude Luna's intentions, they are seated, and Luna's horn ceases its glow.

"An illusion works best when combined with yet-subtler magics, I find," the princess explained in response to his curious glance that expressed his wonder of how they managed to get inside without triggering a calvalcade of questions and bowing.

"Not that I'm complaining, Luna, but I'm pretty bewildered here, why did you yank me out of my lab this early in the morning for a play?" he responded slowly.

Luna frowned. "Firstly, it is noon. Secondly, you need better means of having fun. I may not mind your less reputable methods of amusing yourself, but when your night terrors feature the slow decline of your own morality as their overarching plot, then I must insist upon whisking you away to silly things like this."

She gave him a piercing look that demanded honesty. "Have you been having dreams like that every night?"

The sage grimaced. "I have. They keep me focused on what's important. You should stay out of my head from now on, Luna."

She didn't respond as the play began, but he got the distinct feeling that, in this particular matter, she absolutely would not obey his request.

The play had begun nearly thirty minutes after their arrival. The schedules of actors, it seems, did not bow to those of royal blood or deific power. It was a fairly intricate showing, a story that followed the whirlwind romance and betrayal of two enemy commanders and a humble second-in-command.

Weiss was mostly disinterested in the intrigue and drama of the play, and at times, he seemed slow to figure out what exactly was happening in the interplay between characters.

The fight scenes were of marginal interest, but they seemed too saturated with long monologues, and unrealistic feats that strained his suspension of disbelief.

As the play ended, Weiss and Luna left as quietly as they came.

As Weiss made his way to the Arcana Janus portal connecting Equestria and The Shadow Realm, Luna stopped him, a bubble of silence surrounding them and isolating them from the crowd of those coming and going.

"Lord Weiss, I want you to know that you are not responsible for what happened to them. You did all you could, and I know they would forgive you, no matter the circumstances. Your dreams are just that. Dreams, and nothing more."

Weiss seemed to hang on to this statement, processing it slowly as his mane flickered in a ponderous way.

He walked off without another word, but his posture seemed more sure, his actions less hesitant. She could only hope that her words had eased some of the guilt he had been feeling.

Luna attempted many more times to pull Weiss away from his court, to make him partake in various frivolities. Parties, plays, and more were the weapons of her conquest, and yet, they only seemed to highlight the disinterest Weiss had slowly gained towards others.

Those she would introduce him to, he was coldly polite towards, and what few friends he had once made, he seemed uninterested in meeting any further. Isolation, even in a crowd. The only things that seemed to catch his interest and bring him out of his shell were those who seemed determined to be belligerent with him. Haughty nobles, wandering heroes who heard of his "cruel and unusual punishments" (typically manipulated to confront him by haughty nobles), and of course, Celestia herself.

His bickering with her sister seemed to fill him with vitality, no matter how crude or heated their constant arguing became.

Where the idea of friends seemed to push Weiss away, and her own attempts at giving him a sense of normalicy felt like sand slipping through her hooves, it was enemies that saw some semblance of the old Weiss returning.

The Shadow Realm was little better, as a site for her goal. Games played on dream crystals were entertaining, and he seemed invested in teaching her everything he knew about the systems, games included, but he avoided the actual inhabitants as if they were sick with plague.

When she asked how long it had been since he spoke to another, she hadn't realized then just how little contact he had with his ponies and the others who came to live in the Shadow Realm. It was none at all, or as close as could be had.

His guards, what few he had? All of them received orders digitally. His court? He only spoke to criminals during it, save to give commands or ask questions from witnesses.

He was isolating himself from the Shadow Realm, using nothing but his automatic systems to govern them. To let them govern themselves without his oversight.

He seemed at his happiest on one day in particular, when her attempts to bring Weiss to a meal at the castle were interrupted by the arrival of a dragon.

It was another day like any other, when one of Weiss's golems informed him of a breach.

"Oh, goodie, this should be a treat," he said, waving for her to follow.

As she did, she watched as various screens displayed the new difference in how the Shadow Realm's defenses operated.

All of the homes in the Shadow Realm now relied on the Arcana Janus, each housing district not only containing escape portals, but being kept inside them as well. With a gesture, ponies, griffons, and other assorted denizens were whisked away in moments as a swarm of golems swept through the zone.

He refused to let anyone know where any of these portals actually led to, geographically, and there were steep fines for anything that threatened to reveal any of the spatially disjointed homes.

The princess watched with an impressed stare as the entire Shadow Realm was on high alert in seconds, doors were locked with molten iron, massive mechanized golems were distributed, and the smaller population only made it simpler to ensure all of this. So much equipment was left behind that there was a surplus of defenses, and a distinct lack of individuals for them to actually protect.

As they walked up and out of one of the exits, they found the dragon that had arrived out of nowhere, calmly sitting cross-legged on the ground and watching them approach.

"Greetings, Lord Weiss Noir," The white dragon Parboil of the Dragonlands had said, surrounded by golems and other automatons at the entrance of one of the zones, bowing lightly to the sage.

The dragon dismissed Luna out of hand, though she couldn't tell if it was out of blatant disrespect, or merely the tension of the situation at hand. It wasn't every day when a single individual was surrounded by an entire army of souless enchanted soldiers.

At the sight of the dragon, Weiss seemed to come alive in a way none of their outings, none of her visits, nor any of her attempts to assist him in his work had seemed to.

"Dragonlord Torch demands your presence. He would speak to you of what you have been doing to the dragons who enter your realm," the elder dragon said simply.

She saw Weiss Noir's smile at this proclamation grow, until he was vibrant with excitement.

"I would love to."

(Present Chapter 43) Friend and Foe

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Eclipse plopped down in one of the benches nearby, wiping the sweat from her brow. She had to put more than a little bit of elbow grease into helping with the move. A lot of ponies had a lot of problems that needed addressing, a few of which only she was equipped to solve.

Without the Kingdom Heart, ponies were suffering from a slow buildup of hatred that they had a hard time expressing an outlet for, and she had to quickly rally the Windego. By pairing them off with ponies, the spirits were able to help by feeding directly on the negative emotions, something that was sure to be important with the stress that came with moving to a new temporary home.

She wondered why Weiss hadn't been the first to suggest it, but when pressed, he seemed a bit confused at her explanation of the problem of hate building up inside everypony, and tried to brush it off as him giving her an opportunity to prove herself. Something she simply nodded at before returning to the task of helping herd Longma onto ships.

She wasn't an idiot. Eclipse Flash was taught by one of the single most talented dark mages of the ancient era, and the only thing more important than learning to overcome negativity and to shed it in Foeship was the experience to first recognize it.

Eventually, however, her tasks in helping wrangle the population distracted her from what she was seeing in her teacher, and she had her hooves full helping them settle into places like "Olympus", (Apparently, Weiss had stolen an entire castle from some place called the Storm Lands and plopped it atop a mountain), Star Road (An entire flying island powered by the same G-Diffusers that the Arwings used!) and of course, Weiss's own tower, (He had somehow managed to wrangle his way into claiming Castle motherfluxing Everfree from the Princesses, and sprouting an entire spire of black crystal from the place!)

There were even rumors that he had turned an entire mountain into a volcanic alchemy vessel at some point, one that was only waiting for his impetus to turn it into yet another strange and magical locale.

Needless to say, anyone with a pair of eyes willing to look out the window thought it was a bit silly to call them rumors, what with the huge pot-shaped mountain that could be clearly seen on the horizon from any one of the three lairs.

Shaken out of memories of what she had seen by a sudden jolt, she noted the source with a look to her side, Priss of all ponies, plopping right down next to her on one of the benches placed around Star Road's floating yellowish soil.

"I managed to get some info," she said conspiratorially.

Eclipse glances at her. "And?"

"Pardon my language, but sweet blue blazes this whole situation is bucked. He's got this mercenary working for him, Tempest. She's close-lipped, but I figured out a few things at least. She had her horn repaired by dark magic. A chunk of it was bright purple, two guesses where that came from, and when I pressed her on it, I'm sure you can guess she clammed up quick. Made it easy to get her to spill some other little facts that I followed up on, though."

Priss raised a hoof, a crystal embedded in her armor projecting a holographic photo of Canterlot Castle in flames. streaks of molten rock were strewn about the courtyard, and a massive cloud of smoke carrying a fuzzy photo of Celestia smashing a hoof through a massive black dragon's face was hanging overhead.

"Managed to get this by poking around. The news spun it as a sanctioned test of Canterlot defenses, but I did some more digging and asked around. The entire Royal Vault had to be carried out of Weiss's tower, and when the princesses went there to 'thank' him, one of em left missing teeth."

She swept her hoof across the hologram, moving on to a candid photo of Celestia, dabbing a cheek with a red stained handkerchief and looking distinctly displeased.

"Paramilitary Companies, a sudden attack on the capital, something called the 'Dark Tournament'. In under a year, Weiss just showed up somehow and started putting fingers in a lot of pies, and set up shop right in the middle of Equestria."

Priss turned to Eclipse. "The Princesses, Celestia especially, have been keeping a tight lid on all of this. I don't know why." she shook her head.

"So, I told you mine. Do you have anything for me?"

Eclipse nodded, but it was a hesitant thing. "That lightning he used back at Crystal Egg, after he saw my reaction to it, he's been really careful not to cast spells in front of me. It hasn't stopped me. I've been able to examine the enchantments he's been using. A lot of them are usual boilerplate enchanting, stuff you could buy at the store back home, but some of it..."

She shook her head. "There are some insanely dark artifacts laying around, I'm not sure Weiss even realizes some of what he's got laying around here. It looks like at some point he started using Corrupt Crystal for almost everything instead the Arcana Nox's wireless controls. It's honestly pretty genius, if he didn't have the population to control things manually, it makes sense that he would go for pure golemcraft."

Priss raised an eyebrow, crossing her hooves "And the juicy bit?"

Eclipse sighed. "Fine. You remember my list of 'Red Flags for Dark Magic'? It's like he went down that list and decided to do every single one. I'm getting vibes all up and down the board, there's an enchanted item of some kind in that tower of his that is literally stinking up the place with residual mind-altering magics, on top of that, he's shown signs of classic dark-magic corruption. Inscrutable obsessions, compulsive behavior towards ponies he has an established relationship with, goal-oriented psychopathic behavior when establishing new relationships."

She frowns. "But let's take a step back, Priss, I think... I don't know what to think about the way he's acting, but it's clear that he's trying. If he's been abusing dark magic like I think he has, the sheer force of will he's got to not be attacking anything that moves... It's phenomenal."

After a moment, Priss nods with relief. "I needed to hear that, Eclipse. If you think there's anything I can do to help, just say the word."

Eclipse nods. "Right now, he needs stability. Who knows how much he drew on dark magic's emotional alteration effects while we were gone, the number of behaviors and habits he might have inadvertently taught himself abusing it could be astronomical, and picking those apart is going to be an ordeal. Just try to-"

"Hello! I hope I'm not interrupting anything?" a purple unicorn interjected cheerfully, trotting up to the pair with bulging saddlebags and a small dragon riding on her back. A hot-air balloon a short distance away explains how the Unicorn got all the way up to Star Road, if only to raise questions of why modern ponies were using hot-air-balloons to get around anywhere.

The two Longma shared a look, before turning their attention to the interloper.

"You are," they said in unison, making the baby dragon's eyebrow raise.

"What do they call it? Stereo?" he asked rhetorically.

"Oh, well, uhh, I was told to meet with you, ma'am, I'm Twilight Sparkle, prized student of Princess Celestia and a scholar in the magic of friendship," Twilight responded, pulling out an official looking letter as Spike hopped off of her back and grabbed her by the tail.

"Spike, wait, this is important!" she complained as she slid back from the pair at his insistence.

"We'll come back when you two aren't busy," Spike said as he tugged away the complaining unicorn.

Eclipse held up a hoof to stop them. "Hold on, did you just say 'Magic of Friendship'?" she interjected, eyebrows shooting up incredulously.

Twilight broke free of her assistant's incessant pulling, nodding cheerfully as she lifted a quill and parchment from her saddlebags. "Yes, I did! And the princess told me about your studies as well, it's my hope that we can learn a lot from one another through friendship and mutual cooperation!" she affirmed optimistically, not noticing the sudden quiet snort from Priss, who hid the expression behind a hoof.

"She's very excitable," Spike attempted to explain, thinking back to a half-hour ago.

Dearest Twilight. I've penned this letter to inform you of our success in preventing the worst. Myself and Luna, admittedly, were of little help in the conflict that had passed, for you see, much to my surprise, the fabled Shadow Realm has somehow returned, something I long thought impossible, and with its return come ponies who were once only known to legend and history. It was through their return that Noir Weiss was returned to his former self, such that it is, and the direst possibility was avoided. He had fought like a devil to avenge them, and now that they live, I cannot help but feel hope for the future, his of course, and ours as well.
I wish to stress, above all else, Twilight, that you need not heed this call that is to come. What you experienced in the hour of Weiss Noir's return was truly nightmarish to witness. It hurts me that you had to see something that I fear may have shaken your faith in harmony in such a way, and if you so choose, I will not ask you to interact with him or his any further. The same goes for your friends as well. The return of that ancient realm has caused much confusion, and much strife for us all, Weiss Noir included.
While he perhaps needs friendship more than ever, at this critical juncture, that task would be cruel to force upon you, and redundant besides. Instead, I only offer you some small token of my regret. I know your adoration towards knowledge and history, and thus, I believe you may take pleasure in this:
There existed a pony in the ancient past who I know fairly well. She was a student of Weiss Noir, and I believe what she has learned may serve your own studies into friendship well, for you see, where you have learned the magic inherent between ponies who truly care for one another, the magic found between friends, she instead studied the opposite side of this coin. She, Twilight, my beloved student, studied the magic found between enemies.
Should you so wish, I will not prompt you again on this matter. Perhaps not in full, but I know in part the terror you may have felt the day he returned, but if you perhaps feel that there is wisdom in sharing knowledge with one who is in many ways your foil in academia, then know that this pony is alive, and her name is Eclipse Flash. She currently resides as a temporary resident of Star Road, where many of the Longma have taken shelter until their realm can be restored, and homes built to house the multitudes. Attached is a picture of the pony in question.
Your teacher and friend, Princess Celestia.

Spike waved his hand in front of Twilight, who stared at the letter with wide open eyes, and a jaw that refused to close.

"Uhh, Twilight?"

Spike blinked in the time it took the unicorn to flash around the room in a manner that likely would have impressed Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash if they had seen the frantic feat, packing saddlebags with ink, books, parchment, checklists, and Spike, in that order.

He only barely managed to catch a word or three from the unicorn's incoherent excited rambling as she rushed them directly to Star Road as fast as her hooves could take her.

It took her until she was directly underneath the floating island before she realized she hadn't actually had a way up there, and it took her until she was already in her hot-air-balloon to realize she could have done any of a dozen different things to get up there without it.

"...I can see that. Well, our earlier discussion doesn't exactly have an expiration date, so I suppose we can make some time," Eclipse responded to Spike's assessment.

"Ok, but I'm still hung up on that last part, you said you studied the 'Magic of Friendship'? That's painfully hilarious. So let me guess, you go around watching ponies and writing reports on lessons you learn, sending them to her?" Priss couldn't help but laugh a bit.

"Huh? I mean, yes, but-" Twilight retorted, quill and parchment drooping alongside her mood.

"Be nice, Priss," Eclipse attempted.

"Weiss can never know about this, if he found out Celestia ripped off your Foeship studies and whipped up her own bootleg version, I'm pretty sure his ego would get bigger than her flanks," Priss snickered.

"Excuse me? My studies aren't a 'bootleg' anything, With Weiss Noir's obvious foresight into future events, it wouldn't surprise me if he ripped off the Princess! The power of friendship has saved Equestria numerous times, and it was only by understanding it that I and my friends were able to wield the legendary Elements of Harmony!" Twilight responded bluntly.

"Ok, so, you're not joking, are you? This would be a really funny prank, but..." Eclipse said in response to this while Priss just cackled, rolling off the bench and onto the ground in hysterics.

"What exactly do you think I'm joking about?" Twilight deadpans as Spike watches the interplay nervously.

"You sound a bit like somepony out of a Saturday Morning Cartoon, Miss Twilight," Eclipse responds diplomatically.

"This coming from the ponies who named a country after something from one?" Twilight retorts, temper failing at the perceived jab at her way of life.

Eclipse's eyes narrowed as she stood. "Sounds like somepony's a bit envious. Gonna hit me with a Carebear Stare?"

Twilight let out a puff of air, nostrils flaring. "I don't know, are you going to resort to mean words? I'm not seeing any 'Foeship' powered world-saving magical relics laying around, so I'm assuming that's your go-to when you aren't wasting priceless magitech on finding better ways to beat each other up," she said, gesturing to Eclipse Flash's power armor.

Eclipse sneered with amusement. "Yeah, see, that's the difference, I use cutting edge technology to send ponies mean words and beat them up. I'm assuming from your regrettable choice of writing implements that you're more familiar with smoke signals and the wonders of flint tools?"

Twilight's hackles, fully raised, enabled her to totally overlook the reason she came in the first place.

"Callous techno-barbarian!"

"Vapid cavepony!"

"Buck you!"

"Fuck you!"

"Buck! You!"

The two glared at each other, foreheads pressed together as they both snarled openly. Eclipse Shadow's mane frantically whipped around in a wild blaze of yellow and red, while Twilight's own mane and tail smoked and smouldered with pure rage.

With a broad grin, and a few remaining barks of laughter, Glitter Miss Priss managed to get up off the ground and stomped with applause. "I like this one."

After a moment of silence, Eclipse suddenly smiled, backing away good-naturedly as she visibly relaxed. "Yeah. I agree."

She held out a hoof to the utterly bewildered Twilight. "Eclipse Flash. It's nice to meet you."

Twilight grimaced with confusion and annoyance, even as she accepted the offered hoof on instinct.

"You are as insufferable as your teacher," she groused, shaking earnestly.

"Thank you, you're as close-minded as yours," Eclipse responded with a smile.

"Thank you," Twilight retorted with a faint smile of her own, realizing that she had somehow made a friend out of this infuriating exchange.

As I sat in a sealed chamber in my tower under the guise of "managing systems", I was instead spying, naturally. I couldn't help myself. I needed to know what they spoke about. I needed to see them, even if I was too scared to be near them for too long. One of my Eyerocs proved to be as useful as ever for watching them.

When Twilight arrived, and the conversation shifted, I decided to send a small communicator to Celestia. She would get a kick out of watching our students go at it, I'm certain. Who would win this confrontation, I wondered?

"Hmm? What's this?" Celestia mused as her face appeared from a nearby gemstone, and she quickly realized what was being shown to her, and by whom, as one of my little communication crystals appeared wherever it was she happened to be.

"Oh. Hello, Weiss. Spying on our students?"

I smirked. "As if I would let you miss your precious student's first meeting with mine. This'll be a treat."

She watched with great interest as the three ponies quickly fell into an argument, and I found myself surprised when Eclipse turned it around at the last minute. How did she do that?

It seems neither of them won. Or both of them did.

"I'm so proud." I wiped my eyes tearfully.

"I can't believe we were ever that young," Celestia said with a smile.

I shook my head. "I have no clue how Eclipse managed that. She turned all that hate directly into other feelings, and so easily..."

I didn't know how she managed to do whatever it was she did, but it didn't stop pride from welling up inside me.

Celestia tittered. "Funny you should say that. Don't you recall what you once told me?"

I turned to the hologram curiously, unsure of which exact statement she was referring to.

"There's a thin line between a friendship and a foeboat."

I paused, recalling the quote, but having a hard time piecing together what I originally meant when I said it.

'Doesn't matter. They seem to be happy, so I'm happy,' I thought firmly.

"Also, stop spying on ponies. It's very creepy," Celestia explained gently, terminating the connection.

"Well, I'm certainly not going to stop doing that," I scoffed, before terminating my own eyeroc feed and making the tiny bat-eyeball monster explode into dust.

'I mean, I'll stop for now, but I'll be damned if I up and comply with Celestia of all ponies. I'll have to spy on her out of spite later,' I thought, leaning back in my chair and trying to meditate on the day and dust off what little sanity and self-control I could find rummaging around under the metaphorical bed and in the mental shelves of my mind.

I have less time than I thought, judging from Eclipse and Priss's conversation. If she can sense the Devil's Machine, even as far down as I've buried it... Her senses must be astronomically sharper than mine when it comes to emotional energy.

Maybe I should show her. Not the entire truth, but... Some of it. If she knew I hadn't successfully used the Devil's machine, it might help prove my willingness to change.

I thought back to what Celestia said, and couldn't help but scoff again, amused at her explanation for Eclipse and Twilight somehow becoming copacetic like they did.

"I must have been crazy when I said that to her. 'Thin line between a friendship and a foeboat' my ass. That Harmony-addled old hag probably thinks we're friends too, talking like that," I muttered, crossing my arms impertinently as I tried to pick apart and understand the odd feelings running through me.

https://youtu.be/_OnZh8dLsQM

"So, one of the biggest lessons I learned about friendship was not to judge a book by its cover. One of my best friends now is a zebra named Zecora, and let me tell you, it was embarrassing, having to correct my own preconceptions. It was only by looking past them that I was able to make such a wonderful friend in the first place! I'm just glad I was able to figure it out before I did anything really regrettable..." Twilight explained as the quartet walked around discussing the pros and cons of being enemies and friends.

As they walked around Star Road, they saw houses being built, and portal networks being established. It seemed that more than a few Longma would be keeping in touch here, even once shelter was set up back in the Frozen north.

Eclipse nodded. "That was actually one of mine too. Weiss Noir made me his student after I accidentally let a dragon rampage through the tunnels. I thought he was pure evil and hiding it really well, so I figured one of his prisoners would tell me the truth about him, but after he saved me from the dragon, he sentenced me to becoming his student."

She flushed with embarrassment. "I still thought he was my enemy for a while after that, but after he saved my life a second time from a monster I accidentally made attack us, I had to accept that I was the one in the wrong. Though, with me, it was less about judging a book by its cover and more that I had to learn that a pony's behavior and attitude wasn't justification enough to be their enemy. It's the results of a pony's actions are the most important thing about them, when it comes to deciding if they're friend or foe."

As she spoke, a newly built Arwing flew overhead the quartet, carrying a large beam of wood that was slowly lowered onto a cottage, G-diffusers humming as it slowly floated the timber down, and a bunch of Luna's draugr guards helped set the beam into place, gliding around on batlike wings. At the same time, Longma riveted redhot bands around the wood with their bare hooves, standing up on ladders to reach the needed areas.

"You know, it's funny, you acted like friendship wasn't all that important, but you and your friend Miss Priss seem to be as close as friends get," Twilight muses.

Eclipse laughs. "Friends? Oh sweet flux no. We're rivals, and yeah, it doesn't get closer than that. I hope someday you find a healthy rivalry of your own. It can do a pony a lot of good, isn't that right lesser-minion?" Eclipse snarks at Priss, who just giggles.

"Darn straight. We don't just help each other, we push each other. That's how we grow," Priss explains. The almost matching power armor on the two Longma suddenly makes a bit more sense, if each one of them was trying to one-up the other over the years.

"Well, it sure looks like friendship from where I'm standing," Twilight mutters, but it's clear that Eclipse's explanation has given her something to think about from the thoughtful look in her eyes.

Eclipse hummed. "Oh, back on the subject of lessons, I'm almost positive you never got this one, so, one Foeship lesson I had to learn early on was that stallions and colts are dumb as hell, and fight for even dumber reasons. Two of my friends, Jerryrig and Cabal Counter, had actually gotten into a brawl over a silly card game as colts, but in spite of them coming to blows, they still competed in a big Duel Monsters tournament, and after Jerryrig won, they talked it out and less than a minute later, they were laughing together like best friends."

She shrugged. "There may have also been a lesson about learning to forgive and forget there, but that wasn't as important as the part about boys being dumb."

Twilight balked at Eclipse's dismissive tone. "Whu- That's absolutely the most important part! Being able to overcome the animosity that comes after a physical fight at such a young age through the shared hobby of games? That's an incredible lesson."

Priss snorted. "Where do they get ponies like you?"

Twilight rolled her eyes, quickly coming to accept the teasing for what it is. "From Canterlot, at Princess Celestia's School for Gifted Unicorns" she responded as if it were obvious.

The Longma blinked, her pink mane flickering, the inattention was enough for her to bump into a pony carrying a huge stone block on his back.

"Hey, watch where you're going, Priss!" Glitter Bomb said, shuffling to keep the block balanced as he carted it off to where it would be used in building more temporary homes.

"Sorry dad!" she said, walking around the stallion as she refocused on the conversation. To her credit, it didn't take more than a second for her to continue unhindered after that, shifting her attention to Spike.

"So, shortstuff, where are you from, then? Dragonlands?"

Spike shook his head. "Oh, no, I was hatched in Canterlot too! Twilight was the one to hatch my egg, actually."

Eclipse blinked "That must have taken some crazy strong magic," she mused.

Priss, however, had a different thought in mind. "Met any cool dragons, then? I'm guessing most dragons aren't as annoying as they used to be, if polite little gremlins like you are walking around," she teased.

Spike's frills drooped a bit at this. "Uhh, no. Sorry. I haven't met any dragons before."

Twilight looked a bit sad at this. "This may go without saying, but when it comes to dragons, a thousand years changes less than you might think. It's not safe for ponies to delve too deep in dragon territory. And there's not exactly a surplus of them for Spike to talk to here in Equestria," she admitted.

Eclipse and Priss shared a look that conveyed a rather large message in a rather silent split second.

"You want to meet some, then, shortstuff? I know a few we could introduce you to. They grew up with one of ours, Dr. Absolutely Real Homeopathy's kids," Priss offered, feeling bad for the little drake and gesturing to a large lab being hastily built off in the distance.

"If you want, we could go give em a visit. I doubt they're doing anything too important right now. There's three of em, Ruby, Sapphire, and lil Padparadscha. Paddy's about your age, actually. Well, they all are, technically, but that's a long story," she trails off.

Spike lit up with shocked excitement, frills returning to their full height as he realized what she was offering. "Twilight, can I?! Please!?" he asked loudly with wide eyes and a broad insistent smile.

Twilight was a bit surprised to see her normally laid-back assistant so worked up by this.

"Well, when you put it like that, how could I say no?" she accepted, smiling happily at the sight of her assistant's own joy.

As the group turned their attention to the lab, an ominous airship slowly rose up and began docking on the other side of the floating island, one that radiated a malicious aura due to the horrid contents it carried...

Tourists.

(Past Chapter 39) Dragon Mouse

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"It is with great pleasure that this one declares the presence of the master of the dark arts, his irreverence, Lord Weiss Noir!" Torch hears some idiot shouting at the top of their lungs.

With a low grumble, he rises up from the magma, intent on discovering who would interrupt his slumber.

The first, some odd looking pony with glassy eyes, holding up a scroll and wearing a ridiculous poofy outfit. Torch's senses told him there was nothing of value in the creature, it wasn't a living thing, but some sort of false shell.

The second annoyance, standing on a literal red carpet that had been rolled out and into his pool, was even more ridiculous.

The pony was wearing an ornate cape lined with a comedically thick fur ruffle, as well as a set of golden horseshoes and a large crown.

What was the most obscene of the lavish adornments, however, was the seemingly solid-gold dragon arm statues mounted to the pony's back, each one posed artfully into frankly pretentious positions, two were clasped together, as if in prayer, while another set had its palms held to the sky in a sort of shrug. The final pair was slung low, claws set to a sort of "OK" sign.

Torch stared blankly, and glanced around to see if this was a joke. If it was, it was in very poor taste.

This? This was Weiss Noir? The famous Sage who disrespected his authority so?

'He is everything I expected from an arrogant pony, and yet I'm almost disappointed in how accurately this garish little fool reflects my lowest expectations,' the strongest dragon in the world thinks to himself, noticing the pony raise a hoof, and his nose, into the air.

"Well? I would have respect, dragon," the pony says in an over-the-top aristocratic accent as he presents his hoof to be kissed.

Dragon Lord Torch closes his eyes, and takes a deep, calming breath, before reaching over and casually smearing the pony and his herald like a stain across the ground with the palm of his titanic claw.

The Dragon Lord looks down at where his claw had been. On the ground, he only finds fading black smoke and a mixture of sinister black crystals and odd false flesh where the glassy-eyed herald had been. As the smoke slips away, he frowns.

It was rather smart of the sage to flee.

The next day, the sage returns. His herald jolting Torch from his rest with the blaring of a trumpet.

♫"Haaaaail! Your attention I praaaaaay!"♫ the herald sings.

With a roar, Torch erupts from his caldera, a wave of molten rock smothering the two idiots and washing them away in the boiling lava.

The dragon lord growls as he stares at where the two ponies were. Cracking his neck, he prepares for a long flight to the Shadow Realm. Torch had planned to wait until after his slumber, but it was high time to teach this one respect.

He hears a crunch.

"Well, that gets rid of that headache," Weiss says, sitting casually to the side on a jagged rocky pillar with his legs crossed, chomping through a large jewel as if it were an apple. Inefficient signs of magical smoke trail off from where he drew himself together and reformed his body, and he looks haggard from the strain, despite his devil-may-care smile.

The sage now looks different as well, the silly vestments gone, and the golden limbs he wore sag slightly as gold paint flakes off of them, revealing the glittering purple underneath. The obstinate crown is still poised atop his head.

Torch's eyes narrow. "You're trying to provoke me. You didn't bring any little pony soldiers because you think you don't need them," he growls, climbing up from the magma pool until he towers over the sage.

Weiss raises an eyebrow. "Impressive. So you can put together basic logic."

"I can do more than that, pretender. Fine. If you want to disrespect me, then so will I," the dragon says in a deep, booming tone.

"You are not the strongest dragon. You are no dragon at all. That means you have no authority over dragons, nor do you have the right to humiliate my race through them. If you are too weak to slay your enemies or protect your land, then that is your problem. You will give your prisoner to me for my own judgement or you will slay them. If you don't, then I will destroy you where you sit," he explains.

Weiss pauses only long enough to take another bite from the large ruby in his mocking imitation of the draconic diet.

"Try me," he smirks.

Torch glares. The stones on this pony were quite massive indeed. "There is a reason why your little tyrant saw fit to leave the dragonlands be, and now you will learn it. Even the princesses know better than to toy with my dragons, and even your little predecessor knew better than to pit pony magic against dragonfire."

Torch takes a deep breath, the dry cracked ridges of his ancient chest expanding as he filled his lungs to the brim.

Casually licking gem-dust off his fingers, Weiss stands up to his full height.

"Same time tomorrow?" Weiss asked sarcastically, as Torch unleashed a roiling wave of red flames that consumed everything on the volcano. With a mental smile, Torch heard the sage scream as the flames erased his shadowy form.

True to his word, the foolish sage returned the next day. Unlike the previous visits, Torch was actually awake this time, and watched with a glare as the Sage casually approached, chewing through a large emerald.

Despite their relaxed stroll up the volcano's side, and their leisurely grin, Torch could sense a tension in the sage that wasn't there before. Their crown was missing, leaving only the gold painted draconic limbs hanging frozen from their back.

"So you're still alive. Interesting," Torch says, flames wafting from the corner of his lips as he spoke.

Weiss sat down, polishing off the last of the geological snack. "Naturally. I'm afraid I came here for a reason, Dragon Lord. You see, the fact of the matter is, I'm manipulating you," he says casually, dusting off his hooves.

"Oh?" Torch responds.

Weiss nods. "Yup. I'm going to trick you into accepting a wager."

Cracking his neck, the sage stands, having dusted all the emerald dust off of him.

"The fact of the matter is, nothing you do will actually kill me, as I'm sure you've come to realize. That said, I have to admit, even though my magic makes me impossible for you to kill..." he trails off.

"It hurt like hell."

After that brief pulse of murderous rage, the sage returns to his previous happy-go-lucky tone.

"So, a wager. I'm going to keep coming here, over and over, until you accept the authority I wield over all within my realm, or you manage to cow me into submission."

Torch's teeth shimmer as he bares them in a predatory expression. "Why would I accept a bet like that?"

The sage smiles, as if he had already won. Despite this, Torch notes the facts that the sage attempts to hide behind his bravado. Being burned alive leaves a mark on any creature, and the bags under the sage's eyes reveal a distinct impact from yesterday's revelry.

"Because I challenged you," Weiss states with dangerous glint in his eyes.

"We both know you don't need another reason."

Time stretches between the two, and finally, Torch smiles.

"Well played, pretender. It seems you've manipulated me after all," he finally says.

"But you'll wish you hadn't. If you would pretend to be a dragon so desperately, then I will discipline you as one. Watch carefully, pretender. I will show you that I don't need to kill you to make you regret challenging me."

Torch's next breath isn't a deep one, it doesn't need to be.

As he does, the air begins to reek of ozone, and the clouds of smog overhead crackle uncertainly.

Weiss doesn't remember what happened after that, as his entire world became bright white agony, and then darkness.

This time, it took three days for the sage to return. As he did, he finally revealed the truth of his nature. No crown, nor ornate cloak was on his body. No foolish false-creature acting as his herald.

He arrived with his six limbs crossed behind his back, a rich purple color lacking the slightest hint of gold to hide their organic nature.

'So they are real arms,' The Dragon Lord thinks to himself as the sage approaches.

The sage looked no worse for wear after the attack, but only physically. Mentally, Torch could see the signs that the pony attempted to hide. The Flame of Pain was a cruel weapon for a dragon, one of destruction and agony, no manifestation of greed surpassed it in its ability to deal both.

It was more than just fire that Torch erased this sage's curious specter with previously, but plasma, rich with the power of lightning and with a heat that could boil stone, channeled into a beam of terrifying power.

A worthy sword for the Dragon Lord.

"So, what's it called, then?" Weiss opens by asking, crossing two of his arms in front of him with a raised eyebrow.

"Hmm?" Torch responds questioningly.

The sage waves a hand. "That thing you did. I've dealt with it before. One of your stooges tried to use it on me, but it was far less powerful," he explains.

"The Flame of Pain is its name. You would do well to remember it, pretender."

With that, Weiss leaps to the side, narrowly dodging a blast of the eradicating plasma.

"Oh? What is it you ponies say? Once burned, twice shy?" Torch asks, climbing up onto the stones surrounding his pool and standing up to his full height.

Weiss smirks, creating a long spear of purple crystal and preparing to fight back. "Something like that."

The next blast is too fast, and once again, Weiss Noir screams in agony as his Shadow Clone is banished.

Luna watches as Weiss stares blankly at the battle before him. A small group had restarted the Golem Fighting Circuit that was once famous in the Shadow Realm, and Luna saw it as a prime opportunity to try and pull Weiss out of his isolation and keep him out of it.

However, his dealings with the Dragon Lord were wearing at his already frayed psyche, and even the sight of two teams made up of various races controlling war machines more impressive than the ones Longma alone could construct was insufficient to pull him out of whatever thoughts he was immersing himself in.

"Weiss, why do you persist in goading the Dragon Lord? You cannot defeat him as you are. If you would just ask, I and my sister could try to assist you," Luna finally asks, when it is clear that her friend is not even paying attention to the showing.

He blinks.

"Absolutely not. I won't have you interfering with my plans, especially when they're going so swimmingly," he responds. Even as he does, she notices a shiver run through several of his limbs, and a flash of instinctive fear as one of the war golems sprays sparks as it is damaged beyond repair.

Luna huffs angrily. "What plan? To subject yourself to torment until you snap? To placate the Dragon Lord by throwing yourself at him day in and day out, alone?"

It had been a month. Long enough for Weiss to already have developed a clear phobia that even Luna could see.

He doesn't respond, at first, clearly thinking of a response that will placate her, without needing to compromise on his idiotic stubbornness.

"Nine years," he says, in lieu of an answer.

"What?" Luna balks at the vague response.

"Nine years. In the land I hail from, it is believed that nine years is the length of time required to become a master of a trade. For an elder dragon, he will likely perceive it as a particularly annoying week."

Weiss smiles, forcing strength into his body through will alone.

"I will become a master at resisting pain. A worthwhile skill for the long life ahead of me, and one that will help me learn others."

Luna had failed again. Again, there was nothing she could think to do. Her mind blank with the sheer insanity of what her friend proposed he would do.

She knew she couldn't stop him.

It got worse before it got better.

For a time, the sage grew more desperate in their pitched battles. He began to use spells, teleporting around in flashes of familiar magic, using gateways to try and stem the flow of dragonfire.

At first, the sage's slow ramping up intrigued Torch. With every day the sage managed to overcome the mind-numbing memories of plasma, he appeared to grow more skilled at avoiding Torch's attacks, even if his own attacks did nothing at all to the elder dragon.

But this quickly faded as the days wore on. By the first year, the sage had backslid. Distracted by memories of agony, his ability to make the meetings last slipped, and for a time, the sage had only made weekly visits to taunt and goad Torch into annihilating him.

Halfway through the second year, Torch did not blast away the sage immediately.

"Surely you know the pointlessness of this exchange. Submit to my superior strength, whelp," he said grimly. The sage had, in the past month, simply walked up the mountain and awaited the Flame of Pain.

Weiss smiled, as if he had achieved a victory. "Growing weary of our bet already, Torchy-Worchy?"

A blast of white-hot energy answered the question definitively, and the sage did not return until the next year.

Celestia frowned at Weiss, halting him as he made his way back to the Dragon Lands for yet another round of battle with the Dragon Lord.

"You will go mad before you success, Weiss. Luna told me everything."

The sage looked at Celestia bitterly, but there was an undercurrent of something else. With her senses as honed as they were, she could see him shaking in ways he likely could not even perceive himself.

"But of course," he responded blithely, walking around the alicorn.

Celestia grabbed him in a telekinetic aura. "Do you think he will go along with this for the better part of a decade? What will happen when he tires of your games and attacks your Shadow Realm directly? Must we then clean up your mess?"

"Why would he do that? I would say the diplomacy is going quite nicely, from our perspective," Weiss retorts.

Celestia's confusion grows beyond her exasperation. The sage was doing it again. One of those disturbing plots where esoteric behaviors and confusing facades were the soldiers in his war.

With a sigh, she takes the bait, setting the sage down. "What do you mean, Weiss?"

He chuckles. "Princess, there's a thin line between a friendship, and a foeboat."

With that, he throws his horn to the sky, and casts one of his most powerful Vancian spells, teleporting away in a bolt of greedy lightning.

The following years showed a slow, but noticeable change in the sage's constant duels with Torch, duels which he had come to expect, and which had slowly garnered a small audience of drakes too young and foolish to know better.

Weiss had his head held high as the young dragons booed and jeered at him on his way up the mountain.

He had been growing more used to the battles, and had slowly risen back in intensity to what he used before in the fights. a dance of quick movements and blistering spells, met with Torch's overwhelming brute strength, invincibility, and the unique and deadly flames that only an Elder Dragon could bring to bear.

"So you're back, whelp. I'm beginning to grow weary of this foolishness. Is it really worth a hundred times the agony you inflict on your prisoner, just to taunt me and humiliate my subjects?" Torch asks.

Weiss just laughs. "So you're admitting that you can't keep me down? Should I begin eating your jewels again to encourage you?" he responds, portals dispensing a suit of enchanted armor that clamps to his body.

"So that's where you've been getting them," Torch growls, muscles tensing. In truth, Torch did have one flaw, one aspect of himself that would be humiliating, from the perspective of an ordinary dragon.

He simply didn't care as much for wealth as his kin. Jewels and Gold were sustenance. No, what he craved was what allowed him to become Dragon Lord in the first place, and keep it through dozens of trials and tests.

He hoarded power.

That said, with all of the young dragons around, who were openly gaping at the idea of a pony stealing from the Dragon Lord...

Well, he couldn't back down from the challenge to his power. Weiss did indeed threaten his horde, in that sense.

"Are you a pony or a mouse? How dare you eat what is mine, whelp."

With that, the battle began in earnest, the sage's armor sending him dashing around the mountain as Torch unleashed blasts of flame and lightning alike.

With one final blast of the Flame of Pain, Weiss was obliterated, blasted apart into screaming shadowy smoke.

The younger dragons who hadn't been caught in the crossfire cheered at yet another victory over the dumb ponies, but Torch withheld his judgement, watching with something almost akin to respect as the abolished smoke continued to scream.

With what must have been a mind-numbing force of will, he watched as the shadows pulled back together, and with heaving breaths, the half-formed Weiss Noir stood before Torch, black smoke bleeding off of his form as he barely held it together.

The pony took a deep, crackling breath at the same time that Torch did, and both of them unleashed blistering beams of the Flame of Pain at one another.

Weiss was instantly annihilated by Torch's immeasurably more powerful blast, which consumed his own without resistance, but now the dragons in attendance were no longer cheering.

"So you come once again, Mouse."

The ninth year had come and gone, and by now, fewer dragons were willing to watch the boring affair of the Dragon Lord proving his dominance.

This time, however, was different. In Weiss's company was a nervous, fearful dragon, Blister.

Weiss grinned "Indeed. I've come to both proclaim my victory and my loss."

With a gesture, the dragon's blackened eyes returned to normal, an even blacker flame washing over the young drake and erasing the traces of Weiss's curse from them.

"I free Blister the Dragon from his punishment, ninety years earlier than planned, and submit him to your judgement, Dragon Lord," Weiss explains.

Blister, suddenly aware of who he's standing before, bows deeply. "Oh! Dragon Lord?! I'm sorry!" he shouts as he bows before the master of dragonkind.

Torch raises an eyebrow. Did that young drake just apologize?

Furthermore, did that pony just admit defeat?

By now, Weiss was able to reform his shadowy mist more often than not, sometimes even changing its shape during their battles when he reformed, turning into blackened snakes, twisted hawks of crystal and fabric, or other, more unknowable things.

"That loss, I freely admit," he says merrily.

"And your so-called victory?" Torch responds. The pony was conniving, sneaky. When he thought Torch to be too lax in their duels, he would sneak about, stealing treasures and openly eating them somehow, despite being a pony.

It was an action that demanded swift and instant retribution from the Dragon Lord, and it allowed the sage to continue their wager thus far when needed.

Weiss's expression is languorous and indulgent.

"Simple. I have lost to you, Torch, but I have achieved victory over myself, thanks to our little bet. Pain is an excellent teacher, and you played your role well in supplying it," he muses.

With a casual motion, Weiss bites off the finger of one of his draconic arms, turning it immediately into a hazy smoke that quickly reforms. He doesn't flinch at the action, nor does he show any signs of pain.

Torch huffs. What an annoying whelp. To think this pony came to him for torment, rather than victory. Disgraceful.

"I would have our final battle privately, Dragon Lord. You deserve something, as the winner of this annoying little bet of ours, and I, perhaps, would like to prove something as well," he says.

The Dragon Lord thinks on this request. The lord of the Shadow Realm had already admitted defeat. Had admitted his power to be lesser than that of Torch.

It was a simple request to grant.

"LEAVE!"

Torch said calmly.

Every dragon in earshot fled in cowardice and fear at the command, leaving only the two lords to face one another atop the volcano.

https://youtu.be/46FDlsGFM3s?list=PLnZc6WBQn4V9z2GNHljpOa4FRne6tlBG5

"So then, little mouse, what is it, then?" Torch demands, watching as Weiss walked out onto the surface of the lava, too light to sink through the molten rock, but every bit the fire-immune Longma at heart that the rest of his ponies were. Dragonfire may have been a different beast entirely in terms of the harm it could do, but mere lava? A triviality.

"Simple. I have been preparing something over the years. A proof of concept that one of my lovely council members helped me to achieve, through the study of dragon biology. A secret technique, if you will. Do keep it to yourself, yes?"

Weiss's body fell apart into smoke as he bit through an arm, and as it did, Torch watched curiously as the smoke began to grow, larger and larger as a single Vancian spell that took Weiss nine years to empower was cast.

The smoke exploded outwards, magical black muscles growing over magical black sinews growing over magical black bones.

By the end of the transformation, a truly massive black dragon hovered in the air, dwarfed by Torch, yes, but still gargantuan in size.

With a flare of leathery wings, the new monster fell into the pool, and vivid green eyes opened.

"Now that I've learned all I need to, I can reward you with this, a fight that is for once, worth your time, using a spell I crafted for you, and you alone."

Hydraulic muscles flexed as Weiss's six arms slowly shifted their incredible mass, almost boiling hot liquids flowing through the graphene-laced false flesh.

"I call it Malifessence."

Torch stared, and then, he laughed. He laughed so loudly that it could be heard for miles around, and then, with a motion faster than his titanic frame would imply, the two began to fight in earnest, lightning and fire, stone and magma, all of it spilling out over the mountaintop.

The battle took hours, or perhaps it took days, but the outcome was a foregone conclusion. The Sage of Darkness, for all his abilities, and all the magical techniques at his disposal, was not the Dragon Lord. Mere hydraulic pressure wasn't sufficient to fight an Elder Dragon physically. Ordinary flames were insufficient to do more than blind one. Razor sharp claws could only do so much to scales as thick and scarred as those of the Dragon Lord, and what could be done could be healed by the magic he wielded with ease, if it were truly threatening.

"Come on, is that all you've got, Torch?!" Weiss roared, flipping over onto the larger dragon's back and snaking a limb around the dragon's neck, pulling tightly to hold them in a choke-hold as he punched and clawed at his enemy.

With a snarl, Torch flapped his wings, lifting into the air and diving back down in a flip that tore Weiss free from him, one of his arms being pulled off in the process.

To his credit, Weiss didn't react at all to the damage, landing in a roll before shooting a trio of fireballs at Torch, clawing at the magma and dragging himself across it as the flames splashed harmlessly across the Dragon Lord's face.

In this brief period of inattention, however, Weiss managed to claw at one of his eyes, blinding the dragon briefly and opening him to a flurry of slow, but immensely strong punches that pushed Torch back slightly.

A glow of magic coincided with Torch growing even larger than before as greed flooded his body, and his eye healed in moments. Weiss, however, wasn't as quick on the uptake, and lost another two arms for it as Torch grabbed a pair and kicked Weiss in the chest, sending him flying back through the magma and smashing into the lip of the caldera.

With a grimace, Weiss tried to regenerate the damage done to his spine, but could only manage a few weak bits of spellwork to reconnect the damaged nerves. With his three remaining arms clawing at the surface of the lava, Weiss dove under it and began growing a large spear of crystal beneath the magma.

As he leapt up out of the molten rock to stab out with the spear, Torch unleashed his own attack, another blast of the Flame of Pain that erased both the spear and the two arms that held it from existence, boiling away a chunk of Weiss's false scales as well in the process.

Torch grabbed at Weiss and flung him out of the magma, and it was at this point that Weiss knew the fight was coming to a close. There was little else he could do. Malifessence was too powerful a spell for him to contain any other Vancian magics alongside it yet, even with his spirit's capacity expanded by both greed and hatred, and he found the form lacking in the power needed to compete.

Thus, it was with one final parting claw swipe that Weiss gouged at one of Torch's arms before that limb was forcibly removed by the Dragon Lord's own slash, leaving the artificial body helpless to continue.

While Weiss's Malifessence form was bleeding black boiling water all over the ground as shreds of false flesh and royal cloth scattered the landscape, Torch was not utterly unharmed, for the first time in their years of duels. Claws and strength had done what mere pony spells could never hope to do.

He had new cuts in his hide that would soon become part of the map of cracks and canyons of scar tissue that covered the elder dragon's body. New burns and bruises that would soon disappear, shedding away to reveal unfortunately fresh scales.

Weiss's one remaining eye watched as Torch slowly plodded over, standing over the smaller dragon with a bright fire in his eyes.

He began to laugh again, chuckling with intrigue at the sight before him.

"What a worthy gift. It almost makes up for the annoyance. The sheer annoyance of finding myself respecting a pony. You are truly an irritant. A pest that is oh so persistent, even against me."

"You consider yourself worthy of a dragon's claws? A dragon's form? Fine."

He takes a deep breath, a full inhalation, as much air as he can manage.

With a faint mutter from the Dragon Lord, Weiss's broken shadow clone grins, even as lightning begins to strike the ground from a clear sky.

"You truly are a blight on my horde, nibbling at what I treasure. You have proven yourself a rodent among dragons, Dragon Mouse," was what he muttered with a toothy smile, the bright glow of power shining out from behind them.

With that, Torch erases Weiss's Shadow Clone in its entirety with his most powerful flame, and listens to the maniacal laughter that erupts from it as he does.

(Present Chapter 44) Sharing Stories

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https://youtu.be/HznNpNyT-C0?list=PL19JeoRIjn_PGG82RzApKKXAGSwzv4poM

Spike sat cross-legged on a table, staring at the three dragons (real dragons!) in front of him.

"Spike, huh? So, what's it like with the Equestrians?" Padparadscha asked, fiddling with a cluster of little crystals and wires. A magic computer that Dr. Real provided to give the little pink dragon something to do.

"Oh, uhh, well, it's really nice. I don't know how it is here, but ponies are all usually really nice to me, especially in Ponyville! Canterlot is... Well it was a lot bigger, but Ponyville is the kinda place where you can get to know everypony there," he answers, feeling a bit self-conscious at his answer.

Spike also noticed the little pink dragon's choice of words. "Equestrians", rather than "Ponies". It made sense, they grew up with ponies too, even if it was probably an entirely different experience.

"I've heard that Equestrians put hay and sugar in everything. Is this true?" the second dragon, Sapphire, asked in an almost monotone.

Spike thought about it, and considered that Sapphire might have had a point. "Well, not everything..."

'Right? They don't put sugar in...' he thought to himself.

Bread? No, wait, most bread in Equestria was made with some hayflour filler and sugar.

Haybacon? It didn't have sugar in it, but the name was obvious enough as to what it did have...

Spike had a small little revelation that, outside of gems, he hadn't really eaten much of anything that didn't have one or the other as far as he could remember. Equestrians, without any real source of monster meat and an abundance of grasses and sugars, had made the duo a key staple in their cooking.

"Well, I can't think of anything off the top of my head, but I'm sure it isn't in everything..?" Spike said, trailing off questioningly near the end.

He shook his head. "What do you guys eat then? Just gems?" Gosh, that would certainly be something. Even Spike mostly got gems as a treat, rather than something he ate constantly. He imagined he would be even pudgier than he already is if that were all he ate.

Ruby's eyes flashed, and with a sudden motion flexed violently before running out of the building at incredible speeds.

Spike swallowed. Ruby in particular was incredible, if incredibly odd. The bright red dragon was taller than anypony he had ever met, and practically looked like a bodybuilder compared to the thin Sapphire and the pudgy Padparadscha.

"Uhh," Spike said intelligently after the dragon in question escaped in a blur of movement.

"Our brother is energetic," Sapphire answered plainly.

Padparadscha rolled his eyes. "Give it a second."

After an awkwardly silent minute, Ruby dashed back in, carrying a stack of foil pouches, dumping them on the table behind Spike, who shimmied around to look at what the red dragon brought back.

"Get ready!" Ruby posed dramatically.

"For Longma Delicacies!" he finished with a second, equally dramatic pose.

The trio grabbed some of the pouches, and Spike, with an internal shrug, picked up one of the ones that had his name scribbled on it, as he did, his eyes widened. This stuff was hot!

Spike learned a long time ago how to tell if something was too hot for ordinary ponies to touch, after an accident where Twilight got burned when he handed her a pan he had been using to cook before it cooled off. As a dragon, even an open flame wasn't really anything worth noting, but this certainly was, it was one of the hottest things he ever touched!

Pulling the foil open carefully, he noticed that it was full of glowing little sticks. "What the heck is this stuff?" Spike asked, pulling out one of the red-hot snacks and trying to figure out what exactly it was. It smelled a bit like metal?

Sapphire, sticking a round disk into a clear liquid that caked over it before popping it in his mouth, decided to answer.

"Earth Pony Magic deals heavily with not only the growing, but the manufacturing of food, even from normally inedible materials. The Shadow Realm moved from a primarily crystal and gem based diet to a metal based one after the Crystal Ponies became Longma instead. Some crystal-based foods are still popular, but it is what it is," Sapphire explained, chewing through the fried disk.

Spike listened with awe, realizing that it looked and smelled like a red-hot piece of metal because it was one!

He nibbled at it, and found it to be extremely tasty. It reminded him of sourdough, in a way. It was funky and under the sour-metallic flavor and the really hot temperature, it had a thick unctuousness that reminded him of fried hay. It wasn't at all like the time he accidentally bit through a spoon when he was a baby. That tasted awful, and not at all like food. Earth pony magic really was something else...

"Well?!" Ruby demanded excitedly, watching Spike's expression for signs of his reaction.

He swallowed with a smile "It's weird, I've never had anything like this, but it's good!" Spike answered honestly.

Paddy popped little gems in his mouth from his own pouch like popcorn. "You probably could guess, but don't give any of this stuff to ordinary ponies until it's cooled down. We can handle the heat, but more than a few Pegasi and Unicorns had to go to the doctor for trying to eat fresh Longma cooking."

Spike nodded. "Yeah, I can tell," he said, still surprised at how hot the food was. He hated to admit it, but there was definitely an appeal to the warm feeling that came after emptying his pouch of red-hot fries that his usual food couldn't really match.

For a little bit, the dragons just ate, enjoying the fast-food quietly, eventually, however, Dr. Real peeks in, glasses hanging off his coat pocket as he peers in to see how his boys are doing.

"Everything going alright in here?" he asked.

Spike had seen Dr. Real when they entered the unfinished lab, but he was busy directing a small crew at the time, and simply waved Twilight and the others to the room where the dragon trio were hanging out.

Twilight found herself distracted by the sight of all the magical computers being installed, which led to Spike meeting them alone. He didn't mind, and Eclipse and Priss seemed to pick up on him liking the idea of meeting them by himself, as they stuck with the unicorn.

Dr. Real's stomach growled, and he nervously affirmed that he hadn't eaten yet, as busy as he was with re-establishing science in this era.

As Ruby took a pitcher's stance and flung a pouch of food at the doctor, who fumbled to catch it, while Paddy affirmed that everything was fine, Spike shook his head with amusement. It seems his new friends have a "Twilight" of their own to put up with...

"What's so funny?" Sapphire asked, casually watching the shenanigans between Ruby and Dr. Real with a cool expression.

Spike blushes. "Oh, well, I just thought you three would be... different. But I guess we've got a lot in common!" He wasn't sure what it would be like to meet other dragons, but this wasn't at all what he expected.

The three dragons went quiet, looking at Spike, who noticed the attention and flushed deeper, wiping what he would insist is just some dust from his eyes.

"S-sorry, it's just, this is really nice. Thank you for letting me meet you guys. It's really cool to meet some real dragons," the little dragon said.

The three seemed to wince a bit at this, something Spike noticed with confusion.

"So, about that... Can you keep a secret?" Padparadscha began.

Spike sat quietly as they explained their origins, and when they finished, his jaw was hanging open.

"Wow... You're really clones?"

Padparadscha shrugs. "We didn't exactly come out of an egg, no. So if you're wanting to learn about what dragons are usually like... You're not going to get that, hanging out with us. We're Shadow Realm, born and raised."

Spike shakes his head with a determined expression. "No way, I don't care about that at all. You're all really cool! Twilight hatched my egg, so it's not like I'm one to talk." He didn't want to admit it, considering how rude the thought was, but it was almost comforting to know that they weren't normal dragons.

As nice as they were, he felt intimidated, not knowing exactly how he should act. He wanted to come across as 'normal' to them, without knowing how. Now normal was moot, which took some of the tension out of the little drake.

"I mean, it's kinda neat, actually, like something out of a comic book!" he admitted.

The three look confused.

"Comic book?" Ruby asks.

"I think Lord Uncle talked about those once." Sapphire responds, an unsure bent to his tone.

"Is that like an anime?" Padparadscha asks Spike.

This time, it's Spike's turn to look confused.

Slowly however, all four of their expressions turn inscrutable, as they eye one another with intent at the realization that they didn't know about their favorite media.

'Looks like they're in desperate need of some real culture' they somehow all think at the same time.

It's at this point that Twilight peeks her head in. At some point a lab coat and a pair of goggles made its way onto her body, and judging from the dusting of crystal dust, she had been helping Dr. Real somehow.

"Everything going alright in here?" she asks.

"Twilight, I need to go get some of my comic books!" Spike exclaimed, hopping up on the table.

Her brow furrows. "Why not use that spell you learned?"

Spike realizes what she's talking about with some embarrassment. "Oh, right. Sorry Twilight!"

She just smiles and shakes her head, before leaving them to their business.

The little dragon focuses hard on what he wants and summons up some other narrower feelings, before, with a snap of his claws, a small bolt of lightning shoots in from a nearby window, landing on the table with a loud crack before manifesting into a stack of comics.

The other three dragons look impressed at this.

"Where did you learn that technique?" Sapphire asks, intrigued at the sight of another dragon knowing the secret to Dragon Lightning.

Spike is jolted out of him picking through the books for a good one by the question. "Oh, uhh, Weiss Noir taught me, it's a long story. Why, is it a big deal?"

Ruby points straight up. "Lord Uncle is very secretive with his magic! If he taught you, then that means you're trustworthy!" he shouts, dropping the aloft arm to point directly at the purple-green dragonling, a broad smile on his face as he makes the dramatic movement.

Sapphire follows up on that, holding up a crackling claw of his own. "To my knowledge, Spike, we are the only other dragons alive he taught that technique to. Unless he has grown less secretive since we last met?"

Spike shakes his head. "Oh no, he's totally squirrelly about that stuff still, if that's what you're wondering. He got really mad when the princess stole one of his books, or something, I think?"

It makes him think, though. These dragons are like his nephews, judging from their nickname for him. When Spike was learning the spells, the sage made it all seem silly and intentionally over-dramatic to make things more fun, but hearing it from these three... It was an odd feeling, being trusted with something like that.

"Well, anyway, here, this is one of my favorite comics, it's called the Power Ponies!"

As Sapphire and Ruby approach the book, Padparadscha summons a crystal with a snap of his own claws.

"Well, while we take care of our required reading... You've got some education of your own to take care of."

Spike blinks as Padparadscha walks over to one of the terminals, plugging the crystal in and causing it to project a large holographic screen above it.

It doesn't take long for the room to grow quiet, aside from the sounds of cheesy dialogue and other assorted sound effects as Spike is enthralled by the sight of animated ninjas, while Padparadscha, Ruby and Sapphire are all crowded around the bold and stylish artwork of comic book superheroes.

It was perhaps in that moment of silent media consumption that, like all times when a group of people hang out in a room quietly enjoying stories they've been introduced to, that another great nerdy friendship was born.

A few episodes and a few books later, a letter is penned and sent off by a unicorn peeking quietly into the room a second time.

Dear Princess Celestia
I'm pleased to say that, while I've learned a great deal by speaking to Eclipse Flash, and will record my thoughts on our discussion in a future letter, it appears that Spike is the one to have truly benefited from this meeting. I wasn't at all aware that there were dragons living in the Shadow Realm, so it was quite a surprise to both of us when we were informed about one such group in particular.
After meeting the dragons Padparadscha, Ruby, and Sapphire, Spike appears to be happier than I've ever seen him before. It has done him well to meet with peers he can relate to who share his interests. I have no problems whatsoever with interacting with this newly returned realm, and am excited beyond words to learn more from our new neighbors, if this is the quality of friendships that can be found therein.
Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle.

(Present Chapter 45) Meeting Fury

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Despite Celestia asking me not to, I ended up not doing anymore spying. Instead, I made my way up to the top of my tower, staring out over the land from on top of the roof.

The tower wasn't meant to be stood on top of, so I ended up having to use the new spell Nightmare Moon inadvertently taught me to get up there, slipping out of the window in my 'mist' form, collapsing into embers and floating up on top of the slanted rooftop.

I half-sat, half-stood on top of the tiled rooftop, hanging onto the spike jutting from the middle of the towertop as I looked at the forests surrounding my new little home away from home.

"It wasn't all bad. When you scare people into line, at least it means they're learning a lesson... No, that won't work. She knows right from wrong better than I do," I mutter.

After a while, I try again, trying to figure out the right words.

"I couldn't understand anymore. I still don't, really. All I knew was negative emotions. It was just my means..."

I shake my head. That isn't the right way to explain it either. After all, I did that to myself. I put in work... Hard work, in fact, to make sure that I was exactly the kind of monster I wanted to be. Even with Luna trying to pull me away from it, and Celestia trying to keep me focused, I put in the effort to push past all of it.

I don't know how to explain it to them.

I sensed something as I stared at Star Road. Something familiar. A tiny dot on the horizon, flying slowly over to the floating island.

I feel cold anger boiling up inside me, as I slowly picked apart the sensations and recognized the dot. Recognized the sensations of those obsessed with the false "ideals" of the Shadow Realm.

Letting go of the spike, I slide down the rooftop, leaping off and turning into a flurry of embers as I fall down into the forest below.

It seems there are more messes for me to clean up.

Twilight Sparkle is a weirdo. There's no doubt about it. In Eclipse Flash's humble opinion, if ever there was a pony who apparently needed to be a scholar of friendship to get up to speed on the concept, it would be this one.

That said, the unicorn is pretty interesting in spite of that, if perhaps precisely for the same reasons she's an oddity.

"Oh, oh no! I was so frantic to get up here, I completely forgot to tell anypony about this!" she shrieked quietly, pacing around. She had been having quite a fun time grilling Dr. Real on all things ancient-magitek, until the purple pony suddenly had a moment of dawning realization, followed by a neurotic breakdown.

"Ok, I can fix this, just head down, tell my friends about the civilization next door, and pop back up, easy peasy, oh but I don't want to interrupt spike and his new friends," she mutters to herself, continuing to pace outside by her hot air balloon.

Priss raises a hoof. "Question, Ponyville is that way, right?" she asks, pointing over in a direction.

Twilight stops. "Yes, that's right," the unicorn responds.

"And what would you do if you fell off a high place, just as a random question?" Priss continues, casually waving a hoof around.

Twilight, not quite realizing the implications, answers blithely. "Oh, well, I would just cast one of my teleportation spells. I know one in particular that actually cancels out a pony's momentum, so it would be simple enough to-"

Priss turns and bucks Twilight, intending on sending the mare flying straight towards Ponyville, only for her to blink to the side in a flash of instinctive magic.

"-teleport to a place within my line of sight and... You just tried to kick me!" Twilight suddenly realizes.

Priss rolls her eyes. "Yeah, because you were working yourself into a tizzy over nothing. Real's kids are fine to watch your little boy for a few minutes. Now hold still so I can give you a free trip home," the mare smirks, adjusting her angle as Twilight scrambles into her hot-air balloon and takes off before another kick can arrive.

Eclipse groans. "That may have been a bit too far, Priss. We don't want ponies to think we're violent, remember?"

"What? I was just going to use a Lucky Shot, completely harmless!" Priss complains.

A young colt stomps over cheerily "Wow, you really showed her!"

Priss and Eclipse shared a look of confusion. Neither of them recognized the Earth Pony colt, or the mother who frantically came up and grabbed him.

"I'm so sorry, he's very excitable," the mare said in an exasperated tone.

"It's fine, who are you, ma'am?" Eclipse asked curiously, noting the other Earth Ponies filing off an airship nearby.

"Oh, well, I'm Screwtap, and this young colt is Thread, we're here with Chapter Black, actually, my husband wanted to try and see if any of his ancestors were here," she explained.

The two Longma looked confused. "Chapter Black?" Priss asked.

Screwtap nods. "Oh yes, it's a very important historical society, they help ponies track down their ancestries, do bookkeeping, archeology, all sorts of things!"

Priss and Eclipse both suddenly felt uncomfortable at this information.

"And by history, you mean..?" Eclipse asked with a frown.

"Oh, well, Chapter Black deals mostly with the Shadow Realm's history, more than a few Earth Ponies can trace their roots back there, so there's quite a few members!"

Suddenly, a thousand years felt a lot longer to the two mares, and the reality of the situation seemed sharper and more real than before.

"Wow, that's... That's really something," Priss muses.

Screwtap nods. "Well, we'll be off now, sorry again if Thread was bothering you. Have a nice day you two!" the mare says, pulling away her complaining son who tries to explain how 'cool' it was for Priss to try and kick a unicorn off the island.

"We better check this out," Eclipse says somewhat nervously.

Priss just nods as the duo make their way to where the crowd of tourists are slowly dispersing, cameras flashing as they take photos and obtain memories of an older time.

"Ahh, greetings. I am Chancellor Golden Apple, of the Gilded Half-Acre Shipping Company," the well-dressed Earth Pony said to Fair Cut, adjusting his vest as he did so. He took a brief glance around Fair Cut's working area, but dismissed it out of hand when he realized that the crystals and metal devices had practical uses, rather than being tasteful-yet-abstract decor. He ignored out of hand the ponies who walked by the open garage-like building, going about their business as if they were peasants.

As his name suggested, Golden Apple was all yellows and oranges, from his mane to his hooves, complete with a shiny yellow apple with a filigree for his cutie mark. Along with that, the pony wore a dark green vest with a trim of an unnaturally green metal. All in all, it was an appearance carefully cultivated to demonstrate wealth and social status.

Where many Unicorns thought themselves deserving of noble class due to their ability to cast overt magic, what few Earth Pony nobles there were had a different means of assuring themselves of their superiority, in the form of their ancestry and, like all nobles, their monetary holdings.

Fair Cut, meanwhile, was a merchant of an entirely different class. Despite being one of Weiss Noir's most trusted mathematicians and a key individual in developing the crystal enchantments that powered the Shadow Realm's games and computers, he was far less impressive looking, for better or worse. He instead was a pale grey coated Longma, with steel-blue flames and scales. His own outfit was more practical, a simple coat and a belt with a few tools on it. His own cutie mark was a diamond carved into a '#' symbol. A representation of his talent for mathematics and crystal craft.

"I'm Fair Cut. I'm assuming you're here with those other ponies?" He asked, noting the sudden influx of curious ponies to Star Road, all seemingly intent on indulging their curiosity, whether it be informally through simple wandering around talking to Longma, or in a more formal way, through actually writing down what they found upon finishing said wandering and talking.

This one though... This one seemed to be different. His brief sneer and half-aborted scoff indicated that almost immediately.

"No. Apologies," Golden Apple responded with a shake of his head.

"I'm here on business. I was told you deal with the currency of this place, yes? GP? I operate one of the largest shipping companies in Equestria, and so it behooves me to meet with one here who can help establish ties with for our mutual profits. I hope that enlightens you as to the importance of us meeting as soon as is feasible," he explained, trailing off near the end with an implicit stare.

Fair Cut paused. "Well, the first thing to note is, you may have better luck approaching Sir L.S. Capital. He runs the Open Market, where ponies go to sell things that aren't on the fixed prices list.. It's smaller than you might be expecting, but more than a few ponies use it to offload oddities."

Golden Apple's ear twitched with disgust that he only barely managed to restrain at that last part.

"Fixed prices?" he repeated slowly, as if Fair Cut had just brandished a knife at him, and he wasn't quite sure what to make of the imminent threat to his life.

Fair Cut nodded. "Yes, Mr. Apple, we use fixed prices for trading among ourselves. It's part of why we use our own currency instead of bits. By distinguishing between Shadow Realm currency and outside currencies, we can use the Arcana Liber, that is to say, we can use voting systems to establish fixed prices for things like food and sundries."

Golden Apple's eyes narrowed. That would make things... Complicated.

"I see, so how would a trader turn a profit, in such a system?" he asked diplomatically.

"If it's on the fixed price list, you should be able to sign up on the Arcana Liber and perform transactions through that, then convert your GP to bits based on the going rate. Normally, Lord Weiss handles imports and exports that don't fit within that system, but I suppose, with the current situation, Princess Luna would be the pony you would want to speak to on that matter?" Fair Cut answers hesitantly.

Taking a deep breath, Golden Apple calms himself. In truth, there's no reason to get so bent out of shape on principle alone, even if these Longma are a bit hopelessly backwards, or at minimum, hopelessly lacking in ambition. There wouldn't be any particularly useful deals to be had here, but other than the sting of being denied a new source of profit, he hadn't exactly lost anything from the exchange.

He certainly wouldn't be haggling with Princess Luna herself to try and get a good deal trading things to these Longma. If Princess Celestia and Princess Cadence were anything to go by, immortals were as worthless as can be when it came to their use as trading partners.

They had simply put too much time in the game to settle for anything but the best result for themselves, when they bothered to actually move bits around.

"Thank you. You've helped me understand a great deal about how to move forward with you and yours. I will have my ponies contact yours if things pan out favorably. Either way, if you require my company's services, or high quality apple products, you need only contact me," the Chancellor said, turning to leave. As he did, he heard a rather loud exclamation from some mare nearby, and, turning around, broke out into a cold sweat.

If I was going to get information out of him, I had to stop him from escaping, and nothing short of a broken leg would keep an Earth Pony from doing whatever the hell they wanted, when it came to running.

"Weiss, stop!" Eclipse Flash shouted, grabbing me mere moments before my claw would have clamped down on Golden Apple's leg with hydraulic pressure.

He turned around and saw me right behind him, freezing with a terrified expression as my claw's new position put it dangerously near his throat after the turn.

Good. This little conspiracy tried to stain the Shadow Realm's memory. I won't let them poison the real thing.

I could tell just by looking at him that he fit the same profile as Gourmet. Noble, greedy, paying vast amounts to Chapter Black in the form of "Dues" and "Charitable Donations". I could sense the darkness in his heart as well, for lack of a less corny statement. Someone was drilling the idea of violence as a philosophy into his head, and it showed in his emotional pattern.

If this so called Chapter Black thought I was incompetent, they had another thing coming. My senses are more than sharp enough to pick out a member of their inner circle when he's being this obvious about it, and I had done at least a bit of research into potential candidates for the ones pulling the strings behind it, at least enough to know who the rich members were.

If I couldn't break his leg, I'd use a spell. Black Water Mist is temporary unless I pour crystal growth magic into it, but it would keep him there long enough for me to isolate and question him in an illusion.

My horn glows, and I summon a small vial of black liquid.

"What the hell do you think you're doing Weiss?!" she shouts in shock, pulling me away and breaking my eye contact with the stallion, the vial shattering on the ground with a fuming hiss as it began to decay.

"Not right now, Eclipse, this one is bad news. Their whole little organization is, but this one especially" I explain, returning my attention to the pony in question. She didn't approve of harming or illusory effects. I'd have to rely on traditional questioning. A challenge, but one I welcome.

"So, which one are you supposed to be? Doctor? Gamemaster? Oh, let me guess, Seaman, right? Or would it be Seapony? You can't be Black Angel. I already know who he is," I insist with a pulse of killing intent.

He stammers fearfully. "I don't know what you're talking about," he blatantly lies to my face.

Eclipse grabs me by the chin, forcing me to look at her again.

"Weiss, what did he do, and what proof do you have that he did it?"

I scowl. That doesn't matter, he's a part of that damn organization, I can literally pick apart this little freak's psyche from here! "We're a little bit beyond the point of evidence and judicial process, Eclipse. His organization is my enemy."

She doesn't let me pull away.

"Weiss, this isn't how we do things. It's not how you did things. I'm not going to let this be how you do things. You need to listen to me, please," she begs, probably sensing my boiling anger at Chapter Black poking and prodding at my ponies.

Another consequence, come back to ruin everything.

I hear the Chancellor back away, slowly at first, and then rapidly as he flees.

Ponies are looking at me in confusion and fear.

"If he's evil, Weiss, then we get proof, and then we make sure justice is served," she attempts, letting go and watching me carefully as I turn to stare at the fleeing pony.

"Remember how I got my Cutie Mark, Weiss? I didn't let you get hurt without evidence and a trial, just because somepony else had a hunch that they were doing the right thing. You have to remember that," she insists, and I feel my anger dropping out from under me.

This wasn't like that. Whoever Chancellor Golden Apple is, he's a member of Chapter Black's inner circle. My intuition doesn't lie.

I'm not like she was. This isn't a case of me mistaking a dark magic user for an evil magic user... This was one of my mistakes, and I had to correct it.

The look on Eclipse's face makes my chest clench, like she's both disappointed and pitying at the same time. I know I was doing the right thing. I was trying to do the right thing. If I can't even do something good when I'm trying...

I glance around at the ponies who were almost a witness to my impromptu interrogation. I spot Priss, standing far back and watching me at a distance. She's in a position to intercept me, in case Eclipse's own part in this fails.

I have to go. I have to think about this. Get away from her painful sympathy. I let my body collapse into embers and slip away before my student can call after me.

Unfortunately, Twilight's plan to convince her friends to come up to meet all the new ponies had a minor hiccup. Pinkie Pie didn't want to go.

"I know there's probably a lot of really nice ponies up there, Twilight but... I'm not ready to get back into all that stuff. I..." she trailed off.

"I got scared pretty bad the last time we got tangled up in all this stuff," Pinkie said, looking unhappy with herself for admitting it.

It shocked Twilight to her core to hear it, and judging from the expression on her friends' faces, they were just as shocked. Even Fluttershy hadn't felt that way, though she was incredibly nervous to meet new ponies in general.

While Rainbow Dash was brave, and Applejack was stubborn to a fault, the mares had always known Pinkie Pie as the fearless one of the bunch, the one who always had a laugh and a smile, even when the going got rough. It made it all the worse to know that their encounter with Weiss, and the megalomaniacal behavior that followed had shaken the mare up so badly.

Who would have thought seeing a robot double of your bestest friend get crushed would put some fear into your heart?

It was that same friend who walked up and hugged Pinkie tightly. "You don't gotta go if you don't want to, Pinkie. Hay, we don't have to go if you don't want to," Rainbow Dash said, squeezing the pink pony until she let out a dog-toy-like squeak of escaping air.

After that brief smoosh, the pegasus backed up and gave Pinkie a firm look.

"That said, if you're scared, you don't have to be. We're all in this together, and that's the way it's gonna stay, got that?" she growled, making Pinkie perk up.

"Got it!" she giggled, thinking hard.

Finally, Pinkie Pie nods with determination. "Alright. I changed my mind. I'll come along to meet these new ponies. I can't let you all run off without me!" she says, receiving a group hug for her troubles. She was still afraid, but that was all the more reason to smile and laugh. Things could always be funny, as long as she had friends to laugh with her.

As they make the return trip back to Star Road, Applejack is pushed aside rudely almost as soon as she hops off of the hot air balloon, only for the pony that did it to notice her and sneer in her direction.

"Oh, good," Golden Apple barks sarcastically.

"This saves me the trouble of paying you a personal visit," he says bitterly, pulling a piece of paper out of his vest and shoving it at the mare, who grabs it with confusion and annoyance, reading it slowly.

"A subpoena? You're suing me?!" Applejack snarls at Golden Apple after getting the gist of the legal document.

"You... You dirtbag!" she curses, making Pinkie gasp as she covers Rainbow Dash's ears.

"Applejack! You can't just say that, there are precious innocent little filly ears listening!" she says, making Rainbow Dash glare at the implication, pushing the pink party pony off of her.

"What the heck is that supposed to mean?!" Rainbow Dash complains, ruining the tense atmosphere with her annoyed bluster.

"Hmph. Far be it from me to tell you how to run your farm, but the Apple Family Charter specifically forbids the use of magic usage in the growing of crops. You made the claim that your farm is using it, so I hardly have a choice in the matter if we're to protect our reputation. If I hadn't brought it to court, then one of the other Apple Family members would surely have done so themselves," Golden Apple said in response, flush with insulted fury at what she had called him.

He huffed angrily, stomping off to his private airship, but before boarding it, he turned and offered one last parting blow.

"I'll see you in court, 'cousin'," he said with all the coldness he could muster.

Pinkie whistled after he left. "Wow, I wonder what had his tail in a twist?!" she mused, scratching her chin.

"...Guess we'll find out next time!" she finally shrugged.

"...Huh?" Applejack asked, cutting a confused look at Pinkie Pie.

(Past Chapter 40) The Second

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Fleta the griffon nervously twiddled her claws and adjusted her glasses. Today, something would happen that apparently hadn't happened since before her parents were born.

Lord Weiss Noir, the mysterious master of the Shadow Realm would make a public appearance. At her school no less!

There was a lot that people didn't know about the mysterious ruler. He never made proclamations, and nobody ever saw him. Some rumors had him showing up in Equestria on rare occasion, and one theory she personally believed in was the one about him prowling the Shadow Realm in disguise, but one way or another, if you weren't a criminal, you were unlikely to ever see the ruler, much less speak to him.

A few of her classmates didn't even believe that the pony existed, as a matter of fact.

'Dummies,' she scoffed, glancing over to where some ponies and pokemon were sitting around one of the tables, playing games on their terminals before class started.

She looked down at her own personal copy of the Grimoire Noir, it was a battered old thing that her grandma had purchased years ago, and the notes penned into the margins of the book had only grown with each generation since then.

"Doodling in your dusty diary, Fossil Fleta?" a scrawny blue longma asked sarcastically. His friends, a longma-pegasus filly with a mane of lightning and little wingtip claws, and another griffon, a burly individual with undersized wings and a mechanical backpack, both snickered at his "genius" joke.

Her book was also a source of bullying, from ponies who thought pen and paper were 'primitive'.

"Ok, first? It's not a diary. Second, can you even think of a better insult? Lastly, you know I can beat all of you to a pulp, right?" Fleta responds, standing up with a dark aura.

As she does, the trio's own energies come to the surface, the room pulsing with a youthful malicious energy.

"On your own, or all at once," she boasts, smirking at the bullies, who respond with grins of their own. This was the way of things here. What wasn't a fight was always merely the prelude to one, in this realm.

They reveled in it.

The building violent emanation is quashed by the arrival of their teacher, who pops into the room cheerfully, automatic doors sliding open for her.

"Hello class! Everyone to your seats, please," Miss Weldline chirps, bouncing along into her own seat at the head of the class.

As the trio of idiots took their seats, and the rest of the class slowly closed out of their various terminals and did the same, Miss Weldline began preparing something on the board, projector glowing as the lights were turned off

"Today we'll be learning a bit more about enchanting. As you all know, enchanting is-" she begins to explain, going on about emotional influx, magical splitting, and the ways perspective mattered for spellcraft.

Fleta was anxious, and she had already learned today's lesson, which made it easy to tune it out and worry about what was supposed to happen today.

Though, even if she did know how to enchant items already, she would never admit it, for fear of being placed a year ahead.

One of the many lessons she learned from her personal studies into her copy of the Grimoire Noir was caution. 'You don't know how fast is too fast until it's too late to stop.'

It was true for learning Dark Magic, and it was true for other things too. Accelerating her learning could see her out of school sooner, but she would miss out on things too. Not least of which the fun fights.

Finally, though, when she was almost afraid he wouldn't show, the sliding door opened, and a young-looking unicorn peeked inside.

"Is this room #209? I was supposed to come for a visit?" the white pony asked, his purple eyes sliding across the room. Along his back, six pads of metal were seemingly stuck to him, and despite having the black flame of a Longma, his hooves didn't seem to have a single scale on them.

Miss Weldline blinked at the newcomer.

"Oh! Yes, my lord! Please come in," she said, turning the lights on and turning to the class.

"Everyone, this is Lord Weiss Noir, he has agreed to come here and speak with you all briefly, so please be on your best behavior!" she insisted, her brown flames flickering nervously.

Of course, anyone could have seen what came next quite handily, as the sparking pegasus took a shot at Weiss, flying towards him with wing-claws outstretched.

He just chuckled a bit, taking a smooth step to the side that resulted in her crashing into the closed door with a loud CLANG!

"Kids these days, am I right?" the Lord of the Shadow Realm said, shaking his head at the teacher, who grabbed the little filly by her ear and pulled her back to her chair.

Honestly, who could blame her? A few other students were eyeing the Sage of Darkness as well, a fight with him would be the stuff of legends, the kind of brawl that only happens once in a lifetime!

Sadly, it looked like the filly had ruined it for everyone else, the sage would be on his guard now, making a sudden fight much more difficult.

"Heh. So, everyone, I'd like to preface this by explaining why I'm here. You kids probably haven't seen hide or hair of me before, and that's because I'm typically quite busy," Lord Weiss explained, stepping to the front of the class and taking a seat on a chair that comes into being with a quick spell.

"So, to clarify, I'm here because, as Princess Luna told me, 'your ponies are beginning to doubt you even existed!', and trust me, when a princess is mad, you know you've screwed up," he joked, making the class laugh.

He shrugs. "So, if there's anything any of you would like to know about, I'd be happy to give the deets," he explained.

Fleta was the first one to raise a talon, as high as she could. She had so many questions, and now was her chance to get them answered!

"Ehh... You there, in front," he said, pointing a hoof to a random pony.

"My pa said you was a dragon," the colt said, hoof still raised.

Lord Weiss blinked. "That's... Not a question. Do you have a question?"

The colt shook his head, and with an incredulous chuckle, Lord Weiss moved on to another question.

"Why don't you have any scales?"

"I left them at home, next," he snarked back.

"Fight me!"

"You're fifty years too young to be fighting me, brat, next!"

"Will you teach me some dark magic?!"

The class went silent, and Fleta realized that she's the one who asked, words bumbling their way out of her mouth without her authorization.

"My lord," she quickly appended, flushing deeply under the intense scrutiny of the class, and of course...

Lord Weiss Noir himself, who stared at her for an awkwardly long time, something flickering in his eyes serving as the only noteworthy aspect of his otherwise blank expression.

He blinks, and the moment shatters. "See me after class," he finally says, pointing to a small Windigo inhabiting a little fox pokemon body for the next question.

When asked why he tastes like spicy peppers to the Windego's hate-senses, the class exploded into guffaws, and weird Fossil Fleta's abrupt request fell out of their short little memories.

He was waiting for her. Like a ghost standing out in the tunnels, he seemed to materialize out of nothing. Could she learn to do that?

"My lord," Fleta attempted, bowing to the dark mage of legend.

He took a deep breath at that, blinking several times like something had blinded him.

"Walk with me, kid," he said, turning and stalking down one of the halls. He was heading towards one of the older places, places where veins of white ever-molten metal did not yet light the tunnels in place of enchanted crystals.

Old, old places.

She followed as fast as she could, and as Lord Weiss turned left and right down the twisting halls, following a map that only he knew, they eventually came out of one of the service vents overlooking the Kingdom Heart.

It was a black, writhing thing, a blend of millions of emotions, thousands of viewpoints, and perhaps billions of individual little hatreds.

She stared at it with the same awe and pride that she always felt when she saw it. Her hate was a part of this too. Her grudges, however small and petty they were, helped to keep the kingdom safe and warm.

"Tell me something, kid. When you come here, what do you put into the heart? What gets your blood boiling in the morning?" Lord Weiss asks, staring into the magical flame himself.

"Oh, well... There's a lot of things, my lord! Bullies in school, teachers I particularly loathe, who honestly, I don't think are fit to teach excepting as an example of what not to do! I also particularly dislike the fact that Griffonia doesn't use greed magic anymore," she explains.

Some griffons were unhappy with King Grover, who had discovered a magical idol capable of turning the greed of griffonkind into pride. Those griffons who wished to recapture the greed they had lost had come to the one kingdom that endorsed it. Her grandparents were among those, welcomed to the Shadow Realm with open hooves.

"I'm as proud as any of us of course, but greed is what we came from! We were once as greedy as dragons, and my dream is to prove it! It's why I wanted you to teach me something, anything! So few truly delve into the dark arts, beyond knowing enough to feed the Kingdom Heart or enchant items..."

After a few moments of panting from her excited explanation, she clarified. "My dream is to find a way to combine Pride, Hatred, and Greed together. Surely it can be done, can't it, my lord?"

Lord Weiss Noir digested this answer, and pruned away the extraneous bits that came from having one so young try to give an answer so important.

He looked pained, and offered a sideways smirk to Fleta in spite of it.

"You probably shouldn't learn any more dark magic."

She didn't hear it correctly, at first. A mistake of perception, maybe.

"Is it something wrong with my answer? If there's a problem, surely I can fix it! I know magic takes a certain perspective, and I can find that perspective! Change for the better!"

He shook his head.

"I can't teach you how to change for the better, that's not how dark magic works. ...Once you go deep enough, you only change for the worse."

He looked sad, but kept smirking. "You're dreaming, kid, and it's time to wake up."

Sadly, she was capable of eventually perceiving reality, given the seconds to do so.

A pony probably would have reacted any number of ways. An adult griffon, probably just one very violent way.

But she was a child, and children had their own way of reacting to something like that.

She bawled.

She bawled in the way that someone only really did when being chastised, not just for doing what they love, or from being chastised by one they revere and respect, but by both of those things together.

She didn't take the rebuke as a source of rage to push her on further and further towards mastery of the dark arts. She didn't take it as a casual offer of advice, that she could then ignore and continue on as she had wished.

Truthfully, then, anyone could have predicted that, if left as it was, the young griffon would grow up into anything at all, so long as it was something sad and miserable. That night, she sniffled and cried her way to sleep, and met an Alicorn Princess in her dreams who knew her plight, and took up where a Lord left off.

She wasn't the greatest dark magic user in the world, but she was gentler, and knew a fair bit herself, perhaps enough to be considered second best. A consolation prize for a poor little griffon who was born too late to be a least treacherous student.

History books wouldn't remember Fleta as more than a proud researcher of magic, who used Freedom and Greed in creative ways, and invented new alloys of feathers and metals combined, but she was penned into the books nonetheless. Princess Luna demanded it.

https://youtu.be/f0oZNGAtq5U?list=PL3-Zr0Ym0FgydhRbIkycNzcc2nx_AnzTx

Weiss had done many visits that day. Talked to many who thought he was a myth. It all led to here, his last visit of the day. His last reminder of his existence, and his ever-present control. One last pony would remember that he was no mere specter.

Weiss knocked on the door, despite knowing all of the secrets needed to open it by force. It slid open automatically, and he strode in with a more genuine smile. It was time to take one of his dishes out from its slow cook in the oven. It was finally ready.

The room was lavish, decorated with the skulls and heads of monsters. It was terrifying, lined with walls of weapons and armors, magical and mechanical alike.

It was old, and if Weiss allowed it to be much older, then his plan would fail.

Bruto sat in an armchair. It was his one-hundredth birthday.

"So, you've finally come. I imagine you finally figured things out? What could you possibly punish me with at this point, my lord, this late in the game?" he asked with a wizened smile.

He had spent his life in fear of being discovered for his treachery, for a time, but as the decades wore on, and he battled without end amassing victories both fair and unfair alike, that fear disappeared. Weiss Noir hadn't dared to confront him about what he had done. Hadn't dared to punish him for all he had stolen.

Weiss laughed.

"I bet you're wondering if you've been in the Three Curses this entire time, huh, Bruto?" he asked.

When the ancient Longma refused to answer, Weiss laughed again.

"No, I suppose you didn't. Well, here we are. Why would I need to punish you further, Bruto? Look at this!" he gestures with his six claws around the room.

"You made a hell of your own design. A lifetime of fighting, and now you've grown old, too late to wean yourself off the taste of it. I didn't have to do anything but make sure you survived."

Bruto took a deep breath that hurt, as he realized how insane the master of the Shadow Realm truly was. For dooming countless lives, he was punished with nothing at all? A long life to be ended quietly in his old age?

Weiss had known, perhaps from the beginning, that Bruto had given the enemy information, manipulated events just to squeeze a good fight out of the circumstances, and this was how he reacted?

It was galling. Insulting.

Effective.

"I'm not here to punish you... I'm here to make you an offer you can't refuse. One you won't refuse," Weiss began to explain.

"You, dear Bruto, are perfect for a special council of mine. One I have taken care not to bloat overmuch with those too obsessed with my care or my status. You, my dear Judas, my... My Brutus! You've wounded me by letting Sombra slip past my defenses..." he said, as if Bruto had done it yesterday.

"But like a man said, what doesn't kill me... Only makes me stronger."

He pulls from an invisible place behind him a lamp.

"And you will make me stronger... Do this, and I will grant your deepest, truest desire..."

Bruto listened with baited breath. The Lamp of Life, Weiss Noir's most treasured treasure, the source of his immortality and long life, a vessel containing what must have been thousands of years of taken lifeforce.

"I will give you worthy opponents."

And Bruto remembered the glory days. He remembered the hours spent watching cartoons, between the hours spent living them in endless bloody brawls and pointless fights. In hunts that saw him facing grand beasts and incredible monsters, with only cheating and brutality to avail him.

He remembered when he could perform his special talent. His talent had always been fighting dirty, and that meant having an advantage beyond raw muscle in a skirmish... But no pony could fight forever. How long had it been since he had used his special talent? Since he had done what he learned at age ten was his heart's desire? What he knew he wanted to do for the rest of his life?

Weiss made sure he had a full, fulfilling life in the Shadow Realm, all to addict him to it. A cruel drug that was dangled in front of him here. Life.

He didn't care about the delicate metaphors of good and evil right now, here at the end. He just wanted to fight.

"I accept."

Weiss clapped happily, drawing a white flame from the lamp.

"I'm glad to hear it, Councilman Oh Hell."

Bruto frowned at the name. If he was going to be a faceless member of a mysterious group enslaved to a madman's will, he would at least demand a proper title.

"Please... Call me Black Angel"

The next day, Weiss, brutalized and bloodied in his own inner sanctum, begged the princesses for help once again. Bruto, a violent pony from a bygone era, had stolen life from the Lamp of Life, and nearly taken away with Weiss's own. The alicorns easily dealt with the rejuvenated Longma, and had him in chains before the day was through.

For his crimes, he was sentenced to Tartarus while still alive. He laughed, even as he was carted beyond the gates, and taken into the land of the dead to remain there for eternity in its prison.

That day, a second Black Materia found its way into Weiss's hidden collection. A second Materia containing the "Summon" spell, nearly seventy years after the first.

(Present Chapter 46) The Honest Truth

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She found me sitting in the middle of the Star Sanctuary's innermost room. The one I had built to concentrate and manifest the physical form of various wishes made by individuals across Equestria.

It's one of my better works, to be sure. Ever since Luna took over caring for it, she's been able to take the stars created from these magically collected wishes, and with the help of her guards, carry them up into the night sky.

I read some of the documentation. By having a pegasus or draugr fly a star up high enough and drop it, they could release their stored up energy over a far wider area, and allowing the wish-magic to have the best possible chance of granting the stored desire through subtle manipulation of the magical field of Equestria.

Literal Shooting Stars. Genius on Luna's part, if I'm being honest.

The room was empty for now. Luna only had ponies working in here at night to gather up the stars, after all. This made the magically dense room especially quiet. It was a good place for the talk to come.

"Weiss?" Eclipse said, approaching me as I stared up at the little floating stars, thinking about what I would say.

I pulled on my own heartstrings, as hard as I could. With bleeding hands cut by too-tightly-held strands I held them taut, trying to figure out which string was meant to be tied to which peg. I could remember so many things, with the rituals I used on my mind, but I couldn't remember how they were tuned. All sour notes.

It was a slapdash job, and frankly, the metaphor I used to describe it probably wasn't that good either, but what I would say needed to come from the heart, so I needed it in working order for a bit.

"I'm sorry you had to see that, Eclipse," I began.

"The way I do things now... I use my enemies against themselves. Fear, hatred, greed, pain. I've gotten extremely good at using negative emotions as a means of getting what I want," I explained, not looking at her as I spoke.

She sat down next to me, and I continued.

"What you need to understand is, I've turned myself into a weapon..."

I paused, and shook my head, frustrated at the misstep. "...No, that's not the right word. Not a weapon," I corrected.

"A weapon can be turned to another purpose. Another target, new hands could guide it, and even a sword could be beaten into a plow, when war ceases," I explained, gesturing blandly.

She listened quietly as I spoke, not offering anything of her own to interrupt.

"I turned myself into an arrow, then. An arrow, fired into the future, at a single target. And unlike a sword or a spear, an arrow isn't built to survive its task. It has so little steel that there's nothing to be done with it even if it did survive. No material left for it to be turned to another task, to be reforged into anything of note."

I paused, feeling something gripping my insides. An unfamiliar sensation that I didn't know what to do with.

"An arrow, my student, can only really be fired again, once it's done its duty."

The silence dragged on. I wondered what my student was thinking. What was she taking from this?

"What happened?" she asked, and I considered which 'what' she was looking for an answer to. There were a lot of 'what's that had happened, after all, and it seemed she was after one in particular.

I decided to start with the first one.

"You died. All of you, or so I thought."

I sighed, finally realizing something.

"Sorry, but, I think I figured out a flaw. An old zebra ritual gave me eidetic memory, but I'm only just now figuring out the flaw with that."

I chuckle, and slap a palm to my forehead.

"I hadn't realized it until now, but, just because I can remember anything doesn't mean I can remember it right. Memory is fickle that way."

I realized something wrong with my recollection of that day. I hadn't remembered the feelings correctly Now I do.

"I was so afraid, Eclipse. When I realized you were all gone, I knew... I knew."

I took a deep breath.

"I was at the precipice, my hatred growing beyond anything I could stop. I knew if I lived another minute, I would become a monster. There would be no turning back."

"So I pulled it inwards, I caught my body aflame, turning my own hatred against me. It was my last chance to escape my destiny, and I had so little time to do it, before my emotions would rampage out of all control."

I laughed.

"Luna... She begged me to live. She couldn't have known what she was asking me to do, and yet she somehow said the one thing that would work. That day was the beginning of the end for me. I spent the next three centuries watching the slow seep of my own humanity, and the thing that grew in its place and became what I now am."

She didn't respond. She understood full well the story I was telling. It was apocryphal, in terms of dark magic. There must have been a million stories scattered across history books and old scrolls, detailing in no uncertain terms the countless individuals who had fallen to exactly this, to the point where my story must have sounded cliche to her.

I frowned. "I'm not an idiot, Eclipse Flash. I knew what my overuse of dark magic was doing to me, what I was becoming. My skill with the dark arts is sufficient that, if nothing else, I knew exactly where it was taking me. But I wouldn't stop. I was so afraid, so disgusted with myself as I drew deeper on my lust for revenge, as I isolated myself from all sources of positive emotion, and surrounded myself with sources of yet greater corruption."

I remember it properly now. I remember how the nightmares used to feature my friends criticizing my actions. I remember how slowly, my mind knew I was no longer tormented by the sight of friends and family hating me. It was around that time that my nightmares changed.

Now, the sight of them happy and alive was what haunted and terrified me. I had reached the point in my studies where positive emotions could physically harm my body if I wasn't careful, and my subconscious reflected it by changing what I feared.

"It was one of the classic blunders. I'm sure you're familiar. First of which is 'Never get in a land war in Blazeia', but only slightly well known is of course this; 'Never mistake knowledge of corruption as a resistance to it'."

The reference wasn't funny, but I smiled anyway.

I froze, realizing what came next in the story.

"Then I did something bad."

Eclipse Flash tensed up beside me.

"Cadence said I needed to tell you the truth... But I'm afraid."

I could definitely identify that emotion, now. I was scared, but the words came in spite of it.

"It was, to the exact day, the three-hundredth year after I arrived in the Frozen North. I-"

https://youtu.be/rygZkj3W_RM

"No," Eclipse interrupted, her voice thick with emotion..

I finally turned to look at her, and saw the watery look in her eyes.

"You don't need to tell me. It doesn't matter."

I blinked. What did she mean?

She shook her head. "Look at yourself," she explained, gesturing to my posture, the way I sat there, hunched in. I realized I was shaking.

"I know what it's like to be afraid, Weiss... Why would I want you to be? If telling me what you did makes you so scared, then don't. Not yet. Not while there's work to do," she said, some new emotion building up inside her.

"Work?" I asked, suddenly lost and confused. This was the part where I confessed, wasn't it?

She blinked away the moisture, and gave me a look, one that demanded she inject some humor into the situation. "We'll need potions. And a shrink. A good one."

"For what?" I asked, more confused by the minute.

"For you, moron. You're off your rocker. Completely batty. Marbles out to lunch. It'll probably get worse before it gets better, too, if this is as cliche as it seems. You try to tell me the truth, we get interrupted by someone bursting into the room, I find out your big secret later at the worst possible moment, it'll be all dramatic and blow the budget for special effects and then we hug it out in the finale. That's how these things go, you know," she joked.

I started to laugh, a low silent chuckle that built up as she spoke. I couldn't help but laugh.

"So enough of this melodrama. I don't need to know. You don't have to force yourself to tell me like this. Maybe I'll find out what you did that was so bad, and maybe things between us will change when I do, but before then, I've got work to do. You're trying now. Knowing what you did before doesn't change that, I won't let it. This will be my last big Foeship lesson, cleaning up the mess your dumb ass made with all that dark magic abuse."

She had a determined look on her face, and I feel her thump a hoof on my back encouragingly.

The determination fades a bit when she sees the awe in my eyes.

"You know, I wasn't sure why I decided to make you my student, Eclipse Flash."

"At first, it was just your name. I won't get into it, but you've got a pretty telling one," I said with a knowing smirk.

"Later on, I had another reason, but... The memory of those feelings is murky now, at best."

I shook my head in disbelief. "But now I remember it clearly. Dark magic changes a person for the worse, Eclipse, and yet, even at your worst, you're so good it hurts."

I stood up. My resolve was clear.

"If you've got work to do, then so do I. If there's even one good thing to come out of this mess, it's that I'm probably one of the most experienced dark magic users alive. There's a lot I could teach you about it."

I helped her stand up, and laid my cards on the table. "So, can I be your teacher again, Eclipse? Can we make that work too?"

After a long pause, the mare clearly thinking about how to respond, she put a hoof to her chin. "Hmm... I dunno, Weiss, my schedule is pretty full."

I balked. "What?!"

"Maybe I can pen you in for a lesson or two. I'll have to sleep on it," she giggled.

With that, she summoned a rippling portal, and leapt through it.

"Come back here you little turd!" I shout, running towards the closing portal as she stuck her tongue out at me. That brat!

Slashing open another portal and racing after her, I didn't see the pony behind one of the pillars slowly come out from behind it as I left.

I didn't see Luna, who had heard the conversation, and her role in it.

"Oh... Oh my," Rarity said, voicing the surprise and mild awe that the rest of her friends felt as they saw Applejack's appearance at the train station. Twilight and her both were prepared to visit New Canterlot. One to deal with a legal dispute, and the other to support her friend in this trying time.

Applejack rolled her eyes with consternation, letting out a loud huff. "Now dang it, Rarity, don't go gettin' all googoo eyed. A pony's gotta have a hat for the sun and a suit for the court. Nothing more to it," she said, adjusting her best (and only) dress-suit, tightening the bolo-tie and adjusting her hat.

"Well, pardon me for being surprised, dear, I wasn't aware you owned anything so dashing, nor had I realized how sharply dressed you can be! Oh, I have such ideas for when you return," Rarity responded.

Applejack sighed. "Well, this ain't the first time somepony took a pass at Sweet Apple Acres. Just cause we work at a farm don't change the fact that we own one. Don't no Apple I know of ever got outta wearing a suit one day or another," she frowned, dusting off the jacket of the suit.

"Ah'll be back in a day or two. Chances are the Princess'll put her hoof down hard soon as we all get in a courtroom, what with how silly the whole thing is, but..."

She smirked, and stepped up onto the train with a sly look to her friends.

"Well, we can't let Celestia do all the work."

(Past Chapter 41) Subtle Oddities

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Weiss could sense it on the air. Disharmony, confusion...

Today was a day for Chaos.

"I believe I would do well to thank you, Lord Weiss, not only for accepting this meeting, but for all you've done. I have strived to make my subjects content, and indeed, I have heard all my life the contentment your own griffons have, ignoring their penchant towards the darker aspect of things, of course," King Gideon, the tenth in his line, said with a smile as he poured wine for himself and the sage.

Weiss smiled, his bland disposition towards the griffon and the meeting itself disguised flawlessly beneath his warm expression.

"Of course. The Shadow Realm welcomes all who embrace their innermost self, and those who express their outermost desires. What could I do but dote on my greedy little griffons?" he responded, as if he had anything to do with their prosperity.

Weiss made more appearances in public over the years, enough that people didn't consign him to myth, but in all honesty, he knew little of what went on in the day to day affairs of the Shadow Realm. The Arcana Liber, an enchanted network of magical computers that spanned the Shadow Realm, made it so that he was able to turn the population into their own rulers. Surveys, scans, votes, and of course requests all passed through the automated systems, with Weiss doing little more than occasionally looking at the results, and from time to time proposing his own queries towards them.

The advisors suggested things to pass to a vote. The Shadow Realm voted. The officers enacted the results of the votes. Weiss, for all his reputation as a wise, almost prescient leader, had spent the last few decades making his own presence as unnecessary as possible for actual governance.

All the better for him to have the time needed to pursue his true purpose. Beaten bloody in endless training, surgical and magical enhancements that would give any pony trauma at the sight of, and endless meditation upon new, darker emotions. All of these things were more important than trying to shape the Shadow Realm to some nebulous idea of what he believed it ought to be.

It was honestly a good thing King Gideon had no intention of actually critiquing any of Weiss's "decrees", considering he could hardly explain his thought process on a decision he took no part in.

"Well said, Lord Weiss. I can only hope to achieve some of your wisdom in my comparatively brief time as king," he responded, raising a glass to the Lord, who did the same automatically.

The wine was poisoned, of course, but when you're the Dark Lord of the Shadow Realm, a cesspit of violence and dark magic, such things were to be expected.

He had long since refused to create a Shadow Clone without a bevy of enhancements, magical and surgical, to quash such deadly trifles. Just because the poison wouldn't kill him didn't mean he had to tolerate his clone being dispersed every time a member of royalty or nobility invited him for a drink.

"Be at ease, your Highness, but I believe one of your staff has poisoned me. It would do well to be mindful of the threat such individuals pose. Well, to one who isn't me, of course," Weiss said, uncaring if it was the current ruler of Griffonia or some other nefarious individual.

Judging from Gideon's rapidly blueing face and the choked gasps he quietly emitted, it seemed to be the latter this time.

Weiss, rolled his eyes, and with a crack of his knuckles, began casting spells to purge the griffon ruler of the toxins.

Only once the griffon king lost consciousness at the cure's completion did Weiss speak his mind.

"Waste of my weekend. God damn it," he muttered, making faces to practice for the shocked expression he would have to make when guards burst into the room at his 'panicked screaming'.

He had greater things to investigate this decade, and this meeting was taking time away from that.

Weiss entered Chaos Cacophony Zone with a flourish, the doors opening to reveal a wall of noise.

This place, on the face of it, was an entire zone, practically a city, with the sole purpose of giving ponies, windego and griffons and others besides a place to do all things weird.

There was one major difference between this zone and several others. For one, this zone wasn't meant for habitation, of course, but it shared that with Wacky Workbench as well. Rather, the one thing that distinguished it was something incredibly simple.

There was no law against noise violations.

Thus, when Weiss entered, it was to an utterly massive cavern covered floor to floor with people making an uproar. Garage Bands blared out next to orchestras of odd ponies, and too many solo acts to count, like a music festival that hardly ever quieted down.

With a pinkie plugged into one ear, Weiss chuckled. "Either I'm getting too old, or this place gets louder every time I come here," he mused as he walked down the streets.

This zone needed more guards than many of the other zones, due to its purpose as a place for all things unacceptable in a quiet suburb. Pranks, shows, and of course the awful awful music were all scattered around the large dome-like area, all to a single purpose.

Weiss made his way into the center of Chaos Cacophony Zone, and down a guarded stairway that forbade any unauthorized access. A pair of living Longma Guards let him by with nary a word. The paranoia he once fielded for his secret projects had changed since Sombra's attack. Why trust guards, where magic and science worked oh so much better?

The signs outside of the stairway warned clearly, but he didn't heed them, as flames, radiation, poisons, crushing walls and piercing spikes all assailed whoever walked down, no matter their status, their position, or even their species.

Strength was the only metric by which one could be authorized to enter Weiss's hidden places in this era, the strength to survive traps designed to annihilate anything that couldn't simply reform from damage of any intensity.

It was here, at the bottom of the stairwell, that one of the Shadow Realm's better kept secrets was held, in a small chamber buried deep beneath the zone.

Weiss's claw trailed along the wall as he walked down the hall towards the chamber, small sparks flying free of the wall as his claw idly scraped against it.

He studied the seven gemstones that shone in a rainbow of colors. One of his experiments that had been cooking for a very long time indeed.

They were hardly their namesake, but Weiss still saw fit to give them an appropriate name.

"The Chaos Emeralds," he spoke.

It was an experiment that, if successful, could grant him another source of power and corruption to push himself closer to his destiny. If he could just figure out how to turn the confusion and chaos of an entire city's worth of ponies into magical power for himself...

It would be impressive, indeed.

Weiss frowned. He had come here to check on the emeralds due to a sickening sense that had been growing in the air as of late. A sense of the exact magic that had eluded him for over a century in these idle experiments.

The emeralds were designed to draw in the various emotions of Chaos Cacophony Zone, but despite having a small lake's worth of confusion, disharmony and, for lack of a better word, discord, Weiss found that they didn't have any unique magical properties. The gems were magic, but they weren't Chaos Magic. He could somehow just tell.

He could tell all the more now that an odd sensation had come over the planet lately, one of actual Chaos Magic.

"If not you, then what?" Weiss wondered, touching one of the magical gems with a curious expression.

He shook his head. "No matter. If this is what I think it is, then I need to keep my nose out of it."

With that, Weiss left Chaos Cacophony Zone, and returned to his chambers, allowing his Shadow Clone to collapse as he went to sleep.

'I've got nothing to worry about. I've got no beef with him, even if he is revealing himself to the world.'

Weiss's face scrunched up as he slowly woke up in his coffin. For some reason, it was hot and cramped, more-so than it typically was.

"Was it good for you too?" Discord said with an amused leer.

"FUCK!"

Weiss exploded, and the coffin did as well, fragments of molten metal splattering all over the room as it turned into a firestorm, Vancian Spells rocketing away from him in a panic.

As the dark lord breathed heavily, panting with adrenaline and shock intermixed with the confusion that only comes from a sudden and unpleasant awakening, Discord slowly dribbled down one of the walls, his body acting like an icky paint-like goop.

Eyes darted to the draconequis, the sage's fearful, panicked expression fading as Discord rose up out of his own muck, chortling softly.

"Well, don't blow up at me, gah," he joked, pinching a small flame out that had sprouted atop his fuzzy head.

Weiss schooled his expression. There was no chance of him doing anything more than annoying the draconequis, he could tell just by the overwhelming disparity in their magical powers.

"Of course, my apologies, Discord, Spirit of Chaos and Disharmony."

With that, Weiss inclined his head, something between a shallow nod and a bow acknowledging the gap between their strengths.

Little did Weiss know, of course, that Discord came for precisely that reason, not to be annoyed, sure that such a thing wasn't possible, but for the sage to attempt nonetheless.

"Ooh, what's this?" he said, reaching over to the Dream Crystal jutting from one of the walls.

"Please don't touch that. What reason do you have to come here? The Shadow Realm offers refuge to all visitors, of course," the sage responded with cold restraint.

Discord, perhaps explicitly to avoid heeding the request, plucked the crystal off the wall as if it were stuck there with suction cups, making faces into the polished facets of the crystal

"It's awfully shiny, isn't it?" he said, ignoring Weiss's reasonable greeting.

Planting it back on the wall, Discord cocks his hip to the side. "So, boring business. Always business with you. I come by for a little visit, and you're already trying to figure out how to foist me off. It's rude, you know."

A flash of something crossed Weiss's face.

"I'll admit, I would really rather you didn't turn my kingdom into an epileptic carnival of madness. Whatever your plans are, I hope I can offer you an embassy of sorts on our lands," he responded after mastering himself.

The draconequis sighed. "Yes, yes, you know all about the future. How dull. Go ahead, tell me why I would try to fit all of my wonderful worldwide chaos in your tiny little bubble."

Weiss shrugged "Chaos Cacophony Zone is hardly small. You would find individuals receptive to your humor, or lack thereof," he said, a hint of annoyance slipping into his tone.

Discord smirked. "What if I don't want them to be receptive? Singleminded yesmen are hardly chaotic. Even if I did, why would I want to hang about in some oversized rat maze for you to study me?"

"We both know you aren't required to cause suffering, merely chaos. Ponies like going to carnivals, they don't like living in one. Is it really acceptable to you to have mere suffering alone in the environment you want to make for yourself?" Weiss responded.

Discord was difficult to read, his emotions seemed to shift and ebb with a delay as he cast small spells of Chaos Magic. Was the draconequis disguising his emotions? It seemed to be the only explanation for why his emotions would change after casting a spell, rather than before.

The spirit seemed to ponder this for a moment, scratching his chin with a claw held in his claw that looked like the claw he was holding the claw that looked like his claw with.

"You're overthinking this, John Doe."

https://youtu.be/CzM2oWtTAws

At the name, Weiss froze.

"Simply because I am chaos doesn't mean I'm some mindless automata that would try to ensure an even blend of everything good and evil. That would be far too predictable," he snarked.

"Don't call me that," the sage whispered.

Discord flourished the held chinscratcher, before placing it up to his ear as he fluttered his eyelids. "Don't call you what, John Doe? That is your name, isn't it?"

Weiss's eyes flashed an un-color. "That's not my name," he answered.

Discord rolled his eyes. "Don't get so bent out of shape. I was merely informing you that I'm hardly a philosophical conundrum for you to solve. I can be angered too, John, and I've heard all the arguments before. 'Oh, but you're a spirit of chaos, so that means you should do both good things and bad things!' 'You could use your powers for good, if you only tried!' 'Of course, Discord, chaos is an important part of the world around us, but it should be balanced with order, or it stops being chaos!'" he mocks.

The draconequis suddenly frowns, the first sign of displeasure since his arrival to Weiss's innermost sanctum.

"It's all pointless tripe meant to diminish me. To make me something predictable, less than I really am. I'm not a force of nature you can bully around like the wind or the trees. You can't explain me into doing whatever you wish, Mister John Doe; Former human jeweler-to-be, dead at age sixteen thanks to the De Beers Corporation, whatever that is, spirit and soul captured in a dark ritual and dragged into this boring winter wonderland promptly thereafter, confused and alone," he waves.

"That is not my name!" Weiss shouts, light disappearing into him as it touches his darkening form.

The draconequis smirked. "I know you better than you even think you know Chaos, much less how well you know yourself. So perhaps stop talking as if you're the one manipulating me."

Weiss took a deep breath, as a chill in the air seemed to grow, and his flames drew inward.

"Alright. How about instead of manipulating you, I do what I should have done from the start and threaten you?" the sage whispered.

He gestures around him. "Over a dozen different ways I could empty this entire country. Scatter every inhabitant over the planet in seconds. You can't stop them all, you're hardly omniscient, and some of the contingencies, even I don't remember. If I can't keep you from hurting the realm I care about, then I'll simply ensure there's no realm at all. No ponies to torment in one easy location, no oh-so-annoying Chaos Cacophony that I was willing to simply cede to you, not a damn thing but quiet empty ant tunnels."

He snarls.

"If you're going to be petty while you do whatever you damn well please, then I see no reason why I shouldn't spit in your face on the way out. You won't last anyway."

With that, Weiss seems to smile, and ice cracks along the floor.

"Oh, now that's just cruel. I've got a better idea. How about I just tell you the future? I've met with the fortune tellers who confirmed my own foresight long ago. You don't seem to know or care about what comes next. That's intentional, I'll bet. You can hardly have your fun if you already know how it's going to end."

He spreads his arms wide. "There. A suitable ultimatum for the god of the unpredictable. A prediction in full, if you don't leave us be."

At the end of the rant, Discord smiles at Weiss's cold fury at having his past flung in his face.

"Simply wonderful, you really are fun to enrage. I knew you'd be. Do come by Equestria sometime. It'll be a riot, once I've got things the way I like them there."

With that, Discord begins rolling himself up starting from the tail, body shrinking and twisting into nothing.

Before he disappears entirely, The Sage of Darkness offers one last ominous warning to the draconequis.

"Remember, Discord. The more things change..." he leers with cruel spite.

"...The more they stay the same."

Weiss only caught the last glimpse of Discord's displeased scowl at the philosophical remark, before every surface in the room erupted with flung pies. A last thumbing of his nose at the sage before he moved on to more entertaining subjects.

Ones that would put up even more of a fuss at his idea of fun.

(Present Chapter 47) Poor Fools

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https://youtu.be/-E-m2pxeWHA

"I'm sorry sir, I'm just... I'm really torn up about this!" Sunburst said, looking around the scarred underground chamber. The blazing hatred that had ravaged Canterlot had run its way into parts of the mountain itself as well as the surface, and with it, so much of Chapter Black's magical knowledge was damaged. or lost.

Black Angel looked tired. "I know, Gatekeeper, but it's not all bad. If there's one thing I've learned, my boy, it's the benefit of keeping backups. Most of this? It can be replaced easily enough, and what we can't replace, we've got a whole country of ponies waiting to help, now."

He puts a hoof on the bright-colored unicorn's shoulder. "We didn't lose the most important thing. That's you, Gatekeeper. You've got a work ethic that puts mine to shame, no matter your spellcasting ability, your theory-work has pushed us so far in this day and age. If you can keep your spirits up, I know we can too. That's why you're our Gatekeeper."

Nervously, the nerdy pony takes several breaths. The amount of data crystals and books that were damaged by fire was great, but...

He slipped free of Black Angel and looked around the room. "Is it here? Oh, oh dear I hope it wasn't damaged..."

"Are you looking for this?" Black Angel asked, stepping aside to reveal a box.

"Oh thank goodness! My project!" Gatekeeper shouted, opening it up and breathing a sigh of relief.

"I didn't keep it here. This is, after all, one of the more important things you've made. I kept it in my personal quarters, and a good thing too," he explained, opening the box.

Inside, several rolls of plain white bandages sat in the middle of it, glowing with magical runes sewn into the cloth.

Gatekeeper nodded with relief. "Those bandages are going to do so much good, once I work out all the bugs. Oh, just think about it! Bandages that disguise themselves as the pony wearing them! Thank you so much for holding on to them, sir," he said gratefully.

Black Angel nodded. "Anytime, kid. That said, I need to give these to an associate of mine for testing. Do you recall our arrangement?"

The unicorn nodded. "Yes. It's awful to think a pony could need bandages like these all over them, but... I'm glad they'll be put to good use. She'll tell you if there are any problems, right? These are good bandages but putting the illusion over an entire pony's body... Well, I'm not sure if they will work perfectly..."

Black Angel shook his head. "Don't worry about it. She's been nothing but forthcoming with me. If they weren't working perfectly, believe me, we would know. Don't be so hard on yourself. We couldn't wrangle these books without you," he repeated.

With that, the dark stallion emitted a sigh. "That said, there is something I lost. Something that that damn draconequis took during his chaotic spree through the city. Something... Important. I'm not sure if you can replace this."

Gatekeeper's eyes widened. "Well, I can try! Which entry was it? I can go through the Grimoire Noir as soon as you please and get started."

"None of them, unfortunately. This was a rarer piece of dark magic than that. Worst of all, it was a Materia. I only have the vaguest information on it for you. That's why I'm concerned. You might have to reinvent the spell from almost scratch. Are you really up to that?"

The unicorn had a determined expression on his face at this. "I won't know if I don't try, sir. If it was rare as you say it was, then... If I don't figure it out, we could lose a piece of magical knowledge forever!"

Black Angel considers this. "Alright. So, here's the spell, it's a variant on a magic used by none other than the Sage of Darkness himself. A clone-creation spell, only, rather than making a shadowy double of the user... It clones a subject of the user's choosing. A Dark Summoning Spell, and it was stored on one of the world's last Black Materia."

Sunburst gasped at this. The Black Materia were enchanted vessels containing some of the rarest and most powerful dark magic of all time, kept strictly in the Shadow Realm deepest and most secure vaults until its end. Ones used only by the sage himself.

He suddenly felt less up to the challenge of recreating the spell theories of one from scratch.

"You get it now, don't you? This won't be like figuring out how Royal Cloth is made. It will be difficult, and you'll likely have to do some actual spellcasting. Theorycrafting won't get you all the way there. You'll have to put it on a Materia as well, so you'll need to be trained in creating those. Are you certain you can do this?"

He swallowed. "I'll try, sir. And hey! Worst comes to worst, we can always just call up the Longma for help!"

Black Angel smiled indulgently. "If worst comes to worst, yes, but I feel like that would be cheating. I wouldn't ask them for help if I were you, not until you've given up on doing it yourself. I know it'll be more challenging that way, Gatekeeper, but I promise, it's a feat worth doing," he mused.

"Once you believe you've figured it out, I'd like you to come to this place, you'll need a red rubber ball, your notes, and of course, the Materia," Black Angel explains, getting out a map and marking a particular place on it. One long since lost to time, provided one doesn't ask an immortal about it.

"The gates of... Tartarus?" Gatekeeper said, looking at the map with a bit of confusion.

If an era of peace had one flaw, it was perhaps that ponies failed to recognizes places they really ought not to go, owing to their disuse in such calm times.

Ever since that awful mishmash whatever-it-was went and got Canterlot destroyed, Blueblood's already minimal wealth not associated with his role as prince had gone utterly out the window. Home? Gone. Gold? Perhaps a splatter or two could be found embedded in the mountain, returned to ore.

None of this, however, could compare to the true misery of his change in fortunes, indeed, being forced to live in a royal hovel, a mere hut by his exacting standards, cohabitation with other critical members of government as if they were commoners without homes of their own, (they were technically without homes, those who lacked estates outside of Canterlot, but that's besides the point) was hardly the worst of it.

No, what had made Prince Blueblood's situation irredeemable was the loss of his beloved pet, which had been missing at the time of the evacuation, and neither whining nor shouting nor obstinate behavior allowed him to stay behind to search for his beloved Bugsly.

Which is why now, of all times, he alone suddenly saw a silver lining in the total destruction and slow reconstruction of Canterlot, where his fellow nobles were still bitter over the wanton loss of material wealth. (As if money were any object to a prince!)

"Gasp! There you are, Bugsly! Oh thank Celestia, oh thank Celestia indeed," Prince Blueblood said with relief, hugging the gigantic beetle tightly. The beetle was draped in a torn and ragged maid's outfit. The beetle was often found in such a state, and despite admonishments passed to Blueblood, which he then passed along to his beetle, the creature was incorrigible in seeking out the uniform and then adorably emulating the maid-staff.

He ran to his drawer, grabbing a special brush that had been saved from the devastation, returning to his pet and brushing its pale cerulean shell.

"Oh, my poor Bugsly, just look at yourself, all covered with soot and dirt, you do not befit your noble stature, no you absolutely do not," the prince fusses, brushing the bug and removing the scraps of maidcloth from its iridescent body.

As he did, tension over the uncertainty inherent in any traumatic event slowly fell from the boorish prince's shoulders. While maids, fine dining, a large home and lavish environs were of course mandatory for the prince to be at his best, it seems that even a pampered noble upbringing failed to fully train the prince to feel agony and anger at the loss of luxuries long since considered normal, provided the relief of a beloved pet returning to him.

After a while of brushing, Blueblood felt better, and his Wannabeetle certainly looked better, freed of the grime and dirt that it must have gotten running around in all the capital 'C' Chaos that had befallen the capital.

The bug squirmed from his grip, and when it failed to dislodge the pony, its feelers began to dance across the prince's hooves, making him laugh and complain.

"Enough! Enough I say, Bugsly, very well, go on your morning constitutional, but do not dare worry me so again!" he huffs, letting the beetle free, whereupon it offers a few final feeler pokes of affection before scuttling out of the room of the regal apartment that had been quickly constructed to house the princesses and other castle staff until a new palace could be constructed.

With a low buggy bow, the beetle vacates the premises and scuttles off to parts unknown.

In a secret basement, buried deep inside of Canterlot's darkest mines, a box is dragged out from a secret alcove between two large tapped veins of crystal, long since mined of any worth that could be found in them.

Inside the box, which seemed too clean to have been merely found there, as some lost remnant of a mining operation, there was a set of bandages, each one glowing with enchanted runes.

Slowly, the bandages were wrapped around the one who took them from the box, and as they did, the bandages began to glow, revealing their purpose. An illusion began to form.

After a while of wrapping, the illusion was complete with a final twist of a knot, and a mare, Mrs. Shelly, was revealed.

She looked upset. Bitter. Angry, even. Despite this, she put on her uniform, and returned to work for a time, until, on one of her breaks, she saw someone sit down on the bench nearby. Nopony else was near it, and it seemed almost as though something was preventing ponies from noticing this one place in particular.

"Are you ready?"

Mrs. Shelly, or rather, Game Master, scowled. "I don't want to do this," she said.

"You will. I've already gotten replacements for your bandages. You'll do this," the dark stallion said plainly.

And indeed, she would.

"This is it. I do this, and we're done," Game Master said with a grimace.

"Alright. One last job. You know where the machine is kept, don't you?"

She grabbed a shoebox off the bench harshly, opening it to reveal the pristine white bandages underneath.

"Yes. I already disguised myself as him long enough to learn its location earlier," she answered.

"Good. Remember, make it violent."

Game Master took the box into a hidden dark place to change them out, and with a flash of enchanted magic, a Weiss Noir walked out of the mines, slipping away towards "Mount Olympus" with bitter resolve and disappointment.

Walking past all of the security checkpoints, which opened to the Weiss without pause, they approached one of the inner chambers of the repurposed palace that once housed the Storm King and their servants. Now, however, after being stolen and teleported to Equestria, it had lain dormant, save for one device in particular. One that would now serve the purposes of Chapter Black.

The Weapon of Light, The Great Sacred Treasure.

The mech sat in chains, it was designed in such a way that only one individual could truly operate it. The jets were too powerful, and the wings were too intricate to be piloted by automatic systems. It would take a truly superb flier in order to make use of the machine for anything but a paperweight.

For Game Master, however, it was as simple as pretending.

The bandages shifted and flashed, and suddenly, it wasn't Game Master at all, but a Rainbow Dash, smirking with a devil-may-care attitude as she slipped into the cockpit of the massive golemic machine, and, inside the vessel, it did what Wannabeetles did.

It pretended to be what it wore.

Chancellor Golden Apple tapped his hoof, nervously, tensely. He was trapped properly now. Forced to make unsavory choices not just for profit, but his own life. That blasted sage might have threatened him, but he wasn't the only one making threats to the earth pony. There were others.

"As soon as she gets here, I'm settling out of court. All you wanted was to get one of them to New Canterlot, that will happen now. If this makes it to court, I'm ruined," he said out loud in the privacy of his own bedroom.

A voice answered, in defiance of the wards placed on his home. So many wards, and the source of the voice didn't even bother to notice them.

"No. My agent needs time. Time you will acquire by dragging this out as long as possible. No settlement. She could leave the day she arrives if you did that."

Chancellor Golden Apple frowned. "What if I want out? I don't want to do this, it isn't worth doing any further. I was only in this for the money, I'm not here for some kind of scheme against the Elements of Harmony. If you're really going to force me to choose between risking financial ruin and prison, I could throw myself on Celestia's mercy today and save myself the trouble. Prison won't have my assets lost if I confess enough."

The voice seemed amused. The emotion radiated into the air.

"You wouldn't make it to prison, Seaman. You wouldn't even make it to Celestia. You'll do your job because of that."

And he was right, of course.

Seaman would do his job, because of that.

He adjusted his coat, piled legal documentation into his briefcase, and left his warded bedroom, as safe without as he was within.

It was something he had noted during his time as one of the inner members of the group. Chapter Black was never strong because of secret plans and clever plotting. It was strong because it had power to throw around. Brute force, like that sufficient to stop one who had had quite enough of the mindgames and unprofitable ventures.

It was a society that at its core tried to preserve the standards and knowledge of a country built from hatred and violence, and that unfortunately meant something to its eldest member.

What wasn't a fight was merely the prelude to one in this dark realm. No matter what. Seaman's only choice would be if he participated in a fight, or if he participated in the prelude leading up to one.

(Present Chapter 48) Some Honest Work

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Applejack looks perturbed at the state of New Canterlot. While buildings do seem to be emerging in due time, most of them are what would logically be built at a time like this. Homes for the needy, buildings for key facilities, waste management and governance.

A hotel, a motel, or even an inn appears to be off the table, not that she blames the ponies. Some needs are just greater than others.

"Well, Twi, looks like we'll be roughin' it till this is done, lessun' you got a house packed in there," she says with an agitated tip of her hat, glancing askance at the unicorn's usual over-packing.

"Oh, well, I have to admit, this is... It's not good," Twilight said, uncharacteristically lacking in vocabulary or solutions, the two mainstays of the purple bookworm.

It absolutely was not the right place for her to be, something she realized as she stared around the slowly rejuvenating city that had sprouted on the crater that used to be her home. There was nothing. The things that were lucky enough to become rubble after Discord's return were things outside of the actual blast radius. Everything else was so obliterated that the new streets of New Canterlot practically sparkled once the black soot was washed off, a glassy smooth shell, flat and serviceable for new growth.

She, for a brief moment, felt a touch jealous of the ponies on Star Road. It seemed for all the world that they were far more prepared to quickly make an unfamiliar place home for themselves. She tried to stomp out the feeling, and replace it with sympathy for individuals who had no choice but to become skilled at making themselves at home, metaphorically and otherwise, but the feeling had come, and that was sufficient to bring her some shame.

"Let's... Let's see my parents, Applejack, maybe they've got a place we could stay in all of this," Twilight said after a long few moments.

Applejack seemed to notice and realize the reality of the situation, and bumped up against her friend dutifully. "Sorry, Twi. Looks like my troubles ain't the worst ones here," she mused, getting a sad nod from Twilight before they made their way down the wide open main street.

Thankfully, it seems there are benefits to being a student of the princess. While it wasn't quite what she remembered, Twilight Velvet and Night Light were far from homeless. A humbly sized home made of solid, immaculately sharp stone turned out to be their current residence, and after Applejack reported their location to the local mailponies for any correspondence needed while they were in the area, the two were welcomed warmly.

Unfortunately for Twilight, the welcome was the traditional fare of any proud parents, and was flush with embarrassing stories and photographs alike.

"Oh, and here's one of her after one of her little experiments turned rather hairy. The poor dear was inconsolable!" Velvet said, showing a picture of a teenage twilight, face utterly obscured by the overgrown hair of a malformed hair-growth spell gone wrong.

"Mom, please!" Twilight begged while Applejack did her due diligence in trying not to laugh.

Soon enough, though, around the time Night Light brought in a plate of hay-appetizers for the group to snack on as they talked, bad news inevitably came, in the form of a mailmare popping in with an urgent delivery to Applejack.

The earth pony read the letter with a growing scowl, before tossing it on the couch with a half-sigh. "Consarnit, Golden Apple's stalling. Court date got moved to a few days from now."

Twilight's eyes widened at this. "That's not good. I hope we can get this done soon, knowing our luck, the longer we stay here, the more opportunities there are for strange things to happen in Ponyville without us..."

Applejack smirks. "Maybe. I ain't worried though, Sweet Apple Acres'll keep without me for a lil while, cider season or no. With granny all fixed up, I pity whoever'd be dumb enough to cause trouble round the farm."

Today was going to be a VERY profitable one, or so two ponies thought as they interjected on one particularly thirsty day at Sweet Apple Acres, bursting into song over the cider running out for the day.

As they sang, more and more of the crowd was getting hyped up for their cider-squeezing machine, and it wouldn't be long before the whole town was excited and ready to start buying their product instead of whatever these hodunk farmers were able to make by hoof. The wonders of automation!

♫"Well you've got opportunity, in this very community!"♫

♫"He's Flim-"♫

♫"-He's Flam"♫

♫"We're the world famous Flim Flam Brothers! Traveling salesponies nonpar-"

Two unicorns find their large overblown musical number interrupted by a rather odd sound.

Crunch!

Everypony looks over to Granny Smith, who crushed an apple in a small wooden tub nearby.

"Oh, don't mind me boys, lotta thirsty folks, so I'm gettin' started on tomorrow's load a' cider," the rejuvenated and young Granny Smith said, crushing another apple loudly.

"Though. Iffin you don't mind me saying, I imagine ponies hardly need a song to get em cravin' a mug of cider, if yer offering," she continued after an awkward pause from the two brothers.

"Brother, I suddenly feel quite nervous for some reason," Flim mutters in a sotto tone to his brother, Flam.

"Yes, funny that," Flam responded, gulping quietly.

The crowd seemed to notice the proposal Granny Smith offered, and shifted from excitement to anticipation.

"Yeah! Hurry it up!" Rainbow Dash shouted, voicing the will of the crowd.

"Uhh, alright then! Of course, show tunes can hardly slake a thirst, we'll move on to the demonstration! If you don't mind ma'am, we could produce cider right this minute, with only some of your absolutely lovely-looking and decadently fragrant-smelling apples!" Flam said to Granny, who was receiving some looks from Applebloom and Big Mac.

Unlike the filly, who let out an "Umm" of confusion, Big Mac was quiet. Not because of his usual taciturn nature for once, but because he knew full well what Granny looked like when she had had just about enough of somepony's nonsense.

"Go right on ahead, boys," she allowed.

Nervously, Flim flipped on the machine and a hose extended from the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000, floating over to suck apples straight from one of the nearby trees.

Ponies watched with excitement and unbridled thirst as the machine spun and hummed and whirred and buzzed, beeping and booping as it quickly began turning apples into cider.

"Now, here's where the magic happens, deep in the mechanical innards of our wonderous machine, these freshly plucked apples are being turned directly into high-grade, high-quality, high-octane cider that's bound to have you chomping at the bit to try it!" Flam boasts.

"Don't take his word for it, take a look!" Flam continues, pointing out the glass panel revealing the machinery's internal components churning away at the apples.

Granny walks up to the machine with an appraising eye, watching the device discard mushy or discolored apples after a brief scan.

"I see it's tossing out the bad apples. And I'm supposing it does that by sight, some fancy way or another, but how's its smeller?" she muses, glancing at the unicorns who blink at this.

"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean, ma'am, but our machine does indeed visually inspect every single apple for quality assurance!" Flim begins

"No bruised or mouldy apples go into our high quality cider!" Flam interjects.

Granny Smith only raises an eyebrow "So it don't smell the ones that went and gone off on the inside. I suppose you can only get so much done havin' a robot doin' yer quality assurance."

Flim, who hadn't even realized that scent detection might be a problem, hastily pours a mug from the machine.

"W-well, I'd say the quality speaks for itself, assuredly! Then we can get right along to the part where we make our generous offer!" he says, offering it to the discerning Apple Family Elder.

After a sip, the crowd waits with baited breath for the matron's approval, going silent.

"You boys don't know what cider is, do ya?"

Flim and Flam turn red.

"Now just what its that supposed to mean?!" the moustached Flam barks out.

Granny shrugs. "It's tasty and all, but this ain't cider. It's sparklin apple juice. You do know the difference, right?"

"Wh-b" Flim stutters.

"I thought it was a mite strange for unicorn magic to make cider that quick, but I figured I seen stranger things, and iffin a mare weren't in possession of discernin' tastes, she might not tell the difference. Let's get those ponies their juice and we'll talk bits after, hmm?" she quickly said, allowing the crowd to distract the two brothers who suddenly had more immediate concerns in managing a large and thirsty crowd lacking in her "discerning tastes".

Applebloom's jaw was dropped as Granny Smith returned to their own stall.

"That was something else, granny! Where'd you learn all that?!"

Granny Smith waved a hoof. "T'ain't nothing. I seen a dozen of their kind come through Sweet Apple Acres and you'll see a dozen more by the time you get to be my age. Always some newfangled gadget or other. Every once in a while somepony comes by with something worth havin, so we gotta hear em out. Last time I didn't, the abacus done passed me by, and by gosh is that a handy little tool to have," she exclaimed as the two brothers stalked over, pasting on their winning smiles to cover up the minor magical exhaustion.

They hadn't exactly planned on actually supplying the whole crowd with cider until they had cozied up to the local apple farm, but they had no choice when the alternative was looking like a bunch of cons. (ideally, they wouldn't look like cons until the very end, of course.)

"So...! On to business, I'm sure we'd be delighted to make and sell cider-" Flam began.

"-Sparkling Apple Juice," Flim interjected, reading the room correctly for once.

"...Sparkling Apple Juice, and at a generous 75/25 split on the profits! We provide our unicorn magic to run the machinery, and you provide the apples!"

Granny immediately responded. "25's too high. We'll give you 20."

Before the two could splutter about how they were meant to get the 75, she continued.

"It'll be a novelty outside of cider season, we'll have to check the apples before you use em until your kit's up to par, visual inspection ain't good enough, and ponies could get sick if any bad apples get in, so we'd still be doing half the work. On top of that we'll get a hit to price without the Magic-Free Label until Applejack's done with her business up in Canterlot, and even on top of that, ah got some other concerns about that contraption of yers' that ain't completely settled yet."

"That's highway robbery! At those prices, we'd be better off as competitors than cooperators! Perhaps we should try our hooves at it, and see how your tune changes when we're out-selling your cider. There's plenty of apples in Equestria, after all!" Flam finally managed, Flim nodding with shock in agreement.

"You're right, I suppose. Couple a' proud young entrepreneurs, tryin' ta run the old fogies outta business, you might make a livin' that way, but then, if it were an honest livin' you were after, you'd take my offer. Though, I ain't so proud that I wouldn't have turned my nose up iffin' you were smart enough to make a counteroffer. I had a few little treats to sweeten the pot if you held out a bit more before threatening our livelyhood," she shrugged.

With that, she leaned in, and the two traveling salesponies leaned back, taken off guard at her open admission. "You two are right prideful of that thing, ain'tcha? If you were smart, you wouldn't have been offering to work that doohickey for us, you'd be up in Canterlot or Manehattan with a patent in hoof and the whole thing pawned off to some goons who'd do the selling for ya."

Flim and Flam looked uncomfortable at the familiarity of the statement, down to the towns they had tried to start their business in.

Granny nodded. "Correct me if I'm wrong, but that didn't rightly work out for you two younguns, now did it? Fruit market ain't kind to unicorns here lately, and you two just plain reek of 'inventors seeking capital'." she commented, knowing full well that when it came to produce, an Earth Pony is an Earth Pony, and everypony else was just about out of luck unless they had an awfully good gimmick.

Flam drew himself up. "Well, so what if we are a bit prideful? We're offering a fine service, and a finer machine, more than a match for any hoof-made cider! How about a wager, then-" he attempted, trying to take control of the negotiations.

Granny, of course, immediately took it back with a dismissive wave that deflated the unicorn's bluster. "Too old for gamblin' sonny. Now listen, and listen good. I'm an old mare-"

The two ponies looked confused at the mare who was visibly younger than they were, and Granny sighed.

"-Well I am, dang it, now listen, I'm an old mare, and that means I've sold apples since you two were in diapers. The way I see it, a couple of bruised apples are still fit for cider."

She leaned in further, tapping the wooden table. "You two want to make it big? Here's what you do, you sign up with Sweet Apple Acres now, while you can. There's about to be a storm comin' and agriculture's about to flip on its head. I can't promise you yer 75/25 split, that'll run us out of business," she admitted.

With a gesture, she pointed out towards Ponyville. "You know what I can promise you though? In about a month, every unicorn from here to Hayleyville's going to be rushing into the apple business as fast as they can, and you don't want to be going it alone when that happens. You work with us, we'll treat you fair, we'll treat you right, and you'll sell more cider than you can even make," she said firmly.

Applebloom interjected against Big Mac's silent warnings "Well, it ain't about the bits, granny-"

"Shush Applebloom, course' it ain't, but these boys came here for a deal, so either they get it or they'll go, and 'Magic-free' is about to be a dee-funct label, so we might as well get while the getting's good. These boys got a quality product, and ponies who ain't as nice as I am'll turn them into applesauce if they pull this stunt anywhere that ain't half as strange as Ponyville" she drawled.

At her statement about the Magic-Free Label, the two unicorns were suddenly very interested in what she had to say.

"...Ok, we're listening," Flim said, as the voice of reason.

It didn't take long for a proper deal to be struck, and as the two unicorn entrepreneurs half-stumbled out of the Apple Family home after being brought there to have its details hashed out and written up, Granny Smith shot Big Mac and Applebloom a look, plonking down into her rocking chair with a smug expression.

"So, you tell me, I lost my touch yet?"

Brother and sister shared a look before shaking their heads frantically. "Nope!"

Applejack smiled and laughed a bit to herself at the idea of someone trying to pull someone over on a young Granny Smith. "Oh yeah, the farm'll do juuust fine, Twi, don't you worry."

(Present Chapter 49) Little White Lies

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Over the next few days until the case could be dealt with for good, Twilight quickly had several questions of hers both raised and answered

"What I don't get, mom, is, if everything in Canterlot was destroyed, how did you even get those pictures of me? I'm glad that our photo albums were fine, but... Something seems odd about it," Twilight mused.

"Well, you're right about that, dear, it is odd. Far be it from me to look a gift horse in the mouth though. Apparently, other ponies have been finding little things like this left in the rubble. Old toys, photographs, one pony actually found her wedding band, sitting right where her house was, all of it completely untouched," Velvet explained, running a hoof along the photo album gently.

"It's made things a bit more tolerable, I suppose," she finished quietly.

Twilight quietly accepts this. There may have been a million and one theories for why certain sentimental objects survived the destructive magical eruption that flattened the city, but there was a time and a place for it. Now was a time to be grateful it was so.

Applejack, meanwhile, was putting considerable effort into strengthening her case by contacting other members of the Apple Family.

"Looks like Fuji and Pippin are willing to look over Twi's test results and do some investigatin' of their own, but Rome and Black Diamond are a total loss. I don't hardly blame em, but by golly it's going to make this rougher than it needs to be," Applejack muttered, chewing a pen nervously as she looked over the letters with care.

Granny Smith sent her a letter that warmed her heart, apparently, she was already gearing up to take advantage of the changes to come, slyly recruiting a couple of unicorns with some kind of fancy applejuice machine. It was a sign of confidence and trust, and one that gave the mare the resolve to see this through.

After all, what showed more confidence in you from your elders, if not insider business arrangements that assume you'll win?

Soon, it would be time to settle this once and for all, and drag the whole of agriculture into something a bit more honest. Earth Ponies used a magic all their own to grow some of the finest food in Equestria, and soon, Equestria would remember it once again.

On the day of the big event, Applejack's other friends came to support her as well, from Rainbow Dash to Rarity, none of them wanted to miss the big day.

"You show em Applejack!" Rainbow Dash said, offering a hoofbump to the suited farmpony which was met with a confident nod.

Fluttershy and Rarity simply smiled, they didn't have anything to say to such a serious occasion, but their presence was girding.

Applejack was only stopped from entering the impromptu courthouse by Pinkie Pie, however, who for once had an air of brevity.

"Don't worry. You've got this," Pinkie said quietly, as if somehow sensing Applejack's well-hidden nervousness.

With a deep breath, Applejack entered the courtroom. Unless you were going before the princess directly, your experiences with Equestria's legal system would vary. In this case, it involved going before a small group of appointed ponies who would deliberate on a case. Some were empowered to ask questions of one side or the other, some to interject, and one to act as a central figure, this pony would deliver the final decision.

Applejack saw them getting into their tall seats, as Chancellor Golden Apple and his own motley crew of lawyers and goons filed in.

Golden Apple gave her a look as he passed.

"For what it's worth, cousin, I-" he began, only for Applejack to hold up a hoof.

"Save it," the mare responded, not bitterly, but with a definite edge. Friendly words were for friends and family, and Golden Apple had no intention of acting in either capacity today.

Applejack noticed Celestia, sitting off to the side. The princess winked, and it became clear that, yes, the case was a foregone conclusion for anyone who knew anything.

Chancellor Golden Apple seemed to notice as well, and tensed up, glancing around the room. What was he looking for?

It didn't matter. Applejack settled in for the beginning of a long and drawn out song and dance that she knew well enough to follow along with.

It was strange. Golden Apples lawyers were true beasts, worthy of their cutie mark, with how they savagely tried everything they could to get Applejack to fumble, to misspeak or misquote evidence, to contradict herself, or make a mistake in even unrelated matters.

However, as one day of deliberations drew into two, and then three, one thing was not as it should have been, Applejack noted.

Golden Apple himself. He did not seem interested in participating, even as her case pulled ahead without Celestia needing to intervene, bit by bit, he didn't seem more nervous than he had been upon entering, and the way he was nervous didn't fit a courtroom setting.

Ponies often thought Applejack's ability to suss out dishonesty was supernatural, but so much of it came down to really basic things that didn't really distinguish truth from falsehood, merely tension from relaxation. Did it matter what a pony answered with, when they seemed tense at the question alone? If you asked them why they seemed stressed, did their answer hold water?

It was things like that that helped Applejack in her day to day business, both before becoming an Element of Harmony, and afterwards as well. Aside from skilled, or mentally unwell ponies, she preferred to believe, and had reason to believe, that most ponies weren't comfortable with being deceptive.

It was any wonder that Weiss Noir made her uncomfortable. For him, nothing mattered but making ponies act in a particular way. Whether he told the truth, a half-truth, or an outright fabrication that was only the truth if you had the full context, depended only on what he wanted you to do for him.

So, then, knowing all of that...

'Why is Golden Apple acting like that? If he knew he would lose, why even drag me here?' Applejack questioned, her eyes narrowing.

'He looks like he thinks somepony's gonna show up at the last minute, and by golly I do not like it.'

Something was rotten here, and as the court took a brief recess, she confronted the Chancellor in the hall.

"Explain it to me, Golden, what in Equestria possessed you to go and do this iffin you ain't even gonna try to prove me wrong. You are jumpier than a hen in a snake's den and it absolutely ain't cause I'm kicking your flank," she demanded.

Golden Apple frowned, he seemed to debate with himself, but finally shook his head. "It doesn't matter. Do what you need to do."

With that, he walked off quickly, too quickly, in fact. Applejack could tell that the pompous Earth Pony had come to a decision.

As ponies went back in for what would likely be the last round of deliberation for the day over whether or not Earth Ponies were, used, and did magic in the production of apples, the mare noted his expression, and how a dangerously defiant glint seemed to enter his eyes.

During a lull in the arguing, Golden Apple stood up. "With the permission of the court, I would like to say a few words that will bring this case to a close," he said suddenly, and the spectators looked as confused as the appointees themselves.

The head pony took a long look at the Chancellor, whose lawyers were fumbling over one another trying to figure out what exactly he was doing, what exactly it was he planned on saying, and why he didn't gosh-darn tell them if he had some kind of ace in the hole!

"Very well, say your piece," the head pony allowed, and he strode forwards confidently.

"I would like to begin by pointing out something many of you already know, and the rest of you, I am sure already assume of me," he began.

He put a hoof to his chest. "I am, for lack of a better word, a rich bastard."

The seeming non-sequitur caught most of the room off guard, and it was only Celestia herself who had the wherewithal to consider the deeper implications of this off-base comment.

"I'm not filthy rich, that honor goes to Filthy Rich, of course," he said with a nod to the pony in question, who was part of the spectators.

"But I'm without a doubt rich, both in the acquisition and subsequent frittering away of immense wealth. My shipping company, and my luxury apple farm has provided for myself wealth sufficient to live in the lap of luxury. I want for nothing, and while away my days doing two things. Luxuriating in the things my bits grant me, and gaining more of them. This court case, this entire suit, then, has done neither of those things," he barks.

"Do you have a point, Chancellor? If so, please get on with it," the head pony requested.

"I do. It is with this preface that I would like to admit to the frivolity of this case I have brought before the court, and the true intention of it." he said.

Celestia's ears twitched, and she began to tense.

"Therefore, in the interest of making more bits than I would following this farce to its end, and in surviving to spend them, I would throw myself on the mercy of Princess Celestia, and urge you to-"

https://youtu.be/b53tBbhTEfE?list=PLD267B8CC48D06DF5

A faint whine, a burst of light from Celestia's horn, shielding spectators, a crash of stone, and then, a crack of air.

These are the things that lasted long enough for ponies to even notice them happening, as a giant mechanical monstrosity crashed through the room, orichalcum armor and magical hellfire rockets sending everything it touched everywhere around it as it grabbed Chancellor Golden Apple, and, in a flash, drug him screaming into the sky with a crackling trail of neon electricity behind it.

Golden Apple screams his lungs out as the machine crests over a cloud, humming loudly as a Rainbow Dash peers out from the open cockpit.

"What's wrong, Seaman?!" she shouts with a smirk.

"You're insane!" he screamed in response, thrashing in the mechanical claw of the Great Sacred Treasure being piloted by Game Master, who used her imitated skills to pilot it.

"Now that's just sad! Don't you know? The market teaches you not to panic... When there's a sudden drop!"

With that, she dropped the Earth Pony, sending him screaming to the ground, a thrashing flailing animal in the face of the terror surging through him.

The Great Sacred Treasure screamed as its rockets ignited once again, sending it flying in an arc back towards the courthouse, while Golden Apple continued falling like a ragdoll.

He squeezed his eyes shut as the ground rushed up too quickly for any other action, but at the last minute, the feeling of weightlessness turned into a sudden sensation of intense forces in the wrong direction.

"I got you!" Rainbow Dash yelled, snatching him out of the air at the last minute and setting him down.

He collapsed as soon as she did, blinking and struggling to breathe.

"What the hay is that thing? It's crazy!" Rainbow Dash yelled, hovering near the Chancellor as Celestia flew up and fired a beam at the flying machine, a beam that parted around its armor as it slammed into her, before firing off a beam of plasma that drove her back.

Spotting the pony in the cockpit, Rainbow Dash balked and threw up her hooves.

"Another one!?" she cried incredulously at the doppelganger, the second in as many months.

"Game Master- Imitates, I don't know," he choked, legs shaking as he tried to stand with adrenaline savaging his nerves.

Rainbow Dash frowned, giving the pony one last look before darting away to help in the action.

He watched in awe and horror as Game Master fought savagely in the machine, making a special point of attacking the Element Bearers, and Applejack most of all.

The earth pony's sweat marred her brow as she stumbled back, Vampire Killer Whip in her teeth slapping out at the mechanical abomination, knocking aside bolts of plasma before a missile streaked from one of the sides, spiraling around and getting too close for her to safely bat it away with her flaming whip.

The missile exploded as she sliced it in half with the Weapon of Light, and sent the mare into a broken chunk of wall with a yell of pain, Twilight's aura springing up to grab her before she could fall.

Celestia slammed into the back of the machine, tearing off a chunk of it, but as she did, another piece of machinery slid over into place, replacing the functionality of the damaged rocket and allowing it to whir around and strike her in the face with the barrel of its gun.

Game Master bared her teeth in a smirk, firing blast after blast that seemed to lose effectiveness against the princess with each repeated shot. One final shot managed to crash into her face, but the clearing smoke revealed the princess's untouched expression, and it was pissed.

At least, one could intuit that it was, beneath the off-white platemail armor that had grown to encapsulate her entire body, synthetic unicorn horn that made her nearly as durable as she was regenerative.

"Enough."

Celestia blurred with a wingbeat as the machine tried to go after Fluttershy, who was in the crowd trying to keep them calm and away from the violence, and with another wingbeat, slammed the wretched machine and its pilot deep into the stone foundation of New Canterlot.

With an ignited horn, the princess pulled Game Master free of the heavily damaged machine, her body held perfectly still in wrathful telekinesis.

Celestia studied the pony with a cold fury, and noticed a loose bandage sparking and sparkling, the source of the pilot's disguised form as Rainbow Dash.

She tugged away at the bandages, until the illusion failed entirely, revealing a gigantic Wannabeetle, a familiar one, despite the cracked shell.

She glared at the bandages, at the runes sewn into them.

"Unicorn magic..." she hissed, recognizing it for what it was.

She turned to the crowd. "Blueblood?!" "Blueblood!" she roared, determined to receive an explanation for this.

"Scary, isn't it? Just how vulnerable any pony is to violence. Just how little others can protect you from it, when you can't protect yourself. How quickly and accurately it comes, when it's... Necessary." Black Angel said quietly next to Golden Apple, who was swept up in the crowd.

He and the rest of the crowd were watching as the normally arrogant and rude Blueblood cowered before a Celestia who was trying her best to not have him thrown in the dungeon after what his loyal and loving pet had done to Applejack, who was being carted away to a hospital as rapidly as possible.

Golden Apple wanted to cry at how close the eldest of Chapter Black was to him, too close. He could scream, tell everyone what's going on, the truth, but he was too close.

Black Angel smiled, and quietly muttered under the din of the crowd. They didn't seem to react to his words, or even his presence. "It's alright. You didn't say anything too terrible, so this was just a little scare. Just a little scare, Chancellor. We'll use up the prince now, Game Master has been framing him for quite a bit, so now is a good time to... Expend him. Draw a healthy amount of attention away from Chapter Black."

The stallion's smile widened as he thought of something. "You know those old mafia movies, where an important fellow is threatened so he would keep his mouth shut? Pretend that that is what's going on here. Just a fun little movie, just a cliche, where the important person keeps his mouth shut...

"So a horse's head isn't found in his bed the next morning."

As Prince Blueblood was brought in for questioning, and his pet seized as damning evidence, Golden Apple kept his mouth shut.

He tried to give honesty a shot, but the cost... Unacceptably high, for any businesspony.

(Past Chapter 42) Grand Mal

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"Weiss..."

"Weiss!"

"Can you hear me? Please..."

The Sage sighed. It had been a few years since Discord had shown up in his room, and, after tightening his security, he hadn't seen the spirit again.

The reason, of course, was obvious. Discord had been busy.

Busy turning Equestria into the Chaos Capital of the world, that is. In the time since their meeting, the spirit had quickly taken over the entire country. The princesses fought and kicked and screamed the entire way there, but when your opponent was more powerful, more slippery, and in possession of greater cunning, there wasn't much that could be done.

Ponies wondered if their princesses were dead, without a doubt, the two were gone, at some point during Discord's takeover, they had disappeared without a trace, some believing the two were destroyed, others seeming to think that they fled in cowardice.

Weiss, of course, had the pleasure of knowing the truth. They weren't dead, and they hadn't given up. Annoyingly, they instead saw fit to begin calling on him of all ponies, nearly a decade and a half after Discord's takeover.

'Well, it looks like she's in deep, this time. I can't keep pretending that I'm missing her calls,' the sage thought to himself, as the murky smoke around his dream began to shift and shimmer, a low pounding slamming into it from the outside. Luna was trying to break in, and if he resisted at this point, she would likely realize he didn't want to help.

"I don't want to do this... But in this line of work, I must do many things I do not enjoy," he said, opening a hole in the virtual dream to allow her to enter.

"Weiss, thank the stars," she said, collapsing to the ground. Her body in this dream looked haggard and exhausted, weakened from whatever struggles she was facing in the outside world.

Weiss formed two large couches, and a table between them. Food and drink meant nothing in a dream, but two ice-cold glasses of juice kept their flavor nonetheless, and so he set two of those on the table, watching as Luna guzzled it down, taking sustenance from it in a way he couldn't perceive.

"You warned us, you told us and I did not pay it the attention it deserved, D-"

"Don't say his name. Thermal scans from a golem I have watching him show his ears raising in temperature when it's said verbally," Weiss interrupted.

Luna paused. "Surely, in a dream he couldn't?"

"It's risk. I hate risk," the sage frowned. He had injected meaning into his words, and Luna saw the unease that this conversation was bringing him.

"Why are you here?" he asked, knowing full well the answer.

"You told us. You told us that we defeated him with a set of magical relics. The Elements of Harmony," she admitted.

"We have searched, we have scoured Equestria, and the lands beyond, but no place possesses anything by that name. No books speak of it, no tales by Zebra, Griffon, Yak or any other! I..."

She looks down. "I do not know who else to go to. I do not know what to do."

The sage took a deep breath, and slowly let it out.

"I can't. If you seek the Elements, if you fail, and he discovers my part in it..."

He grimaced. "Look, I already tried that. I tried making things better like that, and you know what happened? It made everything worse. That's my destiny, Luna. I've tried to defy it, and now you're asking me to try again? No."

He snarled at the princess, standing up and sliding the table aside with a loud squeal.

"Give up on this, Luna. Go home. I'm no Starswirl, Luna, I can't give you the Elements of Harmony."

He stomped, and the dream began to collapse.

"I'm a villain, Luna. My weakness is here, in the seat of my power. That's why I can't help you, and that's why you need to go. Do you understand?! I can't let what I've created be destroyed again!" he demanded, as black fire hesitantly consumed the last dregs of the dream.

The world was awash with a bleak lack of color, but as the dream reached its end, two vivid green eyes opened in the dark, each one larger than Luna's entire body.

...

"Go!"

She woke up in the middle of the deep jungle the two sisters had been searching through. Her sister, of course, was already awake. She didn't sleep anymore, not while Discord held Equestria in his impish grip.

Despite the intensity of the threat they hid from, and the harshness of their living situation outside of Equestria, Luna and her sister didn't roast some disgusting meal over a fire, skewered on a comically apropos machete, nor did they drink dew from some sort of improvised rain collector.

Being alicorns, they didn't eat or drink at all. Such things were luxuries, and while Weiss may have insisted to the contrary, food and drink weren't critical to an immortal ruler's effectiveness.

She felt incredibly sad, that the sage had truly abandoned them to this pointless search, worse, then, that he urged them to give up on it, but as she thought more critically about it, things began to seem... Off.

Off about the way he spoke, and the things he spoke of. Why did he bring up Starswirl? Why did he insist that they go home, now of all times, when their home was the central nexus of Discord's chaotic reign?

'I'm a villain, Luna. My weakness is here, in the seat of my power. That's why I can't help you, and that's why you need to go.'

Why did he word that so awkwardly? Normally, when Weiss wasn't simply stating a direct quotation, or cursing loudly in that strange way he did, he at least had an air of ease to his manner of speech.

It dawned on her as Celestia stared into where a fire would be, if either of them needed such a thing to survive in the jungle.

That was the mistake they had made. The Elements of Harmony weren't something unknown to them, or rather, the elements did not come from an unknown source, in an unknown locale.

Weiss had inadvertently told her, no... Secretly told her what she needed to know. Starswirl could have given them the elements, he implied. Their quest to find the elements was hopeless, he insisted. They should go home, he demanded.

He was a villain, and his weakness was in the seat of his power.

"Sister, I know where we must go," Princess Luna said with newfound confidence, standing up to her full height.

Celestia gazed up at her sister, rising to her feet. No questions. No curiosity.

How odd, that her sister didn't doubt that she would succeed on her dreamwalking quest for knowledge, when even she had felt that doubt before realizing the truth.

"Lead the way," the solar diarch said simply, shaking the mud from her body. The two had taken to not speaking aloud anything they wished to communicate, knowing of Discord's preternatural ability to somehow know plans hatched in such a way.

With a mighty flap, the two alicorns burst from the foliage of the dense jungle they had been scouring for signs of an ancient temple, and disappeared into the morning sky.

To the forest of Equestria's Capital. To the Castle of the Two Sisters.

To Castle Everfree.

'But first... A distraction,' Princess Luna thought, veering to the right, towards Peace Country. Discord's latest acquisition on his quest for widespread chaos.

"Hmm. Perhaps a mountain here? No, no, flip it around. Gah, shading is so difficult," Discord murmurs, rearranging the broad and flat plains, turning them into a checkerboard mosaic of shifting earth and soil.

The deer living there, of course, were swept aside to get them out of the way while he did his work, not that he didn't endure they had some grass to eat. He had it growing up over their ears in fact! For good measure, some magic-induced agoraphobia would help ensure they didn't miss the lack of land to roam around on. He certainly didn't see any of them complaining.

...What with the grass growing up over them and all that.

"Oh! I think I've got an idea!" he said, clapping his hands merrily. Why bother trying to use mountains and canyons as a medium for art when you can simply change the color of the soil and rock itself?

He felt a ticklish feeling emerge as he snapped his claws, and in a moment, Peace Country was now one gigantic self-portrait of the draconequis.

He framed it with a portrait made of his own paws, staring out at it with one eye to make sure he got it all correct.

"Well, a single country can hardly capture my full majesty, but it'll do for a start," he smiled.

As he cracked his back with a job well done, he saw storm clouds begin to approach from the north.

"Oooh! Now that's interesting," he mused, waggling a talon and hastening its approach.

Of course, what he only saw moments later was the twin princesses pushing the storm along, standing atop the largest and darkest of the clouds. They held gleaming thunderbolt-shaped javelins in their teeth, and behind them, thousands more floated behind them in an unshakable grip.

Discord's lips pursed, and he slipped over behind them in some sort of indiscernible movement that defied space.

"Ahh! Just the two I was hoping to see! Celly, Lulu, It's so good to see you. Have you been well? Oh I do so hope you have. I've been keeping the thrones warm while you're gone!" he said, draping an arm over each of the alicorns as though they were best friends.

He puts a talon to his chin. "Oddest thing, though, your guards seem to love throwing spears at me when I do! You really should let them know about the change in management, so I can let them out of time out," he chortles, walking on air away from the two, who stand there on a large storm cloud.

The two sisters share a blank look, before, with a whip of their heads, they prepare to throw their javelins.

Discord snorts. "Come now, I would normally never say this, but for the sake of brevity, let's be realistic for once, a few little toothpicks aren't going to-"

He blinks as, instead of flinging the humming yellow weapons at him, they hurl them at the ground, dragging with them the full might of an alicorn stormfront.

Discord's smiling face on the landscape below suddenly sprouts an unsightly pimple as the twin javelins cause a titanic mountain of molten rock and lightning to erupt from it.

With a hasty snap of his fingers, Discord banishes the mountain, and whirls around to glare at the princesses.

"Now look here, just because I saw fit to change things around doesn't mean you can go and throw a tantrum like this, I've got rights you know, artistic license!"

The storm begins to rage, shrouding all of Peace Country, and dropping the javelins in force, magically charged Jupiter Bronze forged by the princesses bringing down the wrath of gods upon Discord's art piece.

Discord, despite his best efforts, is limited in his ability to stop it. Snapping away all the storms and javelins doesn't work when the princesses are only making more of them with the very molten metals and vaporized mist flung into the sky by their rods from the gods, forcing him to put his attention towards trying to fight them while preserving his precious art.

"Now see here! I do not have to put up with this!" he shouts, snapping his fingers and turning the two princesses into cotton candy and fudge ponies respectively.

The two princesses halt, shuffling uncertainly at the sudden transformative magic.

Celestia tests her footing on the storm cloud below her as Discord heaves in the calm created by their attack's cessation.

"Sister, you might note we haven't fallen," she muses.

He couldn't take away their magic, no matter how cleverly he was able to pretend to weaken them.

https://youtu.be/YQ5r7rTA-7M

The twin sisters erupted with yet stronger magic, and Discord pulled at his hair with frustration as, even turned to candy, the twin sisters still held the tireless and inexhaustible spirits they had ascended into possessing.

Above, the storm raged, and below, the draconequis threw up everything he could think of to stop the princesses from simply kicking over his sandcastles. The tactic reminded him disturbingly of a certain pony's threats. Mutually assured destruction of a sort. If the princesses couldn't stop him, and he wasn't quite able to simply stop them instantly, then they could deny him his fun for a time.

Taffy, wooden building blocks, balloons and gigantic anachronistic paperclips appeared from nowhere, attempting to stymie the rain of Jupiter Bronze, and slow the conversion of Peace Country to mountainous rubble.

With a frustrated growl, he realized that much of the power of the javelins was in their drawing from the storm clouds that the princesses commanded. With a snap of his fingers, he realized if he could not erase the clouds, and he couldn't stop the spears, then he could simply render them impotent.

"Why don't we brighten up this dreary weather, dears?!" he shouted from the ground, snapping his finger. A wave of chaos magic flew out, converting all of the water to candy and sweets, a plague spreading from droplet to droplet until the skies were filled, not with blackened clouds and flashes of lightning, but a gentle drizzle of chocolate milk and bright pink cotton candy puffs in the sky.

The javelins, once dragging down building-thick pillars of lightning, were now slamming into the ground feebly, mere enchanted metal that buried itself into the land like drops of soft rain.

He breathed a sigh of relief, and looked around at the landscape. The entirety of the land had been turned to craters, jutting spires of molten rock, and plasma that arced from place to place randomly, like static running over a crackling metal surface.

It would take entire hours for him to fix all of this!

With a sigh, he flashed up to where the princesses were, and sneered.

"Well, you had your fun. I didn't much care for it, but you did, so quit it!" he shouted, but quickly realized something was wrong.

Princess Celestia was the only pony there. Luna had been gone, for who knows how long!

https://youtu.be/4ujFscf3Ogo?list=PLz53LvcQUa3HeT0BfHSoA1LfUQMvDNbXU

As soon as the draconequis had scurried below the storm to try and manage it, the alicorn of the night had disappeared in a supersonic crack, blurring to Equestria at speeds impossible for any normal pegasus.

She could only pray her theory was correct. Discord, a spirit of chaos, was limited in his ability to actually slow or stop chaos, even when he disliked the results of it, or its source.

She could only hope that what Weiss implied was true, she would have so little time to search, so precious little time.

She landed on the roof of Castle Everfree, and desperately raised her horn, casting a powerful searching spell through the temporarily fudged appendage.

She was in search of one thing, and one thing alone. Starswirl the Bearded's magical signature. If he was responsible for the Elements of Harmony, then surely...

'There!' Luna thought desperately, detecting a vast quantity of magic aligned with his emotions, deep into the forest, at the center of where the Everfree's odd qualities emitted.

The Everfree Forest had been an odd place, even before the princesses had settled there and made it their capital. It was a frightening place, one where the laws of nature seemed to not apply. Everything within it functioned on its own, without the intervention of ponies or magic, the beasts could get along without guidance, the weather could form and develop from mundane temperature and water vapor alone, and even the plants could grow, without a hint of life-giving magical energy!

Luna landed at the mouth of a large cave, from which the strongest source of Starswirl's magical signature lay.

As she walked inside, she saw it...

Standing proudly in the cavern's center, a massive crystaline tree, one that, from what little she could gleam, had been growing and gestating beneath the Everfree Forest for what must have been countless years.

She approached the relic with awe, and no small amount of reverence. Her mentor, hers and Celestia's, he had created this?

It was, for lack of a better word, divine. It was a magical relic that defied everything she knew about magic, because, in the most curious way, she could simply tell that it was growing.

As six gems slowly plucked themselves from the tree, and placed themselves within her magical aura, she could feel the tree growing even faster than before. Growing as it learned from her emotions, from her bonds with others.

The curse that had been placed on her by Discord shattered in a moment, leaving her completely free of any sort of confectionery transmogrification.

This was Starswirl's legacy, his last gift to Luna and her sister.

The Elements of Harmony.

Discord looked upset. "What is this? Where is your bitter little sister? Not sweet enough to stay and clean up the afterparty?" he said, growing more irate by the minute.

Celestia felt something odd, an emotional pluck that made her eyes twitch involuntarily towards Equestria. Discord's Chaos Magic shattered from her body, and her true self was revealed from the cotton candy form forced on it.

"That's for me to know, and you to find out," Celestia smirked, before teleporting away in a bright flash of light.

Discord sneered, following the teleport all the way to its destination.

"And find out I shall!" he responded, snapping a claw and disappearing in a loud and mournful honk.

He arrived to the sight of the two sisters, who, while battered and bruised, looked at the artifacts with hope and confidence.

Celestia turned to Discord. "Playtime is over. This ends here, and with it, your cruel reign."

Discord crossed his arms. This? This is what they risked his fury for? A few enchanted trinkets?

"Oh, I doubt that," he said, pulling out a small sack of seeds and munching on a few. This aught to be good.

something's wrong

"Hungry?" he asked, shaking his little satchel around, spilling seeds everywhere.

Their magical aura around the Elements grew.

"Oh, suit yourselves," he shrugged, munching on a few more.

run

"So, then, what have you got there?" he asked curiously, scratching his chin eagerly to see what silly attempt this would be.

Oddly, he felt something he didn't quite recognize.

"The Elements of Harmony!" Princess Celestia answered.

"With these, we will at last defeat you," Princess Luna insisted.

The gems began to turn into a sphere of light and magic, whirling around the two alicorns, and growing greater, and more powerful in strength.

The curious unfamiliar feeling began to grow in the draconequis, and he couldn't help but laugh. What was even curiouser was that, for whatever reason, it didn't seem quite as funny as the laughter would suggest...

"Ohahahahahah! You should see the looks on your faces! All that buildup for this?! It's hilarious!"

He of course, didn't realize it until later, but that feeling was fear, and his laughter, which seemed appropriately hysterical, was, as the princesses touched horns, and with the surge of new magic flowing through them, used the Elements of Harmony to perform an act which was without them impossible.

Two ponies, performing magic as one. Magic cast with this pony emotion called 'Friendship', the first magic of its kind.

A spiraling beam of rainbow light erupted from the sisters and their bond with one another, and flew at the spirit of Chaos and Disharmony, who was laughing helplessly at the sight, even as it turned his body to stone.

His madness seemed to melt away, the most egregious and disturbing changes to their country and their world began to fade, among those that demanded the magic of chaos to continue their function. Much would remain as it was, tainted by Discord's touch, but with him imprisoned, and the worst of the chaos magic banished, ponies in the houses nearby hesitantly, fearfully emerged.

At last, Equestria could begin to heal.

(Past Chapter 43) Unpunished Deed

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https://youtu.be/o-xRxXYpavU?list=PLB4DC2508C4D0076D

Weiss rolled his eyes as a party of untold scale and scope raged through Equestria. Ponies had been living in chaos for over a decade, so the return of the princesses and the defeat of Discord came as something mind-numbingly euphoric.

There were foals who had been born and raised in the nightmarish fever dream, ones who were astounded by things like simple consistency and object permanence that their parents had once taken for granted, and it seemed they had no intention of doing so ever again.

For some reason, he had been invited to the party at the castle. It stumped him, frankly.

'I'm honestly surprised I'm not receiving another angry visit at my part in all of this,' he thought to himself, sipping at a glass of cider. It was no soda, but at least it was fizzy and crisp.

Despite this, the princesses seemed almost overjoyed to see him after they gained the elements and defeated Discord.

"Lord Weiss, we art pleased to see you. Be ready, for soon, we shalt call upon you for a short announcement," Luna said, giving him a quick hug. Celestia smiled in a way that made the sage deeply uncomfortable. It seemed to have lost the tension and sass that he so adored. Clearly, defeating Discord had left the princesses a bit more buzzed than any mortal wine could manage, or so he thought.

They walked away to hobnob with ponies and reassure the masses in that regal way they were so familiar with. Children were a focus of their efforts, among those who had never seen the princesses while old enough to comprehend them.

Weiss ignored this, and slunk his way to the most interesting part of the throne room. The place of honor where the Elements of Harmony rested.

The magical artifacts were set atop a fancy marble statue, a sort of planetarium in which they sat in an inert form, waiting for the next time they would be called upon.

They made his teeth itch, just to be in the same room as them.

"Harmony. So here it is," he said, standing near enough to observe the elements, without daring to approach them fully.

He had immersed himself in his role for a very long time, living a life filled with deception and compromise. Either the elements didn't approve of him, or it was psychosomatic.

Both options were discomforting, and yet... Reassuring. Clearly, his plans were coming along nicely.

'It's any wonder. Is there a single element I haven't opposed?' he thought to himself with a snide smile.

The lies, how he hid away his worst enemies so that they could be enslaved to make him stronger and more villainous.

The cruelty, his new hobby in luring criminals to his court so he could offer them clever torment in place of kinder measures of reformation.

The disloyalty, in betraying everything he once stood for. Nothing else needed to be said, on that front.

The isolation, which he used to prevent backsliding in his transformation as much as was possible without making unnecessary enemies. Friendship is magic? It isn't Dark Magic, and so it would only distract him, like it is even now.

The greed, which he lived and breathed, until even the greatest of dragons had no choice but to consider him one of them...

Weiss shrugged. 'Eh. I think I get a pass on that, you lil macguffins, you. It isn't as though I'm not generous too,' he thought. He was more focused on creating treasure than amassing it.

He turned and began to walk away from the elements with a neutral expression that disguised his frown. The last one, then. That had to be the ticket to what seemed to push him from the magical artifacts in a subtle, warning fashion.

It was the hatred, that damn hatred most of all, then. His anger and rage, which were his sole motivators in life. There was no fun and merry laughter in his future. He wouldn't allow it.

As he made his way back into the crowd of ponies, he noted the griffon delegates, who eyed the Elements of Harmony with intrigued expressions. They seemed rougher than normal, and with the scare of Discord, he couldn't blame their ragged appearances one bit.

Even pride and surety must have faltered with a creature of humiliation and confusion on the prowl.

He bit his tongue as he had a realization. Celestia's lack of her usual anger and disdain, Luna's insinuation that he would be called forth.

He frowned. If they planned on using those damn elements on him...

'Damn. I might need a way to avoid that, assuming I survive today,' he thought bitterly. He had absolutely no confidence that a mere Shadow Clone proxy would be enough to prevent the Elements from reaching over and slapping the shit out of him like a diapered half-court shot.

He blinked for a moment. "It seems like metaphor is the first to go in the pursuit of evil," he said quietly, before Princess Celestia's booming voice rang out over the room.

"Lord Weiss Noir, of the Shadow Realm! Step Forwards!"

He was prepared. Thanks to his training with Black Angel, he knew that biting through his tongue was painful enough to disperse his Shadow Clone, if he wasn't on guard. Here, it may prove crucial, should this be what he thinks it is.

Nonetheless, he approaches, and begins going over speeches of his own to throw in their faces.

The crowd is silent. This wasn't on the itinerary for the celebration, and it left many individuals, both local and foreign, bemused.

"Lord Weiss, I have called you here before all gathered for a very important reason. As you prefer the common speech, so shall I honor you with it, for these words must come from the heart," Celestia says, as Luna walks up and beside her.

He tenses. Is this the heroic 'Sorry I gotta kill you' speech? Because wow, he did not see that coming from the princess of al ponies.

The two sisters lower their heads, something lost between nod and bow. "Thank you."

'Have to admit... Wasn't expecting that one either,' he thought, dumbfounded.

"You risked everything to help us defeat Discord. I know there was little you could have done, and yet, when we came to you, in our darkest hour, you helped us. Without the knowledge you gave us, the hints you laid before us, we could have spent centuries, trying and failing to locate the Elements of Harmony. You told us where to look, even after informing us of the threat it meant to you, and your rule," Celestia began.

She turned her head to the side. "I am... Ashamed. I know we have not seen eye to eye. Your choice of magic, no, to a greater degree, your very way of life... Grates on me, and truthfully, you are rarely intent on easing the burden of bearing your personality," she admits.

"I did not trust you. How, then, could I let this stand, when your foresight prevented the worst, and your actions risked everything you had worked so hard for?"

She draws herself up, steely resolve in her eyes.

"Let it be heard, before all Equestria, then, that I give you my trust! That I lay my fears to rest. You, Weiss, possess the will to do right, even in the dark, even when at risk to yourself, and with nothing to gain but our thanks. I will strive to mend the gap between us, as rulers... And I hope, as friends." The princess says, with another short bow.

Weiss blinked, and, on autopilot, he bowed in turn. "Of course. I would be honored. I hope we can speak more of this soon, in private," he responded blankly.

With that, he smiled and waved automatically at the cheering crowd, who seemed quite taken with the princess's words.

https://youtu.be/dyw6kQ5O-YA?list=PLU4ktq2pWONtSYFFHnFZPFfSXMF5Rw0fn

As soon as his request for privacy was granted, some hours later after the celebration, which continued to stretch on through the night and spill out onto the streets, he looked at Celestia and Luna with a sneer.

"What the fuck was that all about? Why did you..." he gestured angrily.

Luna looked confused. "Weiss, all Celestia spoke was truth. I was able to see the hints you gave us, you risked so much to give us all we needed to find the Elements of Harmony!"

Weiss's lips drew up even higher as he barked out in response.

"No I fucking didn't! I told you both to fuck off! I have literally no idea what you're talking about!" he screamed.

He jabbed a finger in the direction of the ballroom. "When you two called me up there, I was ready to hightail it out of here because I thought this was the part where you turn those damn elements on me! Luna, when you came to me, I absolutely did not help you, I threw you out on your ass and blocked your calls!" he exclaimed, heaving deep breaths.

The two sisters shared a look. "Weiss... Are you certain? The way you spoke, the things you said... If your plan was for us to bumble blindly through the world without knowledge of the Elements' location, then why did you insist that we should give up and go home? We had no home to go to, save the very Everfree that the Elements lay within," Luna responded softly, trying to be sympathetic to the neurotic unicorn.

He blinked. "I... I just."

He didn't have an answer. Why did he say that? It risked everything! It flew in the face of his own rationale for not helping them!

Celestia stepped forward. "I still mean what I said, Weiss. A part of you clearly wished to do the right thing, and I cannot help but honor that."

His breathing shuddered, and twitches wracked his body.

With a quick bite through his own tongue, his Shadow Clone burst into smoke, and he awoke in his inner sanctum, thrashing and snarling at holograms filled with diagrams and diatribes on the nature of the heart, and of emotion.

Celestia's words stabbed at him over and over. A part of him that still wished to do the right thing. That wished to risk everything he had worked towards.

"Where is it!" he screamed, swiping through the holograms.

"Where is the part that will not succumb!" he howled, gripping the entire computer and heaving it onto its side, shattering the display irrecoverably.

Heaving, he whipped his head towards the secret chamber. Stalking towards it, he summoned a Shadow Clone, slumping to the ground as his duplicate teleported into his council chamber with a hellish expression.

"From the depths of Tartarus, I summon you! Come, Black Angel!" he screamed, holding aloft his Black Materia.

A black smoke erupted from it, and formed into a shadowy double of the brawler.

"What's wrong, my lord? Rough night?" the stallion asked, leaning coyly to one side.

"Shut up. Go fetch whatever weapon you please. I would train with you today," Weiss demanded.

With a shrug, Black Angel walked over to the side, where a variety of weapons lay. One in particular stood out to him, a magical laser, too weak to cut through the room, as Weiss had so insisted and mocked. And yet, it was perfect, downright perfect, for leaving marks on the council chamber.

He turned to the sage and opened fire, the two fought for several hours, and slowly, so slowly, Black Angel had left a subtle and crude message etched into the walls of the room. One in a code he should not have been able to know, without outside help.

He was dismissed once Weiss's shadow clone was destroyed. His summon could only survive so long as its caster remained awake and alive, unfortunately, and while he never dared to summon both Black Angel and Councilman Oh Goodness at the same time, for fear of the two working together and disrupting his manipulations...

That was insufficient for two clever individuals to find a way.

The next week, Councilman Oh Goodness was summoned. Weiss provided a suite of data on the Elements of Harmony, what little he could glean. He wanted her to tell him all she could about the relics, and indeed, ways he might thwart them, should the worst come to pass.

She did of course. She was no magician, but she could do math and emotional dynamics as well as need be for a biologist. The sage received her recommendation flat out. If he is so frightened of harmony's disapproval, then he must simply be approved of.

But while he ranted and raved to himself, making theories of his own and performing experiments to prove them... She examined the scorch marks on the floor. The scorch marks which laid out in a code she hid in the council chamber's walls and floors, messages from a mysterious "Black Angel". A fellow prisoner of Tartarus. A fellow slave to the Sage of Darkness.

Today's message read thus: "Foolish sage didn't kill the changelings. One of my mind-controlled ones reached the gates of Tartarus and confirmed its survival before leaving. An asset?"

She communicated a response hidden in scratches on the floor, slowly, oh so slowly. She communicated, and thus, was not completely isolated from others.

She was not isolated in the way that Weiss Noir required, in order to work his magic of manipulation properly.

In that way, they did what anyone would do in their position. The one thing that would slow, halt, and reverse Weiss's manipulations that kept them docile and loyal.

As coworkers do, they shit-talked their boss behind his back. The death-knell of worker compliance.

(Present Chapter 50) Nine-Tenths

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"You've got to be kidding me, this..."

I was shocked. To think that one of my own creations, one of the Weapons of Light could have done this...

It hurt.

I stared at the heavily damaged machine. It would take months, maybe years to repair, and more resources than I could easily tap from my stashes and hideaways.

"Your creation ran rampant in the hands of an enemy of Equestria. Applejack is still in the hospital. Ponies were hurt. Worse may have befallen those who were, had I not been there to stop this weapons platform." she said simply. There was no anger in her words, nor was there disappointment. The emotion in her voice was bland acceptance.

'If it wasn't this, then it would have been something else,' her tone seemed to say. A feeling so far beyond anger or disappointment towards this latest mistake of mine. Expectation.

"It wasn't meant to do this. It was meant to do good," I said, not meeting Celestia's gaze as she presented the machine to me, and I meekly disconnected parts of it, to prevent it being reactivated, even in its damaged state.

Celestia shrugged helplessly. "Have we not done this dance before? You've been robbed before, to similar ends. Or do you forget why you created the original Weapons in the first place?"

I hadn't forgotten. I swore not to let something like this happen again, and yet, here we are. It was shameful to know that my best intentions had once again caused something like this.

"What now, Weiss? Something must be done with it," she asked.

I thought about that. This Weapon of Light was "mine", and, if nothing else, it was stolen from my care, and so, it was up to me what was to be done with it now. My responsibility.

If it could be stolen, even from the most secure areas I could create, and suborned, even by the most advanced identification I could build into it with the magic and science of my time, then there wasn't anything I could do to prevent it from being stolen again. I didn't have time to try and lure the Element Bearers into claiming it through a series of trials and tribulations.

I would have to skip the dramatics, for once.

I sighed. "Give it to Rainbow Dash. It was always meant for her, and, once I repair it, and shore up the security flaws, it will be a valuable tool in the defense of Equestria," I finally say, turning away. It was bitter, I had such plans! Such glorious plans!

I was going to force Rainbow Dash to have one final race against her metallic doppelganger, force her to realize just how difficult it was to defeat enemies who had cold metal as their strength. Then, with the Great Sacred Treasure, she would win, and destroy the golem once and for all!

Explosions! Fire! Excitement and a flight to the finish! Everything a good hero's journey needed.

I shook my head as Celestia lifted it up in her telekinesis and silently walked away with it to who-knows-where. I'd find out later. It was no threat now, as damaged as it was, and for good measure, I had made sure to disconnect various components to prevent it activating until I could figure out exactly how a Wannabeetle and some illusion magic was enough to trick it.

I was thankful that the princess had nothing else to say before leaving. I couldn't stand to look at the machine for another second, considering what a failure it had turned out to be.

"Well, Eclipse, now that that's done, I suppose it's your decision what we do today," I said, turning to her for her opinion. She seemed stunned when the princess brought the Great Sacred Treasure to Star Road, and saddened to hear what had happened to it. Subverted by a Wannabeetle. It must have been a familiar problem for her, if I recall correctly.

"Well, the first thing we should do is work out a plan. If that Golden Apple guy really is performing evil deeds, then we can use that. You need to learn what justice and law are again, before we can move on to more ephemeral things like your social and moral well-being," she explains, a hologram fizzing out from her armor displaying a running wall of text that she glances across quickly.

Documents on Equestrian Law, scanned from every lawbook in Twilight's library, courtesy of the librarian herself.

I felt sweat uncomfortably arriving as a herald of what's to come.

"Eclipse, come on... I don't think that's necessary, I haven't obeyed a law since..."

I paused, trying to recall the last time I intentionally kept from doing something due to it being against some law or other.

Eclipse waited for me to answer, before sighing in a way that sounds distinctly impatient to me. "Wow, alright, there's a lot to unpack there."

I blinked. What's that supposed to mean?!

Rainbow Dash looked apathetic at the hunk of junk. "Sorry Applejack, but I literally didn't have room for this thing at my house. I mean look at it, it's bigger than a cart!" she said gratefully, gesturing to the damaged Great Sacred Treasure, currently being hauled around behind one of Sweet Apple Acre's barns by several Royal Guards.

"It ain't nothing, Dash. It's not like you ain't done me favors before," Applejack retorted. She smiled as best she could, but her voice was a bit strained, and a thick brace was clamped around her waist and back.

While being thrown through a wall by the mechanical menace thankfully hadn't killed her, it had certainly put her in the hospital, and even after getting out, it would take time and rest for her back to heal properly.

'Things are going to be rough,' Applejack thought to herself. Being down a pony in Cider Season ensured that things would be rough indeed.

Rainbow Dash looked at Applejack and frowned, shaking her head. "I don't know why they're giving me this stupid thing, it got you hurt, if I had a say in it, I'd say we should just dump it in the junkyard and call it a day," she grumbled.

Applejack laughed a bit. "I agree. I might be a bit biased, but danged if I don't think it's more trouble than it's worth," she responded. It was hard to wrap the idea around the idea, that Celestia, (and that dirtbag, Weiss,) had decided to give Rainbow Dash of all ponies ownership of the war machine.

Rainbow Dash shrugged. "Well, outta sight, outta mind, am I right? They said they made it so it wouldn't work anymore, so it isn't like I can even use it. Not that I'd want to," she clarified.

Applejack nodded.

As Rainbow Dash made to leave for home, Applejack waved, before wincing at a tingling pain in her back that made her put her hoof back down. Granny Smith, as if psychic, seemed to come out at just the right time with a bag of ice, and a shoulder for her granddaughter to lean on as she led the pony back to her own home.

Out of sight, out of mind. The fate of the Great Sacred Treasure, and all the wonderful plans it could have been a part of. The machine sat in the middle of the grassy patch behind the barn, torn plating and frayed wires sitting idly by. It could have repaired itself, it was built for Rainbow Dash, after all, and she was hardly a mechanic, but the machine's creator had disconnected that functionality. Removed it entirely, in fact, by detaching the Timeshift Crystal that was once buried deep inside its core.

Without it, the relic was simply that, a dusty old artifact, in dire need of repair, one whose jets and wings were held in silent repose, awaiting a pilot that would never come.

Flim groaned, laying his head on the mercifully cool table at one Sugarcube Corner, while his brother had his own face pressed flat into it. The two of them had singed horns with blackened tips, and a miserable new outlook on hard work.

"It's awful, brother, who would have thought hard work could be so... Well, I just said it!" he complained, as his brother nodded quietly.

"Magical overexertion, to think we'd end up overworking ourselves, us!" he said, blinking as a pair of ice cold smoothies were placed in front of them.

"Oh, thank you," he said gratefully, before pressing the ice cold glass to his head with a groan of relief. The milkshake sizzled comically.

"It's that darn mare! I'm afraid we've been conned, dear brother," Flam said, drinking his milkshake instead of turning it into slush with his overheated horn.

"Conned? How so?" Flim asked, drinking his own melted milkshake.

Flam straightened out his frazzled mustache. "Simple, brother, we agreed to this job expecting our lovely machine to do most of the work, and unfortunately, it appears we've signed up with a mare who looks at ponies instead of profits to decide when a job is done."

He slammed a hoof into the palm of his hoof. "I daresay lemonaid and apple fritters would have kept coming out of that darn house until midnight if she thought it would get a few more hours out of us!" he admitted.

'Not that it wasn't delicious', The two of them privately mused for a moment. Granny Smith's strategy of keeping them fed and watered inbetween hours of magical labor operating and improving upon their Super Speedy Cider Squeezy, coupled with devilishly encouraging words whenever they were ready to call it quits had turned out to be quite the effective grift...

"It's insidious! All this agony and work, and for what?!" Flim lamented.

Flam thought about it. He really did, and finally shrugged at his elder brother. "Money."

"Oh right, money," Flim realized. By Celestia's sweet tooth the money.

He shook his head. "Money aside, we need to find a solution, I'm a unicorn, not a candlestick!" As if to enunciate his point, the tip of his horn caught fire, and he hastily plunged it into his drink.

Flam frowned. "Well, I don't see where there's one to be had, brother, other than simply waiting for our magic to grow stronger over time. At the end of the day, enchanting new parts is simply difficult work for two unicorns alone, and there's a lot to do before that workhorse will be satisfied with our machine's quality control."

He chuckled lightly. "I mean, it isn't as though the Apples have a giant pile of magitech parts laying around for us to use,"

https://youtu.be/Cm0M3cOKdRE?list=PLLVedurB7ZPbdTRgvL53QN_0o8bWO9vL3

"Brother, remind me to have you make more ironic statements to our benefit in the future," Flim said dryly, eyes as wide as can be as he stared at the truly massive machine before them. It was a monolith of orichalcum, even deactivated and scuffed up, it still glowed with enchantment and magic.

The Great Sacred Treasure sat there, glowing under the attention of the two ponies, but even as it did, it sagged under its own weight. Here was a machine cast down in its very first flight, by a pilot that saw it as nothing but an expendable resource in a dark plot.

Flam swallowed. "It's incredible... This thing looks like it belongs in a museum, I mean, look at the craftsponyship, it's stunning!" He walked around the sides of the mech, noting the hellfire engines, the numerous sapphire golem cores, and of course, the massive enchanted gun jutting from one of its two main limbs.

"You might very well be right, look at this," Flim said, poking and prodding at one of the sides of the Great Sacred Treasure, until a hatch opened up on it, and a holographic display shone out of it, a simplistic magical computer reading out various status indicators, and, in the corner, a date for when the magical computer was first enchanted.

"Dear Celestia, it's... It's ancient!" Flam gasped. The hologram sputtered.

Anypony could tell you that enchanted items hadn't used holograms for hundreds of years, ever since direct control and intuition broadcasting were invented by Equestrian enchanters. This floating image of illusory dots was a relic, by the Flim Flam Brothers' standards.

"Parts of it are, but something about the magic, I think this may have been assembled recently. It was certainly damaged recently, see here, around the armor plating? The magic is still leaking out..."

The ragged edges of melted and torn orichalcum seemed to pulse to his diagnostic spells in a raw way that indicated fresh, unrepaired damage. He could practically hear the screech of metal from whatever caused this piece of work to be totaled in this way.

"Quite a mystery... Where on earth did the Apple family get this? I dare say, it would be an insult to the craftspony to use it for parts, we'd be better off scrapping our own machine to get the parts for this one!" Flam stroked his mustache thoughtfully.

Flim shook his head. "Well, no matter what, we should leave it alone until we can convince whoever owns this to let us have a look at it. I daresay, I see opportunity where the owner clearly did not, wouldn't you agree?" the stallion asked.

Flam nodded. "Absolutely, dear brother. It would be a travesty to let this poor machine sit out here rusting for no good reason."

As Flim pushed to examine an engine, The Great Sacred Treasure leaned forward, gears creaking as parts shifted under their own weight.

They promptly went to Granny Smith, who was forcing Applejack into bed with a bowl of applesauce.

"Yer after that old thing? Well, Princess Celestia had the darn thing drug over here. It nearly killed me, so I ain't exactly pleased with havin' it around, I gotta admit, but apparently Rainbow Dash owns it now, so I did her a favor. You'd have to ask her if you want to mess around with that thing." Applejack said uncomfortably.

Flim glanced at his brother. "I see. Well, we're certainly sorry to bother you about it, then. Do get well, ma'am, until next time," he said with a nod.

As the two brothers left, Applejack and Granny looked at one another. "What do you think, Granny?"

Granny Smith let out a huff. "Well, those two haven't done us wrong yet, so I'm inclined to give em the benefit of the doubt. It might be a might nasty of me to say, but if they fix the darn thing up, then that Weiss won't have reason to come over to do it."

Applejack hadn't considered that angle, and her back twinged painfully as she tried to lay back further on the bed.

Granny frowned. "Now, it ain't that I'm ungrateful or nothin'. I wouldn't be as spry as I am without that tonic or whatever it was, but he's got a way about him that don't sit right with me. I can't help but hope that he don't come over here any time soon."

Applejack shook her head. "No, granny, I know what you mean, he's..."

"Go on then. Run home. I've no more need of you," he offered with a smile.

She could tell, he was drinking in their fear. It was why he crushed that Rainbow Dash robot. He wanted to see what they would do. Would they stay and fight? Run and hide?

Applejack knew that he was hoping to see them turn on each other over the offer. His gaze wasn't merciful, it was anticipatory. Waiting for the show to come.

She blinked the memory away. "He scares me. That's the honest truth. I think we're all a bit scared, Granny."

(Present Chapter 51) Ten-Tenths

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Rainbow Dash recognized the duo who approached her. It was those ponies who made all that tasty cider!

"So, you see, Miss Dash, I and my brother noticed the wonderful machine in your possession, and we believe we can repair it in full, given your blessing of course," Flim said diplomatically.

Flam interjected. "Of course, all we're asking in return is the right to operate the machine, you see, we've got some plans revolving around our cider production-" he attempted, only for Rainbow Dash to suddenly zone out at the word 'Cider'

"Yeah, go for it, you two can have the thing for all I care," she waved flippantly.

The brothers shared a shocked look. That was a lot of hardware to just "have for all she cares"

Out of a more honest pony's mouth, the words 'Are you sure?' would have been inevitable. The Flim Flam Brothers, however, were more graceful towards their gift horses. Neither had any interest whatsoever in looking into this particular one's mouth.

That said, the weathermare still noticed their look. "Well it's not like I'm going to use it. That thing nearly got me and my friends killed. You aren't planning on doing anything like that with it, are you?" she raised an eyebrow.

Flim and Flam shook their heads frantically. "Perish the thought! We were planning to simply repair and refit it for farm usage, cut down on our work," one of them responded quickly.

Rainbow Dash nodded. "Yeah, I figured. Go for it, dudes, I guess just make sure you don't break it? The guy who made it can be a bit..."

She searched for the right words.

"Well, he made a giant flying death machine and randomly gave it to me for no reason after somepony tried to kill us with it," she shrugged, trying to play it off cool.

The brothers shared a look. "Perhaps we could be a bit more conservative with our modifications," Flam mused.

"Right, conservative," Flim agreed quickly. Neither one was keen on angering the apparently still-living creator of such a magnificent and terrifying machine.

Flim and Flam stood before the Great Sacred Treasure once again, surrounded with parts and mechanisms.

"Alright, let's get this old gal put together, but good!" Flim exclaimed, smacking one of the plates with a loud clank. The plate promptly fell off, and he chuckled nervously for a few moments.

"Let's just... Get started," he finally said, levitating an enchanted horseshoe out of the pile.

"So, the first thing I think we need to address is the controls. Without a proper enchantment, anypony who would want to fly this thing would need an intimate knowledge of all things flight just to get it in the air, much less use it well," Flam interjected, stopping his brother from opening up one of the power supply units to replace it with the horseshoe.

"Hmm. You might be right brother. Do you have any direct control enchantments handy?" he asked.

Flam waved the antennae. "I have the one from the SSCS, keyed to our magic, of course. No need to have this delightful device stolen for a joyride," he exclaimed, passing the antennae over to Flim.

The Great Sacred Treasure creaked and groaned as levers, buttons, switches, dials, and nearly everything in the entire cockpit was unbolted, unwelded, cracked free of its crystal housing, and tossed aside in favor of a pair of seats and an antennae buried in the floorboard.

"Now we just need an intuition broadcaster," Flim muttered. Unfortunately, their Super Speedy Cider Squeezy hadn't actually had one, the ground-vehicle didn't need to feed the two brothers information on things like its speed and all the other values, but for a vehicle meant to fly?! It was mandatory for the riders to have the knowledge fed into them directly. Something that, for modern enchanting, was standard issue on any respectable invention that required fine control.

"I still can't believe anypony was meant to fly this thing as it was. It's no wonder she had an open cockpit, you'd need one just to see out of it!" Flam shook his head.

"Well, it looks as though we'll have to make our own intuition broadcaster, so I suppose that's our next job." Flim said, pulling out a copper necklace from the pile. One thing that was common with modern enchanting was to start with jewelry, even if the object you were creating wasn't meant to be worn. Some quirk of magic meant that it was simply easier to enchant a necklace, than, say, a support strut.

That you planned to embed the necklace in a dashboard and cover it with a metal plate was irrelevant, after the fact.

Taking deep breaths, the two brothers focused on sensations of understanding, intuition, agreement, and of course, change.

With these emotions and feelings combined, the two could create a spell of empathy, which, when embedded in an enchanted item, could be used to have it broadcast what it knew to the one using it. A wand of flames could broadcast how much fire was in it, and how hot it was currently set to burn, a magic mirror could broadcast all the zits it reflected, and, in this case...

A gigantic magical flying machine could feed its rider everything from yaw to altitude, all in a form as instinctive and animalistic as a bird in flight.

The two brothers sweated heavily as the necklace glowed and floated in the air, surrounded by their magic, until, with a final flash of light, it fell to the ground, shimmering.

Flim rubbed his horn. "We were off again," he mused. His horn tended to overheat whenever he and his brother worked on enchantments together. Whenever one or the other made a mistake, the backlash tended to go straight for him. It was annoying, and led to constant overheating whenever they worked on something big like this.

For any pony not wearing an Element of Harmony, there was no convenient bond between ponies that helped them cast spells together. Not that any ponies save perhaps the princesses even knew about that fact.

Flam shook his head at this brother. "We got the job done, didn't we? It's as they say... Sloppily complete is hardly unique-"

"But finished at all is magnifique," Flim finished with a small smile.

With that, they got to work, putting together enchantments that were good enough for what they were doing, and took pride in the fact that at least their work wasn't quite as bad as the magnificent beautiful dinosaur they were repairing.

"Oh my goodness brother, look, it's actually using reactors and... some kind of portal-based antigravity for lift," Flam noted with dawning horror. Why didn't they just use a levitation charm? Even the youngest most ancient unicorn could manage some basic ordinary magic like that, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZVOqxobAWQo

"Still using Prestidigitation for everything, huh?" Eclipse asked, sparring with me in my tower. I hesitantly flung another boulder of black crystal at her, using the frustration powered magic to lift and fling the rock.

She smashed through it with what appeared to be ease, but I could tell her armor was beginning to strain a bit.

"You're a bit stronger than I remember, though. The Weiss I know couldn't have done that without at least muttering a Vance," she said, dodging my slow swipes as I clawed at her, quietly allowing her to take a measure of me through our battle.

The crucible of combat was one of the best places to talk, I had found time and time again.

I halted, and the spear of white crystal that smashed me into a pillar exploded into sparkling dust as Eclipse ran towards me in a panic.

"Oh crap, I didn't think that would get you! Are you alright?" she asked, helping me out of the rubble. She saw something that made her uneasy in my own distracted face.

"Eclipse, am I going too easy on you?" I asked genuinely. I had tried so hard in the past to give my student every last ounce of power I could, but here... I was honestly frightened I might kill her by mistake, if I didn't play softball with her.

She leered. "My lord-"

"Weiss will do, Eclipse. I'm not the lord of anything, anymore," I insisted.

She rolled her eyes quickly enough that it seems she might not have thought I saw it.

"Yes, my lord. That said, I really do not want you holding back against me. I need you good and tired out before we get started. I find that's the optimal state for anypony trying to learn about the Equestrian Legal System. Especially this modern one," she mock-frowned.

I blinked. She was trying to tire me out? "I'm not sure that will work, but..." I was doing this because I trusted her. Even if it didn't, she would learn something.

"Alright. I'll stop holding back," I said quietly as she poised herself to stand against me.

'Weak,' a voice inside me suggested. Instincts honed over decades telling me to toy with my opponent, to both humiliate and protect them from the alternative. I forced the instinct down, and drew out eight swords. One for each claw, one in my telekinetic grip, and the last between my teeth.

Eclipse rolled her eyes. "Don't let Iron Diamond see you doing that," she smiled, her armor hissing as grown ice turned to steam from sheer pressure inside the chambers within.

I didn't say anything. I didn't feel anything. I just fell upon her, moving in ways that surely must have been sickening, disturbing to watch.

I had spent years refining it to that state of vile spectacle, from where once it was merely perfect.

It was roughly thirty seconds later, surrounded by broken and discarded crystal swords, that I decided to stop thrashing and whirling like snakes and snapping power lines. I made sure not to do any permanent damage to my student, but I was fairly impotent in actually teaching her anything. She wasn't able to keep up enough to improve, and I wasn't skilled enough to teach her without holding back. A failure on my part.

"I'm sorry, I don't think this will work, if you want me exhausted," I said sadly, holding out a hand to help her up.

I was happy in a way, seeing the fear as she slowly let me help her up, her power armor sparking and leaking all over.

Happy that she had indeed learned something by fighting me as I am. I could tell, even as short as the rest of the fight was, that she had gleaned something from my movements, understood something about me as we spoke of things with blades that could never be properly spoken of with words.

In the same way one couldn't properly speak of business without a suit and drinks, to get the true measure of someone, you had to fight them.

"Maybe you're right. But for the record... Don't go easy on me anymore," she said, hardening her resolve. Ha! I remember what that emotion looks like!

She had courage. Maybe if I hadn't already slated out Twilight Sparkle as the Master Sword's true wielder, it could have gone to her instead.

"Come on, let's see if you can remind me how to abide the law before I commit another war-crime. Or I guess, in this case, a regular crime?" I asked politely, hiding my mirth.

She somehow sensed it, though, and smirked. "Fine. I've got to get payback somehow, for you ruining my armor," Eclipse Flash said, a hint of malice in her tone that made it that much more delightful.

Later, we were going over how to accuse Golden Apple without throwing him at the hooves of Princess Celestia ("Or Luna!" Eclipse insisted), when I got an interesting message from one of the Eyerocs I had spying on Ponyville.

"I haven't reached that part yet, but I'm fairly confident spying is illegal as well, my lord," Eclipse said tersely, flipping through holograms to find the part that would ruin my fun.

While she did that, the synthetic bat-eyeball landed on my arm, and projected a screen of light displaying something quite interesting. Two familiar ponies, repairing the Great Sacred Treasure?

I frowned, but when I saw the Apple family greeting and supplying them with snacks, some of the tension left me.

"Hold on a moment, Eclipse, I need to take this," I said, snapping my fingers and creating a portal from here to there.

"Hello boys, working hard or hardly working?" I said through the portal, to the two suddenly shocked and afraid scam-artists.

"Er, hello? And who might you be?" Flam asked, only to get elbowed by his brother, whose eyes were wide.

"Haven't you heard, dear brother? This is none other than that rather impressive sage that has been making the rounds about Equestria. Might I ask why you're er... Visiting?" he ventured.

I waved my arm disarmingly, and Eclipse watched with interest as I spoke to the pair.

"Nothing much. I'm just the assembler of that rather wonderful piece of technology you seem to be twiddling on. I do trust your intentions aren't..."

I searched for the right words.

"To piss me off?" I attempted, shaking my head. "No, sorry, I meant to say 'untowards'. Sorry again," I apologized.

"No, of course not! We were just modif-" Flam said, only to be muffled by his brother again.

"Repairing! We were just repairing it, with both the Apple Family and Rainbow Dash, Element of Harmony's blessing! And we figured, well, while it's here, we could give it a few upgrades as well! There's a lot of er... things that need touching up on?"

While they were afraid, what impressed me the most is that they were still playing me. Or trying at least... Damn, that's actually really impressive. They were pretending to be more scared than they really were, and Flam was playing up the whole "say things unintentionally" bit to make them seem less competent and less threatening as a result.

The only reason I could tell is because of the knowing looks they kept shooting each other, even before Flam pretended not to know who I was.

I sighed. "Look, I'm a big fan of scams. Me? I fought a damn war with them, more or less. I like the two of you, Flim, Flam. You're likable ponies. I'm just going to ask three things, and they aren't that big of a deal," I responded, holding up three fingers.

"Leave the weapons on. It needs to be ready for combat in case the Element of Loyalty has to fly it. I suppose I don't care if you put some sort of scam accessory on the dashboard or tie a winch to it to steal whatever it is you're going to steal." Finger one went down.

"Don't steal the Great Sacred Treasure itself. It belongs to an Element of Harmony until further notice, and they kind of need it. If you do steal it, I'll find you and you'll wish a great many things that you'll wish you weren't in a position to wish for." Finger two. A pulse of killing intent had them shivering unconsciously, without knowing why.

"Finally, bring it over here for me to have a glance at it at some point. Maybe I'm an old fogie, but I've got some advice here and there for you. If you're doing this pro-bono, getting paid, whatever, I don't care. Just know your limits, because you're skirting around several, modifying a Weapon of Light."

The two glanced at each other. "Of course!"

I clapped my hands and smiled. "Thank you very much. You two may not know it, but you inadvertently saved me a lot of work with whatever bullshit you're pulling right now! If you even manage to repair it, at least," I whispered the last part quietly enough to make it seem as though I hadn't meant for them to hear it.

The statement would motivate the pair to do my work for me, and get the machine halfway ready for its owner.

"Ta for now, boys. Again, I'm very grateful. Don't forget to repair the hellfire vents! They cease to be over time!" I shouted one last time, before closing the portal.

Eclipse gave me a look. "What? What?! I didn't hurt them or overtly threaten them, just a few implicit ones!" I whined.

Flim and Flam swallowed heavily, and shared another look.

"You want to tell that pony that the previous owner gifted it to us of their own free will, with no intention of accepting it back, or shall you do the honors?" Flam smartly insisted, not actually including any clause in his words that would imply he was willing to do so himself.

Flim just shook his head. "Absolutely not."

"Well, somebody's going to have to do it..." Flam frowned nervously.

Neither of them were anxious to discover how the hyperviolent, intently malicious sage who had featured in many frightening newspapers would react, or how large the grudge he held would be if he found that out.

(Past Chapter 44) Bad Boys

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He caught a spy. Not one of Celestia and Luna's of course, they were more likely to simply show up in person, if they wished to know his secrets.

This one was from the nobility. A unicorn who refused to say anything, once caught sniffing around files used by the researchers in Wacky Workbench Zone.

In a landmark case, he was brought to Weiss's court, without having requested it first. Something that made many nervous. If Weiss was now going to deliver his ironic punishments to any criminal, whether they asked or not...

There were eyes on this case. Ones other than Lord Weiss's own.

He sat on a throne of purple crystal, lazily leaning on a fist. "Now, I know it may seem frightening, but, for once, I have no ill intent. I won't be doing a single cruel thing to you. I won't lie to you, or let my anger out onto you," he said to the criminal, who was bound in chains, with a crystal over his horn that sapped his ability to cast through it.

He had to play the game differently, now that the Elements of Harmony were on the field, and it started here, in the dark court.

"You have spied on my people. Perhaps stolen their secrets. But, I have seen the light of harmony in person, and it has changed the way I shall deal with you and yours. Where once I was cruel, I shall now be kind. Where I once deceived, I will now be honest. No anger, but laughter. Instead of punishment... A gift, Mr. Lights Out, for you and you alone."

The unicorn was nervous, but kept a steely expression. This one had been trained. He knew the risks, and was prepared for whatever horrible thing came next.

Weiss snapped his fingers, and a portal dumped a bottle into his hands.

"In this bottle contains my gift to you. You will drink it, and from this day forward, I give you the gift that any infiltrator would kill for. I know your sort, you do what you do for Equestria, do you not? Go forth, then! Do good, as a pony with the power of invisibility and in return, never plague the Shadow Realm again!" Weiss said, throwing the potion to the unicorn, the ornate bottle rattling on the table in front of him.

The witnesses to the court were stunned. This was unusual, to the sage, who loved to smartly disguise the punishment under innuendo, expressions, and ironic metaphors. If what he said was true, if it really was as it appeared...

"And if I don't?" the unicorn guilty of espionage asked, leering at the bottle.

Weiss smiled. "You will."

It wasn't a threat, but an order.

Lights Out swallowed, feeling something dangerous run down his spine at the look in the sage's eyes. He drank the potion, and, with wide eyes, watched as his coat took on a sparkling sheen.

He disappeared, and the court was in shock, guards stock still as the criminal disappeared.

Weiss smiled indulgently, and nothing more was done.

Five years later, Weiss chortled at a newspaper.

"He couldn't even make it the whole decade!" Weiss laughed and laughed, showing the paper to Luna, who sipped at coffee nervously.

The headline was plastered with the results. Lights Out let the power go to his head, and in a short time, by the reckoning of an immortal, he was arrested for treason in Equestria. He couldn't help but abuse his new power for his own personal gain.

"You cannot honestly expect me to believe that this pony behaved exactly as you expected him to," Princess Luna said incredulously, reading over the paper.

Weiss grinned. "Well, I could hardly expect him to act any different. You know I spied on him for a year before arresting him, right? Itty bitty little Eyerocs, everywhere, at all times. They can be... So hard to spot."

One shimmered into existence, flapping above Weiss's head. The same sort of invisibility that the criminal had been given.

"Psychological profiling did the rest. He was doomed to betray you from the start. No family, no real ties to Equestria beyond his patriotic mentor. That patriotism didn't last long in the student, after the death of the teacher... It was somewhat inevitable. I could have been wrong, but, well, I wasn't. He did it to himself."

It was another black mark on Weiss's record, though what he did could have been considered quite 'good', from a twisted perspective. Benefit of the doubt, a generous gift instead of a harsh punishment. He told only the truth, and the whole truth, among what was relevant.

But, the secret key of course...

Weiss looked at his cutie mark. His special talent. "The world has a way of things, Luna. I've seen it, and you have too. It was too ironic for things not to play out that way," he said, a hint of malice entering his tone.

'He would have done it there, or here in the Shadow Realm, and since it isn't time for this villain to fall, there could only be one result,' he thought to himself, utterly confident in connections he made that had seemingly no relation to the reality around him.

He thought to the two members of his Council, and wondered what exactly it was either of them were planning. He hadn't been able to figure it out yet, but surely at least one of them had been plotting to betray him. The only question was when... and how.

'It will be fun to watch, either way,' he finally shrugged, and stood from the seat he was in, pushing his own coffee aside. Meetings like these were important. If not for friendship, then for an alibi.

He stretched. "Well, Luna, it's been a time, but you know how it is. Tell your sister I said hi. I've got places to be, things to destroy... Stuff to steal. Ta."

With that, he burst into smoke, causing several ponies in the cafe to cough violently, and making Luna huff as she had to blow a strand of her ethereal mane from her face at the shadowy wind blasting it out of place.

"Always so standoffish," she muttered with disappointment, and perhaps slight amusement.

It was sad that she couldn't seem to help him. Sad to know that he was still obsessed with play-acting as a villain. But at least he was honest with her.

Despite his best efforts, Weiss was unable to escape Celestia's attempts to make amends.

Doubly unfortunately, Celestia, lacking the power to enter dreams, kept their meetings to the waking world, and to appropriately lavish and ornate endeavors when it was "her turn".

"As thou canst see, these are jubilentils, quite expensive, but well," she pokes at one, and the magical legume laughed and giggled, releasing some of the joy it had absorbed in the soil.

"A treat, are they not?" she finishes, delicately eating one.

Weiss, unfortunately, had gotten used to a diet of crystals, metals, and monster meats, which, over decades, had changed his tastes quite a bit.

It took everything he had to remain polite and choke down the giggling plants. While the sudden surges of laughter that erupted from him were pleasant, it was soured a bit by Celestia managing to keep herself to a small polite titter.

After a while, he sighs with a smile that hadn't quite faded. "I've had better," he says with a raised brow.

The princess's own smile twists slightly. "I suppose I'll have to see what you consider better, in our next meeting."

With that, she rose from her chair, and servants took away the empty dishes, waiting for Lord Weiss to chug down the last of his wine before passing it off.

A brief, polite hug is shoved onto Weiss by the princess before she offers her goodbye, and he turns, rolling his eyes and bursting into smoke.

The entire thing was horribly horribly awkward, and Celestia mused to herself once and only once, quietly enough that no servant would hear it. "I suspect we had more fun fighting than we do befriending, isn't that so, Weiss?" she shook her head.

Either way, the good times of her and him quarreling would have to end. She needed to express trust, forgiveness, and apology in equal measure to the sage, to hopefully bring out in him what he seemed to be trying to push away.

"Maybe if I make awkward enough small talk, he'll renounce hatred just to make the diplomatic dinners stop. Luna would be pleased with that, I imagine," the princess considered, turning to her quarters to do some thinking.

Trying to establish a better relationship with a former rival was hard, but she wished to be kind, and if nothing else, the Sage deserved that much, after all that had happened.

She hoped he would not betray the trust she had given him.

"And you're sure? You're absolutely sure? Because I've seen Griffons go down into one of those treasure chambers of his, and they don't come back." Blackbeak said tensely. This new griffon acted cold and logical, and wore a black necklace that he guarded greedily. It showed that the newcomer was at least willful enough to muster up some greed, in spite of the Idol's influence on griffonkind.

For the griffons who lived in Griffonstone, the idol was a heaven-sent blessing that let them rise above their petty squabbling, but for those who chose to come to the Shadow Realm and make their lives there, it was a stifling restriction.

The Idol of Boreas. A magical artifact with one simple purpose. To turn the greed of Griffonkind to pride. It was powerful ancient magic, from a time before any living griffon. Some say that, without it, griffons would have fallen into squalor.

Blackbeak disagreed, and, in the Shadow Realm's files and stories, he read something that summed it up best. Greed, like Fire, is a wonderful servant, but a horrible master.

It was here in the Shadow Realm that griffons had fled, in search of the mastery to make their greed their servant, but they could hardly do that with the Idol's magic lain over them.

It was why Blackbeak, the criminal leader of a small gang in the Shadow Realm, had chosen to hear out this newcomer's words. He said that there was a way to steal one of the hidden treasures of Weiss Noir, the hidden treasure of Chaos Cacophony Zone.

Weiss refused to use a single enchantment in protecting the treasure chamber and what lay within it that he himself had not lain. If the gang could find one, even one single emotional flaw that the sage of darkness had, then the traps would be worthless.

But if they didn't... Well, the traps that the sage used for his greatest treasures were meant to utterly eradicate anything that wasn't him. Failure meant a one-way-trip to Elysium.

But success might mean the return of greed to griffonkind. The greatest heist to have happened in over a hundred years. Even through the pride he felt in his people, and the confidence he felt in himself, he could feel glimmers of deep avarice emerge at the thought of owning one of Lord Weiss's treasures.

'It seems the Idol of Boreas is not as powerful as they proclaim,' he thought to himself, smiling at the thought of mustering up powerful greed that shouldn't have been possible with the idol still in place, or so the legends go.

"What did you say they were called, again?" Blackbeak asked, noting the intriguing looks his gang was giving the newcomer. The weirdly calm griffon simply repeated what they said, like some kind of golem.

"The Chaos Emeralds. I know a method by which you can steal them. I offer it freely," the griffon explained blandly.

Blackbeak thought about this. It was risky, especially with the sage changing the way he handled criminal behavior in the zones.

"I'll have to talk to my gang about it. Don't call us, we'll call you," he said tersely, waving them out of the room.

They left, and as soon as they left the boundaries of the Shadow Realm, they ignited with a flash of green light.

They reached up, touching the black crystal necklace they wore softly, to make sure it was still there. Even centuries after death and rebirth through the Changeling Archive-Mind, some things were hard to remove, if they weren't detected.

This changeling in particular had once been enslaved through a black crystal made by Black Angel, and the orders persisted even through new bodies. Unable to resist, and then, incarnated later, unwilling to, the nameless changeling had returned to Tartarus to receive their master's orders. They retrieved a necklace of black crystal to maintain those orders, and now, they executed those orders.

Bring chaos and upheaval to the Shadow Realm. For Black Angel. For the freedom of his master.

For the hell of it.

(Present Chapter 52) Slow Change, In An Instant

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In Flim Flam Brothers Fashion, their work, and my own added security in the form of dark crystals that painfully banished illusion magic, were revealed to the public in spectacle.

"That's right folks, if you liked the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy, then you'll love this! Say hello to our newest and latest project!" Flim pulls a tarp off, revealing a stunning sight. Painted in Sweet-Apple-Acres red, the Great Sacred Treasure shone and hovered proudly in standby mode.

Large barrels were strapped around the "hips" of the flying machine, and where the gigantic gun arm once was, the flying machine's two forelimbs have been replaced with simple metal hooves, serving a dual purpose as landing gear and manipulators.

The cockpit had been totally changed, now a completely enclosed chamber with two large soulful eyes plastered on. The sight was, in true Equestrian fashion, particularly cheery and shiny, like the front half of a horse with the back half of a mechanical array of crystals, cleverly hidden under giant metal tassets that draped over the hips of the machine.

Ponies didn't immediately understand what the point of the machine was, until Flam clambored up onto it, and into the cockpit using a gold staircase that slide intricately out of the machine to let him up.

"Using this marvelous machine, the Flim Flam Brothers will be taking our world-class sparkling juice worldwide, to all of Equestria and beyond! This, dear onlookers, is a flying machine!" Flim said, pulling out a small necklace, gold, with a cherry-red gemstone in the shape of an apple draped from it, like his cutie mark.

Once Flam was inside, Flim held the gem up to his mouth and spoke into it, the jewel glowing as it allowed communication between ground and air. "Alright brother, things are looking good out here, go ahead and give it a fly around, show off the work," he said.

Slowly, the giant red machine lifted into the air. The flight was utterly silent, hellfire engines replaced with telekinetic enchantments that didn't require a supply of fuel to get into the air.

Ponies ooh'd and ahh'd appropriately as the machine slowly swooped over the air, before, with a flourish, Flam made the Great Sacred Treasure do something quite interesting indeed, a pair of shimmering transparent wings sprouted from the mech's sides, and it suddenly sped up dramatically!

Impressed with the show, ponies were stomping with applause as it came down to land, and as Flam slid down off the machine, the brothers high-hoofed, before popping one of the barrels of juice mounted on the side of the machine.

I shook my head with no small surprise that they were able to pilot the machine, even if they did modify it as much as they did. Even I couldn't manage to fly the bird before, it needed raw instincts and talent to keep it in the air. That was meant to be one of its biggest bottlenecks to anyone who would steal it!

Eclipse shot me a warning look as I approached the pair, and I let out a puff of air. 'Yes, yes, threatening ponies is also apparently frowned upon, yes, I think it's bullshit if that's true, no, I won't be threatening them,' I thought, trying to mentally infuse this thought into my returning eyeroll.

The two spotted me and some of their jubilation faded. "Let me begin by saying, I have no clue how you two managed to fly the Great Sacred Treasure. It should be impossible for a normal pegasus to do it, much less a pair of unicorns," I admitted.

The two shared a look. "Well, we simply used an airship's control enchantments. It's oddly shaped, but hardly harder than a sailboat to keep in the air and more aerodynamic by far," Flim explained.

I blinked. Wow, I really did miss some equestrian development, didn't I? I made Arwings specifically because keeping odd shapes in the air was impossible, practically speaking.

Finally, I shrugged. "Whatever, good job then. I hope you kept the gun, those hooves won't do the Weapon of Light's owner any good if it's rusting in some old barn. Have fun," I finally said, turning and walking away.

When I finally left Ponyville, Eclipse in tow, she gave me a long look, before nodding.

"You managed not to cause a scene. I'm really glad," she said, sighing with relief.

I scoffed. "Look, I don't care that much if people rob me, I've long since grown desensitized to that. I already laid down the law, as long as they don't make it unusable to Rainbow Dash, it's true owner, I don't care that much about what they do. It's nice to know it will be in service outside of a combat scenario anyway. It'll make sure that there's someone to keep an eye on the automatic repair enchantments," I listed off, exasperated a bit.

Eclipse nodded at each of my points. "You could have gotten angry, though, and you didn't. You didn't threaten anyone, no property damage, no evil curses. Am I wrong to assume that the thought didn't cross your mind?"

I flinched. Damn it.

I thought for a moment. "Well, there may be one irksome problem I'll need to look into. I could sense an awful lot of Wish Magic floating around. I'm concerned Fluttershy may have maxed out the output of the Star Rod of Wishes, If she wasted all the energy on some sort of constantly empowered wish, it wouldn't be able to grant any others while it's active," I explained.

"She probably used it on some poor critter and maxed it out that way. I'll see about investigating-"

"No spying," Eclipse deadpanned. I already recalled all of my Eyerocs, what more does she want?!

I deflated. "I wasn't going to spy, just check around! Eclipse, I'm being a good little pony, cut me some slack."

"And the thought of sending one of your spy-flies over to 'check around' didn't cross your mind either?" she asked. Damn it, she's way too good at sensing malicious intent. My pride is only tempered by my annoyance at the laser-guided questions.

"Okay, fine, you may have a point. No spying, no threats, no tiny enchanted golems solving my problems in the most efficient way possible," I groaned.

I drew myself up, trying to defend myself. "Look, I'm sure if there's a problem, it's nothing I can't fix without doing anything too crazy or illegal. It isn't like the Great Sacred Treasure is just going to be a cargo plane from now on, and I'm sure that the Wishing Star is just wasting power making a rabbit huge or something."

Eclipse hemmed and hawwed.

"Can we please go send Chancellor Golden Apple directly to prison now? Have I earned enough goodboy points by not robbing stories, blowing up continents and jaywalking?" I begged.

"I've been gathering up the evidence while you've been trying to get back into the habit of not doing horrible horrible things. We can go get the police involved now, if you can keep your temper in check," Eclipse nodded, finally.

I smiled. "What do I have to be angry about?"

Meanwhile, the Flim Flam brothers were generally soaking up the crowd's attention and awe at their machine, something which made for good entertainment, a decent ego boost, and of course, profit. There was plenty of cider and juice to go around, after all, and such full wallets to empty in exchange for it...

Things went a bit odd, however, when one of the ponies approached the Great Sacred Treasure.

"Hello there! And who might you be, Ma'am?" Flam asked, noting with intrigue the pony's odd mouth, and curious-looking folded wings. Along with that, there almost seemed to be a yellow glow from the blue pegasus's chest.

She looked back at her own cutie mark before answering. "Umm, I guess call me... Shooting Star! Yeah, that sounds rad. Heck of a lot better than the other one," she said.

Flam blinked. "Well, it's good to meet you, here to admire our wonderful machine? Courtesy of Sweet Apple Acres and a gift from the illustrious Rainbow Dash, of course," he deferred.

She shrugged, and from the crowd, a griffon and a few other ponies joined her. "Yeah, I guess I wanted to see it. It's a long story, but... I guess I was made from the same stuff as this thing," Shooting Star said.

Flam was confused, until, for a brief moment, the pony seemed to change, blinking between her current self, and a heavily mechanized pony with jet engines for wings. It lasted only long enough for him to notice, before suddenly she was flesh and blood again. What he did manage to see though... The same philosophy of design went into whatever this mare is as the Great Sacred Treasure. Swooping lines, Orichalcum, and Hellfire Engines galore.

"So, uhh, yeah. We're practically siblings," the former golem admitted. The emotion in her voice was uncertain. Should it be bitter? Amused? Nostalgic for something that never was?

Flam simply winced. When it came to their earlier business dealings, everything always seemed to go very sour once family mixed into it after the fact, if this robotic pony thought this machine was 'practically siblings' with her, this could turn ugly if she didn't like what they were doing...

"Well, I assure you, we've taken care not to remove the most critical components, it's just been a refit, a few modifications to the chassis, really basic things, ma'am," he hastily assured.

Shooting Star looked at the machine that was meant to destroy her in some insane plot that would never be.

"So you're just going to be flying this thing around, delivering cider and stuff? Nothing else?" she asked.

Flam looked especially nervous, considering to his knowledge, the only 'else' the Great Sacred Treasure was meant for was blasting things apart with great prejudice.

"Yes, our primary goal is to use it to deliver Apple Family products all across Equestria, a rather laudable goal, wouldn't you agree?" he asked nervously.

Shooting Star looked at the machine quietly.

It was just a golem-powered mechsuit, after all. It didn't even have her Againte Core to make it almost perfect. What impressions the Great Sacred Treasure must have had were probably bare whispers compared to herself.

An amalgam of what must have been dozens of enchantments, from dozens of different ponies all together. Attributing it pony qualities was probably inaccurate. Simpleminded.

"Hey sis", she said quietly, and somewhat awkwardly, before walking away with the rest of her friends.

"Wait!" Flam called after her, and she paused long enough to hear the salespony's words.

"Now, perhaps this is out of line, but if what you're saying is correct, I would be remiss not to speak with you on the subject more! If you're so invested in our new... Whichever word isn't offensive to you to refer to this machine, then I would be more than happy to speak more about it, perhaps explain some of the things we did to bring it up to date with Equestrian magical technology?" He said.

In truth, he was perhaps a bit biased. The Great Sacred Treasure was an amazing piece of work, and an outdated one too. It turned out to be his two favorite qualities when it came to working on the machine, and here stood a pony who was apparently of the same make and model as it. Not trying to speak to her more about it, well, it would be a waste of a good business opportunity! Having to work with an outdated machine was enough of a chore as it is until they upgraded it. He could scarcely imagine how annoying it would be embody one.

Shooting Star considered his words. Did she really want to learn more about the machine? She really only came here to look at it because she felt odd about the entire situation, and wanted that feeling to go away or resolve itself. Unfortunately, the odd feeling had only grown stronger since she saw the Great Sacred Treasure, especially since the two brothers had apparently painstakingly anthroponyphized it to look like a big red pegasus.

Maybe it wouldn't hurt to learn about this stuff. Like learning biology in school, but infinitely weirder, and with milkshakes.

Gilda gave her a look, questioning if she needed to pull out that classic Gilda fury to get this pony to step off if he was stepping on any hooves, but she shook her head.

"Alright, meet us at Sugarcube Corner if you want to talk. Bring your brother too, if you want," she said to the mustached unicorn, who nodded eagerly.

https://youtu.be/PUoN4lfF0hE?list=PL1kU0pk5M3GCwzveqamX71sW3RmCzuXB5

Twilight was busy performing experiments when Spike approached her. He had been in and out of the library a lot recently, and while he still had chores, she had reduced them by a vast amount ever since he began hanging out with his new dragon friends.

A lot of it was just busywork, after all, things to do for a baby dragon who would otherwise stay in the house reading comics and scampering underhoof. It was less necessary, now that her little assistant was starting to come out of his shell more.

"Hello Spike, back so soon?" she asked, smiling gently at the baby dragon, who looked a bit shifty and nervous. A familiar sight for Twilight, who knew exactly how he looked whenever he was working up the courage to ask for something he didn't know if she'd give him.

"Well, yeah. Umm, before I ask this, just uh, try to hear me out," he said, scuffing the floor with a foot nervously.

"The guys have been talking, and well, they decided they wanted to go on a road trip to the Dragonlands, see if things have changed, see it for the first time, maybe even meet some other dragons, and..." He looked even more nervous. He hadn't ever asked for something like this before, and it was a big deal, what he was about to ask for.

This wasn't like asking to stay at Twilight's parents for a day, or Celestia babysitting him when Twilight was at the doctor's office.

Twilight waited patiently, but she had an idea of what he wanted.

"Can I go with them? Just for a little bit?" he said, his voice lilting.

Twilight gave it its due attention. She hated to say it, because she really did love Spike, but, while Dr. Real's children were stunningly polite, if a bit odd, she really didn't know them all that well. She especially didn't know the Dragonlands that well.

"How long is a 'little bit', Spike?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I dunno, a few days? A week at most. We're going to fly in an Arwing! Have you seen those things go? They're almost as fast as Rainbow Dash!" he said excitedly.

It was a hard decision, and the longer the pause before her final answer dragged on, the more Spike seemed to deflate.

She sighed. "It sounds dangerous, Spike, are you positive? I can't go with you with things like they are right now, and if something came up, I wouldn't be able to come get you, like I can when you're at the Star Sanctuary," she explained.

Spike looked down. "I know. I just really want to go. Sorry," he apologized out of habit.

Twilight pursed her lips, and finally broke. "On two conditions."

Spike's smile lit up the room as he beamed, all that lost energy flooding back into the tiny drake.

"One, you do what I say, I'm going to write a list, and I want you to follow it. Daily letters, so I know not to worry, staying out of trouble, I'm going to make a whole list, and you're going to follow it as if the princess herself signed it into law, got it?" Twilight asked firmly, and Spike nodded so fast his spines flopped around in helpless jubilation.

"Two, I'm packing for you, and you're bringing everything I pack. No 'losing' it before you go. Paper, toiletries, inkpots, books on the dragonlands, backup books, backup book protectors for your books," she continued, and this managed to suck some of the fun out of Spike's mood. If she had her way, he would be carrying a backpack larger than he was...

"Three-" she attempted, but Spike interrupted.

"Hey, you said you'd only have two conditions!" Spike whined a bit.

Twilight shook her head once. "Well, I changed my mind. I've got one more."

She leaned down and hugged Spike. "Going all the way to the Dragonlands, without me to look after you, meeting dragons? You're scaring me a bit Spike, so promise me, if something goes wrong, you come right home, alright? Even if it means it's a wasted trip. You learned how to make those portals, and I'm sure your friends know how too."

She pulled away and looked Spike right in the eyes. "If something bad happens, you come straight home."

Spike realized then that he was asking too much from Twilight. Too much that she was barely able to give to a baby dragon wanting to go somewhere on a whim. It was pretty clear right then from how her eyes had a bit too much of a wet sheen for her to have been at-all approving of this sudden road trip, but fairly helpless to actually deny it to him.

"I promise, one-hundred percent, Twilight, if anything bad happens, or anything goes wrong, I'll come home right then and there, I promise," he repeated, hugging her back.

"Fourth," she began again, making him huff with indignation.

"Make some friends! Is the trip really worth taking if you don't?" Twilight finally asked, smiling sappily.

As he grinned at the statement, Twilight couldn't help but think to herself.

'Darn it, Spike, couldn't you have gotten a bit older before growing up on me like this?' she thought with a happy sad-smile, blinking away a small tear before he could see it.

(Present Chapter 53) Path to Victory

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Flim and Flam listened with rapt attention as Shooting Star, formerly Metal Dash, formerly "I thought I was Rainbow Dash, but since that ship has sailed, I've got to be a big pony and be me instead."

"And it's all thanks to this," she patted her chest, where a warm yellow glow hummed beneath her chest.

"Maybe I could have figured out how to live without it, but... Not being able to remember things, not being able to grow as a pony... I don't know if that would have been worth it. I'm really grateful for this Wishing Star thing, it really gave me my life back... Or I guess, it just gave me my life in the first place," she sighed.

Flam mentally cracked his neck. This was a job for smooth talking, and while his brother was normally taking the lead, the pony was a bit too clever to not be obsessively stunned trying to think out the ramifications of a truly sapient artificial pony, one that was, as he tactfully kept to himself, "Running on borrowed museum artifacts and cobbled together on a hope and a dream."

"Well, it sounds to me as if it was quite the inspiring story! I can't imagine what that sage was thinking, acting as if something of your stature was the same as some common animate statue. Empowered by the ultimate Pegasus Magic, parts constructed by the finest minds of an era we are rediscovering wonders from by the hour! Capable of feats most pegasi would dread to attempt!" he exclaimed.

While Shooting Star was pretty sure she was being buttered up, she couldn't help but metaphorically preen. Second best to the original may have been grating, but that only made the compliments a bit harder to ignore in this case.

"If you ask me, things turned out quite magnificently for you, did they not? Why, I would even dare to say, the only way you could have turned out better is if you hadn't had to deal with that brute in the first place," Flim nodded, interjecting.

Gilda and Trixie both nodded emphatically, while Sunset awkwardly shrugged.

"Yeah, Weiss is bad news. Anyone who managed to get out of his crazy orbit is alright in my book," Gilda said, slamming back the last of her rootbeer float and setting the mug down with a clatter. In a pink poofy flash, the mug was replaced with a full one.

"Trixie managed to avoid the worst of it, but she can't help but agree. He orchestrated a musical number to try and ruin my act, just so I would go along with whatever it was he was after!"

Sunset looked displeased, and glanced down at her necklace. While Weiss didn't make it according to his original specifications, he still had a hand in the magical artifacts that were actively keeping her from ceasing to exist. Badmouthing him felt wrong, even though, from an objective point of view, he was a rather terrifying individual in general.

Shooting Star gave one last heavy sigh. "Yeah. So, if you want my advice, Flim, Flam, I'd get as far away from him as ponyly possible. If he doesn't hate you, it's because he's got a use for you, at least, that's what me and the girls seem to agree on. I keep feeling like the other shoe is going to drop-"

That damn memory appeared in her head again, unbidden, of being crushed and tossed aside like a prop for dramatic effect, on the day Weiss Noir freed himself.

She forced herself to finish: "-With you two working on that Great Sacred Doohickey or whatever you're calling it" she explained

Flim and Flam shared a look. It was time for one of those situations where everypony wins, given a bit of prodding.

"It stands to reason that you would be in more danger of that than us, Miss Star," Flam admitted, stroking his mustache.

"Huh?"

Flim nodded. "If that so called Wishing Star is just keeping your head on straight, then you haven't gotten a single thing in your corner, when it comes to the other nasty stuff that might be installed."

Shooting Star suddenly looked tense. "That shouldn't matter though, I mean, I'm a pony as long as I've got the Wishing Star, so who cares about any 'installations' or whatever?"

Flim and Flam both shook their head. "But it's a transformation. Transformations hide the true form underneath, like putting on a mask, but the mask is real too. If there was something nasty left behind-" Flam began.

"-And believe you me, there was some truly nasty stuff in the Great Sacred Treasure. Weiss Noir absolutely did not want anypony using that thing who didn't fit a very particular criteria, and went to great lengths to prevent it, even if they didn't quite work right..." Flim interjected.

Flam nodded. "Then a transformation wouldn't stop whatever was in your original form from causing problems."

Gilda, ever the cynic, decided to raise an eyebrow and lean over. "Let me guess, traveling salesponies nonpareil have a quick, cheap, and good solution, checks off all three boxes?" she said sardonically, taking some of the sting out of Shooting Star's nervous realization that they might be right.

"Hey, yeah, maybe you're right, but this kinda sounds like you're after something, so spill it," she barked.

The brothers took off their hats solemnly. "We hardly need to be after something, we'd get it if we didn't charge a dime, helping you out," Flam began.

"To put it simply, Miss Shooting Star, if we, for lack of a better word, popped you open and looked around, we'd learn things about magic that can't be learned a single other place in all of Equestria and beyond. That's just for looking. What do you think brother, is that worth a checkup from two of Equestria's finest tinkery types?" he asked, turning to his brother.

"Indubitably, my brother. That old bat Granny Smith taught us a very valuable lesson. Honesty is the best policy when everypony stands to profit." Flim continued, surprised but pleased with his brother's uncharacteristic leading of the con- conversation, that's what this is. Doubly uncharacteristic, then.

Shooting Star was sorely tempted, she still felt slow, in the way her body seemed to not be as 100% as she would like, and while the Wishing Star had been pulling double duty keeping her mind and body the way she liked it, she could tell that the relic was working at its limits, trying to do so much with so little. Something twinged in her mind that a bit more health for her old form meant a lot more health for her real self.

And that was ignoring the fear that Weiss Noir might still have some kind of way to control her, or shut her off.

"And you won't mind if somepony who also knows a thing or two about magic keeps an eye on this so called Checkup?" Sunset interjected. This was getting a little too real for her to sit it out as a casual conversation, and she felt the protectiveness well up over the new member of her in-group.

She still felt terribly awkward when Gilda and Trixie gave her a thorough dressing down for "Acting like a complete sociopath to Metal Dash" when they first met, and she gushed over her capabilities.

To their credit, the brothers didn't hesitate. "Of course, more eyes mean fewer mistakes, isn't that right?" Flam asked rhetorically.

Shooting Star finally caved. "Alright, fine, make me the six-million-bit pony then, but after you make sure you-know-who can't just tell me to drop dead," she insisted.

"Business before pleasure, of course," Flam said with a winning smile.

'What an excellent end to a skillful con- er, conversation, right, conversations are what we do now, apparently,' he thought, shaking hooves with the artificial pegasus.

https://youtu.be/EtwxLSIWV4o?list=PLEE9B8E4750CB344A

"P-p-please, Aunty, I swear, I don't know what this is all about, I- I didn't know that Bugsly would do... That Bugsly would do something like thi-his," Blueblood sobs behind the bars of the dungeon.

Celestia looked sad, stricken even.

"Explain why the guards found evidence in your room, Blueblood," she said calmly.

The prince looked shocked, "Evidence? Of what?! I- I don't know! Please, I don't know what all of this is about, A-Aunty," the prim and proper unicorn sobbed, terrified of the charges mounted against him. High Treason. Assault on the Elements of Harmony.

"In your room, Blueblood. There was a diary, diagrams, explaining how to train a Wannabeetle to operate enchanted machinery. Reports that tie you to illicit activities done as a supporter of Chapter Black, what am I to do with you, if you cannot explain this?" she explained.

I took the opportunity to burst in dramatically, barging through the dungeon hall with aplomb, while Eclipse followed after me.

"Weiss, when I said you should obey the law when pursuing these ponies, this is not what I meant!" she said with exasperation.

I chuckled. "Look, Eclipse, when it comes to things like this," I waved as guards held spears to my neck nervously.

"The law at its most powerful is executed through its highest authority," I finish, as Celestia turns and stares at me with confusion, and no shortage of amusement and disdain. I was interrupting something very sensitive, after all.

"Hello, Celestia. As I'm not simply allowed to beat someone to a pulp or threaten them in the streets to extract the truth from them, I have decided to concede to my student's demands, and learn once more how to operate within the law," I bowed smugly.

Celestia gave a sigh. "That is wonderful, Weiss, I am dealing with something I would rather not have your presence for, however, so it would be most welcome if you would leave. It isn't exactly legal for you to march into the dungeons as you've done."

I rose, and waggled my finger. "I'm doing you a favor here, so cut it with that. Give me your blessing, your will of authority, and I'll solve this entire problem for you within a week. Make me above your laws long enough to investigate, and you know I will bring out those responsible."

She opened her mouth, but I interrupted it with a snarl. "Scratch that, I'll do it in three days. An auspicious number, and far more impressive for my record. Give me your blessing to act, using your authority as ruler of Equestria, and Chapter Black's criminal elements will be excised in the next three days," I boast.

She closes her mouth, and begins to think. I walk over to the cell where the sniveling, or rather, sniffling prince is sitting, on the verge of bawling his eyes out.

He doesn't notice me until I speak. "What did you do, Prince Blueblood? Are you an enemy of Equestria? Of me?" I whisper through the bars, and he finally makes eye contact with me.

I watch his expression, and after moments of confusion, and subtle shifts in the prissy unicorn's tear-stricken eyes, I've got all I need.

"Wh-what?" he babbles uncertainly, reacting as I would expect from someone utterly ignorant of the game he's a pawn in.

"You're a punk, but you aren't guilty. I'm going to utterly decimate those who are, so stop your whining. " I say calmly.

Eclipse and Celestia's eyes widen.

I shoot them a glare, is there something on my face?

"He's not a member of Chapter Black, you imbeciles. He's a patsy. Chapter Black doesn't recruit useless ponies to its highest ranks," I explain simply.

"Wh- What is that supposed to mean?! I am a Prince of Equestria! You cannot speak of me like that!"

"Shut up. Uncle's talking, and he knows a little more about this situation than your precious Aunty does. I happen to like bumbling imbeciles, in a sort of ironic way, so don't wear out that one point in your favor," I bark, shutting up the unicorn who has the decency to squeak quietly with fright.

I return my attention to Celestia. "Three days. Give me three days."

Celestia finally sighs. "How can I trust you? I quite literally know you'll answer that with-"

"You can't," we both say in unison.

I smirk. "But you can trust Eclipse Flash."

Eclipse, who had mostly been stunned by this entire situation, either by my callousness or my way of speaking to Celestia, but either way, she is stunned even more as the princess turns her gaze on my student.

"What do you plan to do if I accept this offer?" The alicorn asks.

"I speak to the member of Chapter Black's highest echelons that you have impounded somewhere like a common animal, of course. The one that's right under your nose."

If a Wannabeetle could pretend to be a pegasus, it could pretend to be a Chapter Black member, after all. And only a sapient thing could have fooled a Weapon of Light. There's no getting around that, even if I made mistakes in the security of my Great Sacred Treasure, I know that only something capable of rational thought would be able to use it as well as that Wannabeetle did.

I had a chink in their armor to pry open, and one that was all alone.

Alone with no one to keep me from doing what I do best.

A red dragon stared into a hut. The elder dragons told him that Weiss Noir, the literal legend himself, had returned. Garble, who had been raised from a hatchling on stories like those, knew that he had to do it. He had to fulfill his heritage, his destiny, even!

If there was one thing every hatchling knew from elder dragons bragging, (or complaining), was that, while he was alive, robbing Weiss Noir was a rite of passage. Apparently, after the Dragon Mouse had been robbed, and promptly threw an insane fit, it became tradition for dragons to try and steal from him, until he stopped getting mad, and thus, it stopped being funny.

Then it got really funny again, and dragons started doing it again. But that's irrelevant, what's important is that Garble sniffed it out, a genuine Shadow Realm Relic, just sitting there in a hut, with nothing but some old Zebra to stand between him and it...

As soon as the mare left, he ran in and grabbed it like the sage was on his heels, running through the Everfree Forest as fast as he could.

"I did it!" he roared, before clamping his jaws shut, and repeating in a quieter tone as he took flight.

"I did it!" he muttered. The first dragon in six-hundred years to steal from the Dragon Mouse! (Or one of his friends, clearly)

He laughed a bit, then louder and louder with glee. Everyone would be so impressed, so shocked to find out that he took this big dumb pot thing fair and square!

All that boring effort trying to learn to sniff out treasures, to tell the differences between treasureses that determined who something belonged to, all for this!

"Hahahahaahahahah-URP!" Garble choked as an airship suddenly crashed into him, sending him crashing to the ground painfully, and making the weird airship make a sudden landing nearby.

"Uhh, are you sure he's alright?" a squeaky voice squeaked.

"Yeah, if he's anything like my bros, he'll be up in like a minute flat. This isn't the first time an Arwing has ran someone over," a slightly less squeaky but still verymuch so voice answered.

"Whuzzhuh?" Garble garbled, blinking stars from his vision.

"Hey, wake up sleepyhead, we just ran you over by mistake," Padparadscha said, slapping the red dragon across the face several times.

"I really hope his-" Ruby began, pointing towards the large urn on the ground dramatically.

"Really cool pot didn't get broken!" he finished.

Sapphire scratched his chin. "It looks fine, brother."

Spike looked at it uncomprehendingly, until something about it seemed to trigger a memory. "Hey, I've seen that before, that pot belongs to Zecora!" he shouts, realizing where he had seen the magical artifact before.

Padparadscha drops the red dragon's spines, letting their head flop to the ground, tongue poking out unconsciously.

"That so? Looks like we've got some topics to discuss once our little friend wakes up," Paddy retorts with a raised brow.

Ruby tried to tug the pot away, but even unconsciously, the red dragon refused to give it up.

"I don't think I can get it without breaking it!" he shouted.

"He's holding onto it tighter than I held that trashcan that one time!" he continued, giving up after a moment.

Spike blinked, and as Sapphire investigated the dragon to see if it could be pried from their grip some other way, Paddy explained with a smirk.

"I told you we weren't exactly normal dragons. Ruby here isn't interested in gold and gems, he fills his room with junk. Just about anything that isn't worth anything, poor guy can't help himself. Sapphire likes taking stuff, but he just moves it around. No hoarding at all, but I swear he's the reason why there's GP in all the Shadow Realm's couches."

Spike considered this. He read about how dragons were supposed to have big hordes of treasure, but Twilight had raised him better than that, and he kept the stashing to a minimum, usually. More of a snack stash than a horde.

"Well, what about you?" Spike asked, as Sapphire tried to pry open the red drake's claws, only for them to suddenly curl up around it protectively in their sleep.

Padparadscha looked shifty. "Nothing weird," he said weirdly.

Ruby grinned. "He hoards ponies!"

"No! I do not! I just like bringing individuals with extreme potential and magical power together at places of my choosing!"

"That statement is implicative!" Ruby retorted with a broad smile, as Sapphire finally collapsed on his rear, his grip on the Krak Pot slipping and sending him falling back.

"Where did you even learn that word, you lunk?! Look, it isn't that weird, I just throw conventions and parties and stuff. Ask Eclipse Flash, she knows!" Paddy flushed, crossing his arms with a huff.

"Our instincts have encouraged strange habits. Our friends do not hold us in contempt for those habits." Sapphire interjected, and Spike nodded quickly in response, trying to be understanding about it.

"Hey, I know what you mean. I mean, sort of," Spike attempted.

"...One time I hid a bunch of rock candy under my bed and ruined it, and now Twilight doesn't let me have any," he admitted, trying to offer a story of his own.

The trio gave him a silent few seconds of staring, before Paddy broke it with a grin. "Okay, that's pretty funny."

Soon, the other flier who was going along with them came to a landing, the big red metal pony opening up to reveal one of the brothers.

"What's the problem?!" he shouted down to them. It was odd that he had been paid so much to deliver barrels of Cider to the Dragonlands, and so suddenly, but considering that the apparent intended recipients were Weiss Noir's 'Nephews', it wasn't totally unreasonable.

"Sorry, cider guy! We ran someone over!" Ruby shouted, pointing to the dragon in question.

Flam sighed. "I'm paid by the job, not by the hour, is there nothing you can do to get us back in the air?"

Padparadscha shrugged. "He was heading the same way we are. Dump him in the ship, he'll wake up when he wakes up," the little pink dragon suggested.

Spike did not approve of this plan one bit, but before he could voice his complaint, Ruby had already picked up the dragon and did exactly that, dumping him into the back of the Arwing.

"Job done!" Ruby admitted proudly, and they all piled back in to finish the flight to the Dragonlands, their unconscious and unwilling passenger clinging to the Krak-pot like it was the most important thing in the world.

(Present Chapter 54) Gamemaster

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https://youtu.be/kpP2dS48Xfc?list=PLpZa5_1LTfx6fNHqBIi0_3oMH7VUAqXKi

I could tell Eclipse Flash wasn't happy. She had this idea in her mind of law that was incompatible with me going to Celestia and whinging and whining until I got my way.

But this couldn't wait for the slow gears of bureaucracy. I'm too used to solving problems like this as instantaneously as possible.

"So, before I go in here, Eclipse, you need to know some things. I'm going to lie to this bug. I'm going to cheat. I'm going to threaten them horribly, and promise them insane, seemingly impossible things. They'll tell me everything I want to know, and then, I will move on to the next," I explain calmly.

"That sounds..." she trails off. Like what? Efficient? Naturally, it is. All of those things are tools in my toolbox that have been honed longer than she's been conscious.

Checking her face for any telltale signs of moral outrage, I find nothing too horrible, just some nervousness that is normal when people are introduced to my methods.

"Just let me do the talking, and interject if you need to. It's time I do my job."

She looks confused now. "Your job?"

I smirk as I move to open the door into the private room where "Bugsly" is being held.

"Scaring bad little ponies into being good again. Or, I suppose, bugs, in this case," I shrug, before opening the door.

The wannabeetle is chained to the chair, and upon seeing me, begins to thrash, clearly stressed and panicked.

My smile grows. 'Finally, someone who just knows to be afraid. Downright refreshing, at this point' I think to myself. It will save me a lot of trouble, moving forwards.

I snap my fingers, casting a Homeward Portal to drop a small box onto the table as I approach, pulling the chair out slowly, and sitting down as Eclipse finds a spot behind me from which to observe.

The bug has stopped thrashing, and is now just shivering. I open the box, and slide it over.

When the bug sees what is inside it, it stops entirely.

I light my horn, and burn away its chains with some black flames, watching as the wannabeetle slowly takes out the box's contents, a thick roll of magical bandages, retrieved from some evidence locker, and begins wrapping itself with them.

Eclipse looks as interested as I do, watching the symbols sewn into the bandages come to life, glowing with illusion and shapeshifting charms that allow the beetle to quickly take the form of a plain looking pony.

When the final wrapping is in place, she looks no different from any other mare. The illusion is seamless, in the way absolute power is.

'Interesting.' I think to myself. 'It has a preferred form. I can tell how comforting it is to look like that, to this creature...'

Her eyes are red with exhaustion, but she doesn't have a fearful expression. "Just kill me. I'm not going to tell you anything."

I tilt my head. "Curious. You seem to think I'd want to kill you. I dare say, I haven't ever done that before. Why are you so afraid I'll start now?" I ask, plastering a tender smile onto my face.

Her eyes narrow. Clever, she's not immediately barking out that I murdered that one fellow. Gourmet? I don't remember what his name actually was. Very dead, though, I remember that much.

If she did, that would have immediately outed her as Chapter Black. The part that's actually doing the crimes and pissing me off, that is.

I watch as the false pony stares, waiting for me to continue.

"Hmm. Carrot or stick?" I muse out loud.

When I spot the small flinch, my smile widens. Stick it is.

"So, tell me, what do you know about me? What did they tell you? I'm going to be frank, you're a fucking member of Chapter Black, Okay? I know you are. You're the exact kind of individual that would genuinely be useful to them. So, that said, what did he promise you? That he would kill you if you didn't steal my Weapon of Light?" I asked, watching their reactions.

It was obvious they had little practice hiding their emotions while dressed up and wrapped in illusions, but I could tell they seemed disinterested. Their weakness wasn't their fear of death, though they certainly had it...

"No, it was something more than that. A fellow beetle, maybe? 'You do this and I won't smush Mr. Bugsly'? Because if that's the case, I'll be sorely disappointed. That little brat of a prince really seemed to adore you, and he might have had the backup to help, with how obsessive he seems over his precious pet. You couldn't have left him a note? Dressed up and told him before framing him for attempted murder?" I ask, standing up and approaching the Wannabeetle.

I was getting closer, I could feel it. Something was missing, though.

"No... Not a fellow bug then. It had to have been something, though. Unless there was no love lost between you and your wayward master. Was that it, then? You consign the prince to the dungeon, and get this lovely disguise? Play out your fantasies?"

She was getting angry, I could see her muscles tense beneath her disguise. I was finally starting to prick closer and closer to the truth.

I walked behind the disguised Wannabeetle, and leaned in close. "Would it be worth it? Was it really so awful? So terrible, pretending to be a pet, when you're clearly so much more?" I whispered.

She was trying not to listen to my honeyed words.

"You know, your kind wouldn't be the first... I still know it in my heart, how to... Forgive," I said, testing the word in my mouth. If it got this victim to break more quickly, then forgiveness might very well make it into my toolbox once again.

Or at least, the promise of it would.

"Imagine it, all the Wannabeetles, given things to inhabit so much finer than these rags. My ponies could do it, you know... I could do it. One spell, you fall asleep, and wake up a pony. A real pony," I say in a quiet, smooth voice that ripples with truth.

I lean in right next to her ear, the little flap flicking as I deliver the killing blow. "The ponies, I protected... The Windego, I welcomed, I housed their spirits in new flesh... The changelings... I forgave, despite their actions... I could do it to every Wannabeetle. Bring you all under my banner once more."

My body ripples, as I lose cohesion slightly, my voice changing to something darker as I watch her sweat under the heat, the fear, and above all else, the temptation.

"I have no love left to lose for Chapter Black, but Wannabeetles? Your kind was once a prize of the Shadow Realm. Even in that era, they had a place there. Even you could have a place among us. Without fear, and with all your heart desires..."

The air ripples with heat, and they shy away from the threatening aura that begins to underline my promises.

"If you tell me everything you know about Chapter Black, that is," I finish, slipping around in one smooth movement and returning to my chair and returning to dreadfully mundane solidity, as if none of that had happened. I restrain myself and my anger back to manageable levels.

She takes several breaths. I glance to Eclipse Flash, whose eyes are wide. The wannabeetle speaks, drawing my gaze back to them.

"There's nothing I can tell you. I'm not afraid of you," she retorts boldly.

"YES YOU ARE."

I explode, flooding the room with my blazing, immaculate self, a wall of purple and white embers, courtesy of Nightmare Moon's little trick of turning immaterial.

In the next moment, I return back to normal in a flash, coughing lightly.

"Sorry, sorry, it's just, it's this big thing, alright?" I say disarmingly, summoning a glass of water that I sip at while they cower at the back of the room, having flung themselves from their chair and pressed their body against the back wall.

"Weiss!" Eclipse shouts, grabbing me by the shoulder.

I look at her, and she shakes her head warningly.

I sigh. That was my one and only warning.

"Perhaps we've gotten off on the wrong foot here. Hoof, feeler, whatever," I wave.

"Why can't you tell me anything? You've refused to say you don't know anything. Are you being listened to, right this minute? Surely, you can tell me why it has to be a secret. None of this has to leave this room, of course," I say, picking up the panicked victim and placing them gently back on their chair, brushing off the dust with little puffs of prestidigitation.

They look off balance, and I sense a spike of fear from them as I question their reasons.

I summon a sandwich, and another glass of water, sliding them over to the bug.

"Not drugged, I can assure you."

After several moments of silence, I calm down as much as they do, nervously nibbling at the sandwich and sipping at the water, and I begin to finally grasp what their weakness is. I had almost hit the jackpot earlier, but this... That hesitance, that she is afraid someone will find out she told me...

If she isn't afraid of dying, and she isn't tempted by rewards beyond measure, not cowed by threats or allured by promises from me, both personal and societal...

"Ahh. Of course. That ugly four letter word. I was joking earlier, but it seems I was almost right. Someone you love has been threatened, isn't that so?"

They try to school their expression into something neutral. Literally a red flag on its own.

"Eclipse, bring the head of staff for Canterlot Castle here. I believe the secret lies in the pony, rather than the wannabeetle," I say, prompting a sudden spike of panic. I notice them reaching, trying to tap something, presumably on the bandages disguising them, but with a lance of black crystal, I bind their hooves to the chair.

"Ah ah ah. Why would you want to change forms? That one seems to be the one you're most comfortable in, isn't it?" I ask.

It all clicks into place, I wave for my student to stop, she had been going to do as I ordered, but now, it isn't necessary.

"I assumed that the bug was in the perfect position to plant evidence, and that's true, but also not true. A member of staff would be equally poised to do so, and easier as well. The prince's pet, moonlighting as castle staff, given bandages of disguise by a mysterious backer with knowledge of illusion and dark magic combined..."

I stood up and began to pace as the wannabeetle's face soured.

"But of course, you can hardly have a constant presence in and around the lovely prince's room to plant up to date evidence without dealing with him and his... Unique charms. I guess there's no accounting for taste, is there?" I smirk.

"So no matter how it started, you've got a fine motive, after all, what place could be safer than the dungeons? Certainly safer than the casket he would be in if you didn't obey, if you didn't do these small, but increasingly obtuse favors... Prepare him as a scapegoat, for minor crimes at first just in case, then for bigger ones, again, just in case..."

"Be quiet," they whisper.

'Oh, what a wonderful pair of words! What music to my ears!' I think to myself.

"Then of course, I don't need to bloviate on about what you already know. There's no need for pontificating here. Either Prince Blueblood goes to the dungeons, or he goes into a casket, is that the promise you were made?"

I wait for her to shout at me to shut up, as that's usually the next step, but little miss Bugsly here seems willing to surprise me with a return to silence.

I take a deep breath, approaching her, sliding the table quietly away, so I can walk right up in front of the chair she's bound to.

"Let me tell you a little secret..." I begin conspiratorially.

"The ones responsible for fouling up my plans, for convincing your tiny bug brain to steal my Great Sacred Treasure... The ones responsible for threatening my wonderful, wonderful plans... The ponies who are a threat to my little ponies, my precious Longma. You seem to believe otherwise, but..."

"I won't fucking kill them." I snarl, and the implication is clear.

"Is your precious Prince Blueblood one of them?"

The wannabeetle hangs their head and shakes it, defeated. Either they tell me what I want to know, or, as far as they know, I inflict on the prince a truly horrible fate.

Eclipse grabs me and forcibly pulls me out of the room.

"What the hell was that?" she barks, and I can tell she's disturbed in spite of my warnings.

"Hey, I told you I would use lies and threats, you already know I'm not going to fuck with the prince. It's just part of the narrative I'm spinning," I say, trying to defend myself.

The silence is long and awkward.

"Just let me do the rest of this interview, will you, Weiss?" she asks, and I shrug.

"Go for it. I softened em up for you, and we're pretty much done anyway."

She walks in and plays an adequate good-cop. It doesn't take long for the quietly crying bug to give Eclipse a list of names, while she assures them that Blueblood would be protected from "Black Angel", though Eclipse doesn't recognize the name offhand.

"You've been through a lot. We'll make sure they don't get away with making you do all of this," my student says, finally jotting down the last of it.

It takes a long time for Eclipse to do what I planned on doing, following up my threats and disturbing behavior with compassion, kindness, and every form of schmoozing under the sun, but eventually, the Wannabeetle, or "Miss Shelly", as she prefers, spills the beans in full.

Black Angel approached her, first with Shadow Realm Magic that gave her a crude facimily of pony form, then, later on, a more advanced version, produced by a unicorn named "Gatekeeper".

After that, came the threats. Black Angel's signature play. It was really elegantly simple, he would simply threaten to murder someone, prove that he could have it done, and things would fall into place from there.

It was the kind of strategy that only fell apart when someone finally decided that dying was a superior alternative, or, in this case, that there was no choice but to disobey. No alternative to the threat in question.

'Honestly, shit like this is what made Black Angel's 'schemes' so pathetic the first time around. When your entire 'conspiracy' is just people scared that you personally will kill them, all it takes is one person falling out of line for it all to collapse,' I thought disdainfully to myself.

Eclipse finally finished with the rest of the interrogation, approaching with a notebook filled with evidence that a small mechanical limb slipped into a metal pouch on her armor.

I followed her out of the room, and she whirred on me.

"You want to explain that, Weiss?" she says, clearly trying to restrain her anger towards me.

"It was all calculated to pull out her weaknesses and exploit them. Thanks to that, she told you everything we needed to know," I said simply.

She shook her head. "No, Weiss, that's not the problem, the problem is that you were enjoying it. When did you get a taste for this sort of thing?"

She sighs. "This is going to be more work than I thought, Weiss. You were clearly having the time of your life, breaking that Wannabeetle down."

I made a face. "She did try to kill several ponies. Pity well is a bit bottomed out there. Look, do you want to deal with my sadistic tendencies right this minute, or do you want to stop Blueblood from getting killed, because that's what happens now that she's spilled the beans," I jerk a head back to the interrogation room, where royal guards are already running in to restrain the prisoner.

"What?" Eclipse said, suddenly looking sober and at-attention.

Prince Blueblood scratched his chest, annoyed by the horrible itching there. It had started itching as soon as one of the ebony-coated guards shoved him in here, and hadn't stopped since.

"I loath this horrible place so much," he whined, sure that the itching was some horrible disease from being touched by a mere guard's filthy filthy hooves.

The itching intensified, and he began reaching for his coat, prying apart the seam in places, trying to get at the piano wire kept inside it. Why did his coat have piano wire sewn into it?

Something suddenly felt terribly wrong as he pulled the hidden metal wire from out of his coat where it had been cleverly sewn in by the tailor.

"Aunty?" Blueblood's voice came out quietly, hesitantly.

He realized what was going on. Any noble worth their salt is warned about it. Mind Control Magic, or Body Control. He had been 'trained' to resist it, but in this day and age, it was a pitiful sort of training that was quickly abandoned in favor of more "enriching" pursuits like mapmaking and complaining about poorly made maps.

"H-Help!" he screamed, realizing with dawning horror that the guards in front of his cell were frozen still. If he could see them, he would have seen their pained expressions, and their darkened eyes, sure signs that they too were enchanted by some sort of dark magic spell.

He didn't want to look at what his body was doing with the wire, wanted to squeeze his eyes shut. He called out for help once, but now, whoever was controlling him forbid it. He couldn't cry out again.

I smashed open the door, and with a roar of hatred, unleashed black flames that flooded the entire room. They weren't as strong as they could be, I didn't have my Vancian Magic anymore, but I still had so very much hatred to use.

After a moment, I cut off the flow. The guards in the dungeon had collapsed, like puppets with their strings cut. I felt my black fire eradicate the Corrupt Crystals controlling them, little fragments embedded in their skin, erased because I demanded it.

I ran forwards, as two guards dashed into the room, more thralls, who were cleverly ordered to hide outside for just such an occassion.

"Go! Get the prince!" I roared, and Eclipse's armor shrieked with steam as she leapt forwards like a wrecking ball, while two of my arms exploded into meaningless black scrawls, the symbols forming gigantic arms that let me slam the two guards into a wall, knocking them out.

I ran after her, and without paying any mind to her horrified, saddened expression at what she saw in the cell, I unleashed a wave of cursed dark magic. I didn't have time to distinguish targets, the curse spread over everything, petrifying it in black crystal. I had no choice but to unleash the curse in a wave, to make sure I hit him in time.

"Weiss! What are you doin-!" she yelled before being turned to stone like everything else. I could cure them later.

As Blueblood's petrified body fell from the ceiling and shattered into pieces, the thin wire suspending him to the dungeon ceiling snapping after being turned to frail black glass, I simply passed through the bars and got to work reassembling the parts.

The buffoon wasn't dead yet.

With a twitch, I fired a spell at Eclipse's petrified form, black fire washing over her and freeing her from the curse. She stumbled, choking down a half-formed scream.

"Get over here." I order. I use Royal Crystal Growth, but only tiny, tiny amounts. Just enough to tack-weld the prince's statue back together. With the prince's current state, I didn't dare to try and repair everything with my own crude crystal magics. Mine were ultimately meant for lavishness, not strength or quality. For that, only an Earth Pony, Longma or otherwise, would do.

To her credit, she approached me without too much horrified screaming. Any at all would be too much when I'm working on something this delicate. "Weiss, that pony is dead, I don't-"

I half-scoff, half-sigh. "Shut it. You're beginning to sound as dumb as this one," I joke, zapping the statue one last time to glue it all together, just enough to hold everything in place. This was hardly the first time I had to do something like this.

"Earth Pony Crystal Growth Magic. Fill in all the gaps, both internal and external. Do not grow crystal outside of that," I order brusquely, and Eclipse obeys, I see hope glimmer in her eyes, and the sensation of it so close to me makes me hiss as my skin feels suddenly sunburnt.

She does it slowly, carefully. More guards rush in, thankfully not mind-controlled, with Celestia in tow.

"Do not interfere, or the boy will die," I say, glancing at Celestia and her retinue. She sent for medical staff, but kept away from the magical workings.

I halt the guards she sends to do so. "Not yet."

Celestia looks at me warningly, but I shoot back an equally heated glare. I would explain later, and she would just have to deal with it.

They all watch, some of the guards looking at their fellow petrified guardsponies with barely restrained horror, only the presence of an alicorn sufficient to stop them from panicking.

Finally, it was done. Black Crystal from my own curse and White Crystal from Eclipse Flash's undoubtedly skilled cultivation mingled, and the result was a single, cohesive petrified prince. The wire around his neck, which had been petrified as well, was unfortunately not really removable without chiseling it out. The best I could do is have Eclipse simply grow everything closed around it.

Surgery would have to solve the remainder of the problem.

"Step back," I said neutrally, igniting my horn.

Emotions began to fill my heart, and magic began to swell my spirit. I hated this curse. I hated Sombra. I hated his corrupt crystal magic.

It. Would. Be. Gone.

With one final blast of black fire, I utterly eradicated the curse, sending the unicorn thumping to the ground, gasping and clutching at his neck. The wire was still there, just with flesh seamlessly grown around it. He would survive, even with all the choking and gasping.

Celestia cast a sleeping spell on the prince, and picked him up in her telekinesis. She looked at me only once, before I finally began to explain, freeing the other guards from their own petrification curses.

Prince Blueblood woke up in an unfamiliar bed, one not nearly to his high standards. His neck felt horribly stiff, and his throat was dry.

He clapped his hooves with a groan, and only when he didn't hear the clip-clop of a servant coming to bring him his icewater did he finally open his bleary eyes.

He was in a hospital, but a suspiciously empty one.

"Welcome back to the realm of the living," a pony said, sitting in the corner of the room, reading a magazine.

"W-where am I? What happened?!" Blueblood demanded, jerking up.

Aunty Celestia approached from his blindspot, sitting down next to the bed.

"You do not recall, nephew?" she asked him, and he tried to remember. Something about his coat getting torn up while he was in the dungeon, and then...

"You got mind controlled, then necked yourself. Chapter Black bullshit. Everything was set up to off you as soon as your pet bug squealed," the ashen-unicorn said... Wait...

Blueblood recognized the individual, blinking away sleep. It was that terrifying brute who dared to strike the princesses! Who insulted even him!

"You!" Blueblood shouted, pointing dramatically.

"Damn it, I wish I knew you were going to say that, so I could make a Matrix reference," the sage muttered, scratching his chin.

"Whatever. Look, Uncle Weiss just helped save your life, and your little bug too. A bit of... Well, I guess gratitude is a bit too much to expect... I guess tolerance is a bit too much too..."

He muttered more, before shaking his head.

"You are not my uncle! Stop saying that!" Blueblood shrieked with outrage at this buffoon trying to humiliate him.

"Shush. I also helped you fake your death, so that's another point in my favor. When I walk out of here, do you know how pissed I'm going to have to pretend to be to sell that illusion?" He retorted.

"Not very much, I'm blindingly furious right now, but still, the point stands so-"

Celestia interjected. "Perhaps I should explain this. You may go, Weiss," she interrupted. Despite her tireless nature, she seemed to be some flavor of exhausted with Weiss's shenanigans.

With a shrug, the sage burst into flames, flying out the nearby window.

Blueblood could faintly hear him screaming with faux-fury as he flew out over the countryside.

"What in Equestria is going on, Aunty? That callous sorcerer said something about Bugsly?"

The princess sighed. "Nephew, I'm afraid things are going to change for you, for the next two days, at least. You and your pet Bugsly will need to be in hiding, at least until I can ensure things are safe for you. You've survived an assassination attempt, Blueblood, and it was one even I hadn't been anticipating."

She offered the shellshocked prince a brief hug.

"We very nearly lost you, if it hadn't been for that 'callous sorcerer', I'm afraid you would be in Elysium right now. No matter his lack of tact, I hope you understand the severity of that," Celestia said softly.

The prince was quiet.

(Present Chapter 55) Bright Eyes and Wonder

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"Ugh, what hit me?" Garble complained, rubbing his head. The headache felt like what other dragons jokingly thought he felt by thinking too hard, that is to say, sharp and with an undercurrent of annoyed anger.

"Oh no, here we go," he heard a little squeaky voice say with dawning horror.

Garble opened his eyes, and saw that he was jammed in some tiny room with a bunch of dragons, the distinct sensation of movement rumbling in his earholes as three of the four dragons stared at him with wide eyes, while the last, a scrawny blue one, was silently messing with some weird sciency looking stuff.

"AAAAAAAAAAHH!" Garble screamed, prompting a round of everyone screaming at everyone else.

Spike, Ruby, and Padparadscha each took turns screaming in shock and fright.

As Garble started scrambling and thrashing to get up, Sapphire commented in monotone "Please stop, you're going to make us crash."

Unfortunately, he, like everyone else who had ever uttered that phrase, had sealed their fates, as this only made Garble scream and thrash more, the tiny room shaking and several crystalline and metallic objects running through it cracking as he tried to get up and keep his new stolen pot away from these other dragons who clearly wanted to steal it from him!

"I guess we're crashing," Sapphire acknowledged, as the controls rapidly stopped responding, and the G-Diffusers stopped diffusing the G's.

Spike, Padparadscha and Ruby shared one final look of horrified realization, before screaming all together, right before the Arwing they were all in smashed into the ground, magical shields depleting to keep them from tumbling end-over end.

With a sigh from Sapphire, the ship ground to a halt, and things quickly started catching on fire.

Garble, who smacked his head on a pipe during the landing, had to be dragged out of the flaming wreck by an exasperated Ruby.

He shook his head to clear the dazed fog, pulling free from the larger dragon. "What the heck is this all about!? What is going on here?! Who are you!?" he groused, hugging his pilfered loot close.

"We crashed into you. Then we gave you a ride. Then you screamed, Spike screamed, Ruby and Padparadscha both screamed, we started to crash, and then everyone screamed. We are those people I just named," Sapphire explained, leaning against the flaming ship, trying to see if it could be repaired.

Spike pointed to the Krak Pot "You stole that from Zecora!" he interjected accusingly.

Padparadscha patted the little drake on the back. "Yeah. We couldn't leave you in the middle of nowhere, and we didn't feel like trying to pry it from your cold not-dead claws, so we just dumped you in the ship and figured we'd take it back when you woke up."

Garble looked between all of the ones who spoke, snarling with greed. "Well I'm not going to let you steal this from me, I stole it first!" he said with a huff.

They look at each other, Spike especially feeling somewhat nervous as to the 'how' of actually getting the pot back.

Ruby shrugged. "I guess that's that. Might as well make camp," he said, glancing at his brothers and Spike, silently ordering them to go along with it.

It took them a moment, before their eyes widened at what appeared to be some sort of plan.

Since when did Ruby do subtlety?

Flam slowly guided the ship down, careful not to slosh the cider barrels too roughly as he landed near the crashed ship.

With a hiss, the cockpit opened, and he looked out over the quartet and their shanghai'd cohort.

"I'm not sure I can fly you all in this thing, it's only got the two seats... How are we going to do this?" Flam asked bluntly, concerned over the wasted time.

Ruby waved for him to come down, piling dry desert wood onto the fire they're all hanging out around.

"Might as well unload that cider, Flam. I don't think we'll be making it to the Dragonlands before it goes off at this rate," the dragon shrugged, noting the setting sun.

Flam sighs. "Well, it's your cider. Hopefully the order isn't voided."

Spike felt curious. "Why were you delivering cider for us all the way to the Dragonlands anyway? I don't remember any of us ordering it."

Flam scratched his chin, hopping down from the Great Sacred Treasure. "Well..."

Flim and Flam gaped with shock at the literal cartoonish treasure chest overflowing with gold and jewels.

"I want you to follow my nephews to the Dragonlands. Bring as much cider as the Great Sacred Treasure can carry," Weiss Noir said plainly.

Flam blinked. "Why? They're here in Ponyville right now, I could just carry some barrels it over to them right now," he asked, only for Flim to plug his mouth with a hoof.

"I'm sure our client has very good reasons for paying us a very reasonable sum to make a delivery like this one, brother! Let's not pester the pony so much over trivial little details like that!"

Weiss waved the two off. "A few reasons. They'll make better friends with drinks to share once they get there, and I also want to see how well your modifications work on my Weapon of Light. You need merely zip over with them, drop off the goods, and zip back. It'll be a good test," he said.

The brothers accepted this explanation, but something about the way the sage said it...

Garble, who was sitting away from the others, making sure they didn't steal his treasure, scoffed. "Well, you better hope no real dragons find out that flying thing belongs to the Dragon Mouse. They'll try to steal it for sure," he sneered.

Sapphire raised an eyebrow, pulling out several metal ingots and roasting them over the flaming wreckage of their ship. "Explain."

Garble sighed, rolling his eyes. "Figures. Nobody ever listens to the elder dragons do they? Stealing stuff from the Dragon Mouse is a tradition as old as they are! Up until he bit it, dragons were going in there to rob him all the time! You steal something from the Dragon Mouse, and you prove without a shadow of a doubt that you're more dragon than the 'dragonest' pony there is," he said, puffing up with pride.

"I can't believe you scalebrains don't know that," he retorted defensively, when the four other dragons just stared at him with curiosity. In the back, Flam's eyes widened as he realized what Weiss Noir likely meant by wanting to "test" the treasure... He probably wanted dragons to try to steal it from him!

"Is that why you stole Zecora's pot?" Spike asked, crossing his arms.

"Who? Nevermind, I don't care, yeah! If the Dragon Mouse made this pot, then me bringing it back is going to be the coolest thing a dragon has done in centuries! I'll be the top dog for sure once I get this thing back to my hoard! So don't get any ideas, runt!" he said, turning to the side with the pot held protectively.

Spike held his hands up. "Hey, unlike you, I don't steal things!"

Garble hmph'd. "Good. More for the rest of us," he said, reaching behind his back to pull out some gems he brought along for a snack. Holding onto the pot, and trying to grab something at the same time, however, proved tricky, and with a strangled curse, the sapphire and ruby he pulled out tumbled from his claws, and into the pot.

"Dang it!" he said, reaching in to pull them out. As he did, he noted with surprise that blue and red were flying out of the lip of the vessel!

Pulling his claw back out quickly, he noted a thick, purple taffy-like blue substance coating his clawtips.

The others watched as he blinked, then, licked the blue stuff.

He blinked again, and looked into the pot, where the sapphire and ruby had melted down into a deep violet goop.

"That's weird," he said, chewing the now solidified corundum off like rock candy, leaving his claws clean once more.

Despite this, he was suddenly extremely interested. What sort of pot was this?!

He tipped it over, pouring out the liquid gemstone fluid inside out into his open claw, and the others watched with detached interest as the fluid morphed into a single purple gemstone, complete with facets.

Garble had a look of wonder, before he covered it up with embarrassed aggression when he remembered he was surrounded by dragons.

"Ha! This thing is awesome!" he said, pulling out more gems and throwing them inside, until the pot was filled with a rainbow mishmash of Garble's prismatic travel mix.

"Well, can we use it, or are you just going to hog the thing?" Ruby asked, drawing looks from the others, Spike especially looking a bit betrayed by his request to use the stolen vessel. The red dragon simply shot a quick conspiratorial wink to the purple drake.

Garble sneered. "No way! You'll just try and steal it!" he responded, scooping out a rainbow gem from the Krak Pot and chowing down on it.

Ruby shrugged. "Well, then I guess that's that. Flam, got any mugs?" the dragon asked, going over to one of the cider barrels and cracking it open.

Garble blinked at the smell of succulent succulent apple cider, and suddenly his own rainbow gem medley seemed sorely lacking...

He huffed, trying to ignore the smell of warm cider, but before he could properly devote some brainpower to doing so, a mug was shoved firmly into his claws.

"Wh-Hey, I didn't want any of your pansy pony drink!" he growled, holding the mug with a standoffish set to his expression.

Ruby just shrugged with a smirk. "But a pansy pony pot is fine, right?" he responded.

Garble's eyes narrowed, before he took a sip, not breaking eye contact with the other, bulkier red dragon.

"That's different."

Ruby just shrugged. "Sounds like that's that," he responded.

By now, Spike was totally confused by how calmly the red drake was speaking, a major contrast to the screaming posing bodybuilder that he met just a little while ago. It was clear that this Ruby had some kind of plan, or at least, he seemed incredibly confident with the things he was saying.

Garble was drawn back to his new treasure, the weird magic pot. With a shrug, he poured the last half of his mug of cider into the pot with the gems, and once again, sparks and sparkles flew from it like fireworks.

"Whoa," he muttered, looking at the amber iridescent liquid in it.

After several minutes of quiet drinking and eating, Ruby refilled his mug with cider from the barrel, while Garble scooped out the weird rainbow liquid that the tool of alchemy produced. Taking a sip, the dragon was clearly immensely pleased by the result.

"Hey, you going to share, or what?" Padparadscha said. He seemed to have picked up some of what Ruby was planning, and waggled the mug at the rude thief.

Garble sneered. 'A dragon asking another dragon to share! Who even does that?!' he thought.

Ruby paused. There was still another barrel of cider left to drink, and the conclusion Garble came to upon after several moments in thought was left unspoken.

He wanted more of that cider.

"Fine, give me that," Garble said, reaching over and snatching the mug. He fumbled with the now-two mugs in his claws, emptying the pot into them with a clumsy motion, before passing one of them back to the little pink dragon.

"Thank you," Paddy said, more firmly than perhaps needed to be.

Sapphire and Spike looked at the mugs of rainbow gem cider with unrestrained hunger as their owners drank it down greedily.

Ruby, however, wasn't one to let that stand as it was. "I'm going to go get the food," he said, plodding over to the flaming wreckage of their Arwing and pulling out the crate of food they brought with them.

Cracking it open, he passed around ingots of grilled gold to Spike and Sapphire, before grabbing one of his own.

Garble's eyes widened. "Are you just going to eat straight gold?"

Ruby took a single slow bite, staring the other drake in the eyes as he did. "It's good though."

The smaller of the two dragons blinked. "That's metal," he said with some small amount of respect. It wasn't entirely clear if he was being literal or not.

Slowly, the tense vibe in the air began to ease. Without a word, Garble stood up and walked over to the crate, grabbing a bunch of the food.

"What are you doing?" Sapphire questioned, eyeing him as he grabbed an armful of grilled gold, toasted tin, and sous vide'd silver.

"Don't worry about it, blue boy," Garble barked back, stuffing the food into the Krak Pot piece by piece. He didn't react as the other dragons started to gather around to watch the sparks fly.

"Do you know what you're doing?" Sapphire continued, trying to study the pot, and the reactions occurring therein.

Garble rolled his eyes. "Nope. But it looks cool, and I bet it'll taste good too," he said arrogantly, reaching in and scooping out a glob that seemed to morph and change, the group watching with wide-eyed interest as it turned into a metal sandwich.

Of course, Garble was once again surprised and pleased by the result. He shoved the sandwich into Spike's claws, reaching in to grab several more out of the magically fusing pot. "There, now get off my tail about sharing," he groused, but it was clear some camaraderie had emerged due to the shared foodstuffs and drinks.

It didn't take long for conversation to begin in earnest, comprised mostly of Garble, bragging and explaining with sheer investment and barely restrained excitement at all the old dragon stories he knew, and the more his audience seemed to drink the tales in with rapt attention, the bigger his ego swelled and the grander his fairytales became.

"-And then, Big Snaptooth took a huge bite out of the crown, and tossed it at the pony princess, saying 'needs more salt'!" he exclaimed, getting some laughter.

Spike giggled. "I think I remember that story!" he said, tactfully leaving out the part of who told it to him, namely, the "pony princess" herself.

Garble smirked. "Good. Figures a runt like you is the only one still listening to old dragon stories. A dragon who doesn't know why we're the best is no dragon at all, I say," he grunts.

Ruby got a look in his eyes, and it was clear that the moment he was waiting for had come.

"It's funny you should say that. We're on our way to the Dragon Lands to learn exactly that. We've never been there before. None of us."

Garble blinked. "Not a one of you, huh? Well that explains all the 'sharing' and 'not stealing' junk. You came to the right dragon then! Or I guess you ran him over. Now that I stole this weird food-pot thing that the Dragon Mouse made, I'm more dragon than any of those other punks back home!" he said proudly, puffing out his chest.

"Where are you dweebs from, anyway? I don't know any dragons dumb enough to hang out with a pony-" he began, looking at Flam, who seemed vaguely offended, pulling his head out of the innards of the Great Sacred Treasure long enough to glare, before returning to his work maintaining it.

"-but I guess if there was any, they sure wouldn't be living in the Dragon Lands," he finished considerately.

"The Dragon Mouse... You know, it's funny you should say that," Ruby responded.

Paddy and Sapphire both looked at Ruby nervously. This was clearly going somewhere.

"He's our uncle, actually, he practically helped raise us from hatchlings," Ruby finally admitted with a smile.

Garble laughed. "You chumps? No way! You're too young or too old, he only just showed back up a little while back, so you'd have to be either a bunch of babies, or like a gajillion years old!"

Ruby just shrugged. "It's a long story."

Garble's eyes narrowed. "Prove it."

"How?" Ruby responded instantly.

Garble thought to himself. "The Dragon Mouse had this thing he figured out. Dragon Lightning, not a single dragon ever managed to steal it from him. If you're his nephews, then surely-"

Ruby, Sapphire, Padparadscha, and even Spike, (Though he didn't consider himself Weiss's nephew) all snapped their claws, making lightning arc around their arms frantically.

The boorish drake's jaw dropped. "No freaking way..."

Ruby grinned, and some of his hotheaded personality started to bleed through. "Yes freaking way!" he said, flexing with another burst of lightning.

"So, do you want to hear a story?!" he said to the stunned dragon, who rapidly nodded with an expression of intrigue.

The three dragons (and Spike, to a much lesser degree) explained themselves to Garble, talking about their origins as clones, their life in the Shadow Realm, the curse that threw them out of time, and their new lives here, in the present.

Garble didn't interrupt or speak, sitting crosslegged on the ground as the trio offered up their story, and only when they were finished did he finally say something.

"No freaking way..." he muttered, awed by the literal walking history.

Padparadscha finally interjected. "So yeah, none of us really like the idea of stealing from innocent ponies. Our honorary bro Spike here really doesn't like it, either. We just weren't raised that way," he explained.

Garble clamped his mouth shut. "Well, I can't exactly give it back, being the first dragon to steal from the Dragon Mouse in almost a thousand years is going to make me the coolest dang dragon ever, up there with the elder dragons!" he said, once more refusing to relinquish the pot.

Ruby nodded. "Yeah, I figured that a while ago. Garble, will you give that pot back to that lady Zecora, if we help you steal something even better? Something that'll totally freak out even those Elder Dragons?"

He chewed over the idea for almost a minute, but a full stomach and a full head of new stories had a way of swaying a dragon's thoughts.

"...I'm listening," Garble said noncommittally.

The trip back was a bit anticlimactic, as Sapphire, Garble and Ruby flew alongside a disgruntled Flam, who had to share seat room with Spike and Padparadscha. The Arwing was a total write-off, and it left them with nothing but wingpower to make up the slack.

Soon, though, they were all dropped off at Star Road, and with a snap of his fingers, Ruby opened a portal directly to Weiss, who was busy holding up some businesspony by the neck.

"Hey! Lord Uncle! Can we see your arms for just a second? We made a friend who doesn't think they come off!" Ruby shouted, posing dramatically as he pointed to his uncle. In the background, his cohort all nodded, Garble most of all.

Weiss grimaced. "I'm in the middle of something... " Ruby's face became pitiful, and Weiss winced. "Okay, look, just hurry it up," he said, switching to shaky telekinesis to hold Chancellor Golden Apple in the air by his neck, before popping the six arms off and letting Ruby gather them up into a big load in his arms, smiling through the portal.

"Thanks Lord Uncle!" he said, closing the portal with no further adieu.

"Wh- You little bastards!" Weiss shouted, turning to glare at the closed portal. Did that cheeky brat just steal his arms?

'Damn. They grow up so fast, already stealing shit from me to impress their friends...' he couldn't help but grin, shaking his head good-naturedly.

Golden Apple dropped to the ground gasping and scooting away, only for Weiss to return his gaze to the Chancellor.

"Ah ah ah, you were telling me about Chancellor Bitter Pill? I'd like to run that back one more time," he said, trailing into a lower and lower turn as he stalked towards the fearful earth pony.

He'll let his nephews have their fun. He only hoped that they were having as much fun exploring their heritage as he was stomping out his own ill-intentioned legacy.

"So, where were we?" he asked, igniting his horn to wrap telekinetic force around the Chancellors neck again. A portal opened, and Weiss extracted his spare arms from the stash.

He was beginning to run low on those, without an industry to supply him personal sundries like limbs.

Garble blinked as the portal slammed shut. "I can't believe that worked."

"Believe it. There's this pony, Glitter Miss Priss, she once pranked him for three weeks straight making things dump snow on him. If he doesn't hate your guts, it's pretty easy to get one past him," Paddy admitted.

"The pot?" Spike asked, trying not to seem impatient.

Garble nodded. "Fine. Fine, I admit it, bringing back the Dragon Mouse's own dang arms... That's so cool! It's insane!" he shouted.

He looked at the others "You know we're going to be legends, right? Dragons are going to be talking about those-" he pointed at the armful of arms. "-for the next millennia, at least!" he explained, growing more excited by the minute.

When he looked at the Krak Pot, though, his expression dimmed slightly.

The others shared a look, following him as he flew back to the hut where he first stole it from.

As he did, he saw the hut's owner, a zebra humming merrily as she tidied up the humble abode.

Garble looked nervous. "Hey, you!" he shouted awkwardly, holding the pot.

Zecora looked back, and saw the five dragons.

"The dragon brothers, and little Spike ~ I hope you all have been alright," she greets them, before looking to the final one.

"So you're the one who took the pot ~ Had you not come, you'd not be caught.

"Admittedly, I thought it lost ~ Off my list, a thief was crossed," she rhymed.

Garble scratched his head. "Yeah, well, here you go," he held it out.

Zecora reached out to take it, but with a tug, it remained firmly in Garble's claws, and he stared down at the Krak Pot with a hint of longing.

"You may not have done this before, ~ Is returning it such a chore?

"You seem torn, what make you halt? ~ I sense not mere greed at fault," she asked, and Garble groaned.

"Ugh, this sucks, that pot was so cool, too," he muttered, finally letting go and turning away with a grouse.

"It was 'cool'? What do you mean? ~ Tell me, drake, what have you seen?"

https://youtu.be/08Xf1g1Itnk

Garble scoffed, and only once he saw the others encouraging him with their open, totally sympathetic pony-like expressions, he finally loosened up, and, with a hint of vulnerability in his brash hide, explained.

His voice seemed filled with whimsical exuberance as he explained that "the cool pot" was turning whatever he put in it into other cool stuff, like snacks and drinks made from other, lesser snacks and drinks.

Zecora blinked. It was clear that the dragon was thick in the head, he didn't have even the slightest hint of alchemical talent, and yet, his tone was filled with wonder, heaps and heaps of it. Each of the very minor things he did with the pot of Almighty Alchemy seemed to stun and bewilder the dragon with the sheer fantasy of it. Turning gems into drinks, metals into sandwiches!

The zebra pursed her lips, and she had the oddest sense of intuition, itching at the edges of her clever mind. Was the Krak Pot guiding her?

"I must admit that now I see ~ You wish to use it? Then feel free.

"I only ask that you refrain ~ From taking it from here again.

"In Ponyville, or Everfree, ~ Leave it here, with it don't flee.

"I see your passion, this pot does too, ~ So whatever you may wish to brew-

"-Do what you will, it's yours to use, ~ This trust I give, please don't abuse."

Garble's eyes were wide. If he wanted to keep using the pot, he'd have to hang around here? Ugh! So lame!

"Hmph. Maybe. I'll see you when I see you!" he finally retorted, stomping off into the forest.

Spike smiled awkwardly. "I'm really sorry about all this, Ma'am, he's a bit rough around the edges," the little purple drake responded.

Zecora smiled. "For dragons, dear, that is common ~ You're unique, kind to this shaman," she said, patting him on the head.

He thanked her, before waddling off after the dragon trio, who were following Garble as he standoffishly walked away to not seem like some kind of gooshy pansy.

Because he absolutely was feeling awfully gooshy after that zebra said he could use the pot whenever he wanted.

(Past Chapter 45) The Thief-Witch (Part 1)

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"So, are we all clear on the plan, then?" Blackbeak asked, turning to their newest, youngest recruit. A Longma colt of no more than fourteen years.

"You know, if this doesn't work..." one of the other griffons said, trailing off nervously.

The one that came to them with a plan to steal the Chaos Emeralds laid it out simply. Weiss Noir enchanted every single defense leading to the emeralds himself. He refused to risk another person's enchantments having a flaw that would allow them to be bypassed. He, in addition to that, used only lethal enchantments. His paranoia for this treasure was so great, even the slightest attempt at prodding it, any attempt at all, would be met with utterly lethal force.

There was no containment foam. No capture golems. No portals or cameras. Only blistering hellfire, razor sharp blades, collapsing ceilings, and even more horrible things. It was a vault that nobody would be dumb enough to try and steal from, when made by the most hateful pony in all Equestria and beyond. The pony who even now produced enough hate for the Kingdom Heart that it could be felt by anyone who saw it. His hatred was the only single source powerful enough to be sensed above and beyond all the hatred of the others.

What kind of flaw could he possibly have, that someone could break into his most paranoid vault? The one he was so confident in the safety of, that it didn't even have guards to stand outside it, in the middle of Chaos Cacophony Zone?

The Black Griffon who approached them was very explicit. The sage was psychotic, a total nutcase. He could hate someone with mind-shattering intensity in one moment, and be utterly unable to muster up even mere annoyance to someone else. He would never harm a Longma, a young colt or filly especially.

That was the theory that would be tested. The little goblin of a colt they recruited was rude and crass enough to fall in with the gang, and this would be his initiation. If that griffon was wrong though...

The colt scoffed, not fully internalizing the danger he was going to be putting himself through. "You chickens going to keep clucking, or can I go in yet?" he asked, looking into the swirling vortex of black fire that marked the entrance of the vault.

Their sympathy was quickly diminishing as the colt kept opening his mouth.

"Look, fine, alright, just do it," Blackbeak said, shoving an empty sack into the colt's hooves. With a glare, he draped it over his back, and walked into the flames.

One moment, then two...

Nothing happened. The thugs breathed a sigh of relief. "See? Simple as," the colt said with a snide look, before walking deeper inside.

The black flames refused to touch the little Longma. The spiked ceiling dropped down, but halted a mere inch from his head. The floor below him rumbled, but refused to fall into the bladed pit below.

Saws ground, and more besides, but because all of the defenses of the vault were meant to brutally kill a thief, and Weiss lacked the purity of hatred to hurt a little longma foal, the brat was able to walk all the way into the vault's inner sanctum.

"Nice," he smirked, grabbing the rainbow-colored Chaos Emeralds from their pedestals, stuffing them into the sack on his back.

He strutted out with confidence and surity, and the gang, seeing him return in one piece, cheered and barked out praise to the new member of their gang.

"Come on! Let's see the loot!" Blackbeak shouted, grabbing the sack from the child who complained loudly, opening it up to look at the gems inside.

"By god, you really did it, didn't you? Alright brat, you're in. Let's see what these things can do. Lord Weiss wouldn't have set all that up if these weren't powerful," he said with a grin. The gang stalked away, not seeing the little spider on the wall, with black, glassy eyes.

Blackbeak grinned as he felt the green gemstone softly clattering in the pouch tied to his side. He could feel the magical power flowing into him from Chaos Cacophony Zone, bit by bit. All the confusion, the jumbled up uncontrolled emotions of those around him. Somehow, these gemstones were letting him and his gang tap into it!

'With these, we can become more than just a petty gang. We could take some real power for ourselves...' he mused, clenching a talon and feeling the tendons flex underneath. To think, the big secret treasure of Chaos Cacophony Zone would be this, a relic made to draw power from the very chaos it made by letting ponies run around acting crazy and raising a ruckous.

The colt, who insisted everyone call him "Emerald Thief" now that he proved his chops, had the white stone for himself. The jewels were most powerful when they were all together, but you couldn't run a gang that way, gathering up treasure for yourself and keeping it all on your own. Blackbeak knew he'd have to divvy up the loot, and so he did, giving the seven gemstones to each of his gang's most valuable members- And the colt, of course.

"Alright boys, it's time!" Blackbeak shouted in the middle of the zone. He could feel the gems were at the peak of their strength.

The various longma and other individuals in the zone looked curiously to the gang, who had assembled smack dab in the middle of the zone.

"Greetings, ponies and all! I am Blackbeak, the leader of the wonderful fellows you see before you!" he roared dramatically, gesturing to the rest of the crew he brought with him.

"Today, we've done the impossible! We've stolen from Lord Weiss Noir himself, and with that, we're bringing greed back! Behold! The Chaos Emeralds!"

He pulled his gemstone free from its pouch, holding it to the sky.

"We stole it! A gang of griffons stole one of the most well-kept secrets of the whole damn Shadow Realm!" he proudly proclaimed.

"So keep your eyes on the news, because the Blackbeak Gang is heading to Griffonstone! We're bringing back greed!" he roared one final time, before pocketing the jewel. He and his crew glowed with the power of the gems, the crowd's delicious confusion feeding into them to make them even more powerful.

Without another word, he began to walk straight towards the exit. With power like this, even the Sage of Darkness himself wouldn't be so quick to stop them.

Pushing through the crowd, he stumbled as a Zebra slammed into him, and sent him and the other gangsters tumbling over.

"Hey, watch where you're going, you dumb zebra!" he shouted.

She winced, and her eyes looked watery. The zebra had a set of plain, ragged saddlebags, and looked hungry.

"I-I'm sorry. I was going too f-facet,"

Blackbeak glared. "What did you just say?"

"I-I didn't mean to rebuff you, polish forgive me. I didn't look where I was g-glowing," the mare stutters.

Looking at the emaciated zebra, he could see signs of frostbite on the mare. She had just come in from the frozen north, clearly.

He shook his head with a scoff. Despite those disgusting puns, he had more important things to worry about.

"Watch where you're going then," he gruffly demanded, pushing past her with his crew in tow.

She looked incredibly sad, and ran off crying as soon as he did.

"I'm so sorry," she responded, as if she had done something particularly horrible.

The Blackbeak Gang didn't even make it to the portal to Griffonstone, before they were faced with the same dark griffon who met them originally.

"Greetings. Have you found the treasure you were seeking?" the emotionless griffon asked, tilting their head just so.

Blackbeak smirked. "We sure did. Why? You looking for payment? You didn't ask for any when you gave up the info."

The griffon shook their head. "Show me the gems. I need to confirm that you've obtained them."

Blackbeak felt something dark burning inside him. "Out of the question," he growled, shifting to keep the satchel away from the bug, putting his body between them and his treasure.

The griffon tilted their head further, before disappearing in green fire, leaving them all confused and unnerved.

"Come on, everyone, let's go show Griffonstone just what greed got us," he grinned maliciously, glancing around nervously for signs of the weird annoying griffon in the tunnels. The rest of his gang looked equally uneasy.

As they walked through the portal, they came upon the sight of Griffonstone, filled with all the puny smallminded griffons that Blackbeak hated.

He stalked down the cobblestones, watching as shopkeepers glared at customers, and customers leered at products. He watched as griffons argued over a fair price, both of them growing angrier and angrier at their own haggling. He watched two griffons in the street brawling over what Blackbeak assumed was some silly conflict of egos, coins scattered all over the pavestones around them.

All that pride, and not a hint of ambition. That all changed today. With a raised claw, he let a blast of bright energy fly into the sky.

"Griffonstone! Hear me! I am Blackbeak, and I bring you all proof! Proof that the Idol of Boreas is a mere trinket! That the true nature of griffons cannot be so easily extinguished beneath shallow pride! Behold, what greed has brought me and my gang, what we stole from the Sage of Darkness himself! What even the dragons couldn't steal!"

The rest of his gang begin glowing, firing off magical blasts and cackling with laughter as they caused fear and shock in the city of Griffonstone. Guards began approaching them, spears leveled, but with a wave of his hand, Blackbeak and his gang teleported away, high into the air onto a nearby building.

"This is the power of the Chaos Emeralds! The power of Chaos itself!" he laughed.

His laughter began to trail off, as a shadowy figure stood on the building across from him, casually reclining on the brickwork of the small tower, crunching an apple.

"You've got some showmanship, my little subjects," Weiss Noir said, taking another bite from the apple.

Blackbeak sneered. "Finally noticed your little missing treasure, eh? It was so easy, even a child managed to steal it. You're losing your touch, oh mighty Lord of the Shadow Realm."

Weiss smiled, tossing away the core. "Nah. I had an eye on things. I'm just here to make sure you don't hurt anyone, yourselves especially. Hand over the emeralds, my subjects. You've proven to the world what you set out to prove. It's time to come home," he said, hopping over to the building Blackbeak's gang was on, holding out an open palm.

Blackbeak glared. "I will not." The answer seemed to make the sage's soft smile grow.

The griffon and his gang members prepared to fire blasts of the chaotic emeralds' magic, only for nothing to happen.

Weiss blinked.

"Where are the gems," he said in a monotone, stalking towards the gang, who were beinning to panic as they realized the powers they were toying with minutes before had suddenly cut out, exhausted of power.

"I have them, stay back!" Blackbeak shouted, reaching for the pouch, only to realize with a chill of sudden sweat as he grasped at it that it was soft, formless. The pouch was empty. Someone had stolen the gem!

Weiss's arms exploded into smoke, throwing all seven of the gang members off the building, and into the pavestones.

"Where are they!" he roared into Blackbeak's face.

"I don't know!" Blackbeak shouted, now afraid without the weapon he planned to use.

Weiss's eyes softened at the sight of the various Shadow Realm inhabitants, gang members and thieves or no, he felt something soft and annoying bubble up.

He sighed. "Get up and stop blubbering. I'm not going to hurt you," Weiss admitted, with a bitter pang of defeat. He couldn't help it. They were cruel, petty, criminal little bastards, even down to the little Longma colt who hung out with them... But they were of the Shadow Realm, and some cruel hook in his heart kept him from properly putting fear into their hearts.

He couldn't lose any more of them.

As he forcibly lifted the gang members to their feet, he turned to the crowd. "See what happens when you try to fight me, even with my own damn artifacts? You get bodied! I'll be taking these ones back. They will face my justice," he said loudly, his voice carrying out to the frightened Griffonstone natives.

The griffons began to bark out insults and slander at the sage, demanding they face justice in Griffonstone. The sage looked pleased with the result.

"Good, I haven't lost my touch quite yet, it seems," he mused, grabbing the fearful gangsters and forcing them back through the portal to the Shadow Realm.

The stone archway slammed shut at his command, preventing the angry population from following him through the tourism portal.

"All of you, my office. You know where it fucking is," Weiss said with an overwhelming aura of malice that stabbed into the gang, making them back away in newborn fright.

As they all made their way to leave, he stopped them with a raised hand.

"Before you go, I want you to understand something," Weiss said, coldly.

"You fucked over my plans. The only thing you proved with this stunt is that the Idol of Boreas isn't working. You all got it through your fool heads that it's because the damn thing doesn't work, but that's not the case at all. It's because the damn thing is gone. Stolen, and you just let every-fucking griffon know that," he snarled, before pointing harshly down the tunnel, making them scramble down it.

About halfway down the tunnel, they screamed, and he glanced over. The griffons (and colt) had turned into pigs (and a chicken.) Seemingly without cause or reason. Weiss could tell it wasn't a spell, dark or otherwise. The fools must have been exposed to some kind of magical substance or artifact.

Panicking and confused at what triggered their transformation, Weiss raised a curious eyebrow.

"Hey! I didn't say stop! Keep walking!" he screamed, shocking them out of their confused polymorphic panic. He wasn't sure where they had been poisoned with whatever toxin did that, but he didn't care. Just another problem to deal with.

He rubbed between his eyes with a groan. Problems problems problems. It always seemed to be something, ruling over the Shadow Realm. "Forget the fourth one, where are all my damn chaos emeralds?"

https://youtu.be/ZesYo9sv0SI

The zebra mare collapsed into a chair at her "designated housing," shuddering with revulsion at herself. Walking to the back of the small apartment, she dumped off all the things she stole, including the seven magical gemstones she pilfered from those gangsters.

She was still thin, and her coat still blackened with bits of frostbite, but the free food and medical care this "Shadow Realm" was giving away for no reason was helping both of those problems.

With a sigh, she closed the hatch over the hole she melted in the floor of her new apartment, and covered it up with a rug. A bottle of mole-acid solved the problem of where to stash things well enough.

The abode was spartan, if you wanted a room packed with goodies, you had to earn that. Despite this, what little was actually in the room was stunning in its quality. Purple and Black crystal veins spun around the room's walls, toilets were built into their own rooms, a bed, a small couch, and some sort of device she couldn't make heads or tails of, made of bright glowing crystals.

It was so beautiful. So wonderful.

She was going to lose it all again.

"Why can't I just stop? Is there some hole in my heart I just can't fillch?" she says tearfully, stomping the ground angrily.

She resolved to not go outside tommorow. The less she dealt with other people and ponies, the less opportunities she would have to steal from them, or worse. When she was out there, there was no stopping those sudden little urges. A pocket picked here, a drop of poison there. All it took was a vial of "Switcheroolaid" and so soon people's possessions could be swapped with ironic petty poisons.

It happened without her sayso. As soon as the urge struck her, it was over and done before she could think about it. Regret came later for her impulsive acts. It (and the puns) got her kicked out of her own village. It got her driven out, further and further, banished over and over, until all of Zebrica was forbidden to her. It got her into the Frozen North, dying of cold.

Her damnable desire to live, however, is what drove her to the signs of civilization. It drove her to walk out of the blizzard that she was suffering inside of, out into the warm, dark depths of a vast kingdom. To do the simple "online" steps somezebra needed to take to become a citizen of the Shadow Realm. To get the free food alotted to her every day. To get a home to call her own.

She was Malusi, a mare known to Zebrica as the Thiefwitch, and she wished she didn't have to be such a horrible zebra in such a kind place.

(Past Chapter 46) The Thief-Witch (Part 2)

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"Galchemist779" logged off the dream crystal with a small yawn, and a smaller, but genuine smile. She had just finished speaking to a pony named "Rain nor Sleet", who said that he would have her marked down for home delivery!

She felt so much tension bleed out of her shoulders at that. All she had to do was keep away from her door every so often, and her sundries would be delivered straight to her little home. Grocery shopping? Scavenging for alchemy supplies? A thing of the past for Malusi!

It would have been unthinkable anywhere else on the planet, where there wasn't a multi-million-bit industry of magical technology able to use golems or portals or whatever it was they used to deliver things inside the Shadow Realm's deep tunnels. She didn't really care about the how, so much as the what, and what it meant was simple. No more going out, no more temptations, no ponies, zebras, griffons or what have you meant no one to rob and poison!

She wasn't sure how hard it would be, living alone like that, but already, she felt so much better, just knowing she wouldn't have to go out there with all those leering eyes and fat pockets. The sort of fat pockets that just begged to be emptied, and the sort of glares that just begged to be splashed with a pint of gender-bendzene.

She shook her head. "Nope, not going to let it bottle me one bit. No matter how bad it gets now, distill won't be a problem. I don't need to go out, so I don't need to pun-ish anyone," she says loudly, to herself, shaking away the thoughts that threatened to bring down her mood.

Walking over to her couch in a light trot, she hopped on top and let out a sigh as the rock-gossamer cloth of the cushions settled around her like a blanket stuffed with clouds.

She had made a friend or two, though, they all wanted to 'meet up' outside of the virtual dream, and that was a non-option. They were polite enough, and the odd games she could play on the virtual dream were such a delightful way to waste time, even if the potion-brewing in those games was... Well, quite frankly, ridiculous.

With another sigh, she forced herself to lean up. There was work to be done that she couldn't quite do while laying about. She sat there for a few more minutes, before making her way to her little corner of the apartment, which had become devoted to her alchemy work.

While food, shelter, and dream crystals all came free, there were things a mare couldn't help but want. Fancy clothes, odd trinkets, exotic dishes and drinks. For that, you needed "GP", the golden currency of the Shadow Realm. To obtain it, Malusi had robbed quite a few ponies already, but every time she used that money, she felt like something was tearing its way through her innards, with the stress that came with it.

Selling potions and other alchemical goodies was a far better way to go about it, if she could find a way to sell it without actually meeting anyone else. The Arcana Nox and its dreamlike virtual realm was incredibly promising, and she was intent on at least trying to produce some potions that weren't meant to hilariously curse their drinker.

"Lustrous Feather Tonic? No, it quill use up too much of my pearl jam... I'll have to chick if any of the shops carry it."

As she mused on what exactly she would mix up today, a shadow seemed to sweep across the room. She felt an odd chill, but was too distracted by the clever magic surging through her eyes to think about it too much.

"Oh! Scale Shine Soup! Let's see, turtle-tinted-turmeric, I've shell-ly got some of that laying around. Lizard lips, kiss that goodbye," she dumped the ingredients into a simple crystal pot, watching them come to a boil. Little sparks of magic danced before her eyes as she picked the perfect ingredients to brew her potion of choice.

The shadow grew closer, and her breath misted in front of her.

"Maybe just a... pinch of..." her voice trails off.

"...crab cream."

She turned around slowly, breath catching in her throat...

There was nothing behind her.

"Whew," Malusi let out a breath she didn't realize she was holding.

"What's cookin'?" a smooth voice rang out from right next to her, and she froze, terror gripping her heart.

She screamed, and instinctively flung a bottle at the pony next to her, without even looking at who it was. As she scrambled to get away, the bottle shattered on them, and instantly, they turned into a black chicken.

The zebra leapt over the couch, and only once behind it even bothered to look back, fearfully. She noticed her hatch was pulled open, revealing the king's ransom of treasure she had amassed.

The dark chicken approached slowly, and she could feel something cold and deadly in the air, as if a claw were gripping her heart.

"Really?" the chicken said, looking at themselves. "Wait, why am I a black chicken? Let me guess, too much tar, not enough feathers?" he asked rhetorically, before collapsing into smoke, and making the zebra scream again, backing away from the smoke spreading across the floor.

It re-congealed, turning into a pony she had only seen in holographic images before. The lord of the Shadow Realm. The Sage of Darkness. Weiss Noir.

As he approached, and it sunk in what was happening to Malusi, who noted the self-locking doors doing what they did and locking themselves at his command, she chuckled, slightly hysterically. She didn't want to be banished again. Not when things were finally changing.

"So, after months of searching through every single log of every single camera of every single zone that those damn fools were gallivanting around in, I finally found the person who stole my Chaos Emeralds from the people who stole them in the first place. The person who has apparently been quite busy. Very very busy. The zebra who, if I'm being honest, would absolutely have gotten away with it if not for her, shall we say, noteworthy infamy," he grinned.

"Do you have anything to say for yourself, dear? Because I have quite the offer to make to you, an offer you won't be refusing, and I'd like to hear what you've got to say, before I make my pitch" he asked in a chilling tone, with a thin, humorless smile plastered over his face. He would have his third council member today.

The zebra's mind was fried with fright, and, spotting the black feathers still stuck in Weiss Noir's burning mane, she blurted out, before she could consider the virtues of keeping her mouth shut, "W-well, looks like I've got-" She swallowed. "-e-egg on my face."

The sage paused, his looming aura cut through like a knife.

Then, something odd happened. He blinked once, then twice, before plucking one of the feathers off of his head.

Malusi watched with confusion as the sage began to laugh, low at first, and then helplessly loud.

"T-that couldn't have been on purpose, right?!" he said, taking deep breaths as he leaned over, hands on the ground to hold him up.

Malusi hesitantly responded. "W-well, if you've been chicken me out, you'd k-know feather or not I p-pecked puns as my clever challenge of choice."

She was confused as the sage began to laugh again, a much more restrained, but equally mirthful thing. He found her puns funny? That, of all things, is what blew away the sheer malevolence suffusing him, moments ago? Everyone hated puns! Especially the bad ones! It's the lowest form of comedy, and even she only chose them out of bitterness.

She couldn't have known, but in that moment, her fate had changed. Weiss Noir had changed his mind.

"I'm sorry for the rude arrival. Do you mind if we sit and talk, ma'am? I think we got off on the wrong hoof," Weiss finally said, walking around the couch, and growing a throne of purple crystal from the ground in front of it.

In-between it and the couch, a table sprouted as well, followed by two tall glasses.

Malusi was terrified and confused, but not just the animalistic panic of being suddenly frightened, but the bone-deep fear of facing this land's ruler, with her unveiled pile of stolen goods sitting exposed mere feet away.

She walked mechanically to the couch and sat down, stiff and unsure.

Weiss, however, looked casual, and, one might even say, pleased. With a whispered word that Malusi didn't recognize, a portal ripped free in the air, and dropped a bottle down onto the table, which he filled the two glasses with.

"Relax. I've decided I won't be punishing you, nor, as I've been cleverly insisting I now do, will I be 'rewarding' you. I'd really like to talk, now," he said, pushing the glass over to her.

Picking it up, the zebra took a careful sniff of the glass for any poisons, but, unable to detect any in her current state of mind, finally shrugged, and took a sip.

It bubbled, and had an odd chalky taste that wasn't quite to her liking, like a drink half-finished, or improperly made.

Weiss seemed to notice her expression, and looked a bit saddened. "Over a hundred years and an entire wing of scientists, and I still haven't managed to figure out quite how a good soda is made. Sorry about that, dear," he said, drinking his own glass with practiced ease.

"So, you're the one they call Thiefwitch Malusi, right?." he began, trailing off with a questioning tone.

She winced. "I can't help it. By hook or crook, I just... I can't resist. I don't want this."

He smiles. "Is that so?"

The awkward silence drags on, until he breaks it once more. Where others might need a bit more information, he could already see the darkness in her. Self-Loathing, one of the strongest of all dark emotions, from his perspective. One of the least pleasant to experience.

"Would you like to hear about how I am evil, Malusi?" he began, confusing the mare immediately once more.

"What do you mean? I would assume from what I've heard that you are beloved, moral-ess," she punned in response. But her interest was piqued nonetheless.

He just smiled "I am evil. Evil with a capital 'E'. Some of the things I did should have gotten me turned to stone, if you ask me. I am cursed. Until the day Sombra, the dark king of monsters, is defeated, I will continue to become more like him. Day by day, hour by hour. Every once in a while, laying in my bed, I can almost feel my humanity slipping away. I am to share that vile cretin's fate."

Malusi's ears quirked at the odd word, but she intuited its meaning through context. Humanity...

"But do you want to know... What makes it all worthwhile? What makes me stand here, pretending that I'm still a good pony deep down inside? What lets me try to do what I assume is the right thing, rather than consigning myself to oblivion, before it's too late?"

She didn't answer, but she doesn't have to. The sage was doing as he had always done. Perceiving the weaknesses of those around him.

"I reveled in it. I took it for my own!" The sage threw his glass to the side, where it shattered into a million pieces.

"I am the Sage of Darkness! A master of Dark Magic! I rule over a realm of hatred, and the hateful are my charge! I have lost all I had loved, and cast aside all that I might love once more! You say I am beloved? So be it!" he roared.

"I know what I am becoming. I will become it in the manner of my choosing!" he stood up from the throne, while the zebra listened, frozen in place.

"You are a thief-witch! You tell me you've done as they claim in all but confession itself, and yet here you sit, cowering at your own malicious self! Do you think I despise you? That I hate you!? No, as the lord of hatred, let me inform you in the simplest possible terms..."

He throws the table aside, and stomps up to the zebra. He looks at the alchemy tools, at the pile of stolen treasures. At the fragments of the potion bottle that turned him into a chicken. At the fragments of his glass of soda, which had been quietly poisoned with a potion that turned him polkadot colors when he wasn't looking.

"I like your style, Malusi. Would you like to join me?" he asked, thrusting out an open palm to the zebra, who he at long last deemed a worthy mare. She would be the first. The first to join his council, while still in the land of the living.

An evil he could stand by without disgust. With pride, perhaps.

"I... I don't want to steal from anyone, or poison anyone... But I will. I can't help it. Even you. I fear I will betray whatever trust you give me. I can't stop myself from doing as I do. I only want mercy, please."

Her lack of puns made clear the crisis she was facing.

Weiss's eyes only grew more alight. "Exactly! That's precisely why! Join me, Malusi, act as my counsel, steal, poison, and betray me to your heart's content, if only slightly less than you aid me and my cause! I have seen your evil, and I've decided I quite adore it!" he laughs.

She hadn't considered something like that in her life, ever before. She knew it was wrong. Stealing was wrong, spiking zebras' drinks with potions was wrong!

Why was this feeling welling up, what was it?

"N-no! I was turning things around, I was going to sell potions, no more being a thief or a witch, make an honest life here, my lord. I'm trying to be good..." she said, staring at the hand with wide eyes.

"Dear... You may not realize it yet, but you're exactly like the puns you speak so often..." he said, almost hypnotically. "When you're good, you're good..." His eyes, and hers by association, trailed off to the hoard of glittering treasure, and atop it, the seven Chaos Emeralds that she had so trivially stolen, and hid for months without so much as a hint of their presence.

His eyebrow quirked, and he noted a watch, a set of keys, and a black pouch of GP, now atop the pile. She somehow picked his pockets... He didn't even have any pockets, he kept it in the hammerspace ponies used to keep stuff behind their backs! She could even pickpocket that!

With surprise and glee, he leered. "But when you're bad, you're better."

It didn't seem to be getting the reaction he had hoped for, so he switched tracks, and his voice became something softer, and more delicate. Something vulnerable, with a raw hint of pain, underneath. "Just because you should be hated, does not mean you have to hate yourself, Malusi. Can you not be happy, even if you cannot be good?.

She looked uncertain still, but the walls were cracking. Something malevolent was peaking out from behind them.

"Your heart still works, doesn't it? Tell me if that really sounds so awful," Weiss asked genuinely, his hand still outstretched to the mare.

'Happy...' she thought to herself.

Hoof met hand, and, that night, after a lot of talking, Weiss wrote in his little white book, the Grimoire Weiss.

Entry Number Five-hundred and Ninety-Nine, Year Two-hundred and Eighty-five.

"I met the most wonderful person. A zebra named Malusi. She tried to rob me, poison me, and then rob me again.

"And that was in the same day... She's a real angel."

"Ahh, King... Grover the Third? I'm remembering correctly, yes? To what do I owe the pleasure?" Weiss asked, sitting in his office chair, as the ruler of Griffonstone leered at him over the illusory projection they were using to communicate.

With the Idol of Boreas gone, the effects had been apparent and growing for years. The magical pride of the griffons was giving way to greed once more, and their ruler showed it in spades, with his thin, reedy appearance. Without the pool of pride bolstering him, the body was no longer as valuable as the treasury.

"Yes, well, I've come to you with a rather grim matter. The power of the Idol is waning, and with it, undesirable elements have begun to appear in my kingdom. Or rather, they have begun to leave it," the sickly looking king said, tapping his talons on the table.

"A kingdom requires taxes to function, and yet, with your realm's vast means of transportation, its fantastically lazy tools, and the ease by which one may become a member of it in full, I have noted that a large number of griffons are fleeing to your realm to escape tax debts, as their greed overwhelms them."

The sage pretended to listen, nodding in all the right places. The Idol wasn't waning, it was gone, gone to who knows where. Weiss already tried checking the gorge it had fallen down in the original timeline, but it was nowhere to be found there, nor anywhere else he thought to check. In short, this Grover was full of it.

"Now, that kerfuffle with those emerald whatsits was a problem, yes, but one you cleaned up quite admirably. That, I certainly respect, and as such, I have made sure that it remains a quietly kept little secret. Just between us, you see. In return, I would ask a favor for you. Until the Idol's power begins to wax once more, and returns to us the pride of Griffonstone, I would ask of you a tribute. To make up there, what is lost in the tax haven your realm represents," the king said pleasantly.

Weiss smiled. "I see. Thank you for your prudence. I, as the Shadow Realm's ruler and administrator, shall do all in my power to secure your tribute, oh King Grover, the Third."

He waited patiently as the sage began tapping away at a small keyboard made of carved obsidian.

"Oh, did you have a tribute in mind? I would hate for us to misunderstand one another. I suspected a 20% tax would do, but a bit more shouldn't make too much of a difference," the sage mused, watching as the King barely kept from salivating at the number.

"No, that would be fantastic, actually!" he nodded rapidly.

"Good, good. There, the job is done. Give the people a minute to vote," Weiss requested, as the king's expression dropped.

'Vote?' went through the griffon ruler's mind. Was the sage really going to pull this nonsense even behind closed doors?

"Pardon?" he asked, hoping for clarification.

On the holographic screen, a large red bar began to rapidly grow, numbers swelling with every second.

"Mmm. Well, that's looking quite unfortunate," Weiss Noir said, turning the screen around to face the Griffonstone Ruler.

"Would you all like to pay a 20% tax to give tribute to Griffonstone?" the question at the top of the screen read, alongside a live poll, and a small document detailing the rationale as to why it was needed.

There hadn't been a single vote for "yes" in the time it had been up.

"Well, the people have spoken. You do recall that my role as ruler is only to pose such questions to the public, and interpret their wishes, yes? I will allow this poll to continue for a few days longer, but I can't help but suspect what the results will be," Weiss asked, steepling his hands.

Grover's face turned from pleasant to nasty. "You would mock me? Of course they would not vote for such a thing themselves, they don't know any better!"

Weiss smiled. "Unfortunate, is it not? Alas, we two rulers are quite helpless. The griffons leave your kingdom, the ponies do not vote for twenty-percent taxes in mine... What wretched peasants, is that what you would like me to say?"

The king sputtered angrily.

Weiss slammed a hand onto his desk, the keyboard below it crunching into uselessness. "Get the fuck off the line. I've got other callers waiting for me."

King Grover the third glared. "So be it."

With a bleep, the holographic line went dead.

"Well, that went well," Weiss said, stretching as he stood up from his desk, and trotted over to a nearby portal station. It opened to what must have been half a zone of nothing but alchemy equipment.

In it, he could hear the gleeful laughter of none other than "Councilman Oh Lord", or, as she was known to him, Councilmare Malusi. At the same time, he dropped the illusory magic that kept him from appearing to be a sheep. Someone had poisoned him with a polymorphic potion so strong, even shifting forms as a shadow clone proved unable to keep him from turning back into a literal "black sheep".

"What's got you so cheery? Are you going to explain why I had to use an illusion to cover up the potion you slipped in my coffee?" he asked, watching the zebra slide down one of the ladders leading up to a gigantic vat.

"I did it, my lord, I finally did it. It's still brewing, but soon, I'll proof my worth... This will set the bar for alchemy, for decades to come... Have I stirred your interest yet?"

Weiss huffed. "Yes, I'm shaken, over ice, stick a lime on me and rim the glass, could you tell me what it is you've actually been working on now?" he joked. Malusi frowned, and huffed.

"You want some cheese with that whine? I've brie-n coming up with a whey to do the single most forbidden thing I could possibly think of. I know you only cask-ed for my expertise in potioneering, but I must do more. Do you recall, how awful your alchemy is?"

"Hey, if it works it works," Weiss said heatedly. They had argued long into the night over that particular irksome problem. Namely, Weiss's "Test everything and see what sticks" method of inventing new magical substances.

"It doesn't," she smirked. "Bott-I'll make it work," she said, grabbing him and dragging him over to where she had lit lamps filled with incense, carved runes and channels into the floor, and filled them with all manner of things.

"I'm going to make you feel clever, my lord. Perhaps even as clever as me." she said, excited, but with an undercurrent of something else that he immediately picked up on.

'A test...' he thought.

If she gave him access to Zebra Cleverness Magic, he wouldn't need a zebra alchemist anymore. He could simply do it himself.

"This is beyond even my wildest hopes, Malusi, and yet... If you were to use this ritual to give me even a bare whisper of what you're claiming, how could I possibly reward you?"

"G-if-t you must give me something, I only ask you continue giving me your mercy, my lord. I've got such a bad wrap, just being allowed to remain present in this place is more than I can ask," she said dismissively, spotting Weiss's twitching face a moment too late.

"No. It's not enough. At least a thousand years to toy with zebra magic as I wish, the risks of what you're giving me, the worth of it is too great for me to not reward you, damn it," Weiss barked out.

"You think I'm an idiot, Malusi? You're testing me. Seeing if I will cast you aside, once I've gotten what I want out of you. Seeing if I'll take the bait? Take zebra magic for myself, even knowing that it would render you obsolete. Do you really trust me that little?"

He shuddered with anger. Not at her, but at the circumstances themselves, that would turn a mare with such potential into this wilting wretch. "You leave me no choice. Come with me," the sage demanded, pulling her through another portal, as her fear began to grow once more.

He guided her through halls, beyond portals, down stairs and into darker and darker tunnels, away from the lab he had built and supplied for her.

Into a vault.

"In this room is my greatest weakness, Malusi. Let it never be said that I cannot trust. Let it never be said that I cannot be trusted, by those who are worthy," he mused, opening the vault.

Inside, was a single copper lamp, burning with white fire from its wick. In the corner of the room, Weiss's own sleeping body lay on a slab. Scattered around the room, various objects of indiscernible purpose were humming, pulsing, and doing all manner of magical nonsense.

He levitated the copper lamp to himself, dropping it into his hand. "This is the Lamp of Life. I no longer know how much life remains inside it. Years? Decades? Perhaps even Millennia. It is the symbol of the Shadow Realm's faith in me to rule them, as long as Sombra remains unslain, so too will I. Until I avenge those I have failed, this item will keep me bound to this world. An immortal who was never meant to be."

He took the lamp from its small pedestal.

"Let no place be barred from you. Let no guardian stand against you. Let nothing of the Shadow Realm keep you from its warmth. So I swear on my life, and the life that has been given to me, through this lamp," he said.

"Now tell me, once and for all. What shall I reward you with, Councilmare Malusi, once you've given me the forbidden secret of your kind?" he asked the shivering zebra.

"In the time I've spent here, all my wildest wishes have come true. All my fears banished djinn such a short time," she finally admitted.

"My only wish is to continue to live here, my only fear is that one day I will not," she said meekly.

Weiss paused. "Immortality, eh? I can't say I don't blame you. It's classic for a reason. If it is within my power, then I will make it so."

"Wha- No, that isn't what I meant, my lo-" He handed her the lamp, interrupting her stammering response.

"For safekeeping, until I need it again. Maybe you'll figure out a potion of youth or something, if you study it," he said with a wink, before walking off, back to the lab, leaving the zebra stunned, and in possession of a relic bearing more value than anything she had ever held before.

He halted, and looked back at her. "Come along, Councilmare Malusi. Weren't you going to betray Zebrakind, give me power beyond reckoning?" he said coyly.

"Of course." Malusi lowered her head in a deep bow. She could do nothing else, faced with the sheer magnitude of the trust, the care that had been shown to her, in such a short time. She simply didn't have the strength of will to resist the kindness of a cruel and capricious sage. She would give him the magic she promised. She would give him everything for this trust.

The ritual took very little time. Malusi brought Weiss what he needed to consume for it, in the center of a circle, carved with poems of Zebrican origin, ones that spoke of an accursed thief, ones that begged them not to steal the greatest treasure of all. Warnings, dire warnings.

All ignored as, in the center of the circle, Weiss began to drink the potions, as the incense swirled around them.

The blood of a zebra, of course, was the first and last ingredient.

Weiss's mind burned, as he could feel his ego swell. The smug superiority of a clever mind cracking through his thoughts, giving him an entirely new emotion as Malusi's forbidden ritual whispered in his mind.

'What a familiar feeling,' Weiss thought to himself. The Unicorn Emotion of Change, which by now was an old friend. The sense of his spirit swelling, first with the vacuous hole of greed unfelt, then the burning veins of hatred unearned, then with the hollow coldness of hatred burnt away.

This new splinter of what made him feel as though he were the smartest man in the world was simply another in a long line of emotions he would twist to his needs, and another that would twist him to theirs.

Malusi began to extinguish the candles, one by one. She looked at him with concern. Had it worked? Was it too much for the Longma Unicorn to bear?

"My lord? Are you feeling lightheaded? Say something clever," she asked.

His eyes opened, and the bare glimmer of invisible light appeared behind his pupils, making them glint.

"I feel more and more... ~ But the things I had once felt, ~ I feel less and less," he said, speaking in haiku.

He stood, and approached his most faithful servant, who was giddy with the high of alchemical success, of a truly clever working that she had done all on her own.

"Let us go out this evening for pleasure, the night is still young," he said, planning on taking the mare out to steal, poison, and revel in all those evil little urges that a couple of villains felt. A few masks, a cloak or two, and they could have quite a bit of fun. Perhaps in Griffonstone?

"Of course," Malusi responded with another deep bow.

"All is for my lord."

https://youtu.be/NdwVwX1hWzA

(Present Chapter 56) Seventh Warrior, Fifth Weapon

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https://youtu.be/kADFV-zuUOQ?list=PLF3A344B92BCC9F54

Two buildings ground against one another. One, the centermost sanctum of a holy temple, the other, a fragment of a vast and mysterious castle. It was in the center, where these two met, that two very old ponies met once again.

One was a pale white, with vivid red scales, a heavy stocky build, and a mane of blazing fire, that jutting out in all directions like jets of fire, his spiked beard rippling and flickering like cutting torches.

The other was a shimmering color, somewhere between lavender and brown, pudgy and short, with a braided mane of grey-purple flames, thick and trailing down to her knees.

The two were sitting on simple cushions, at the edges of their respective realms, looking at one another with what was clearly love between them.

"Hello, Snacky. It's been a while, hasn't it? Have you been alright on your own?" Whippersnap asked, leaning forwards with a warm expression.

Snickersnack gruffly huffed. "That's not what we're here to talk about, dear. Have you found a suitable user?"

She rubbed her chin. "There is one. My current wielder is fine, but she doesn't really need me, now does she?" Whippersnap responded.

"We need to hurry and get the last two weapons to their wielders. I can feel a change in the wind. We're nearing the time when we'll be needed again. When the Warriors of Light will be needed again," the stallion said, his mane flickering a few times.

"Don't worry. That other star isn't much, but it'll find its way. Trust the tree, Snacky."

Snickersnack rolled his eyes, but his lips were twitching upwards. "Fine. I'll 'trust the tree'... Snappy."

She nodded primly. "We'll find our way. We just have to trust that fate will be kind. Won't it?"

"It will. We'll be facing it together, after all," Snickersnack said, as their two domains began to part once more, temple and castle slipping away.

Gilda finished shaking Applejack's hoof.

"Thanks fer the show. I know it probably wasn't too convenient for ya... I ain't an invalid, dang it, I coulda went to whatever fancy place you were planning on doing this thing at," Applejack commented. She and her friends did seem interested in going to one of Gilda and Trixie's shows, but after the incident at Canterlot, the mare had been too injured to travel.

Naturally, since the farmer couldn't come to the show they decided to bring the show to the farm, to make up for it.

While Trixie was busy talking to the crowd and signing autographs after the wowing display of stunt flying, fireworks, and magic tricks galore, Gilda had gone over to the real audience, namely, the friends and acquaintances she had begun to make in Ponyville.

"Hey, don't worry about it. We still got a great turnout," Gilda shrugged. "Besides, it isn't like we're doing this for money. Still filthy stinking rich, remember?"

"Applejack is mighty grateful, either way, dear. Some R and R is just what she needs to get back on her hooves" Granny Smith said, patting her grandfilly on the shoulder.

"Aw granny, I'm not that hurt," Applejack brushed the hoof away. While she did need to wear a brace, the brace was shrinking with every trip to the doctor, as less and less support was needed for her recovering back. It didn't stop her friends and family from fretting over her, but it was a clear sign of progress.

"Bah. Don't listen to her. Yer little show brought plenty of pep around here, an the sales don't hurt none either," Granny interjected. Twilight and the others giggled a bit as the green mare glanced over at where Flim and Flam were using their smooth talking to move produce over at the stall nearby.

Gilda snorted as her own friends started approaching, Trixie in tow. "Alright. See you round, hayseed."

"That was seriously cool, how did you even do that thing with the hoops?!" Shooting Star asked excitedly, Trixie preening at the attention.

"Well, it took a very long time for Trixie to work out the exact details, but that's all she will say on the matter. A magician never reveals her secrets, after all!" she said, using her considerable mental fortitude to not explain how she hid gunpowder in the hoops to make them spin up into the air like she did.

Following her this time was a few other individuals as well, some flaming ponies Gilda didn't recognize, and a dragon she definitely didn't recognize.

Flim and Flam, done with selling apples and apple accessories, took the liberty of introducing the newcomer.

"Hello, dears and dearettes, this is our wonderful new friend, Garble. He's that dragon that got ran over, if you recall my earlier story?" Flam said, tipping his hat with a smile.

"Hey, don't get the wrong idea, I'm not your friend," Garble huffed, putting the last word in air quotes. "It's just that that zebra lady has been making me come here to get her stuff."

Sunset raised an eyebrow. "Uh huh, and..?" the mare asked, unsure why the dragon would care to meet with them if he was going to be this grouchy about it.

Garble kicked the ground. "Her creepy mom said I had to 'meet the other warriors', and told me to just go along with it, or she'd turn me pink," he grumbled.

The dragon held his hands out, and in a flash of light, a big metal pot appeared. Sunset seemed to recognize it vaguely, but it was Gilda and Shooting Star that immediately realized what it was. Flim and Flam didn't seem to react, having seen it already, and Trixie just looked confused.

"Trixie is confused," she helpfully explained.

"You've got one of those things like we've got!" Shooting Star said, flashing with light as she turned into a robotic, mechanical looking mare, holding a big wand with a glowing yellow star atop it.

Gilda, at the same time, summoned the Master Sword from wherever it was when she wasn't using it, the weapon appearing in her grip.

None of them were sure what to say, but there was some subtle feeling that went between all the weapon-wielders, that seemed to finally be perceptible with four of them in one place.

Garble shuffled. "Okay, cool, so we've all got weird magic things. Is that all I needed to come here for?"

Sunset pushed her way past her friends. "Wait, everyone, we're three, maybe four for four on the Weapons of Light migrating owners. This might be one of those magical destiny things I've read about..." Immediately, the magical-science-obsessed mare had a thought dragging all of her attention onto it.

"What, like a cutie mark?" Gilda frowned.

"No, not exactly. Magic has a funny way of doing things, though. Garble, when you got that pot, did you feel anything particularly noteworthy?"

He shrugged, slightly weirded out by the pony's intense look that was kinda intimidating (for a pony) "I dunno. It's just a really cool pot. That Zecora lady said I could keep using it if I didn't take it anywhere without her permission."

Sunset scratched her chin.

"Courage, Wishing, Innovation, and whatever "A cool pot" keys to... If four out of the six have already bonded to new owners, then is it a pattern? And if so, who's next?"

"Uh, Sunset, I think you might be overthinking this," Gilda said, dismissing the Weapon of Light in another sparkly flash.

When it didn't look like she was going to drop it, Trixie scoffed. "Sunset, you're being ridiculous. Not everything is some sort of conspiratorial machination of destiny. I feel we may be missing something very important here talking about that Sage's magic junk."

She turns to the dragon. "Garble, did you say something about Zecora's 'Creepy Mom'?"

Immediately, everyone who knew what the showmare was talking about realized at the same time, the implication in the air.

Garble scratched his head. "Yeah? She kept making these weird jokes. I was going to Zecora's place to see what happens if you mix steaks with obsidian, and then..."

"Mother please leave! You've brought me shame! ~ Your actions here, they've soiled my name!
"I only wished to live in peace ~ And now you tell me that has ceased?
"I say thee neigh, no way! Now go! ~ You speak of good, you've brought me woe!
"I care not for your prophesy ~ You've spent too long beneath that tree!" Zecora shouted, belting line after line at the unassuming zebra before her.

"Uhh, should I come back later, or..?" Garble said, knocking on the door awkwardly.

The two zebras looked right at him.

"Well, look what the cat's dragon in. No, young drake, my daughter may be spitting fire, but now's as good a time as any," the lady said. "I am Malusi, and you are?"

Zecora's face was a rictus of anger, not at Garble, but at Malusi, who seemed to be acting as if this was her house, rather than Zecora's.

"Uhh, the name's Garble. Look, I'm gonna go, this really seems like a bad time," the drake said, turning around before yelping in fright.

The weird Zebra somehow got right behind him in a second.

"Bad time? Hardly, we should really tock now. You wouldn't want to tick me off would you?" She said, glancing back at her fuming daughter. "Hour little spat can wait."

She began to walk around the teenage dragon, who felt a weird, uncomfortable vibe in the air from this freaky zebra.

"I've got to hand it to you, I really do mean-ute. I wasn't expecting someone like you to have the wonder needed to bond with the Krak Pot, but on the second hand, I suppose it was getting around that time."

"Leave him be. ~ You'll anger me, ~ Something you don't want to see," Zecora warned, having drawn a bottle of something from her shelf, brandishing it threateningly.

Malusi rolled her eyes, but a dangerously clever glint somehow entered into her gaze, even as she dropped the puns...

"The short version, then. I need to return to the tree to meditate anyway."

Garble stiffened as those clever eyes turned on him. When she jabbed a hoof against his chest, he backed away. This zebra suddenly felt an awful lot like some dragons he had met before. 'Old,' Garble thought quietly.

And when a dragon thought 'Old', they really meant 'Dangerous'.

"You are the true owner of that pot you stole, little dragon... Go to those pony brothers you met. Have them introduce you to the new Warriors of Light. The day is coming when you'll all be needed. I've forseen that much."

Garble finally mustered up some anger. How dare this little zebra try to boss around a dragon! Before he could try to regain some of his rapidly disgraced pride, however, Malusi pulled out a bottle of her own.

"Do it, or hue'll find out just how pink those scales of yours can get."

Zecora finally had enough, and splashed green liquid at the zebra, who flipped into the air, laughing as she drank a potion that made her disappear entirely. The liquid hissed and bubbled as it made a thick gummy mass on the floor.

Garble shivered. "Uhh, what was that about?"

Zecora frowned. "I'm sorry you had to put up with her ~ She is my mother, a twisted cur."

Stepping aside, Zecora allowed the tall dragon to enter her home. "Please, come in, we've much to do. ~ The pot's set out, if you'd like to brew."

With a shrug, Garble walked in, and Zecora tried her best to explain things to the dragon that just weren't taking, when it came to his knowledge of alchemy, and the pot itself. He certainly still had fun though, watching the sparkly lights and alchemically producing magma steaks, though.

The best he managed to take away from the conversation to follow was that apparently he could teleport the pot to him, and to never, ever do so in front of the Dragon Mouse.

Garble, over the course of the conversation with the B-Team, had eventually meandered over to a stack of hay bales, sitting down while he talked about the weird encounter.

"So, yeah. I hope one of you can explain what the heck was up with that, because I'm pretty much lost on who that lady is," Garble finished.

"She's one of Weiss Noir's goons, as far as Trixie knows," the showmare responded simply.

Shooting Star had a bitter expression on her face. "She's dangerous. She once poisoned nearly every pony in Ponyville, just to make them all hate her."

Sunset, however, had a calculating gleam. "So I was right, there is some destiny at play here, she said as much! We need to know more, if we're going to come out ahead of this thing. If there's one thing I know about fate, it's that not knowing is as good as losing to it. Garble, are you willing to help us with this? It'll almost certainly affect you too," she said with a stomp.

He didn't know what to say. This whole situation was even weirder than the Shadow-Realm dragon clones, and those were weird. "I guess?" he answered.

Trixie once again scoffed. "Sunset, you shouldn't act so crazed. This sounds like an awful lot of superstition to me."

"Yeah? What do you think it's going to sound an awful lot like when Weiss Noir finds out that a bunch of ponies who hate his guts are apparently destined to wield literal weapons of evil-eradication? It's already bad enough that he's going to find out it happened at all, I imagine... I'd rather know exactly what this prophesy is before it comes to bite us. And believe you me, Trixie, destiny always comes back to bite you," Sunset grimaced.

The mare just scoffed. "Those relics might be choosy, but I find it very hard to believe that they're, what, actively seeking out ponies to use them? Drawing them all together? It seems awfully contrived to me."

"Uhh, yeah. That's destiny for you," Sunset responded as if it were obvious.

"Well, I'll believe it when I see it." The showmare said.

With that, the group parted ways. Flim and Flam went to a small shack on the Apple Family property, Shooting Star, Gilda, and Trixie to their flat, and Sunset to the same dark tower she had been living out of since she came to this timeline.

Garble just sort of wandered off into the woods, aiming to return Zecora's pot, not quite knowing how to teleport it back now that he had gotten it to teleport into his claws in the first place... Somehow.

Trixie blinked awake, she had had the most wonderful dream that night. Fireworks, dazzling and more radiant than any she had made before! She dreamed of designs for her show that flitted across her vision, ones that were far too grand to realize in reality, but pleasant nonetheless.

She remembered seeing a filly in the crowd, the only one in the audience, who delighted and marveled at it all. One with the oddest, vaguest sense about them.

Trixie rolled over, and, seeing a huge, star-tipped rod in the bed next to her that practically deluged with magic, she let out an unholy shriek of shock.

Two little dot eyes blinked open on the oversized star-topper. "Oh, good, you're awake!"

Trixie screamed even louder, stumbling out of her bed.

"Who are you?! What are you doing in my room!" the magician said frantically.

The star bobbed up into the air. "I'm the Star Rod of Dreams! You've got big dreams, so I chose you!"

'Oh no...' Trixie realized with dread. Sunset was going to be so smug, with this magical talking, (and apparently thinking) relic-

"Oh no, I don't have thoughts, I'm just talking because you imagine I ought to! Your imagination must be really great, for that to be the first thing you think of in the morning!" the magical wand said in a peppy tone..

"Yo, Trixie, what's going on?!" Gilda shouted, throwing the door open.

Trixie looked to the griffon, but when she returned her attention to the Star Rod of Dreams, it was inanimate once again, humming with magic in her hooves.

"Sunset is going to be so insufferable when she finds out about this, Gilda, Trixie simply knows it..."

Gilda's cheeks puffed out as she sighed. "Yeah, probably. Can't be any worse than you usually are, though."

"Wh-Hey!" Trixie rebuffed cleverly.

And so, in a completely contrived event prompted apropos of nothing at all, Trixie Lulamoon became the wielder of the fifth Weapon of Light. How had it arrived? Where had it come from? Questions with no good answers, and a curious, fitting, dreamlike quality to its sudden and inexplicable arrival into the hooves of its true master.

The truth of the matter was simple. In the dark of the night, in the depths of Weiss Noir's blackened tower of obsidian, deep in the Everfree Forest, a magical relic of incredible power sat plugged into a horrible, nightmarish machine. The Devil's Machine, made to harness it to bleed dreams into reality, had been meant to use the Star Rod of Dreams to produce the final Relic of Darkness, only to fail due to a certain switch being set to "M" instead of "W".

Tonight, the Star Rod of Dreams sensed a vast, imaginative, and stylish dream in the air, and in a brief flash of light, disappeared to parts unknown.

And somepony noticed.

(Present Chapter 57) Machine Without a Purpose

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Needles of pale, transparent crystal floated in the air, born aloft like feathers on silk strands, each one delicate, finer than the thinnest sewing needle, like wire in their slim simplicity.

"You see, when you do this long enough, you learn how to make someone afraid, even when they're completely safe. Even if you explain in no uncertain terms that you're forbidden from hurting or killing them. Even when they overhear that the situation they're in is as harmless as can be, since your hands, or hooves, are tied," I said, sipping at my coffee as I rubbed at my tired eyes. I was exhausted, and, without any tools or materials left over that could do the job of manipulating my dreams and storing my magic, I hadn't been able to refresh my Vancian Magic for the day.

I could tell that Eclipse Flash wasn't happy, she blinked blearily at Chancellor Bitter Pill, who had been the next on my list for interrogating. She told me not to hurt him, and to state in no uncertain terms that I wouldn't to the pony himself. I held to nothing less than the exact words of that promise.

"Tell me, Chancellor, you did hear that, correct? Nod if you hear me say that I'm forbidden from harming you," I requested, and slowly, the pony nodded his head up, then down. The needles hovering in the air followed him, and the harmless pinprick of the splinters, I'm certain kept him from doing anything rash.

"Are you afraid and willing to tell me everything you know about Chapter Black, Chancellor, despite knowing that I'm forbidden from causing you any harm or pain? Your behavior seems to imply that you don't feel safe," I asked, eyebrows quirking.

"I-I am very frightened, yes."

I pressed the stallion, looking him in the eye curiously. "Despite knowing that I have no intention of hurting you? My student is right here, I can't do a thing."

"Y-yes."

I gestured. "See?"

Eclipse rubbed at her face. "Could you remove the crystals, Weiss?"

I smirked. "Sure, watch this," I snapped my fingers, and the crystals disappeared. The prissy pony's fear, however, did not.

"Do you feel safer? I removed the needles," I asked, in a smooth, oily tone that made the chancellor quite literally shiver.

"Not particularly."

"Great. Now, on to the list of every single site holding Chapter Black assets, illegal dark magic, tomes, dirty money, whatever you've got," I waved casually, sliding a pad of paper and a pen over to the pony.

Suddenly, a chill ran down my own spine, and a little fuzzy flapping eyeroc appeared, seemingly unfolding from empty air, and proceeding to chitter frantically in a sort of non-language that nonetheless conveyed one of my greatest fears.

"Weiss?" Eclipse asked, and I groaned, something clenching invisibly at my stomach. Tension. Nerves. Annoyance.

"Someone stole another Weapon of Light. The one that should have been the most well protected..."

Rather than the hot fury I expected, I just felt anguished. Why? Why do my precious weapons have to be treated like this? They were meant to be beautiful, good. The one thing I had going for me, and this is what they do to it? How they choose to attack me, right at my heart like this?

Eclipse laid a hoof on my shoulder, sensing something in my expression. "We'll figure this out, Weiss."

I took a deep breath, trying to stuff down the hurt and fear back where it belonged.

I turned to the chancellor, who seemed confused, looking up from his writing at the two of us.

I rolled my eyes impatiently, and waved a hand at him. "Look, I have to go do a thing. Pretend I'm still here, saying weird shit and making you scared as all hell, okay? Finish your homework and I promise you'll go to jail," I said to the stallion, whirring around and leaving the room with my student. As I left, I turned my negative feelings outwards, and felt new fresh hatred blooming.

"I am about to redefine every fucking synonym for the word 'pain', and when I find the idiot who stole my precious Weapon of Light..."

My voice trailed off as I grabbed the doors and slammed them shut behind me. The loud echo of clanging metal punctuated the end of my assurance.

"They'll be the defenition,"

Lacking any other immediate leads, I brought Eclipse down to the bottom of my tower in the Everfree. To the lowest floor, where I kept it.

"Well, here's where it was. Look around, see if you can spot anything that seems off," I say, walking up to the machine. Rather than doing as I asked, however, my student follows me. 'She seems...'

"Weiss, what is this machine?" she asked, swallowing heavily.

I frowned, shaking my head. "It's the Devil's Machine. Not relevant to the situation at hand, we should focus on finding the rod, Eclipse."

She didn't listen, walking up to the computer managing it, and just staring at the readouts that it displayed while idling.

"Brainwaves... Magical frequencies. This machine, it's meant to influence emotions, isn't it?" she said quietly, and I could tell something was wrong.

"Yes. I built it to give me the power I needed. This machine is capable of manifesting your emotional conflicts in a dreamscape, and, with the Star Rod of Dreams embedded in that slot over there, it can make this effect permanent. Absolutely nothing kills a pony's magical power quite like being conflicted. With the Devil's Machine, I could permanently suppress that conflict. Defeat my weaker self, and become what I was meant to be," I explained.

I approached her, and placed a hand on the machine, the hoses trailing off of the gruesome-looking pod glowed with a matte light under the dim bulbs illuminating the room.

"Imagine the kind of power a pony wields, when their intentions are utterly pure. When there is no doubt whatsoever in their mind. I've tasted that power before, and this machine was going to bring that power out."

With a sigh, I looked away. "It didn't work, needless to say. I thought it did, but it failed to truly suppress my lighter emotions.

I scoffed. "Bah, what a waste of time. Now I don't even need that power. It's just a curio now, taking up space and collecting dust. Let's go, Eclipse, there's nothing here to help find that rod. We're going to have to figure something else out."

Eclipse twisted, and I could see her shivering, with rage or some other emotion, I couldn't quite tell. "What could you have possibly needed power for so badly, that you would destroy your own heart to do it, Weiss?! This machine... It would have killed you, turned you into a husk of your former self!"

"I needed it to defeat Sombra," I explained, but she shook her head.

"No you didn't. You had Celestia and Luna both, and those Elements of Harmony, those could have done the job, or the Weapons of Light you made, they could have laid that tyrant low just as easily! He had none of his protections, none of his former power!"

I swallowed, taking a step back at the vitriol. "I needed it to defeat him myself,"

"No! No you didn't! I've seen your power Weiss, and Priss? She's found newspapers, ones of you fighting Celestia, twice even! You had the power of hundreds of years of dark magic already! You couldn't have needed more power to defeat him."

I froze. My student, her face so hurt, so worried.

Finally, I answered. "Everything I did, I did to avenge you. Everything I've done, I've done to punish those responsible. All I had to live for was revenge, so that's all I lived for."

"And after that?" she asked, eyes brimming with tears. "After all of that revenge? Then what?"

I looked down. I remembered, in the way I didn't like doing. I answered, in exactly the way I didn't answer Tempest Shadow, when she asked me the same question.

"An end."

I continued to explain, my lips continued to move, but there was no true sound for the two of us. Nothing to be heard.

The words after were meaningless. The intent had been conveyed from the start.

I already spoke the truth. There was nothing after my revenge. No continuation, nothing stretched beyond that moment on the thread of my destiny, in my eyes.

Only an ending.

My student was crying. The quiet murmur of machinery only slowly returned to the background behind us, a sound by which to compare the quiet drip of tears to as they fell to the floor.

I stood silently as Eclipse Flash's breathing grew frantic, and her muscles tightened.

I stepped aside as she walked past me, towards the machine.

I waited patiently as she let out a scream, driving her hooves into the Devil's machine, and beginning the laborious process of annihilating it, exterminating it from this world and erasing it to its last atom.

Should I have advised her? Hatefire alone would have been sufficient. Attacking it with her bare hooves only served to break up the machinery, tearing the rubberized hosing and the steel plating. Her goal was clearly to destroy it far more thoroughly.

For once, I knew that would be the wrong thing to say. I knew hate. I knew that she didn't merely want to burn the machine until nothing remained. She wanted to do it with her own two hooves, piece by shrieking piece.

'How sad is that?' I thought blithely. 'For once, I actually understand my student's feelings.'

After all, isn't that what I wanted to do? To destroy Sombra's hope with such fury and malice that it couldn't be mistaken for anything but blind hatred? That it was done for no purpose beyond the purity of its emotion?

She was breathing heavily as my tower burned around us with the black fire of hatred.

I told Luna. I warned Celestia. Here and now, I saw it in her tears. The truth that I am too far gone. Too far gone to understand the emotions that living things felt.

Why was she sad? Why was she angry? Didn't she understand? She said the machine would have destroyed my heart, if I had used it.

How did she not see, that my heart had already been destroyed, so long ago?

I saw, agnostic of myself, my body, moving on its own. I stood next to her, as the tower shuddered, her hatred too powerful to be contained, even as it dimmed and faded into sorrow.

My body hugged hers, and she hugged it in turn.

I felt... Cold. My ashy body seemed so frail, in her hooves.

She began to say something. About helping me. About fixing whatever had happened inside my mind.

But as she spoke, I was far away. Lost in thought. Since the return of the Shadow Realm, I had been adrift. Without purpose. Without revenge. Without something to hate.

"I will never give up, Weiss," Eclipse promised, with a voice as firm and hard as the foundations of the earth. "I will help you. This- You don't need this. This doesn't have to be your destiny. This- This finality...

"I'll take you past it. I promise," she whispers to me.

Her words feel so... Limiting. Shackling of herself.

Dark Magic is something she has devoted herself to, but this talk of- of making things better...

Dark Magic cannot make someone better. She should know that.

She should have learned that by now.

It burned inside of me, for a reason I didn't quite understand. Why hadn't she learned that? Why didn't she know already?

And yet, the knowledge seemed to draw me out of the cold. A glint of determination, if that's what it was, had appeared in me.

I told Celestia that I would wipe away Chapter Black, and Cadence- I told her I would complete Eclipse Flash's education.

I promised myself to complete the Weapons of Light, so that the Elements of Harmony could be as powerful as they needed to be, to destroy whatever emerged from the dark.

I still had a chance. I could still do good. Despite the suspicion that had been growing inside me, the suspicion of just how corrupt I had become...

There was still a fragment of hope, that I could be a good person.

This story could still have a happy ending.

Lightning struck us, and we disappeared from the tower.

"Erm, ladies," Flim greeted, having called them out behind the barn.

"What's up? You needed to see us?" Gilda asked, looking around suspiciously. The gigantic machine sitting idly by looked... Angry. Its immobile form somehow conveying a certain tension, even in its sculpted, blank pony face.

This was further compounded by the frantic energy of Flam, who was buried in the machine's innards, scrambling to figure something out deeper inside.

"Indeed. I believe something has set off the Great Sacred Treasure. Some kind of... Malice," Flim explained nervously.

"I talked to Sunset, and she suggested you all come here so we could figure this out," he concluded. Sunset approached the group.

"Before you ask, no, it's not Weiss Noir. It's detecting... Something else. I don't know how to explain it, but somehow, all the sensors jammed into it are... Overlapping. Synergizing together to detect something weird."

"Could you be a bit clearer? Trixie is not the best at comprehending vague portents of doom," Trixie asked, trying to ignore the Star Rod of Dreams as it hovered near her, bobbing silently with imaginary words that only she could hear.

Gilda shook her head. "No, I know what she means. The sword's been feeling a bit weird too. Like there's something dangerous going on."

Garble scratched his head. "Okay..? Well if I can't punch it or burn it, I don't know why the heck you guys wanted me here."

Sunset gave the dragon a mild glare. "We might, is the thing. I called you all here so we could figure out what exactly 'it' is."

"There we are!" Flam exclaimed, pulling his body free of the machine, just as a hologram appeared from the gigantic golem-armor's head, its glaring eyes projecting a map of Equestria.

One marked in a particular place with an ominous pillar of darkness.

Sunset nodded to the map, looking at her friends and acquaintances. "As you can see, that is not a marker you want to see overlayed on top of Tartarus itself."

Gilda smirked, as did Shooting Star, cracking their necks as their beaks curled up in unison.

"Sounds like fun. So we go check it out? If Gilda's freaky sword is getting uppity, it's gotta be in need of some buttkicking." Shooting Star remarked. Her own chest hummed, as her Star Rod of Wishes seemed to pulse in agreement.

Sunset hummed. "The fact that the Weapons of Light themselves seem to be drawn to it does imply that it isn't a... Friendship-compatible problem, exactly. Garble, take a letter," she asks.

"No," he answers.

The unicorn looks to the stars above with a silent plea for patience. "Fine, I'll go get my book, then," she says, trotting off to pen a warning to Celestia. As soon as she finished, it was time to go.

The Warriors of Light would face their first true trial...

...At the Gates of Tartarus.