The last clergycreature seeks out the last necromancer in the dead world she's made.
The aging Eros used to be the Archon of the Church of Boreas, Regent of the Griffonian Empire, bent on uniting Griffonia under the Imperial banner.
No more. Not after the undead devoured the world, led by the Queen of Bones, a unicorn named Rosa Maledicta. Her goal: to annihilate all life and usher in an eternity of death. She has almost won, for the souls that yet live are a dwindling, single-digit few.
Armed with nothing but holy water and holy bread, this lonely griffon of holy robes thus seeks out Rosa in the wasteland that is the north.
Clattering resounds from a lonely shack stuck in a hostile wastescape, and Eros has to raise his head. He's so close to her, the mare he condemned as the end of the world.
His claws have crunched bony mulch for days. The feathers on his wings sag: his feathers and fur weigh like the world breaking down his own bones already on the way out. His coughs turned violent weeks ago. Phlegm and blood mixed like pollution, like filth the old archon railed against for decades on the pulpit, under a statue of Boreas and the rest of the Gods.
That's a ghost of a time now. Revolution burned in a holy city, heralding the slaughter of those who had only faith, dancing to the tune of nobility's flock of vultures—bickering dukes and duchesses, they all are. A child-emperor was what the final years gave him. A mere child. No value to anyone save for what his imperial heritage could bestow upon them. That child stood, once, in a tunnel, his shotgun oversized for his feeble claws, overwhelmed by a rush of rotting flesh and naked bones. That sacrifice allowed Eros to have his 107th birthday weeks ago (and the near-decade of birthdays before that). They oppress him in the form of aching eye bags.
His head is still raised, eyeing the dilapidated shack. Its chimney has fallen to the wayside. Soot and ash blend in with the darkness that turned this land into a tangible void that must be waded through. He sometimes spies the rare tree stump that survived the undead's hunger for more material, more weapons, just more.
More clattering pierces through his hard hearing.
His decaying body electrifies with fear. An enemy lurks... or someone in need. The last one, he almost killed out of instinct—his blade taken by a trip on a flimsy bridge, falling down a cliff then a river. She had been a pony, calling those rivers her home. The griffons' empire and her riverlands had strenuous histories before burying the hatchet to unite against the undead menace up north. That last one, the previous one... a simple hooded peasant, begging for him to stay. Please, mister, they... I don't know where they took my husband and my foals. C-can you be with me? I d-don't want to die... alone...
He shoots a claw into his pockets. Three more vials of holy water and a tiny package of bread shaped like a three-leaf clover: signs with which to strike fear in the hearts of liches' ghouls and vampires' thralls. Come closer, creature of Boreas. You shall be commended to Him...and be provided a path to the life hereafter. The prayers were as he remembers, for Boreas and the other Gods to have mercy on her, to spare her from a wicked demise, to have her sins confessed and laid open to the heavens for forgiveness. The rites were as he remembers, for with him still are the drops of holy water (for absolution and purification) and the three breads (to symbolize life and provisions for the mare's final earthly travels). He trudges closer to the shack's open windows and doors that yawn like an abyss. A stench rises, the warning of a dead creature.
Several steps away, a griffon is cast against a table and the dim light of a sun locked in the horizon, surrounded by fallen kitchenware. A pot has just finished rolling around. Slumped on the wooden surface are the remains of another griffon. Its skeleton is held up by thin strands of muscles, with many pieces missing.
Eros takes another step forward to partake in some shelter.
A cough from the table-bound creature is a sign of life, and gold eyes flash open.
Eros clutches his holy implements, scanning the not-so-dead griffon. Among other details, hiding among eating utensils, is a fallen gun; bullets are strewn about, all silver. Eros feels for a weapon of his own. He knows he has none.
"You're..." The would-be corpse creaks, his own head rising to meet Eros' scanning gaze. The voice is young and weary. A record player used to hang around in Eros' former abode, an old broken one, and the way it scratched every vinyl—that is this. "...Archon... Archon Eros... you... you enjoy this, don't you? Heathen, cast down... scum.. don't say sorry! I am scum... you'll say it! I've... heard... of you saying sorry... I see through you!"
The old griff's wings bend at the accusations. A hasty escape, maybe. Not yet. He holds his robe tight. Holy water won't stop bullets.
"What's... Boreas gonna do with... me, huh? Some bandit... a merc!" The stranger lifts his gun in the air. The digits of his claw pretend to pull the trigger, pretend to shoot the sky. "Wetwork, you name... it! Griffonstone-born... what have you? No Idol... no diplomacy, just... war..." His chipped beak is home to a wicked sneer. "I'm... as... holy as you are. Bang, bang... all dead, in the name of... Boreas, a regent for a helpless chick..."
It had been for all that was holy.
A cough kills the silence. That stranger bends over, that fragile beak crunching against the floor and a pot. His lungs hack themselves dry, fighting against whatever's clogging the airways. His newly revealed back shows off sharpened bones, like swords, having stabbed his wings.
"You're... just like me, old rooster." He spits out blood at Eros' face, under a glower. Liquid disgust melts on his cheeks. "I know what... who you want to kill... she, Rosa... I was hoping... to see the look on her face… the phylactery I stole…"
That grips Eros' heart. His graying eyes widen.
"Watertowns, village... her... weakness... my last mission... good pay..."
Holy springs—
"Her phylactery is... buried, hut, house..." Narrower directions, detailed coordinates, out of rote, he continues to slur a flurry of it.
Dark glee races through Eros' veins. What arms has he brought to the fight ahead? Nothing to protect himself with, only a distant hope that Boreas will provide, to save from the final fire that is his upcoming trial.
Rosa’s phylactery is a bargaining chip, something to dangle over her. Distance is an obstacle: Watertowns is far off. The southern roads ask him of time of which he is not sure he has in stock. Any food to scavenge will have been rotten when he gets there, if his frail body pushes its limit to reach the secret forests of those mysterious hooded ponies laden with copse-shrouded secrets.
The stranger coughs once more. There's a retch; it fouls up his ears. Shaking claws fetch a holy vial, another on bread—
He's pulled down; he falls to his level. A tinkle, and a crack—the vial spills holiness through the fragments, then crushed by the pummels of the stranger's weakening claw.
"I see through you!" croaks the stranger. "You won't make... me holy!" Another pummel bleeds his punching claw thanks to the sharp glass. "You will... kill Rosa! That's what... your bloody Empire fought... for... last..."
Coughs attack Eros, and he bends over. His limbs go limp, so the wooden floor becomes an ocean to struggle against, sinking deeper into the boards. A gun is felt. He brushes it away. Another vial, another vial. He feels for it. He prays silently when he grasps solid glass.
His lungs and throat free for now, Eros affords one more look at the stranger.
On its beak, a lifeless grin is fixed, a claw pointed at the archon, the regent, the heart of the griffon continent, ravaged by blood and an attempt at a rejuvenated Empire from centuries past...
Sinner, I am. The greatest and poorest of them all.
The dead griff's eyes have been closed for half an hour, blind to the cold eternal twilight outside.
He's felt its neck, its wrists. The stranger has no pulse; the blood cooled. Its clothes were taken, pockets upturned. Coins fell, small boxes of ammunition. The gun has apparently been broken for a long while.
Eros wheezes, takes out a canister of water to drink, sitting against that dead griff's table. Past the window, everything fades into blurs. Failing eyesight is another reminder from the Gods of his limited time.
Holy archon, holy regent. Palatial pillars and palisades of Griffenheim, where the child-emperor lived and died, where the other archons and priests stood their crumbling ground. What a blood-stained joy it was to see the Imperial ranks fly the standards of every corner of heartlands. A Boreas-blessed variety, pledging their allegiance to burning tatters, demolished statues, fathers and sons torn apart, divided, forced to tear each other apart where one glows greenly, diseased—already dead, yet still demonically alive.
Rosa had been there, the ringmaster of the undead, The Dread League, leading the Black Crusade to annihilate life. The squabble of nobles, the intrigue of soldiers, glories of a reunified Empire, glories of a holy people—these and this stranger disintegrated into ash in the face of Rosa.
Rising to standing, Eros' joints pop and ache, like he is clogging the air around him trying to move. A southward journey to the Watertowns first, then a cadaver's directions branded in his one-track (it's only Rosa, Rosa) mind.
He clutches for the vials once more. Two are left.
Fire burns him all, spears of agony in his legs, and the ground darkly rumbles. Eros wheezes and falls a second time, defiantly unwilling to stoop down to screams.
The seat of her soul has disappeared. Wrath powers through Rosa Maledicta, with only herself to blame. She curses herself for being so lax, having believed that life cannot yet surprise her and that her lowliest guards patrolling the vault of her phylactery are somehow invincible.
The news launches her out of her seat in Magehold's highest tower. She splattered one of the ghoulish newsbearers against the walls, bones stuck by her magic. An ugly mess. Like her. She does not deny that she is another ugly creature. Her parents named her after her scarlet mane, wilted yet beautiful like a rose. Bad mane days pale against her appearance now: gaunt flesh stretched across her skull, with an incomplete coat that uncovers bubbling muscles and ligaments. She smells of eggs and sewers. A tiara of thorns graces her head.
After a dizzying spiral of stairs, she touches down on the ground floor. A chariot awaits her, helmed by loyal skeletal servants whose loyalty rewarded them with their fleshly hides. (Said loyalty is of the brainwashing kind, tainted by her resurrection magic to obey.) "Variegate," Rosa says to the mare leading the chariot charge, who also happens to be the other bearer of bad news, "can you tell me anything about him?"
Variegate snaps to attention, green eyes affixed to Rosa's gaze. Variegate's is a most familiar face, paraded around like a trophy, the earliest corpse Rosa still bothers to keep around. "They've told me that he is Archon Eros, Your Majesty. They've confirmed him to be the last one."
Astonishment leads Rosa to blink in place. "The last one."
"The last of the living, yes, Your Majesty."
The chariots pull over by a run-down house, wooden splinters flayed across the front of the door, dipped in blood.
That drags her out of her reverie. The last one, the last one... with a soul that yet lives, that has not yet tasted death. A box traveled with her vehicle, suffused with maces and daggers and potions to protect against this survivor.
He is a brittle spirit, older than a century. Without respect, he kneels, has been kneeling in pain, watched over by slack-jawed or no-jawed ghouls. A skeleton archer, by his teeth, puts down his bow. An arrow pierced through the archon's leg.
His squirming figure thrills her, supplanting the rage over her stolen phylactery for the time being. The ground is cold mush to her hooves. "The last... of your kind. Of the forces of light and life. Your faithfulness to Boreas... what has that done for you?"
The devouring swarm that marched south to reclaim the land of the living for blissful extinction: it's what she could do. A wilted rose graces what remains of her flanks: A blasphemous talent for Equestria. It's worthy of exile across the sea, to Magehold where darkness reserved a spot for her. (Be free to unleash your potential. Her potential demanded the manipulation of life's fabric, the "sacred" parameters that set the stage of the soul.) It was good.
It did a hacking, coughing Eros no good, with his dirty priestly clothes scarred, torn to chunks.
A claw inches for a pocket. It halts.
Her magic fries the claw useless. A series of elderly, neck-bending coughs later, Rosa pats her horn, warm from the spell. Fixated on him, she orders her slaves to stand down. The last... plenty of blades and bullets had cut off many an enemy's last words. No heroic last stands for the brave priest-soldiers of the Order, nor the hardy Imperial knights at Griffenheim. Not even the united front of ponies, zebras, hippogriffs, kirin—an entire world set against her—for the martyrs might've made legends.
All the lovely, brilliant, explosive years of her prime, passed away. The wind howls, whips at her graying mane and his tattered cloths, background to the ring of ghouls at her command, lending their target no escape.
A glass tube fell. She can also smell burned bread.
"What..." Eros gulps, seeming to grasp for any footing, any opening, to speak more. "What... do you... plan to do, Rosa? After killing...?"
"You're a special specimen," she begins. "I've been waiting to see who'd come out on top in the end. You? Not a fight... not a fight at all. Just a pathetic griff who should've expired decades ago, leader over a church that no longer exists." Her sneer crackles with the fire of fury: it has to be rubbed in the chicken's face. Posters and radio messages proclaimed the northward march of divinity and holiness: regent of an emperor born and raised to rule, regent of Boreas' chosen, his right-claw creature to fulfill evil's extermination. "Your church's devil won. You called me a child of Maar, so Maar reigns. You're the archon of a dead god."
Lack of restraint demands that his head be smashed in. All four hooves can participate in savoring in the gory mauling. Each piece and limb will be accounted for, to give birth to an abomination in a Boreas-given temple that is a bunch of organs' mass on its last legs. Pain to the fullest measure is to be dished out, poured out, and deserved: conflict and strife, ended under her hoof, the over-abundant sewage of life fighting against life, having arrayed itself against her vision... he, too, must die, deliciously so.
Another thing, she lacks, and that lack weighs itself more to her.
She grabs Eros by the throat, raising him up to stand on thin air and her mercy. "Where is my phylactery?! You know, you know!"
Those fading eyes widen, the sign of—yes, he knows. His beak mumbles wordlessly, then snaps shut. Confirmation of where it is. By her whispered order, her ring of skin-and-bones goons close in. He is a shaking pile of anticipation.
"Tell me where I can find it, old bird! If not, I can kill you now, reanimate you, have these ghouls torture you for as long as we search! I'll stay alive just for you, wither away and still be here! You will feel every sensation, every single burn, and if I'm doomed to live forever because you broke it or sealed it away, you are condemned in my name, and you will die forever! Where is it?!"
She lets go to have Eros crash and burn. The crunch of bones is a symphony, his wheezing as drums to her harmony. The allegedly omnipotent regent of the Empire, cast down from his personal heaven. A symbol of life or life personified: hate, hate.
She lets him crawl, dislocated hindlegs aside.
He has the audacity to look up at her. "Tell me... why you want the phylactery..." More of that smug audacity behind a worn down face and a bloody beak. He probably knows. He definitely knows.
"Why should I trust you? You tried to kill me with your holy water!"
A silent yes is mouthed. A dry throat lets escape a hoary sound. "But I stopped... I am... oh, how shall Boreas judge me, I do not know! You were…"
Pathetic old bird. I'll make you cry. I will strip you naked of those robes, tar you, skin you... you will boil, your blood will bubble, and you will melt, and I will revive you, reanimate you, until the only thing I can see of you is your screaming brain—
Variegate wobbles, now slightly out of place. Rosa affixes her with a damning glare; the ghoul obeys and returns to her position in the ring.
The last one.
Rosa crouches to his level, his head lying on the floor, crowned by necro-fertilized dirt. "I can't die if my soul always has a way back." The last few words are spit on him; she makes sure to land it in his eyes. He winces: a small victory. "Life must die, but I am still alive. Life... festers. It rots. It is a cancer. It fights, it robs. It robbed me: exiled for my 'dark arts.' It robbed you: Boreas poisoned you to fight like pigeons. It robbed all of us. And the windigoes that talked to me of the hate they wanted to spring on the whole world, to feed on them through me... hate only grows when there's someone else to hate. Like you and me. You hate me. I just know it."
"Why..." Another cough shoots up a geyser of blood; a vampire would have reveled in the display. "Why kill yourself?"
"I said it: As long as I am alive, I can hate. I already hate you. The windigoes may be dead, but if I stay long enough, who knows? I… I cannot take the chance..." But you're the last of a dying breed. Squirm, you worm.
"Do you... like death?" comes the question, intermittent between coughs, groans, signals of the struggles to stay awake.
Slipping restraint stops a quick yes from coming out. Clichés notwithstanding (the great equalizer, everyone goes six hooves under, king and pawn return to the same box), death is to rest in peace. No more conflict; every tear will be wiped away. No persecutor shall arise to take her place, to set the earth aflame anew: the windigoes, her rivals within the league, so-called friends—
Shrills of horror bust from behind flowers. It is years ago, and those years will be kind to her. They will bless her with a trans-oceanic voyage to salvation. She's been by Rosa's side, yakking a lot about the beauty of flowers and each individual petal. Daring Do novels inspired her to trek into the jungles, discover new specimens, trade with the local bat ponies. A ritual for a dead bat, speaking to the moon, he lives—Variegate screams like all the others, wanting to sell out to the world after years of loyalty. Rosa gets the escapee first.
Silence proceeds from outside of her ring of ghouls, carried only by dead air. It is freezing. She levitates an arrow from one of the archers to cradle it in her magic.
The holy water seeped into the ground long ago. Eros does not grovel. Treacherous life hides behind the facade that bleeds through his beak and scars.
She stabs him with another arrow. He sinks deeper into the ground. Dirt and mud mix with the metal to blind him, to suffocate. He chokes on his own gurgling blood. Feathers are ripped out; his fleshy coughs intensify.
Eros gasps for air when she pauses, his eyes reduced to squinting slits, a pigeon muddied like a pig, the antithesis of all that is holy.
"Do you like death, archon?"
Blood spills through his beak, the arrow across his leg dripping yet more. He welcomes her into his certainly blurry, blackening vision. "No, Rosa... not when it is... everywhere... but you... I w-wish..." His one good leg collapses on a stray stone. A yelping archon sinks further. "Boreas would've led me... to help you... you innocent pony..."
She shoves dirt into his beak. "I am not to be pitied! You take me for a foal?!" Rosa yanks the arrow out to hear his throat scratched and stretched to the limit. The noise he makes cannot be recognized. She slathers the arrow's captured griffon meat onto herself to fortify her skin, to crudely convey to Eros a revulsion only a self-proclaimed "holy griff" cannot resist.
Eros spasms. Blood loss, failure of some organs, stench of an organism shutting down. Red-stained claws search within his desiccated robes, strands of divinity's blessing reduced to fleeting fabrics. He holds up bread, lifts them up mere inches from the ground. "Forgive me... not, if... that's your... wish, but... may I offer... last rites? Before you... go... depart... with your... phylactery..."
The strained request is repeated two or three more times. The phylactery's directions are repeated the same, if stronger, forced out of his heart. Rosa's ears prick up at the latter.
He becomes entertainment, a morbid circus. Back in Equestria, a younger Rosa saw how a few colts and fillies passed the time: watching ants move, in their lines, to and from an anthill, scouring the grand landscape of a local backyard for giant crumbs. A science lesson then taught her decomposition; ants, too, fed on the dead. A rabbit had been mauled in a nearby forest. The ants had a line. She watched the meticulous deed, the careful deconstruction of a body sent to the little feeders. Her classmates cringed at the pastime.
Organ failure, shutting down—every breath he takes defies the surrounding chill him. The ghouls crack their bones every step they take, at the whim of Rosa's amusement. Watertowns, coordinates... his side of a bargain he didn't ask for, held up partly.
Curiosity sets in when his beak trembles. Fainter than a whisper, under closed eyes, gushes forth a wordy stream, parts of it unintelligible. Other parts, she discerns, context given to her when she sees that beak pointed at her, gesturing to her: salvi—spe—vitae—caritas—Rosa. Intercession for the damned and righteously sui-/omnicidal.
A holy prayer, hideous and limp it is all the same.
In her graying magic, an arrow is raised over his head.
The circle of ghouls carries the aged corpse into a wagon. A few, which includes Variegate, pilfered his clothes for anything resembling relics and artifacts in an effort to rid the archon of any "holy radiation." One more vial was found; its contents were promptly spilled to the ground.
His body is heaved onto Rosa's chariot. The Watertowns await.
Days pass in the water forest's labyrinth. It teems with refuse and the vestiges of fruits, nuts, and critters. Autumn and winter last forever: leaves browned or blackened, snapping like twigs under the rattle of bones. Mushrooms make a killing here, several sizable enough to double as chairs or beds, not that her unnatural body needs rest nor sleep.
The first signs of former civilized life appear as robes. The second signs are spear tips and daggers, found within them. Here lie the remains of the hooded, mystical ponies of the Watertowns, the keepers of the holy springs. Fertility and abundance were advertised to the few that dare enter here, speaking of luscious foods blooming from the branches and an army of mothers and fathers taking joy in rearing dozens of foals for a century-long life, watching over the sacred geysers of who they call God.
She smirks at how lifeless the forest is now. It was her plan, after all, set into motion from her personal quarters to drain the natives' waters and send their protectors packing, cowering in so much despair that their last duty left would be to kill themselves out of failure. That plan composed of pipes, tubes, and vacuums stolen from the more industrial nations they had conquered. Rosa's answer to the Watertowns was a lethal dosage of black comedy.
Her killing jokes of years ago yawn out to her in dried up river beds, bridges over untroubled (lack of) waters. It was fitting for their leader to drown in one of them, of course, while the rivers still flowed. Keeper Eathelin... in another life, she might've opened up the disparate villages to the larger world, welcomed visitors and state officials to a treasure trove of mystery and intrigue. She was also cute, an attribute that hood did help, in life and in...
Past the bridge, roofs peak through the trunks. An arrow is shot overhead, tied to a magical flame that does not burn anything. The illumination cuts through the outlines of wooden homes, then it fizzles out. A second arrow is shot, carrying a much brighter and more permanent flame. The mobile torch plants itself on a branch, unveiling not much else: half a dozen houses or fewer, all abandoned. Spare bones, she detects; they're not enough to form an additional soldier. The forest-keepers were thorough in their retreat.
The final section of directions leads her to the nearest treehouse. She upturns the bed, according to Eros' instructions, to discover a secret staircase, similar to Griffenheim's hidden underground passageways. (Poor kid.) A barricaded door at the end of the tight corridor falls to her kicks, and a fleshed-out ghoul (Variegate, she discerns without looking), holds up the magic flame from the surface to shed light on a box, equipped with a lock once drenched in these geysers' waters.
Excitement grows at jumping headfirst into the end. Eros' corpse is dropped.
She shoves Variegate aside, trotting out the second slave behind her. His body dissolves at the touch of the lock, his soul screeching for relief from the mortal realm. She creeps closer to the prize over warbled shouts for help. The lock disassembles itself, weakened enough for Rosa's dark magic to overwhelm it. The bones turned to cinders.
The box snaps open. Her phylactery sits there, laden in coarse rags, set in gold, blessed by her presence.
Like a waterfall or a raging creek sending those who've fallen down it to suffocating depths, peace washes over her. Into her magic grip it goes, then into her hooves. The mandatory kneeling of her ghouls is brushed over. Their fealty will no longer be necessary.
All their flesh vanishes. All their skeletons, she breaks into mindless piles. She then makes her escape.
Northward, Rosa goes. The wagon of bones she pulls bumps with the dirt road's pebbles and rocks. A stagnant sky stares down at her and says that all will be finished at her word. Hills flatten into a blank horizon, bisected only by the elevated city of Magehold. Stumps stand beside foundations of bombed-out structures; sometimes, half a floor protrudes from underneath, sporting knick-knacks like lamps, clocks, and swords. Every item, colored with history and use, misuse, disuse. An ornamental plate or the shattered pieces thereof: a conversation piece that ended up as a weapon in someone's hooves. The blood on it, which she can spy from afar, tells that much.
After passing by the house with the murderous plate, quiet reigns. It's the peace every failed hero strove for when they dashed themselves against Rosa's legions. Evacuations from the port cities, chasing them across the sea, facing down alicorns—they only have to die once. The only blood that remains to be shed in her name is her own.
Her hooves feel dusty.
The silence does not howl. Here rests true quiet; it sweeps across land and sea. Rosa's sole company is a trail marked by millennia of hooves, claws, paws, and wheels. She sees only the path laid out before her, for wariness is a thing of the past. Not that an unkillable mare like her cannot afford to gloat at time: A dying marshal bayoneted her over an eagle's screech, sliced her head clean off. She bashed him down with her own head, then put it back on.
It was that way for the windigoes, not so literally. (The old saying goes on about puppets on strings.) Revelations implanted themselves in her supposedly free mind, to sow global chaos via crusade. Wars, rumors of war, famines, and pestilence mobilized every nation to stop Rosa the Menace. In its wake were fathers against sons, mothers against daughters, brothers against sisters.
Unchained from their control, she feels a foreleg. Cold, still comparably as warm as the pre-war sun, away from their subtle brainwashing (or brain-nudging), their ethereal forms scattered like ash, reduced to countless snowflakes stowed away in the planet's peaks.
Which leaves her. The last one, so said the geezer. She raises her head, perfect vision (despite her officially dead status) letting her see the ancient Magehold skyscraper that has sought to reach the heavens. There flourished a site where the scraps of gentler societies gathered, never to be dispersed to the four winds again, to make a name for themselves in the occult arts for acceptance or professionalism—or revenge. The Society of Blood, the Coven of Blood, the Dread Council...
She clicks her tongue. Rosa chose one of them, wiped the others off then dealt with her own until there was nothing but the Society of Rosa, the Coven of Rosa, the Dreaded Rosa. The world feared her name.
There is no world left for that, no world but the bones and distended flesh dumped into the landfill that is her wagon.
Stone chips at stone, etched into runes or letters that will outlast its creator. By Rosas's side, a scroll and a notebook lie under a flagging lantern. Quills and ink are spread out, sketching out the finished message for this memorial:
If you see this, know that I am here. Behold what I have. Tremble. Fall to your knees
"That's gonna take a while."
Rosa whips her head away from work to size up the errant speaker. Variegate sits at the other side of a grayscale cave that has yielded nothing but coal, soot, and sometimes gold from hard-working thralls when they were still alive.
"Indeed, it will," Rosa replies. "It will cement my triumph long after I'm gone."
"I mean..." Variegate tilts her neck, pawing the empty air just below her bald head. She certainly expected a mane's lock or two to caress. "You can't die, Rose, so... uh, not yet, but, um..."
Rosa puffs her cheeks. Her hooves and horn continue the routine: etch, carve, write on stone, with equipment stolen from an ashen backpack, like this engraver. Was from another thrall, so many bite marks on the neck. A trickle of blood had dried up, a mark of tarnished beauty.
"You know, no one else is gonna see that when you're done, Rose."
Irritation pushes Rosa to hiss at her. "If you shut your mouth, you can at least help starve the windigoes." (It shouldn't be possible. They are all dead.)
When she is answered by silence, Rosa slackens her withers and returns to the monumental task; the better part of an hour has already been whittled away. Each finished letter is large enough to be seen by the naked eye from afar, from the far-away mountains over there. If only she had taken lessons from the egotistic or bootlicking sculptors who lived week to week on the whims of bloodthirsty patrons, she could've erected a statue of herself, not meager printed statements.
"What about a walk when you're done with If you see this, Rose?"
She can blast Variegate on the spot, and the engraver in her magic can be a weapon. Both will result in a dead Variegate. The population of the world will be back down to one.
The phylactery, which she strung around her neck on the way home, weighs heavy.
Rosa gives a huff and a nod to hopefully placate the chatty mare. Rosa doesn't bother to look back to check if Variegate is misbehaving.
Ghostly manors loom over hills of dust and ashes. Pillars buttress gardens and patios where poisonous flowers and berries thrived; the detritus of leafless bushes are the last living items here and in other front yards.
Rosa points at them for Variegate to follow. "The vampires used to live here. Big mansions, palaces, estates... the suckers." She searches for a piece of history among dozens. Many interesting tidbits can be fished out: A younger vamp defected and returned to Equestria for the sake of "electronic music." Duels were had among the closest thing the bloodsuckers had to nobility (from swords to guns). There's chunks of gossip she used herself to sow division among the fanged ranks until they could do nothing but ally with her to stay off her blackmailing hoof.
Thin white stalks rise from the buds, like spider webs but somehow much more organized yet also much looser. They're a dozen tiny sad spider webs in plant form.
Variegate trots up to a pale stem. "White baneberry," she notes. (First time in a long while that Rosa has heard a hint of unforced happiness from her subjects.) "The berries it produces look like doll's eyes. Every part of is toxic. And fatal. I've only found these... close to Acornage. Never the south-eastern jungles. That would've been fun, though."
Rosa feigns ignorance, pushing past the houses and into the urbaner parts of Magehold, as much as a city in necrosis (look at the stores that droop like tar, the roads wasting away in stone and bones) can have something mundanely urban. The bloated town's lynchpin, its great dark tower, does rise into the heavens, faint shadows casting upon the city's only inhabitants.
"Oh, that used to be a café, right?" chirps Variegate. A yes from Rosa is all it takes to drag her by her hooves inside.
The interior reeks of dust and old coffee scents. Zipped up in neat bags are surely some expired beans. The tables and chairs were turned over; others were missing, maybe stolen like the expensive coffee machines smuggled from more "proper" civilizations. The food display proudly sells mold labeled as baguette,donut, bagel.
The kitchen rattles with the falling of pans and pots and other kitchenware. "Don't mind me!" cries out Variegate. "I've got... oh, the stove still works! I'll boil us some coffee. Only thing that isn't stale here is the 3-in-1 sachet."
It bores Rosa, having to follow Variegate around. Then again, the isolation of the coffeehouse's front-row seats leave her room to question her own actions, actions such as reviving Variegate. Being named Stapled Variegate must've certainly been a toss-up as to her destiny: florist or stationery enthusiast. Rosa didn't prod her on her background when she first met her in Equestria, half a dozen worlds away from the rural village of nowhere that shunned her: it was in Fillydelphia, the city of sisterly love, a place for social-ladder climbers and seekers of the quick buck (or bit). As with many cities, criminal underworlds churn underneath, underlined with the occult. Then Variegate stumbled into her life as a generic flower mar after seeing her cutie mark. Wilted Rose, huh? That sounds unusual... hey, we can go on adventures and hunt for the best flowers! Everyone's jockeying for his and that, but it's the same old sunflowers. If we haul home some exotic specimens for ornaments or what not, we'll be the talk of the town... paint the whole town red with our name! You and me! Rose and... Staples? No, no... Rose and Variegate!
The coffee scent is unbearably strong. "Here!" shouts Variegate. She sidles out of the kitchen, a tray of coffee cups balanced on her back.
Rosa levitates the tray onto the dusty surface of her table. Steaming hot second-rate coffee and gobs of barely mixed powder swirl around. They reek of sugar. A vase stands between the two cups.
Variegate gets her own coffee to sip on. "It's something, I guess. I'm sorry I couldn't get any more." She puts it down to fidget with the empty vase. "So, Rose... remember when we went into the thestral jungles far south-east? Heh, talked with bat ponies in the jungles. It was nice meeting them. The nightshades they gave us were nice."
To stay focused for long enough to humor Variegate, Rosa drinks from her cup. Moving her head up to drink lets her feel the phylactery jingle. It's tepid.
"But, you know, it'd be nice if... it's not just me and you, Rose, while you're... uh, waiting, I guess."
Rosa downs her coffee then stands up. It got cold.
A house falls into dust, the ensuing storm raging around them doing nothing to their undead eyes. The daring escape wasn't exciting: Rosa had intentionally trapped herself in one of the rooms after seeing the stairs and some floorboards collapse. Just ounces of pain graced her before Variegate shouted for her name and Rosa picked herself up.
"Unironically, a rose looks good on that," Variegate says, tapping Rosa on her dusty gray mane. "A good splash of color for... um, the rest of your body."
The nerve of her gets to Rosa. "Spit it out. What's really on your mind?"
Variegate steps back, concerned. Fearful. "W-well... I was just... helping to pass the time. That whole countdown thing to... you know..." The end of all life.
The nobody-ness smothered her. That wagon of bones taunted her with its spoils and... death couldn't create life, this she'd known. Mad scientists aside, unless she raises a stallion (and undead procreation had been a taboo talking point), it will stay dead. Her neighsayers have already vanished, anyway.
Vanished neighsayers cannot fear.
The plan was simple enough: revive Variegate once more—she died in those southern expeditions with Rosa, hungry and confused by an oleander petal; she was Rosa's first companion, way before her crossing of the sea—and have Variegate see her mighty works (and despair) of forlorn cities in decay and entire towns flushed out.
The resurrected mare first responded with a hug, then shock, then too many questions, then a strange happy malaise. Understandable for one freed from Rosa's mind control after so long, after so many cheap resurrections (oftentimes with bones from other creatures; bits of griffon can be found in her ribs).
She has kept talking. At the statue in Magehold's outskirts, at the manor then café diving deeper, and after the house should come the tower itself, Rosa's base of operations (before her Dread-ward trip, she heard that BASE jumping was a sport for crazies: find a high place to jump from, then jump). The whole talk about countdowns is a lie—time slips from her. Effectively immortal creatures, without real opposition, have the tendency to not think much about the hours passing unless their work counts on precise milliseconds.
Rosa's jaw brushes against her phylactery. It has emitted a warm glow, a faint toasty fire in the soundless chill (Variegate's hoofsteps disturb the atmosphere; Rosa desires peace and quiet). Numerous promises and assurances she's made rush back to her, her faithful semi-fleshy flock obedient to the end.
Variegate fakely coughs. (Rosa only now recognizes that they're at the entrance of the tower; the skid marks of her chariot ride are still visible.) "So, uh... look, I know you, or the old you,not this new you where you're actually some lich monster thing... I-I don't know who hurt you or why you're a... bad pony... I mean, I think I know the why, but I don't know know... or get it get it, you get it?"
Has to go, she has to go. Rosa's necklace is as heavy as the ocean, a balled up clump of soul. She just holds herself together to stop herself from hissing at her. The chamber then the stairs are not too far away, just one marathon up the stairs to end it.
"I... obviously, everyone came after you because you were... uh, wanting to kill everyone. Which is bad... I can't sugarcoat that, but... there's always a reason why ponies do things, right? A-and..." There's a sigh. And a sob. Rosa doesn't look back; the black stairs approach, a few more steps closer. "I know it's awkward, because I tried to stall for time... I think you know that, too. You saw through that, huh? But! But... oh, you poor thing, I should've asked. I should've loved you better... when you said those weird things about corpses and potions, I shouldn't have cringed. They said that a single friend could change the world, but I wasn't that friend..."
Seduction becomes temptation: you just want to hear it, then you just want to look at it, then you just want a taste of it, of an all-consuming what-if.
The steps are a hop away, a hoof already by the door. Variegate's voice has kept following, never growing distant: "That's something the Friendship Journal said... about friendship changing lives. I... you could've changed my life. I mean, you did by... the whole necromancy thingy... but... oh, I should've asked. I shouldn't have brushed your odd stuff as weird and odd... I said that out loud, didn't I?" Other thoughts and contingencies organize themselves, Rosa inwardly screams at herself on why she doesn't just run. "Rose, please... I don't want to die! It was fun being with you... maybe not the usual fun, but I mean it! It was like we were back in Equestria, being friends—"
Rosa empties her horn at the rattle of flesh and bones. A fallen one, another soul banished another time. Magic fast recharges at the base of her horn.
Again, definitively, Rosa is alone. The last one.
Everything goes automatic: four legs up the stairs, matching a cadence that isn't necessary thanks to her superequine strength and endurance—life festers, life kills to preserve itself, life fights to preserve itself—mantra after mantra fall in line or into pieces.
A quarter of the way there. It's scary, the long way down traveled by a single misstep. Her breath hitches. Her hooves keep moving, keep reaching, approaching the limit of her capabilities against the weight of the world clumped into her soul. It's her life against the world's, and it asks her to fulfill her sacred obligation: to end herself, the last living virus of strife.
Her legs go numb. Halfway there, now a little more. A fever has been with her since she stepped hoof her in the cursed peninsula. It never brought a migraine nor a bout of vomiting. Her forehead burns, her horn burns: she is hot enough to light a fire under this tower.
She falls—no, she trips. A comfort to give up right now, to pause, reconsider, cradle her phylactery. Her hooves disappear into a permanent spin.
Three-fifths of the way up. The tower narrows, each revolution faster than the previous one. There's a hiccup—dread. The well of souls—she'd never been there herself; she felt it still, with every captured soul, every reanimated being. The residue they left behind implied comings and goings, jostling with others in some unknown space she can never pierce. What they wait for: judgment, peace, reincarnation. Her own Elysium has been pictured as golden wheat fields forever, where the grazing is eternal, where friendship—
Four-fifths. It is numb. The phylactery is an anvil that should've snapped her neck ages ago.
She pants by five-sixths. A visage of Eros doesn't mock her; a smile paints his beak. It's not a vision—he died that way, eyes open, pretending that his vision is as clear as day, the old genocidal hypocrite.
The doors to her chamber are within sight. Worry and shock blend together, stab her in the heart. She is immortal, unkillable. They are nothing to her. Six-sixths.
Seven-sixths: Across the room is the murky sky, clouds blotched in the colors of a useless horizon-stuck sun. Her chambers, her room, are neatly organized(put your affairs in order). Legs ignore everything: she is an automaton, there is but one goal, as the last burning star of the world, and that is to end all life, to finish the Black Crusade. Creature comforts are passed over: her bed, her chairs, her desk, her library of secret tomes and her racks of forbidden ingredients, letters, the possibility of—Variegate—
Balcony.
Mantras and recollections should be kicked into high gear: life is to blame for all strife, life is the cause of all strife. Life cannot solve its own contradictions, not on its own: life must take another. To eat is to kill, to take another's life force to sustain itself. The windigoes were life's representatives, the embodiment of it. An argument today is the seed of murder tomorrow is sowed by life today and how it opens the world to a realm of untold suffering, untold bloodshed—
Not with Eros. A robed claw stayed itself from a divine weapon.
An undead hoof kept insisting on just being there.
The phylactery radiates a summer's worth of warmth. Her heart almost beats.
She shakes the illusions encroaching on her mind, and dips her head past the balcony and its spiked railings.
The long way down lies ahead.
In thoughtless rage, she smashes the phylactery on the railing—forgets that it needs to be opened. Stickiness crawls up her, that of cold sweat.
The phylactery is dented. It pulls itself to her; it is storage, yearning for its owner's (un)caring embrace. A great, blazing fire trapped within fire her, the flame that melted the windigoes and the rest of the living.
It cracks open, locking mechanisms still intact. Darkness cackles out, outlined in gold, the damaged box calling out to her, her soul... to keep her soul safe the next time in one loving embrace—this, too, must die, then she shall die, and there will be rejoicing in her head. Her horn and hoof steady—
Another presence. "Variegate?" She turns around.
There is no one. Her personal chambers are shadowed, dipped in pitch-black. No one in the nothingness to come. Alon—
"Yagh!"
Breathing fast, hard... leans back on the railing, gasping, horn and hoof sore. She has just run a marathon, in the body and in her... heart. Self-preservation is disgusting, so close to the end of the world. She catches her breath again, feeling the life in her lungs, like a lone candle against the pitch-black night.
Behind her is the finish line, a hundred meters to the ground. It is being faithful to the end, to the end that will surpass all ends, to peace everlasting and universal.
Before her, a phylactery that skidded across the floor. She threw it; must be why they've hurt. Before her, five more minutes. At least. She still has control over time, her time. A litany of excuses pops into mind. The soothing calm of... another. It's how asylums go without another, you go mad enough in one place to be able to see everything you desire. Granted, everything will be an illusion by then...
Was Eros under such an illusion? His wicked peace... and Variegate, her egged persistence, her sorry regret...
Rosa bursts with relief and dissatisfaction, ending with a painful whicker. The phylactery is just a short trot away. That, and the tomes and ingredients in her room have done miracles before. An answer lies somewhere to the gaping hesitation in her heart.
"Just... wait," she sputters.
She slides down, lying down, at the precipice of walking or falling. Her chambers beckon, tempt her with a few more minutes and an army of tomes and potions and what-have-you, a great many things to act on when it comes to her inevitable death—and the deaths of those that did not shun her to the very end.
