1 . Present Times

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Chapter 1: Present Times
By N00813
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The inn stank of sweat, alcohol and desperation. Dimly lit by flickering torches, and with the setting sun outside pouring orange-red beams through the grease-stained windows, the inn’s wooden panelling tried to shroud itself in shadow, as if ashamed. Unfortunate souls of all kinds and races had gathered in droves, for a chance to drink the night away on the dirty wooden planks that passed for furniture. There was no barmaid, or anyone of the sort; a lone bartender stood behind a long, worn wooden counter the colour of stale piss. The lavender unicorn at the weathered entranceway scrunched up her snout, a reflex to a stimulus she no longer was any stranger to.

Twilight Sparkle tightened the dark brown cloak around her neck and shoulders, and gave the tip of the hood covering her head and shrouding her face a subconscious tug with her magic. She slunk quietly towards the bar counter. There was no need to start any sort of commotion. That would just waste time, and time was something she didn’t have. Not since Spike had been taken from her in that violent rush of inky blackness. Not now, when she was this close to recovering him, and bringing his kidnapper to justice.

She growled automatically, receiving a glare from the black griffon sitting on the barstool next to her. It was odd, really. She didn’t have the recollection of actually propping herself up on the chair she was currently sitting on. It was as if she had simply teleported from the bar floor to the top of her barstool. She knew she hadn’t, of course. That would have drawn attention. And judging by the cacophony of clinking tankards, drunken laughs and… boisterous singing in the background, everything was normal. As normal as could be, with her target not a few miles from here.

Not for her, though. This was her last box on the checklist. Her final stretch. The final step of the thousandth mile of her journey.

Twilight waited patiently for the bartender to come over. Drawing attention to herself, at this point in her journey, wouldn’t be the smartest of ideas. She was a smart unicorn. After all, she used to study at the School for Gifted Unicorns. Used to. That was a past life, one that she could return to after this last hurdle.

The onset of memories, some blurred and others rendered with vicious detail, could wait until she was in the privacy of her own room. Right now, she needed to focus on her surroundings, and prepare for tomorrow’s confrontation. It was a stroke of luck that she was born a unicorn, she thought. Her horn was a weapon, in both physical and magical terms. Weapons were almost a necessity in this region of the world, and many tended to underestimate an opponent who appeared to be unarmed – an opponent such as herself.

The griffon next to her turned back to his own brooding, staring into the flickering flames reflected in the empty glass in front of him. Twilight glanced at him out of the corner of her eye, the cloak’s rough fabric hiding half of her face.

A long-barrelled rifle, ibex-manufacture by the looks of it, hung off his back on tight leather straps. A small machete waited in its sheath, the latter strapped to the griffon’s feathery chest. The handles of both weapons looked well-worn, seemingly as old as the griffon himself. A dangerous opponent, Twilight concluded, despite his relatively small size and wiry frame.

How long had she been travelling, to be able to roughly evaluate someone’s combat experience at a glance? Twilight honestly couldn’t tell. The reflection of her face in the griffon’s glass didn’t reveal much. Her striped mane was still there, her coat was still purple and she was still a she. It felt like only yesterday when the dragon took Spike –

Twilight shook her head. That injustice would be resolved very, very soon. The memories could wait.

The griffon whirled around silently, disappearing behind Twilight’s field of view. To compensate, she turned as quickly as she dared. She belonged, and she was simply looking around. A glance to the stairs at the back of the inn saw his tail disappear up into the floor above. If this inn was built like all the others, then that floor was where the inn’s rooms for hire would be. He wasn’t gunning for her, then.

“Hullo!”

The voice sounded behind her, and she whipped around. Twilight made sure to keep looking down, letting the hood obscure her mane and eyes. From beneath the rough, worn fabric, she could see the orange chest of the male barkeep.

“I’d like a room,” she said, keeping her voice deliberately rough and hoarse. That would make it even harder for him to identify her. Harder for him to alert the rest of the inn to her presence. She had prepared, of course, but there was no such thing as being too safe. “One night.”

“Payment upfront, a hundred bits, fifty riyal, or same in goods,” the barkeep replied, his legs swaying beneath his shifting torso.

Twilight smiled, despite herself. This guy was a worse liar than Applejack. “Seventy five bits.” She wasn’t going to get ripped off.

“Eighty.”

Eighty was still steep, but nothing she couldn’t handle. Best to play his little game, and get him out of her hair so that more important things could fill her mind.

She tilted her head upwards, letting herself see the barkeep’s chin bob up and down, before magicking an appropriate amount of coin from underneath her cloak. The barkeep swept the money away from her with a hoof, before tossing an old, battered key onto the stained countertop in front of her, and sweeping off to the side. A glance that way told her that he was now busy with another order, this time from some big earth pony. She smirked.

Twilight slipped off the stool languidly, before trotting across the inn floor and towards the staircase. Luckily, no one was drunk or stupid enough to attempt to remove her cloak. The results would have been spectacular, to say the least.

The room she’d rented wasn’t spacious or comfortable, or even clean. The window was simply a small hole, cut into the wall, covered by an iron grate that was thinner than the stems of her quills. The floor beneath the window had a similar grate over a hole that she suspected was some sort of drainpipe. Dust and spiderwebs papered the walls, as much a part of them as the light wooden panelling beneath. More insect residue covered the floor and hung off the ceiling like miniature stalactites. The overall look screamed of decay and neglect, the theme highlighted by the application of brown, dark brown and khaki splotches on every piece of furniture and panelling. Under the weak, silver moonlight, it looked more like a dungeon cell than a paid room.

A sharp pang rushed through her as a memory of the past burst through the walls, forcing her to scrunch up her nose to ward off the stinging behind her eyes; Rarity would have a fit, had she come along.

Twilight exhaled slowly, before she began to sweep dust and grime off the bed and magick it out of the window. Then, she turned to the door and locked it shut. It took three attempts, but finally the latch struck home, and Twilight threw herself into bed. She didn’t bother to take off her cloak – there was simply no need, and furthermore, it would stop any attempts to disturb her. Whilst she was relatively vulnerable during sleep, she had enchanted the cloak herself, and any attempt to move her would end in a grand light show. Then she’d wake up, and if the assailant was still alive, she’d be able to do whatever she pleased to him or her or it.

She grimaced. When had she started thinking like this? It seemed like only yesterday that everything was normal in Ponyville. That the most important things in her mind were her friends and her studies, and not whether she was going to live through the night.

Twilight pushed the front of her torso up with her forelegs. The hard mattress barely flexed beneath her shifting weight. On the bedside cabinet sat an old, dirty mirror with a crack running down its surface, whilst an enclosed flame danced inside a small, purely utilitarian lamp on the left of the mirror.

She stared at the mirror’s reflection. There was nothing of note on it; like the griffon’s glass, it depicted a blurred, rough image of a purple unicorn with a deep violet mane, striped with magenta. A cloak draped over her form like a funeral dress, and two intense purple eyes glared out from the darkness under the cloth hood, seemingly alone with nothing to hold them up. The crack split her face in half.

Twilight blinked once, and then looked away, frowning. She pulled back her hood and ran a hoof through her mussed mane once, twice, before deepening her scowl. What was the point? It wasn’t like she was going to perform tomorrow in front of thousands. Why did her appearance matter anymore? What was she really looking for?

Why did anything matter anymore? Next to Spike, next to her friends, her Princess, herself, they were all insignificant.

Spike.

Twilight’s eyes misted up. No, no, no! She threw a glance over to the locked door, and the window. There was no one outside. Taking several deep breaths, she layered a spell over herself.

Then the dam broke, and she felt drops of hot liquid fall down her cheeks as she held her head in her hooves. The spell kept the sound in, letting her release her own feelings with abandon. This was it. Tomorrow was the day that she was going to get Spike back, and go back to her friends and her mentor and everything was going to be just like the old times…

Yeah, right, her mind scoffed. Twilight’s sobs, neither happy nor sad, but relieved, choked away as she unconsciously grimaced. The motion stretched the mithril-based tattoos etched from the corner of her mouth and eyes to the base of her spine, eliciting a cold hiss from the purple pony as dull pain burned at her cheeks. Still, she didn’t regret getting the tattoos. They had saved her life on more than one occasion, and they would save one more soul by the end of tomorrow.

Twilight’s hooves moved towards one another, crushing the air caught in between. Spike. She remembered that day, clear as yesterday.

It was night. Exactly when, she couldn’t remember, but the moon was still rising, about a third of the way through its journey across the sky. She’d told Spike to go clean the library. Stupid, stupid Twilight. That could have been the last time she saw him alive, and her last words, the words he was taking to a potential grave, would have been ‘Spike, re-shelve these books for me’. And he would die, thinking that was all she ever thought of him; as an assistant. A friend, yes, but an assistant first and foremost. She hadn’t even looked at him as she gave the order. The book on magical effects on condensed matter had been more interesting than him.

Stupid, stupid Twilight.

Choked laughter forced itself out of her throat, seemingly mocking the tears still streaming down her face.

Why Spike? Why did he have to be the one? Who would have been sick enough to take a defenceless little dragon? And what for?

A crash had sounded from downstairs, and at first, she’d thought Spike had toppled a bunch of books or plates or whatnot that now, didn’t really matter. Twilight, shamefully, remembered the words that had coalesced in her mind, ready to spear her assistant with: ‘Be careful!’ ‘How many times have I told you?’ Yet it wasn’t just Spike’s face that had stared up at her from the library floor.

Twilight growled, but the torrent of tears leaking out of her eyes didn’t stop.

Spike, her little, loyal assistant, a friend since the earliest days of her life, had been trapped in the vice-grip of another dragon.

She would never forget the dragon’s face. Scales black as ink crested with spikes of dark purple, with chillingly cold amber eyes, the dragon looked at her for one split-second; that fateful moment in time, in which all of Twilight’s thoughts had slowed as if wading through honey. All she could do, and all she did, was gape.

There were not many moments like that in life, Twilight reflected, as she sat with her head in her hooves on the dirty mattress. Looking down at her pillow, she saw a flash of that cruel, jagged snout that was the dragon’s face. An incoherent roar and a blast of purple magic left the stained pillow blackened, a small curl of smoke spinning upwards from the charred fabric.

Of course she had to be so stupid as to do nothing. As the dragon unfurled its wings with a single, sharp flick and propelled itself through the hole in the library and into the night sky, she had blinked, rapidly, repeatedly, screaming that this was all a dream. Once she cut the sole of her hoof on the splintered wood, she knew that it wasn’t. Scanning the shroud of night for any sign of her foster brother had proved fruitless. It was as if the dragon had never existed at all. Every star in the sky looked like a green puff of dragon-fire, flickering in flares of cruel laughter, the aftermath of a nasty cosmic joke. She’d looked back, seeing the hole in the library wall. The building tilted haphazardly, the structure weakened by the dragon’s forceful entry. It had to be some sort of horrid, evil nightmare. Had to.

The blood dripping from her hoof was… was real, though.

Spike was gone. Not in any sort of game, or any rash decision. This was a kidnapping.

Spike was her brother. Foster brother, sure, but blood and ancestry didn’t mean much to her. He was as much of a brother as Shining, perhaps even more so – all the time they spent together, all of the struggles they went through had to mean something. The day he’d grown to monstrous proportions, and managed to get a grip on himself; the week their bond had been tested when the owl came, and come out stronger than ever in the end; the years they’d spent together in Canterlot, before the events that had brought her to this town…

Twilight’s sobs returned in full force, exploding out of her mouth like the tears streaming out of her eyes.

2 . Recollections

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Chapter 2: Recollections
By N00813
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“What do you mean ‘It is complicated’?”

Princess Celestia stared down, her face a prime example of resigned sorrow. Her white coat of hair, normally shining with glory and warmth, now looked dull and tattered, tufts of it fluffing up in odd places. Even her mane seemed to flow with less vigour, less energy. She looked away, her face wrinkled around the eyes with age, a frown etched upon her features. “I’m sorry, Twilight.”

Twilight followed her mentor’s gaze, glancing at the new Sugarcube Corner – the new Ponyville. In many ways, it was just like the old one. Buildings were still in the right places. A cloud home hovered in the sky like a spectre, off to the north, whilst the flags set upon Carousel Boutique continued to flutter freely in the wind. In the distance, neat rows of red-and-green blobs set upon Apple Acres’ land continued to stand on tiny sticks of brown. Sunlight continued to bathe the little town in its warm glow. Only her library looked any different, with a massive, gaping hole set in the wall, and the entire structure leaning and groaning like an elderly pony.

Yet, in so many other ways, it was irreparably different. Guards in golden armour patrolled the cobblestone streets in threes and fours, the sunlight glinting off the enchanted metal armour, turning them into walking, spiky lanterns. A detective, sealed in a white oversuit, took pictures of the wreckage all the while with a big camera as he sprinkled little cards with numbers onto the ground. Her friends, surrounded by guards, stood behind her, whilst her brother awkwardly patted her on the back as she whirled her head back to gape at her mentor.

“You’re just going to let Spike –”

Twilight couldn’t say any more. Spike’s absence already hurt like nothing she’d ever felt before, not even when she was using darker magic, and this new revelation was like twisting the knife. It was just too painful to say, to make it seem like he was actually gone, and that this time no one would bring him back…

No, he wasn’t dead. He couldn’t be dead. He had so much to live towards; Rarity, herself, his friends here in Ponyville. He wasn’t going to die.

And if so, there was a point in rescuing him. A baby dragon, defenceless in a merciless world that only wanted to turn him into a flambé; Twilight could think of no worse thing that could happen to him.

Clearly, her five friends thought similarly as well. All of them wore grimaces, some more severe than others, and one was still sobbing quietly as Twilight turned her attention towards the one pony she respected most in the entire world.

“No, I won’t,” Celestia said, gaze hardening for just a moment, before her eyes widened almost imperceptibly. “I – this is a complicated issue.”

“You know how the dragons are, Twilight,” the Sun Princess murmured, heaving a little sigh. The seemingly mocking treatment tore at the gaping wound in Twilight’s heart. It sounded like the Princess had already given up. “They don’t have a government. Each is accountable only to themselves.”

To Twilight, it didn’t seem that complicated. Rescue Spike from the kidnapper and bring the latter to justice.

Was it politics? Was that why she couldn’t simply find and interrogate every dragon in the country – in the world, if it came to that – to find Spike?

The realisation that she’d already answered her own question hit her like a cold gust of wind. The realisation of what those answers implied hit her like a blizzard. Her eyes widened and her breath shortened into fast, rapid pulses.

“I know how much all of you care about Spike,” Celestia continued, raising her voice to address the whole lot of them. She turned her head away to look towards the shining city of Canterlot. It was just as majestic – and distant – as ever.

Twilight followed her gaze, little droplets of tears springing up over the lip of her lower eyelid. The unicorn’s frown darkened with every passing second.

“Nonetheless, all of you should stay safe,” the Princess continued. “Please, do not attempt anything. I – we will do as much as I can. Let us, and the guards, handle this.”

The image darkened as Twilight felt her eyes close inexorably, crashing shut with the finality of a falling guillotine. She could not hope to resist. When she opened them again, she found herself somewhere else.

Twilight turned her head. The town and the ponies of Ponyville were still conspicuously unchanged. The Princess had left a few days ago, a multi-coloured blur that was as substantial, and helpful, as the mist. Business as usual. Conversations more muted, friends more distant, eyes wider and more prone to wandering or twitching. But still, life as normal. It looked like nothing was out of the ordinary.

What a lie, Twilight thought, almost spitting the words out under her breath.

There was nothing she could do for Spike here. There was nothing anyone could do for Spike here. Twilight shook her head, glaring at the floor as if it could tell her where Spike was.

The Princess was useless, for all of her political clout. There was no rival government to pressure, nowhere to place an embargo. Her brother had attempted to balance guards between the rest of the country, the Element-wielders and Spike’s search team, but he'd heavily favoured her and her friends.

And there was no ransom demand given out.

Some cold, rational part of Twilight agreed with him. That attack had seemed tactical, not random. None of the neighbouring buildings had been damaged in the kidnapping. It was logical that they, or at the very least she, were the real targets of this attack. Logical, yet… the dragon had simply left her alone. It hadn’t attempted to do anything to her. Spike had been the one taken.

Perhaps Spike was the lure. The bait to draw all of the Bearers in, and in one fell swoop, eliminate them. Twilight shivered at the raw brutality, the utter savagery of the soul that was capable of such acts. The soul that now held her foster brother’s life in its claws.

Spike…

She felt her eyes smash shut as liquid threatened to spill over her cheeks, the fur already matted with dried tears.

In the brief blackness, the ghost of a whisper flickered through her mind, tantalisingly close, yet too far away. She opened her eyes once more.

The calendar hung on the opposite wall, pages yellowing and covered with a year’s worth of scribbles. All of those scribbles were her own.

Yes, she’d wasted enough time.

She blew stray strands of mane out of her eyes with a quick blast of breath as she glanced down at the display in front of her. An almost completed checklist lay next to ten prone forms wrapped in golden armour.

The guards lay sleeping, piled up against the wall, their helmet-plumes brushing against the window. She had to thank her prodigious magical power level and her almost-encyclopaedic knowledge for that. Without them, she wouldn’t have been able to find the loophole in their armour enchantments, and overwhelm the weakened magic with her own.

With the best of luck, they’d still be sleeping come morning, and wake up in the late afternoon. In between their limp forms, she’d scratched out a quick note outlining what she intended to do, and signed it with her own magical imprint and signature. Anyone with a brain cell would know that the note wasn’t a forgery.

She charged up her horn, before closing her eyes as she felt the ley take her.

Twilight opened her eyes to find herself on a small ledge overlooking Ponyville. Her gaze roved over the entirety of the town – the entirety of what she had, over the years, come to see as her home.

It looked no different from before.

She could still turn back, say that she was running experiments and that the guards were simply caught in the backlash. She could still give up, and let Spike fend for himself whilst the search team fumbled around…

She had been Spike’s companion for more than a decade. She would be able to track the dragon that had taken him, to recognise the signs that he had made, and brush off any false leads. Celestia wouldn’t have any of it. Divided we fall, she had written in a previous letter. The last letter Twilight received before she started her own preparations.

Her friends? Even now, they were all locked up in their own little bunkers, ten guards to a Bearer. Even if they were free, they had their own careers and their own futures to worry about. It wasn’t like the fate of the world hung in the balance – only the fate of one friend, one dragon, amongst millions of other people.

They would help. That, she knew for sure. They were true friends. Still, Twilight hesitated with a hoof in the air, facing the sleeping barn of Sweet Apple Acres. What if she was wrong? What if this whole thing was a fool’s venture? What if he was already dead and another friend died on the journey? It would all have been for naught. And it would all be her fault.

She sighed.

It was her own fault, her own failure to protect him that had ended them up in this situation. She was his caretaker – she was the one responsible. Now was her chance to fulfil that responsibility. To save him.

Sorry Princess, girls, she thought, but I have to do this. I owe him that much.

Night-time Ponyville used to be a calm and peaceful period for Twilight. With Spike’s disappearance factored into the equation, however, the night sky seemed to hold only demons and dragons, held back by the most tenuous of veils.

In the blackness, her consciousness surged upwards, smashing against the barriers of sleep. With each heave, the barrier weakened more and more, until – at last – her eyes blinked open.

A town of masks greeted her last, parting gaze. Ponies tried to live as if nothing horrific had happened. They papered over the cracks with smiles and sugar, freer laughter and cheaper apple cider. Even as a five-pony patrol of guards marched past, they acted as if no one was there. It was as if everyone wanted to forget, to distract themselves in their day-to-day labours rather than face the truth – they’d been attacked, and the next victim could be any one of them.

She turned away, and pushed her hooves into the ground, starting the long gallop down the lone train-track linking Canterlot and Baltimare. Only a trail of tears followed her. The hungry forest on both sides, held back by the two thin steel rails of civilisation, seemed to mock her with its animal growls and cries.

Twilight hummed, lifting a hoof to feel at her throat. The hard, calloused skin at the centre pad felt like some foreign material next to the soft, pliable fluffiness of her windpipe. She couldn’t tell where the bone ended and the skin began. A small frown drew across her face.

She should have known. For the hours that she’d spent running alongside the tracks, listening to the howls of the wild, some of the wild would have settled in her.

How many years had passed since that memory had been forged? The unicorn shook her head. That wasn’t important. Spike was important, and the fact that she’d gone on this massive, bloody quest testified to that.

She twisted her body around, the hard mattress pressing into the nubs of her bones. Pain, of the sore and aching type, seemed to burn her back, leaving her on her side, drooling into the pillow as she sought to recall that dream-memory. Everything she had done was for Spike. She couldn’t forget that.

The musty air of the room, carrying the stink of other people’s fur and sweat, smashed into her nose. Luckily, the cold air blowing into the room from the tiny grate in the wall provided some semblance of ventilation. She grimaced, pulling herself to sit on her rump, collecting her forelegs under her. Twilight swung her hooves down, letting them hit the dirty wooden floor with several quick, dull clops.

As she ran a quick disinfectant spell over her teeth and body, her tattoos briefly glowed a brilliant silver-white before reverting back to their normal, dull-grey colouring.

Silver sparks, the remnants of ley-infused magicka that had just danced around her torso, spun into wisps of white smoke that burst apart as Twilight strode into – and past – them. Eddies danced in her wake.

She opened the door and stepped outside, floating the key alongside her. Her education in Canterlot, and her special talent, had given her extraordinary control over residual unicorn magic. The tattoos she’d gotten, materials specially procured from a notorious information broker and hammered into her flesh by a trusted contact, had boosted her already prodigious magical ability to insane levels. Enough to do her task ten times over. Just in case.

She felt no magic draw at all, no tiredness or fatigue or headache. As she slapped the key onto the bar countertop, the sharp clack drawing the attention of the barkeep, she couldn’t help but smile. Today was the day.

The bartender's head turned towards her. One front hoof clasped an empty glass, which he was polishing with a dirty rag held in the other. He placed the two items down on the counter, before trotting towards her.

“The Great Dragon of the South,” the bartender proclaimed, almost religiously, as he waved the tankard of booze he held around a hoof dramatically. Somehow, none of the alcohol inside had managed to escape, although the liquid sloshed quite loudly within its container. The flickering lamp, fuelled with some manner of reagent, not magic, cast half his face into shadow and washed the other half with orange fire-light. “Dark as night, his scales the same shade of blackness as ‘is ‘eart. Say he bathed in the blood of ‘is enemies. Eyes that would make you insane if you looked at ‘em fer too long. The face of evil, I tell ya.”

He grinned, and slammed the tankard down with enough force to chip the striking edge, before stretching his jaw around and down.

“Pleasure doin’ business with ya,” the barkeep said, smirking, as he scooped up the key with a hoof. Twilight hummed, nodding quickly, dismissively.

For a moment, their eyes met, and the barkeep's smug grin seemed to crack under her violet gaze.

Twilight was sitting across from him, her eyes wide and pointedly ignoring the groans, sighs and rolled eyes from the other patrons. “When was this?”

“Couple weeks back. Finished pillagin’ the locals, so I guess ‘e moved on up.” He pursed his lips. “Why so interested, lassie? You ain’t looking ta actually gut him…”

The bartender scrunched up his face in sneering grin that Twilight found rather condescending. “Lass, you ain’t got no muscle, no experience, no nothing. You one of them Equestrians, I can see it. Here’s a tip: turn back now, an’ live. Doin’ you a favour here.”

“Dragon’s getting sore up there,” one of the inn’s patrons muttered. Twilight turned her head to see the speaker, a big draught-pony that reminded her of Applejack’s brother. He had a brown-blue coat, the neck area coated with the redness of chafed skin and the body layered with scarring. His eyes and face, wrinkled by exposure to the elements, spoke of a lifetime of hardship endured and pain suffered. He was nothing like Big Mac, on second thought. At least, nothing like what she had last heard of Big Mac. “Bastard. Might lose another part of my harvest this year.”

His friends, crowded around the same wooden table, nodded and agreed in murmurs, before taking a gulp of their alcohol each.

Twilight narrowed her eyes.

“I have unresolved business with that dragon,” Twilight said evenly, her brows set. “And I won’t turn back. There’s too much at stake.”

“You willin’ ta stake ya life?” The bartender shrugged, but he still seemed unconvinced, his eyes level and face etched with a smirk. “Lass –”

“Twilight,” she said, giving him a flat stare. “Twilight Sparkle.”

The entire inn suddenly fell into silence. The bartender backed off rapidly. His eyes were widened, his mouth hanging.

He bumped into the casks of ale behind him. The rattle sounded like thunder in the quiet.

He took off, ducking into a room away from her, his hoofsteps quickly fading into the crackle of the lamps.

Twilight opened her mouth, raising an eyebrow in the process, before she noticed the stares of every single creature – sapient and not – on the inn floor aimed at her.

Her stomach sank. A chill ran down her spine. Cold diffused into the muscle as it went.

“It’s her,” someone said somewhere. Didn’t matter who. Didn’t matter why.

It was as if time had slowed down, as Twilight’s eyes caught the silver-orange glint of weapons being drawn all around her, like fireflies had suddenly popped into existence. Very sharp, murderous fireflies that reflected the orange glow of suddenly-superhot flame lamps.

She let instinct take over, and with a quick, blind teleportation spell, winked out of existence.

Twilight huffed, despite the smile playing on her lips. She had later found out that Celestia had prepared a sum of money to reward whoever had information on her location, and quintupling the reward if she was brought back to Equestrian borders safe and sound. A bounty, in other words. Celestia meant well, she knew, but the consequences of her actions had made Twilight’s life a little more difficult.

Only a little more. After all, she was a smart mare.

She dropped down from the worn barstool, and started her walk towards the inn’s exit.

A roar split the heavens. The wooden walls barely slowed the wave of sound.

The inn fell quiet, all conversation ceasing for a few seconds, before some brave soul’s whisper catalysed speech. Hushed whispers sprang up, in place of the mumbles and chuckles present just seconds ago.

Twilight didn’t even hesitate in her steps.

3 . Violence

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Chapter 3: Violence
By N00813
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The watery blue-grey sky hung above her like a shallow sea forever out of reach. Thin strips of white ran like long kayaks across it, under their own volition.

Here, there were no pegasi to wrangle the weather into submission. That was a distinctly Equestrian custom, as she’d learned over the years. She shook her head, feeling ghostly tickles of raindrops running down the hair and skin on her neck.

Twintel, she said to herself as she looked into the motel’s dirty mirror, droplets of water stubbornly clinging to the fur on her cheek. That would be her. Twilight Sparkle didn’t exist in this new world. Twintel would take her place.

She still didn’t know exactly why she had chosen the name.

It was the bastardisation of some word from another language she barely understood, heard from the murmurs of a bar game in some far-away place. Still, it was easy on the ears, easy to remember and close enough to her real name that she could pass it off without difficulty.

It sounded close enough, but in reality was very, very different.

Her ears flicked beneath the rough fabric of her cloak.

She tugged the cloth around her form, feeling the coarse weave brush up against her coat. She’d spent the last of the money she’d brought on this piece of ‘clothing’; it had been a difficult decision, but the struggle of maintaining any sort of total illusion spell for more than a few minutes would strain her concentration to the breaking point, and she couldn’t afford to let her true identity slip out. There weren’t a lot of colourful Equestrians outside the borders, let alone a purple unicorn with a mane as distinctive as her own.

It was time to find a job.

The local villages didn’t have any need for an academic. Try as she might, Twilight couldn’t find any sort of work as a librarian, or even a performer. An image of Trixie, grinding her teeth in frustration and resigned anger, sprung up in her mind, and Twilight grit her teeth. Times were tight, and purse drawstrings even more so.

She pressed her hooves to her head. She could do this! She could find income, find a job. How hard could it be?

Taking in a deep breath to calm her racing heart, she glanced around.

To the north, a behemoth of stone and ice jutted out of the earth, its tip scraping the sky like claws. To the east, the only road out of the little village lay lonely and abandoned. To the west, a collection of houses sat – beyond that, the forest’s great pines stood, a nigh-impenetrable organic wall.

She looked back in the direction of the mountain. An earth pony shut the door behind her house, turning to lock it with a key in her mouth.

“No! I don’t have anything to spare! Get out of my house!”

That left two options, and neither of them looked good: a hunter of wild monsters, or a ‘workmare’ at the local tavern. Grazing, eating grass that had been trampled, defecated on, twisted her stomach into an ugly loop. There was no way she was going to stoop so low. Not when there were other ways, minutely more dignified…

Twilight looked away, her gaze inadvertently straying towards the worn path leading out.

It was a simple matter of going to the bulletin board for any tasks left over.

Twilight trotted to the village’s bulletin board. Like the hamlet itself, it was nothing great or fancy. A slab of muddy brown wood stood by the side of the village entrance, supported by two roughly attached stakes on either side that had been driven deep into the cold ground. This board was clear, actually, except for the old, weather-beaten piece of parchment attached dead-centre. A price on the head of the ‘Great Dragon of the South’. A price for her target.

The collage of notices on the old, worn wooden board made her drop her jaw, and her stomach almost heaved. Old adverts for finished jobs were left to rot beneath the newer pieces of parchment that papered over them, like wallpaper over termite-infested wood. The smell was horrendous; it belonged to the dankest cave, the stalest of prison cells. The wind finally took pity on her nose, whipping the stench away before it overwhelmed her.

One of the newest pieces, a rapidly yellowing scrap of parchment, simply read: “Bounty. Rabid dogs. Bring five pelts as proof. Payment in bits. Constable Light.”

She hissed at the horrendous mess that was their excuse of organisation, before the growling in her stomach and the pangs of hunger drummed through her body.

She closed her eyes, and breathed out and in, out and in. For Spike. This was all for Spike.

Twilight blinked, twice, and she shrugged. It wasn’t like she needed the money anyways – she was rich enough, by now, to live fairly comfortably for the rest of her life without working.

She grinned. That thought… that would have been something some elder would think, as he was on the way to handing in his retirement letter.

She closed her eyes once more, relishing in the taste of the cold, fresh mountain air washing down the slope.

Blinking her eyes open again, Twilight noted the location of the suspected attacks, marked in red on a crude map scribbled on a corner of the parchment. Just outside the outskirts of town – the no-pony’s land between the wild and the village. Just like the Everfree, she noted dumbly, hooves padding in front of her as if they had a mind of their own.

She passed many houses, all of them closed to her, windows glaring at her like dark eyes whilst steel-banded doors stood as stoically as Royal Guards.

The closest house to the mountain was a simple structure. As she trotted closer, she could see that timber made up its four walls, and it was roofed with thatch and leaves. One chimney, a simple hole, decorated the roof whilst a window and a door were cut out of one wall. The last adornment was the yapping little dog bouncing around the doorway.

Twilight met her first dog that day. Her first real, wild dog, as different to Winona as Spike was to his fellow dragons. Feral monster, more animal than anything she’d seen in the Everfree. She screamed as it lunged at her, jaws gaping and strings of spittle flying, and her horn flared up in brilliant magenta light.

Dogs came in packs, she distinctly recalled, as she looked down at the broken body of the one before her. Its back was snapped in two, and the front half seemed to be bent at a ninety-degree angle to its lower body. Blood poured out of the dog’s mouth, out of its chest and back, where the bones had broken through the skin. The sunlight, weakened by the cloud cover, washed over the body. The trickles of red blood seemed to glow under the light.

White ivory, stained crimson, tore through dirty brown fur. The wet, dull crack of breaking bone. The memory itself would not leave her head, even when she closed her eyes and screamed at the top of her lungs as the gruesome sound of snapping spine played again in the blackness of her mind.

Twilight grinned, staring out over the field of golden, swaying wheat between her and the mountain.

Her target lay at the peak.

Forcing her eyes to open, Twilight heaved a breath, and the acrid, clingy stench of blood roared into her nose and mouth like a wave into a building. Reflex bade her to heave again, as she tried to get more air into her lungs, to wash out the horrific smell. Of course it didn’t work. It only made the stench worse.

That was the last straw. She threw up.

That grin turned into a grimace as she looked at, but didn’t see, the waving stalks of wheat in front of her. It was time for her to start on this last, sordid mission of her quest.

Mount Sterfgeval. A black monolith of ancient stone, the mountain loomed over the little village at its feet. Swirls of mountain wind whipped up the ever-present snow covering the summit. Here and there, however, she could still see the black slashes that were rock outcrops struggling valiantly against the snow that desired to smother them.

The most famous – or notorious – feature of the mountain was the two parallel slashes of white that ran down its slope. Two valleys of black rock filled with snow, they resembled two tear-tracks on the face of the mountain. It wasn’t called the Crying Mountain for nothing, Twilight surmised, sucking in a deep, cold breath. And after the Great Dragon took up residence, the mountain was certainly living up to its name.

Here, Celestia’s sun seemed only a watery, pale-yellow ball of light in the sky – a forgery of the reliable, comfortably warm Equestrian sun.

The wind smashed into her cloak. One half of it pressed against her side, and the other flapped into the air like a flag.

The bubble kept them at bay as she recovered, spitting out the remnants of burning stomach acid onto the muddy soil beneath her hooves. She stepped away, gasping in shock as wetness seemed to bubble up from the soles of her rear hooves, and glanced instinctively backwards. A crimson stain, reaching a scant few centimetres up her leg, greeted her sight. She screamed, her eyes widening, almost bulging out of their sockets – and her concentration broke.

The bubble fell.

The dogs rushed in for the kill.

She shivered as a tongue of biting wind passed under the thin protection of her cloak. It chilled her to the bone.

Even at the base of the mountain, under the weak gaze of the sun, there was no respite from the cold. The cloak’s cloth was enchanted, but not the area around it. She could have woven a spell to protect herself against the elements, sure, but there was no real need. She could endure. And she wanted to be at her very peak when she finally met that dragon at the summit, head-to-head.

She could endure.

The feeling of her own skin being punctured by foreign objects was unique, was new, but was definitely uncomfortable. Even more so was the pain that followed not a nanosecond later, great flaming waves of it that seemed to spread radially from the epicentre of the strike: two dead-straight gashes on the side of her flank, right where her cutie mark was. She could see the pointed purple starburst of her cutie mark cut into three pieces of roughly equal size. Two slices were already stained ruby-red with the streams of the blood flowing out of the wounds and down her leg.

For Spike.

The unicorn trotted down the thin, meandering path alongside the field of wheat. Nearing the base of the mountain, the field began to thin out, as if the crops were wary of moving any further than their pony masters allowed. The stalks bent backwards as the wind picked up, threatening to tear the hood of her cloak off her head. She grumbled, holding the cloth in place with an infinitesimally dim glow of magic.

Twilight whimpered as her horn lit up on reflex, the primal part of her brain kicking in. The pain seemed to fade away, as did the odd sensation of both ice and fire over her wounds. In slow-motion, she could see the dogs fly outwards, a blast of dust and wind and dead leaves whipping outwards from her body. Moments later, she was at the centre of a dust-storm of her own making.

Her eyes flickered from each and every silhouette in the dust that got more and more distinct. A quick gasp of a breath left her hacking out her lungs, her diaphragm violently smashing into her ribcage. She stood shaking on wobbly legs. That would be a lesson not to breathe during a shower of particulates.

Nothing but the cold, hard lines of ancient pines greeted her eyes, her brain moulding their shapes into ribs of an ancient, massive animal – standing tall, proud and dead in this forsaken land.

The houses of the hamlet behind her were the size of quail eggs by the time she stopped. All were nothing special, simply stacks of logs held together with resin to resemble square houses. Only the inn had any stone in its structure.

How long would they last before nature came to reclaim her land? she wondered.

The little wire fence that marked the borders of the field were only a few dozen metres in front of her. She could see little vines wrap around the metal. Little nubs of the palest green dotted the vine at regular intervals, and Twilight swore she could see slivers of petals poking out.

She averted her eyes as she dragged the bodies of the dogs into a modestly sized clearing, before collapsing against the trunk of a nearby tree, feeling the bark scrape at her back. Tiny branches beneath her rump poked against her skin, and she could feel the slight itching of several dozen creepy-crawlies attempting to escape from beneath her.

Her wound still stung, but dully now, like the lingering pain of a crushing hammer blow rather than the searing of a white-hot needle being pushed through the skin. The general-purpose healing spell she’d made sure to memorize at the very start of this whole misadventure had done the job, binding the muscle together and scouring her system of disease as it locked her body in place. A safety feature to prevent things like bones setting wrong, she remembered, her heart hammering away as the growls of the forest seemed to grow in volume and ferocity. She couldn’t feel more relieved when she finally had control of her body, a few tense, terrifying seconds later.

Fluttershy would have been so disappointed in her, she noted. It was almost as if her body was a mile away, as her eyes roved over every centimetre of the scene in front of her. The dead dogs lay in a pile, bodies all in various states of brokenness. One had its back snapped around the stomach area, another with its head bent around such that it was sniffing at the top of its own neck. Twilight could see the spinal cord, or what was left of the pulverised vertebrae, poking out through the bloody fur.

Fluttershy had always believed in the inherent goodness of everyone. Believed that everything, sapient or not, enemy or friend could be redeemed, given enough time or understanding. For all the darkness in someone’s soul, she could see the spark of light, the spark of ‘good’ that was constantly swallowed by the shadows around it.

Twilight sighed as she jumped over a low wire fence at the end of the field, separating the tenuous civilisation of the village from the wilderness. The only problem she could see, after all her travels, was what ‘good’ meant.

Sobbing, and mumbling several apologies to her Princesses, her friends and what she had learnt, she hefted the small knife that Pinkie had given her on her last visit to the bakery. She paused, trying to recall that odd last goodbye. Anything to distract herself from the wretched task ahead.

A wiggle of her body to the side let the sheath of the knife slap against her ribcage, on her underside. She smiled. The blade within was just as solid today as it was when she'd first received it.

Pinkie had seemed unnaturally sombre that day. Twilight was sure that no one had known of her plans; she hadn’t written anything down, for fear of the guards staging an early intervention. Her reading habits had changed, from preferring books on advanced magical study to ones detailing wilderness survival, field medicine and magical defence, although nopony had come by often enough to notice the difference, and the guards had simply dismissed her new reading habits as part of the intense curiosity and hunger for knowledge that she was famous for. Pinkie had just… known.

The once-life-of-the-party had been solemn ever since the kidnapping, but on Twilight’s last visit, she had looked as if the Cakes had died. Mane flat and colours dulled, she simply nodded to Twilight’s mumble of an order for a set of her favourite desserts, and packaged them in silence. She hadn’t even bothered to make small talk as her hooves danced along the counter, stacking cupcake, folding the box, tying the string. The both of them ignored the ever-present Royal Guards standing in the corners of the shop, like statues.

After she’d finished, she’d simply pushed the box forwards with her two suddenly-calm hooves. When Twilight had reached out with her magic to take the box, and opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, Pinkie had simply smiled a tired smile and replied with, “Stay safe, Twilight. Best of luck.”

Twilight hadn’t even known about the knife until she opened the box to find, beneath the food, a small, wickedly sharp chef’s knife. It was – no, had been – one of Pinkie’s own prized possessions, judging by the engraved set of three balloons on the handle. The small ribbon of red attached to the end, tied into a bow, marked it as a gift.

That same knife hovered over the dog on the top of the pile, the silver blade clean, shards of sunlight that had managed to pierce the forest canopy glinting off the metal. It looked almost hungry for the upcoming bloodshed.

Twilight frowned.

The path to the summit was long, winding around the mountain like a snake around a tree-trunk, and it looked worn and disused. She couldn’t simply teleport up there, for fear of blinking into existence over a lava pit or something nastier. Both methods looked like death traps, the longer she thought about them.

Was there another way?

Her cloak fluttered loosely over her skin, like flowing water, under a small, sudden breeze.

The blade cut through the pelt like it was butter.

She should never have doubted. Pinkie had always considered cooking as an art form, and insisted on quality. For that, she needed and used only the best tools.

A splatter of blood from a collapsing artery splashed onto the pink engraving on the handle, running along the dip in the wood, staining the balloon motif red.

She wove a quick magnification spell before her eyes, allowing her to scan the path ahead at her leisure. There was no sudden, mirage-like shimmer over spots that indicated the presence of an illusion-concealment spell, nor any disturbed earth that suggested buried mines or animals in waiting. None that she could see, at least.

Path it was, then. Carving another way up the mountain would be time-consuming at best and lethal at worst. Going so far to suffocate in an avalanche or to break her bones whilst falling down a ravine wasn’t part of her plan for the day.

Twilight squinted as she fixed the destination in her mind. Ambient ley rushed into her horn, flowing through her nerves and burning her skin along the metal-based tattoos.

And the world appeared to rip into white before her eyes.

The first pelt was done. Skinless, the dog’s musculature was revealed in all of its bloody glory. Grey and brown patches of skin, ones she hadn’t managed to cut off, sat proudly amidst the red-pink muscle. Twilight wrinkled her nose, attempting to stop the salty, coppery smell of freshly spilled blood and the rich scent of meat from invading her nostrils.

It didn’t work.

She gagged, stomach heaving, and dropped the scraps of pelt on the dead leaves below as she rushed away from the immediate scene. The knife she left lying beside the skinned dog, on the slowly moistening earth.

It was as if the image of the mountain, the sky and whatever had been in front of her eyes was ripped into two halves, revealing the white space behind. A feeling of nothingness, as if she was simply a spark floating on an endless ocean, filled her frame for too long a time before the rush of sound and light and the pressure of skin and the cloak made themselves known again.

Done. She’d gone up the furthest that she could see was safe. By her estimate, there was still five kilometres of mountain left to climb in the upwards direction – five times that if she took the meandering path. Doable.

From where she stood, in the midst of a dust halo created by her arrival, she could only see the white, snow-covered peak, dotted with black rock outcroppings above her. The sharp curve of the outside edge of the mountain path, cut higher up on the side of the mountain, was obvious. As for what was on the path, though, she couldn’t tell. A mirror spell wouldn’t work, given that the light source would be behind the reflective plane, and the sun was too weak anyways.

She didn’t hesitate before smashing a rear hoof into the earth, propelling herself forwards with all the force of a bullet.

4 . Bloodshed

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Chapter 4: Bloodshed
By N00813
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Twilight trudged into Constable Light’s office. The pony himself wasn’t difficult to find – in fact, he’d found her, trudging through the middle of a growing crowd with her cloak covered in blood and the eczema-riddled dog pelts draped over her back. She had simply ignored the throng of bodies, ignored the dampness growing on her back and ignored the way the cloth seemed to become heavier and stickier as she placed one hoof in front of the other. The bitter, burning taste of vomit had almost vanished from her tongue on the journey back, the last of its traces clinging stubbornly to her teeth.

Little puffs of white breath blew out of her mouth as she galloped on, her pace perfected after a life of adventure in the Known World. There was no ache of lactic acid building in her muscles, no chafing drought at the back of her throat as the cold air scraped against her windpipe. It was only her, the path, and her thoughts.

They’d left the skins by the side of the road, in front of the Constable’s building, a rickety wooden structure that seemed to have been cut from the pine trees surrounding the village and roofed with a sheet of corrugated iron.

Inside, Twilight waited behind a little desk. It was a flimsy piece of furniture – a flat plane of laminated plywood supported by two spindly legs on one side and a drawer on the other. The room was small and cramped, only three metres wide and five long. Even with just the two of them inside, it was difficult to close the door without knocking over the piles of miscellaneous rubbish standing by the walls and the sides of the doorframe.

Just above her head, a small lantern swung almost imperceptibly from a hook set into the ceiling. The flickering flames rose and dove, washing over the two with waves of weak orange light.

As she sat on the hard, lumpy cushion opposite of Light’s own, she could see the pony himself withdraw a cloth bag from an open drawer. He stuck a hoof inside, before casting a glance at her, his face twisted in obvious discomfort even when half-shadowed. She looked away.

“Payment,” the Constable muttered after a while, flinging several dozen small gold coins onto the desk top. The coins clattered as they hit the wooden surface, clinking whenever one met another. He went back under the desk as Twilight glared at the money, a scowl forming on her lips.

Was this what she’d turned into? What the world had turned her into? Whoring out her skills, her special talent for money?

How was that different from any other job? A voice in her brain piped up, and Twilight’s frown faltered for just a moment. Fluttershy sells her skills as a vet. Pinkie plans parties and sells pastry, both for money. Applejack sells her goods in the market.

Other jobs don’t involve killing and murder, she countered, her grimace deepening.

Light glanced her way, after putting the remainder of what was probably a coin bag away and locking the drawer. “This was what’s agreed on the bounty. Take it or leave it.”

Twilight gasped, eyes widening at the sudden interruption and ears flicking up. She breathed out, feeling her face begin to assume a neutral expression. “Yes, it’s fine.” A pause. “What are you going to do with the skins?”

“Burn them, probably. No use. Disease-ridden, and the skinning was the worst botch-up I’ve ever seen.”

The money felt sticky in her blood-soaked hooves.

A roar from above shook the very core of her bones, and her stomach wobbled under the sonic assault, but Twilight gritted her teeth. Little pebbles seemed to dislodge from the cliff-face by her side, raining down on her like hail. She pressed on, pounding her hooves into the ground, small dust clouds kicking upwards behind her.

The end of her journey lay at the top of the mountain. Spike would be there.

Clip-clop, clip-clop. Inhale, exhale. A rhythm of exertion.

Bandit gunfire smashed into her shields. Her magic flared up, shields glowing purple as they stopped the spherical bullet. Twilight grit her teeth. Her horn felt like it was driving into her head like a nail, trying to burrow its way through the thin skull there and into the brain.

The unicorn inhaled a massive breath, ignoring the smell of gunpowder and burning wood as she rocketed towards the other side of the caravan. A rickety thing, she’d first thought it would fall apart when its wooden wheels went over the first pebble. Now, even as holes appeared in the wood and little metal and wooden sticks jutted out of its walls, it looked as impenetrable as Canterlot Castle’s walls.

The thumping pain in her head she momentarily forgot, as tufts of exploding khaki earth sprouted out of the ground around her like miniature geysers. Animalistic, hackle-raising screeches howled from the forest to her back.

Her hooves thundered beneath her.

The wooden caravan shuddered alongside the thumps of impacting arrows and crossbow bolts, and the cracks of gunfire.

The mule that had been pulling the caravan grimaced as he leant against the vehicle’s planking alongside her, a hoof pressing on the blooming red hole in his skin. A bloody crossbow bolt was in his other hoof, and he was shaking like a leaf, groaning. He must have gotten shot when he paused to unhitch himself from the yoke. Twilight could spot the angry red scrapes flare on the mud-brown skin around his neck and chest.

Beyond him, Twilight saw another unicorn, this one a male with a coat of blue and a mane of grey. He wasn’t fast enough. She saw his brown eyes widen as his throat suddenly disappeared with the wet sound of ripping flesh.

Her own eyes mirrored his. Her jaw fell loose. He simply fell.

She watched him gurgle on the blood pooling around him, his own blood, eyes silently pleading, as the sandy earth around him reddened. She raised a hoof, lit her horn –

And with a flare of heat, white consumed her vision.

The first obstacle did not affect her pace at all.

The path crumbled beneath her hooves, spiderwebbing outwards from where her hooves had been, forming a mosaic of worn brown earth.

The image of the path, several dozen metres ahead, repainted itself in front of her with a sharp pop. The rumble of crumbling rock played behind her, like symphonic accompaniment. An expanding ring of dust and grit surrounded her as she fell back to earth.

She hit the ground running, and once more, the jolts running up her legs as she slammed her limbs against the earth faded out into the darkness of her mind.

“No use,” the mule said through grit teeth, thrusting the hoof holding the bolt at her arm. She cried out in shock, the sound cutting off into a squeak as a solid, powerful thunk sounded from the wood behind her. “He dead.”

Twilight watched the light go out of the unicorn’s eyes, watched the eyelids close as the pupils rolled upwards to gaze into the sky, one last time.

She gasped, pulling back, her eyelids almost pulling themselves off her face. Her jaw hung as she tried to process the image in front of her.

He was dead. Just like that. No wise last words, no nothing – just choking on his own blood as he lay on an empty road in the middle of nowhere. Just another missing pony, to be added to the lists.

It wasn’t fair.

She felt warm trickles of liquid run down her cheeks, and her throat began to constrict in the most unusual way.

Twilight blinked away the grit in her eyes. Even here, as far away from the Khamelan deserts as possible, there was still that irritating prickle that told her to close her eyes, and wash them out with a bowl of water. They weren’t tears, for sure. Those prickled at the back of the eyes.

The ground had only barely begun to rumble before she activated the thin strands of silver metal woven into her cloak with a stray thought. The threads shone, long thin scratches of pure white light etched onto the dirty brown canvas of her cloak. Under the burning light, little trickles of sweat burst out of her skin. Not a millisecond later, a translucent purple shell flickered into existence around her body.

Through her purple eyes, the world tinted purple.

Twilight scowled as the worm burst through the earth, smashing into her shields. The hit barely did anything to her. Only the flicker of bright magenta light from her underside alerted her to the fact that something had tried to make contact. The cloak’s power gem still shone as brightly as if it had been freshly charged.

Groundworms could ‘swim’ through the earth with the help of their latent magic as quickly as fish could in water or pegasi in air. Twilight knew that she couldn’t win in a race of speed, but she could kill the thing.

Experience taught her that the presence of one meant the presence of others. It would be best if she went and got the whole family out, before killing them all in one fell swoop.

The ground rumbled in earnest, as if an invisible crowd was applauding the show that was about to begin. Twilight set her jaw, never slowing down, eyes flicking from the brown earthen mound to the grey rock to the green shoots on the packed earth in front of her.

Three of them rocketed out of the ground.

Time slowed down.

Twilight could hear, or somehow sense, the worm behind her burst out of the ground like a leaping tiger, just as the three in front began their graceful flight towards her. The grey, grey-blue and grey-brown tubes that were their bodies seemed to shimmer in the sun, thanks to their slime coating, but the black darkness of their maws seemed to grow as they flew closer and closer…

Twilight grinned, and released a spell: a localised, area-of-effect ‘Nova’ around her own body. The result was as spectacular as the spell was efficient.

The purple magic, a thin, two-dimensional ring, spread out from her torso. It seemed to pass through the worms’ bodies without resistance. Yet, a split-second was all the time needed for startlingly bright blue blood to spurt out of unnaturally straight cuts.

One half of their bodies had barely separated from the other when the remains of the dead worms smacked sloppily against her shields. Blue goo smeared messily down the surface of her magic. She vaporised the stain with a flash of light from her horn.

Soon enough, the rapid, repetitive pounding of her hooves against the earth faded again into her mind, and she was left with nothing but the darkness.

“Where the fuck were you?” the mule groused, glaring at the caravan guard. He pressed a cloth bandage, doused with alchemical medicines, to his wound all the while. The crossbow bolt responsible for that wound lay by his side, forgotten for the moment.

Twilight felt another jab of shame well up from her stomach. She couldn’t heal him – in fact, she couldn’t heal anyone who wasn’t a unicorn approximately her size and weight. The healing spell she’d learnt was very specific in its instructions, and incorrect use would do more harm than good.

The guard, a griffon female whose forearms and chest were simply drenched in blood, rolled her eyes as she picked up the bolt with an idle claw. “Cleaning up. You think they just fucking disappeared?”

She twisted around to slot the bolt into some pouch, revealing the five crossbows and one primitive flintlock gun slung across her back. All were ill-gotten, paid for by the blood of their former owners.

The mule grumbled, but said nothing more as the caravan guard glanced at his wound. The bleeding had slowed, but his brown skin still looked a bit pale.

The griffon tsked. “Idiot.”

Twilight, with her shields still up and her horn beginning to pang in tune with her heartbeat with pain and smothering fatigue, crept out to take stock of the damage.

Three bodies lay in various pools of blood around the caravan. The unicorn with his throat torn out was slumped, as if sleeping on a bed of red sand, closest to her hiding place. She carefully kept her eyes off him. An earth pony who looked like she’d been stabbed through the heart had fallen against the other side of the caravan, painting the wood panels and the dirt red with a massive splatter of her blood. Finally, a griffon lay in the centre of the road in another widening pool of red earth.

The last one was a bandit, judging from the hodgepodge armour he wore. Yet, Twilight couldn’t help think that the caravan guard was wearing the same clothing and armour – if another set of cards had been dealt, the caravan guard might have been one of their attackers.

His chest was still expanding and contracting, rising and falling even as blood gushed out freely from a hole in his stomach.

He was still alive.

Twilight gasped in shock. She stumbled backwards. Her diaphragm heaved as the smell of blood wormed deep into her nostrils.

It was disgusting.

Through the red gash in his abdomen, Twilight could see the fleshy, wormlike strings of his intestines wrapped into a tight, bloody bundle that was slowly fraying apart with each breath. She could see his organs jitter about as he inhaled and exhaled.

She closed her eyes – no, smashed the eyelids shut – but the image had already seared itself into her mind. Slumping down with suddenly-weak knees, she found herself sitting down on the road.

The bandit, somehow, managed to turn his head slightly, enough to stare at Twilight out of one eye. The unicorn herself froze, eyes widening, like a mouse staring into a cat’s eyes.

“Please,” he croaked, and Twilight felt her own eyes widening even further, as her throat constricted. The bandit hacked out a cough, droplets of blood spraying out from the wound and from his beak, further showering the sandy earth with red. Twilight could see the organs extrude blood through the hole in him. “Kill me.”

Twilight blinked, unsure for a second, before twisting around. Thankfully, there was no sign of carnage if she kept her eyes looking high enough. “He’s still alive!”

The caravan guard was in the midst of unloading all of her newly-acquired weaponry into a spare wooden crate as she turned with crossbow in claw.

“Oh, him,” she cawed, chuckling. “He’ll die. Don’t worry.”

Those last two words ran around in her head, mocking her, as she gaped soundlessly. As if the guard thought she wanted to kill him. Why had he attacked? Why couldn’t this all have not happened, and then no one would have to die?

“Kill me,” the voice sounded, wet and thick with blood, and Twilight turned to face the bandit once again. His eyes were closed now, and his beak pointed towards his chest. “Please. Mercy.”

Mercy, huh. She couldn’t heal him. She could, however, do what he wanted. Mercy, he said. He wanted death.

She thought back to the blue unicorn with the grey mane that had his throat torn out by a bolt or a bullet. He had a dream of his own, family members who cared about him, and the bandits took him away from them in a single act of selfish, senseless bloodshed. The earth pony mare, who received only death today, not the riches or glory she was hoping for at the very start of this mess. Anger rose up in her, bubbling and thick as the blood beneath her hooves.

The blood beneath her hooves. His blood. Murder, an act of mercy. It was a kindness, nothing more. Euthanasia. He was going to die, regardless of what she chose to do. Who cared who, or what, killed him? There was no difference. In the end, he was still going to be a dead body on the road.

And in the end, it was a simple matter. Pinkie’s knife, blade shimmering, plunged into the bandit’s throat with token resistance. Twilight forced herself to keep watching as red blood spurted weakly around the blade, splattering onto the handle, onto the front of her cloak and soaking through to the coat within.

She watched as the light went out of the griffon’s eyes, and he smiled, his last conscious act.

She kept watching, staring at the corpse, as bitter tears sprang out from her eyes, mixing with the blood of her first murder in the hungry earth below.

She yanked the blade out, and turned away.

5 . Murder

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Chapter 5: Murder
By N00813
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Noon. Even as the sun beat down feebly upon her back, the unrelenting wind snatched any warmth from the air pockets beneath her cloak. It wasn’t too bad, though. The healthy burn of her muscles staved off the worst of the cold.

Her face and ears stung a little, battered by the icy wind as they were. She shook her head, feeling an odd numbness at the points of her ears instead of the scrape of rough fabric.

Her eyes felt as if someone was poking cold needles of ice into them, forcing the eyelids to squint together.

Looking at the glaring sheet of parchment on the little table in front of her was like looking at the sun’s reflection in a rough, mistreated mirror.

The powerful desert sunlight washed into her room through the tiny, one-foot-square window, under which the parchment seemed to glow the lightest shade of yellow. The Khamelan motel wasn’t ventilated, and so the sticky, stale air hung in the tiny room like laundry, almost choking in its humidity.

She frowned, glaring at the short quill hovering in the air before her inside the indistinct purple veil of magic, before refocusing on what she’d written down.

‘Save Spike’

To save him, she needed to know where he was. She needed information. The quill scratched that thought down onto the pressed parchment before her. She smiled.

The only ones who had a chance of knowing about lone, rogue wild dragons would be the ones who made it their business to know everything. Information brokers. She’d heard of one ‘Vafer’, a notoriously slippery and shady figure that made his living selling data to the highest bidder. He was the best in the business, she’d heard, and his information was always accurate and always up-to-date. The only problem now was getting enough money to find one of his agents, arrange a transaction, and buy the location of the dragon and Spike.

‘Save Spike. Need information. Get money.’

Seemed simple. Three phrases on an otherwise empty piece of parchment. The scowl returned to her face as she stared at the last sentence.

Dromedor might’ve been the shining jewel of the deserts, the wealthiest city in the wealthiest country of the Known World. Up at the top, it certainly looked the part. Spires and massive, gilded structures lined every well-paved road, all trying to outshine their neighbours.

But no one would have known that if they were down in the lowest tier, in the slums, where ramshackle huts and people sat upon roofs of other huts, which were above the roofs of others themselves. Down there, they said it was no better than the prisons.

Her mind, and her eyes, lit up. The sheik that controlled this quarter had been trying to get rid of crime for some reason or another. He was rich, and he would pay well.

Twilight grinned, eyes flicking back to the first phrase on the page. Save Spike. That was the point of this entire bloody quest. That was what she was going to do – and after doing whatever she had to do, she would find him and get him back.

Nothing would stop her.

Twilight grunted, sucking in massive breaths as she continued to ascend. There had been a few more groundworm attacks, but nothing she hadn’t seen before. Their mere presence meant several things, however.

Groundworms were scavengers first, predators second. They wouldn’t pass up a meal that walked by, but they usually established a presence in places like landfills, where there was plenty of free food. That meant that there had to be a steady source of gems or meat rolling off the mountain for them to eat. The fact that there were so many of them meant that the thing sitting at the mountain summit must have been absolutely massive.

Her face twisted into an unconscious frown.

“A slaving camp?” She glanced down at the sheet of pristine white parchment before her, as if the letters had arranged themselves wrong, and would be correct on second glance. According to the drawn map, the camp was just outside city borders, on the down-wind side of a great sand dune that probably served to conceal it from view. Adventurous pegasi or griffons that strayed too near would be shot down with nets, before being shackled and added to the slavers’ inventory.

Shadows from the many pillars that surrounded the room, eight on each wall, fell onto her and her employer. They provided piecemeal cover from the sun’s brutal glare. As the light washed onto it, the red carpeting below Twilight’s hooves seemed to glow as red as freshly-spilled blood. Likewise, the various tapestries hanging from the ceiling at the back of the hall and around the side were as richly coloured and vibrant as one of Cloudsdale’s famous rainbows. Ancient antique pieces of pottery, polished until they positively shone mirror-like, stood in seemingly random places around the border of the room.

There was some history depicted on one massive, panoramic piece hanging at the very back. On the left edge, a bunch of yellow camels stood surrounded by orange, hill-like sand dunes. As the image progressed to the right, the camels stood in front of a group of black-and-white zebras, and then a group of brown cervids. At the right edge, she saw the same four camels stand in front of two alicorns – one white and one midnight-blue. The sand dunes in the background gradually yellowed into piles of gold.

Oddly, the hall was neither too hot nor too cold – some sort of magical climate-control system must have been hidden in the pillars, Twilight concluded. The desert wind blew across the two of them, refreshing and cool, lacking in any sort of sand or grit.

The sheik was a relatively overweight camel, sitting on the gilded recliner across from her. A great mahogany table, also bordered with gold and silver, sat in between the two of them. He wore nice, vibrant flowing robes that seemed to mimic a colourful waterfall, starting from a hood around his head, down to his twin humps and then hanging off the sides of his body.

He nodded. “Yes, Miss Twintel. This was all the information the one you captured gave us, before he… ahem, expired.”

For Spike, she thought, frowning. The sheik’s methods were none of her concern. Spike was.

“What of the slaves themselves?” Twilight turned the parchment over, but there was nothing more on the other side. It was a simple kill mission, with the addition of a bounty on the leader – a rock hound by the name of ‘Denza’.

The sheik shrugged. Twilight raised an eyebrow, and the guards around them instantly tensed up, with some of them going so far as to place their hooves or claws on the grips of their blades. Twilight ignored the display. The Royal Guards had been pretty much the same, back in the day.

The sheik waved a hoof about lazily, making the universally-recognised ‘stand down’ gesture. “I don’t care. Do as you will.”

Twilight nodded, and pushed herself up off the recliner, lowering her head. “Very well. I will be back.”

As she walked away after a quick bow, she heard the sheik mutter, “If you survive.”

Twilight slowed down from a full gallop to a slower canter.

She’d nearly reached the peak. By her estimate, there was still a kilometre and a half of path to go, and snow had settled into thick white sheets that crunched beneath her steps. Looking back, she saw a trail of grey, dirtied hoofprints.

She could just trace the thin line that was her hoofsteps almost all the way back to the sparkling jewel of Dromedor, far in the distance. The sand dunes behind her, waves of fiery gold, rolled out towards the coast.

From this distance, the city itself looked like a pyramid. Buildings, of all sorts and shapes, tried to cling onto the edges of other, pre-existing structures like barnacles. Surrounded by the smooth curves of sand dunes, the city stood as an incongruous monument to the achievements of civilization.

She took a deep breath as she turned towards the small column of smoke several hundred metres in front of her.

The cold air, despite her best efforts, seemed to have succeeded in freezing the moisture in her windpipe, turning her throat into an icy desert that burned with pain. Her leg muscles were still going strong, but they wouldn’t be for much longer if it hurt this much to breathe.

The sentry gagged, his eyes bulging out of his sockets as he scrabbled at his throat. A thin line of magenta magic had closed around his neck. His veins bulged out, brilliant blue lines against his orange-brown coat.

His tobacco pipe lay forgotten in the sands next to him, the flame still burning in the open end. The leaves spilled out onto the sand, still smouldering.

As he scrabbled, hoof shaking as it headed for the dagger strapped to his chest, Twilight watched, her horn glowing dimly.

The sentry’s hoof closed around the handle, and with that action, a spark of desperate hope lit up in his eyes.

Twilight continued to watch.

The sentry’s motions became slower, more sluggish. His eyes drifted towards the top of his head even as he clenched his teeth, glaring at the lavender unicorn standing in front of him. His murderer. He groaned, summoning up all of his remaining strength, even as the darkness encroached on his vision, and flicked his elbow back –

Twilight merely blinked, before the glow around her horn flared up for the briefest of moments.

She forced herself into an easy trot as she felt the sparks of ley congeal around the tip of her horn. Holding in a breath, she closed her eyes for a moment. Warmth rushed across her face, running from her horn down her spine and nerves, and into the muscle.

Waves of heat beat against her, from all sides.

The smoke belching from the slave camp, or what remained of it, alternately tickled and seared the back of her throat. She coughed, involuntarily, before casting a hasty air-purification spell around her head. Her eyes stopped watering, and Twilight blinked rapidly, letting the remaining tears trickle down her cheeks. For the first time in what seemed like hours, the oxygen she sucked into her lungs was fresh and clear – almost like mountain air.

From the outside, it would look as though her head was inside an air bubble. She doubted that many of the residents in the camp cared for her appearance right now, though. She doubted that any of them could see anything through the intense grey-black smoke that spewed from the burning fabric of the tents. The sentries around the camp would have noticed the smoke, if they weren’t lying dead amidst growing pools of sand stained red with their own blood.

She grimaced. That had definitely not been the highlight of her life; she’d even felt a little guilty about the first one. That was before she saw the slaves.

“Fucking bitch!” Denza roared, his tall, minotaur-like form growing more and more distinct as he charged through the smoke at her. His paws were barely audible, even as his muscles smashed them into the ground, propelling him forwards. He was the last one standing.

His cronies had either been speared with lances of purple magic through their skulls, or bled to death as they lay on the thirsty sand with parts of their bodies severed by clean, magical cuts.

The slaves, she’d tried to save. Some of them had made it out unharmed, dragging their siblings-in-suffering with them, even as the lengths of chain that had once secured them were still red-hot. Others had been hit by stray crossbow bolts and bullets. The lucky ones had died on the spot.

Twilight blocked out the moans of the suffering as Denza’s body solidified in the smoke.

She charged her horn again. Five blasts, rapid fire, straight into centre mass. Denza appeared to ignore the beams of magic punching straight through him, tearing out unnaturally clean holes in his torso. He swung his axe, once, but Twilight had already teleported out of the way as the blade was falling. He struck dirt, the sand painted red by the liquid gushing out of the holes in his chest.

Twilight glared at him, almost growling. Her breathing heavy, she smashed a magenta magical barrier directly into his back. He crumpled, arms and legs pointed in every cardinal direction.

Hatred and anger rose up in her, alongside the swelling wave of satisfaction – justice served.

Why? She wondered.

Even as she drove Pinkie’s knife into Denza’s spine, where the base of the head met the vertebrae, she couldn’t pinpoint exactly why that sense of contentment – not exactly happiness, simply satisfaction – had sprung up in her at all.

The slaves had been mistreated horribly, for sure. Most of them had nothing to shade them from the cruel noontime sun. Dirty rags, stained by what seemed like years’ worth of sweat, blood and tears, had been fashioned into hoods. Even then, they were limited only to the ones fortunate enough to have rags to wear.

She’d seen slaves before, in the markets. This was just… more of the same.

Were they? She spun her head around to check.

Some of the older ones looked like they’d simply lost their will to live, and now where only running on instinct, rather than any sort of conscious will. Even then, the other slaves supported them, comforted them.

Yes. They were just more of the same.

To have their freedoms stripped away from them, to be dragged away from their homes and families, their loved ones, through no fault of their own, and be told that this new brutal reality was their future for however long their lives were to be…

Suddenly, an inkling of empathy, of cold, brutal understanding dripped into her mind, splashing into a million drops until all she could think of was Spike, and the dragon that had captured him. A savage grin tugged at the corners of her mouth as she hacked off Denza’s head, the blade stabbing into the neck rapidly, repeatedly. Blood, oh so much of it, spurted out, everywhere. Several jets of it hit her, bathing her in the viscous red liquid.

The last remnants of warmth from the hasty spell faded from her chest.

Twilight sucked in a massive breath. The oxygen level and temperatures at these higher peaks didn’t bode well for a long fight. She had to win, and win quick, or she’d fall unconscious and get cooked in dragonfire. Then all of this bloodshed and killing would have been for nothing.

Her throat screamed in protest as bitingly cold air rushed into her windpipe.

The knife had sunk hilt-deep into the damp red sand by the time she could consciously control her breathing. As the red haze slowly melted away, she stole another glance at Denza’s headless corpse. It was now undergoing rigour mortis. Her heart was still hammering in her chest, the drums of war still going strong. She closed her eyes, washing the image from the forefront of her mind.

Count ten seconds between inhale and exhale, she willed herself. Ignore everything – the rancid stench rising from the bloodied cloak, the quiet crackle of the flames as they consume the remnants of the camp, the lump balanced on your back, still leaking goo.

Ignore it for Spike.

When she opened her eyes, it was as if she was an observer, letting her body run on instinct instead of thought.

Even some of the older slaves, hardened to their former master’s savagery, shrunk back from her as she approached. She ignored the wide-eyed glances. Ignored the sighs of resignation as she took up the chains. Ignored the quiet mumbles of surprise as they began their walk towards the city of Dromedor, the glittering pyramid in the midst of the waves of orange sand on the horizon.

Less than a kilometre left before the end of her quest. As she walked, exhaling a long, puffy stream of white vapour, she felt the corners of her lips lift. The years of travel suddenly seemed to crash down onto her back. She stumbled, legs folding awkwardly beneath her for a moment, and the thick snow met her chin.

She could see the end of the line, the mouth of the cave: a black hole, ripped from dark-grey rock.

The fates had decided that the end of her story wasn’t going to be set in some grand, marvellous, important place like the canopy of Cervidas’s World Tree or Gryphus’s Skybridge. Whatever happened here on Mount Sterfgeval wouldn’t be recorded by bards or minstrels, to be immortalised in oral history. No – for the world, today would simply be another day on the fields, the forests, the deserts or the tundra.

For her, it would be one of the most important days of her life.

The mountain air was more rarefied, more tenuous than the mists. Her burning lungs seemed to flare up in pain with each passing second. With a blast of white smoke from her mouth, she turned to look towards the sun, and the village below.

The village was shrouded in shadow, the pale white light of the sun doing its best to keep absolute darkness at bay. From her height, she could just make out the tiny grey stalks of chimney smoke rising above the settlement, mixing together a scant kilometre above into one big grey cloud.

The sun itself, watery and pale from the village, seemed just a little more potent on the mountain summit. From its position, hanging in the sky to the west, it showered the snow with light, tinting the white a very slight shade of orange-yellow.

Enough wasted time, she thought. Let’s get this over with.

The crunch of snow below her hooves faded into the back of her mind as she began the long walk towards the mouth of the cave.

One hundred metres. Close enough for the rich smell of roasting meat to worm through her nostrils. She scowled, wrinkling her nose. The smell had gotten more and more bearable over the years, but that didn’t mean it was any more pleasant. She’d… just gotten used to it. That was all.

Twilight grimaced.

The crunching of compacting snow. The warmth of the sun, however weak, on her back. The cool wind zipping through the gap between cloak and skin. Her own breathing, deepening and increasing in frequency. Her heart rate ramping up until it seemed as though it was Spike himself trying to shake loose the cage bars of Twilight’s ribcage.

There were many times before when Twilight had looked back at her life, like it was an essay in a test. She could ignore the ticking clock of Spike’s death for a while, but when she stopped to breathe or sleep she’d look up and see the sand in the hourglass pouring down, little by little.

“Stay safe, Twilight. Best of luck.” Pinkie smiled, almost melancholically, as she stood behind the counter.

Back then, she’d thought Pinkie was sick. That tone she’d never heard before; it was full of some emotion – or lack thereof – that she couldn’t place. It didn’t belong with Pinkie.

But now, she recognised the glint in Pinkie’s eyes. It had spoken of resignation, of hope tempered with cynical experience.

Another step forwards. Her breaths, wafting from her mouth like the smoke from the end of a gun barrel, were stolen away by the wind.

“You’ll get over it,” the caravan guard muttered, stretching out her wings as she sat on top of the caravan. Twilight sat alongside her, watching the trees pass by. She could hear nothing but her own breathing, and the harsh, raspy voice of the griffon next to her. The latter seemed muddled, as if she was hearing it from the bottom of a lake. “Nothing else you can do but that.”

Back then, she’d thought the caravan guard – whom she later discovered went by the name of Eri – was some sort of insane psychopath who couldn’t tell blood from water, with the way she was spilling it left, right and centre.

But now, Twilight understood. She understood why Eri would think like that. Simple survival. Nothing less, and nothing more.

Understanding. That was all Eri wanted, anyways. Agreement was just a bonus.

A single thought lit up the tattoos etched into her body, injected into the muscle over the major nerves. Ink and eyes glowing silver white for a brief moment, she felt the ley coalesce into a ball of white fire on the tip of her horn, almost scalding in its intensity.

“In the end, mate,” the Jackal said, grinning predatorily, his fangs poking out from his mouth as little white nubs. He leant back against a crate of guns with his forepaws crossed beneath his head and his stubby tail wagging freely. Both he and Twilight watched his customers unload all sorts of weaponry from his cart. “What you can do, is what you will do.”

And when she looked back, her life seemed to be written in ink that looked more and more like blood.

The burning in her muscles, under her skin, flared up into a split-second inferno as she hurled the magical flare into the cave, illuminating the beast within.

Twilight stood on in the centre of the small lip of rock, about fifteen metres across, jutting out from the cave mouth. Her opponent’s baleful stare met hers.

The image of Spike, fear screaming in his eyes as he was caged within long black claws, flashed through her mind.

Green eyes gazed into her violet ones.

6 . Death

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Chapter 6: Death
By N00813
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White light struggled valiantly against the darkness. But it was futile.

All the flare could illuminate was the front of a massive pile of glimmering yellow gold, interspersed with the almost fluorescent multi-coloured sparkle of gems.

Above the flare, two green eyes flecked with amber were set amongst stained purple scales. A sharp, curved hook of a snout stuck out from the middle of the face, emblazoned with a cruel grimace criss-crossed with roiling waves of light and shadow. The scales on the underside of the dragon’s muzzle were splattered with black-brown: the colour of ink mixed with rust.

As the light washed outwards, Twilight could just about make out the black, jagged fins, tipped with a cap of green, poking out from the top of its skull and running down its spine.

Something was wrong. But this was definitely where Spike was. Vafer was never wrong.

This dragon, though, was definitely not the one in her memories.

Were her memories wrong, having been altered and rewritten by her own traitorous mind over the years of travel? She doubted that. She could still remember the faces of each of her friends, Spike included. Tiny, baby Spike…

She gasped, just as Spike’s scream resonated inside her mind. Bits of the puzzle drove into place, just as the dragon opened its mouth.

Inside, she could see a roiling coil of green sparks falling towards a shimmering secretion at the back of its jaw.

Twilight winked out of the way, nary a hair away from the massive tongue of green dragonfire that blasted out of the cave mouth. She’d barely returned to the corporeal world before her brain spun itself into overdrive.

It was like someone else was controlling her movements, and she was only an observer in her own body. Between cool, deep breaths, she glared at the cave mouth. The dragon’s head slowly emerged, its spines scraping against the rock ceiling. She didn’t even flinch as rolling waves of superheated air crashed into her shields, the magic flaring up and tinting the world purple. A translucent, violet sea of vapour eddied in the air above a stretch of blackened earth, right next to her hooves. Just a few seconds ago, it had been an undisturbed plain of pure white snow.

The dragon’s roar of frustration and anger didn’t catch Twilight by surprise, but the sheer force of it was enough to fling snow and droplets of wet mud into a miniature hailstorm. Twilight frowned as the pellets smacked lazily against her shields, like raindrops crashing into a window. “Spike!”

Her voice still sounded the same – to herself, at least. She hoped Spike would still recognise the sound. She knew she had aged throughout her travels, but… all the years had blurred together. Did Spike even remember her?

At the cry, Spike thrust his head out of the black, like a quarry eel. Bones followed close behind in a wave, spilling out onto the snow and earth. The dirty off-white of the ivory stood in stark contrast to both the blackness of the charred earth, and the glistening glare of the white snow.

They were the remains of all sorts of creatures – the most common being the stout, sloping skulls of wild pig – but a chill ran down Twilight’s back as her eyes flicked between a group of pony skulls, to the antler-bearing craniums of cervids, to what looked like the skull of another dragon.

She felt her breath hitch in her throat. The long-snouted dragon skull was worn with age, bleached white by the weak sun over the years and scored with dozens of cracks and gashes. Approximately the length of Spike’s forearm, it leered at her with its empty eye sockets and perpetually grinning jaw.

“Spike! Stand down this instant!” she shouted, even as the raging beast turned its head towards her, opening its snout all the while.

Dragonfire was inherently magical. This meant that her shields would be useless at best. At worst, even a glancing blow would set off a runaway magical reaction, culminating in an explosion. Given the strength of both her shields and her opponent’s inner fire, the explosion could very well level the mountaintop.

She blinked away again, reappearing on the tract of blackened earth stretching out behind her like a runway. The splash and the clammy cold of boggy dirt against her hooves wrenched a frown from her face.

So Spike wouldn’t listen. A trickle of thought ran down her head – this wasn’t the first time. How had they solved the greed-growth the last time? What had kicked him out of it?

Plunging back into memory was like groping through quicksand for a golden pin. Blind, and navigating by emotion and desperation, her mind’s eye scanned the images flashing past as she delved into the blackness.

Rarity. Of course. He had looked at her, then – somehow – regressed. Was it memory? Willpower? Perhaps he had suddenly known that he was hurting her, and that thought, that realisation had managed to worm into his head and stay there long enough for him to notice and then overcome his avarice.

Perhaps that could work the second time.

“Rarity!”

Spike spat a fireball at her in response, and she blinked away.

“Damn it, she’s going to hate you for this!”

Those words tasted so bitter coming out of her mouth. Twilight could still remember the smell and the slickness of Rarity’s tears running down her cheek as the latter unicorn had poured out her sorrows in the days and months after the kidnapping.

The memories of her playing with him, pushing him away and leading him on, snapping at him when she was in a funk – every last regret that Rarity possessed had burst out of her throat in that hour.

Twilight still didn’t know who cried most, then.

Her voice wavered, the sound hovering like smoke amidst the curling air. Spike didn’t even notice as he drew even further out from the cave mouth, his two blackened fore-claws ripping into the earth, carving deep gouges into the mud and rock.

Her eyes almost missed it. The flare seemed to flicker for a moment, the pile of gems and gold shifting to create a kaleidoscope of rich colours that, for the barest moment, contained a flash of blue. The same colour of blue as the plumes on the Equestrian military helmet.

She glared up at the dragon in front of her – the one that had once been her most loyal assistant, her oldest friend. He returned the glare, rearing his head back before opening his mouth.

A beam of magenta magic shot out of her horn with a high-pitched scream. Spike’s head reared back, his eyes glinting with utter hatred, a cloud of pink exploding from his mouth.

Scales were magic-resistant. The tissue covering the inside of the throat wasn’t as much. Even then, that quick blast was deliberately weak. She didn’t want to kill him, after all.

She was here to save him, no matter the cost.

Spike roared out in pain, spraying droplets of crimson blood over the snow and the scorched earth. His jaw hanging open, the sharp canine teeth red with his own life-blood, he growled, his eyes simply narrow slits as they fixed on her.

Twilight scowled. It wasn’t the first time she’d seen this type of look. The ones before Spike, she hadn’t cared for much.

From him, however, it felt as painful as her first true injury.

She only wanted things to go back to the way they were. She only wanted to save him. If that involved pain, then so be it.

She’d come too far to back down, turn tail and descend. She would save him, no matter the cost.

Unleashing a roar of her own, she stomped up towards her former assistant. Blood ran over his lips and down to the skin-flaps beneath his jaw, dripping onto the snow.

“Me, Spike! How dare you attack me! Of all people, me!”

She stopped, breathing heavily. The smell of acrid, burnt earth mixed with the salty, rusty scent of dragon blood, creating a heady cocktail that would have once made her head spin. She pushed the stench out of her mind.

Spike opened his maw, before Twilight saw the black flash of his claws hurtling towards her from the left. She blinked sideways, looking up with her now-existing eyes to see the abyss of her once-friend’s mouth gaping open high above her.

Adrenaline burst into her muscles. She flung herself sideways, but it was far too late. Even as she saw the tongue of green fire uncoil towards her, and the world slowly tilted sideways, she knew she was too slow.

Dragonfire roared around her hooves. Searing pain erupted up her legs. Just as quickly, the agony hissed back into the recesses of her mind, smothered in the red haze growing around the edge of her sight.

She felt the burning of ley collect around her horn, even as Spike’s head scanned to the side, fire still spurting from his mouth. A whisper of magic was all she needed to blink to the side furthest away from him.

Her hooves met the cold of melting snow, and she hazarded a glance down to inspect the damage. What she saw made her wince.

Glowing coils of magenta and green sank into her hooves, curling into the air as ephemeral thread, before plunging into the reddening flesh. Her exposed skin and muscle screamed with pain at each pulse and flicker, and she followed suit.

The crackling of her charring skin was torn away by the frigid wind whipping around the wounds. The chill – somehow – intensified the agony. She saw her hooves beginning to boil, bits of red and pink splashing up from the wounds, as if her flesh had been liquidised.

Her throat had screamed itself hoarse before she knew what she was doing. Tears drew at the corners of her eyes. Hot, driving pain smashed into her head, and she almost toppled over as her legs shook themselves to jelly.

Twilight hissed out a dispeller, before muttering a heal-over-time spell, her voice growing in volume until she was crying at the end. The pain seemed to subside from waves into ripples, and she looked up, vision blurry.

Spike’s savage grin focused all of her pain into a single, searing lance that roared out through her body. Hot, bubbling anger rose up through her stomach. She followed, pushing herself to her hooves, the numbing rush of adrenaline dousing the burning agony until it was a mild discomfort.

Sudden pain broke through the haze of biochemicals, and Twilight screamed anew as light flared from her hooves, casting the snow around into beautiful shades of pink and green. She was at the centre of a miniature aurora. Her limbs felt like they had exploded – and as she teleported away, the torrent of dragonfire passing harmlessly over her head, they felt like they had done so again, and again, and again. When she landed, another scream tore out of her, punching past her gritted teeth as her knees fought to buckle. Her vision flickered with bursts of black and purple and blinding white. A trickle of warm liquid ran down from her nostril and into her mouth, and she tasted the steel and rust of blood.

Then, the ghostly itching of her skin and muscle knitting back together smothered almost all the feeling in her legs. The sudden absence of any pain, anything at all, knocked her legs from beneath her. She retched, her chin resting in the snow, even as she screamed at herself to move, to get out of the line of fire, and a contradictory voice came in with its traitorous mutterings that maybe this was the easier way.

She paid that voice no heed, locking it up in some corner of her brain even as she wrestled her stiff, unresponsive limbs into pulling herself up. Back into her fighting stance, with a wavering groan, she shook her head – pain and feeling were simply messages. And all messages could be ignored.

Spike grinned down at her, his mouth an evil slash across his face. No, not evil. Simply insane. He’d given in to the greed-growth for what must have been years, now.

It was a lost cause. The pain around her hooves was starting to bubble up again, little pops of fire stuck to her skin that splashed against her mental shields. The adrenaline was wearing off.

“Spike! Please, just stop! I don’t want to –”

Her shout was cut off by the hissing, roaring dragonfire spewing out of his mouth, directly towards her. She blinked, again.

She popped into existence in front of Spike’s now-exposed chest. The dragon’s literally fiery roar paused for a moment, just as Twilight’s horn and tattoos began to glow with earnest, vivid light.

The unicorn reared up on her hind legs, her forelegs covered with an opaque magenta glow, with her bloodied hooves hanging in mid-air for just a moment.

Two solid, brutal thumps sounded out from Spike’s chest, and the roar of a cannon blast echoed off the mountain slopes. The dark brown scales cracked open, covering his once light-green underside in even more blood. Excess gore splattered onto the white mounds of snow, and trickled slowly towards the black earth at the bottom of the slope.

Spike roared out, and a spark of pity and sorrow erupted in Twilight’s chest.

“Sorry, Spike,” she murmured, blinking back towards the rear of the impromptu arena.

She landed on hard glass, dirt vitrified by the extreme heat. Glancing at her opponent, her enemy-once-friend, she felt tears beginning to run down her cheeks. The saline liquid hissed upon touching her glowing tattoos.

She could continue to disable him, hamstring him until he could move no more and would only flail against the cold ground. Then she could force a memory wipe on him through his eye or mouth, to try and remove the effect of the greed-growth.

That was the only way – it wasn’t like the greed-growth was the result of experimenting with dark magic, or chaos magic or anything of the sort. It was as natural to a dragon’s development as physical increases in size.

She would know. She had done her research on her enemy.

But that would be the same as killing Spike. He would lose all memory of her, of his friends and of all of their adventures together. What would be left?

Once upon a time, she’d promised she’d never leave him. If she wiped his mind, it would be as if Spike had never existed at all. The new mind wearing his body wouldn’t be Spike – it would be a stranger.

Spike’s body surged outwards, the legs bulging beneath the scale with taut muscle. Gold spilled out from the sides of his body, pooling about his feet to mix with the bones. He opened his maw once more, the inside of his mouth covered in flammable secretion. It was an invitation for her to bathe in fire.

He was already a stranger.

What about the Elements? Could she not go back and ask Celestia to bring the whole team, and ‘cure’ Spike?

Her eyes danced over the pile of gold. One shape was immediately obvious – the helmet of an Equestrian Royal Guard, Sentinel division. The underside was blackened by intense heat. Even from this distance, she could see flakes of oxidised gold alloy crumble and settle into the snow. Her tongue clucked against the back of her mouth as she watched the helmet sway gently from side-to-side.

No.

Trickles of dread ran down Twilight’s back, even as she imploded into a burst of light and exploded into existence some distance away from the spray of fluorescent green fire.

Spike’s ‘insanity’ was as closely tied to his soul as his body. Removing one meant removing the other.

He wasn’t even insane in the most formal definition, she noted. He’d simply given in to draconic nature. The Elements might not even work. It would be like asking the Elements to resurrect the dead, or change the colour of the sky.

Only one person would be leaving the mountain by the end of the day.

She had travelled for so long, endured so much, to save Spike. And save him she would.

No matter the cost.

“I’m so sorry.”

Even as she uttered those words of finality, she couldn’t help but feel a spark of hope as Spike’s eyes seemed to clear – but it was gone too soon. The glaze of battle, of hate and greed and anger, washed over those green pools and then the Spike she knew was gone.

She could make this quick. A blast through the eye would kill him instantly.

But perhaps she was getting to him! He seemed to have snapped out of it just now – maybe if she disabled him, he could ‘come back’, so to speak.

All chances, no certainties.

Twilight shook her head, clearing her mind. She could kill him now, and he wouldn’t suffer any more. Or, she could slowly whittle him down, torturing him, under the hope that he might snap back through all the agony she would have inflicted upon him by that stage.

And after that, she would have to hope that he wouldn’t relapse under the siren-song of instinctual draconic avarice.

A chance was a chance. Nothing more, nothing less. A fraction of all possible outcomes.

One in a million was better than none in a million. The choice crystallised in her mind, cold and hard, an indomitable pillar of light in a storm of darkness and confusion. And pain… she could always fix physical wounds. Even if the scales and flesh resisted the influence of magic, she could simply overwhelm them with raw power.

The first targets were the knees. Removing them would immobilise Spike. His neck could still twist and turn to barbeque her, however.

One step at a time.

Twilight’s horn, tattoos and eyes glowed white-hot for a split-second. An intense white beam exploded outwards, lancing straight into his left forearm. The bass roar of magic mixed with that of pain.

As the pinkish mist cleared around Spike’s leg, Twilight could see the clean hole bored straight through. The flare below his belly illuminated the wound in all its gory detail. Spike slumped to one side, his limb folding unnaturally, before howling again in pain as his useless leg smacked into the ground.

Twilight grit her teeth. Her mind closed. Silence enfolded her, even as Spike’s mouth gaped open and the flaps of scaly reptilian skin on his throat vibrated and soundlessly clapped.

Another deep thrum of magic flared out, the reverberation of wavering guitar string mixed with the punch of a gunshot.

Spike’s chest hit the ground with a massive, solid thump. A wave of displaced snow swept outwards from the impact point. His right knee was utterly destroyed; the bone and muscle vaporised and carried away by the omnipresent wind.

Twilight couldn’t stop the river of tears leaking out from her eyes, even as she grit her teeth so hard that she was sure some of them cracked under the pressure. Steam hissed around her form as the snow boiled.

She would save Spike. She had to.

No matter the cost.

Spike’s head drew itself up off the ground, no doubt to deliver a torrent of dragonfire. Almost on instinct, she hurled herself up and forwards, jumping into nothingness to explode from a spot behind his head.

The deep boom echoed throughout the cave as Spike’s head crashed into the ground.

He tried to move his limbs, but the great roars of pain that blasted out of his mouth on every attempt left Twilight sure that he wouldn’t try. She landed on his back, crashing into a spinal fin on the way down. It was just like what she remembered, when she patted him – the tissue flexible, but not weak or soft –

Finish the fight, before the fight finishes you.

Archangel’s words disintegrated the memory before it could fully form, locking the remnants down in some far corner of her head. Spike’s head tried to twist back, but a quick spell brought the magenta glow of magic to bear upon his snout. He growled and grunted, but nothing he tried could break the magical, immaterial binding that wrapped around and around his long, scaly muzzle.

She slid down his neck, hopping off at the base of the head, and landing right in front of his ear-fin. There was just one thing more to do.

She trotted around until the one green eye on the left side of his face focused on her.

Then, she took off the hood of her cloak.

Her bangs fluttered all about her head and neck, picked up and dropped by the wind. In the midst of Spike’s hate-filled green eyes, she could see a mare.

That mare once had a luscious, purple coat. She once had an indigo mane, with a natural stripe of magenta running down its length. Her eyes had once been wide with wonder and curiosity.

Once, but no more.

The mare that stared back at her now, in the dragon’s eye, had an indigo mane interspersed with stripes of grey-white. Her coat was patched with spots of grey, concentrated mostly on her chest. Silver-grey tattoos divided her skin, starting from the corners of her eyes and mouth to run down her neck and body like frozen mercury. Her legs were not short and stocky, but lean and long, adapted to a life of travel. Her eyes, once shining with innocent joy, now glared out tiredly beneath her roughly-cut fringe. They were moistened with tears and reddened. Cold and empty.

Suddenly, all of the feeling, all of the emotion, all of the pain left her. Nothing replaced them.

Twilight shook her head, breathed out and closed her eyes just as Spike whipped his head around and slammed his nose into her shields.

The glow of magenta magic flared up, and Spike’s head recoiled, the snout tip spurting blood from the nostrils. The crimson jets came out almost in sync with his rapid breaths. A muffled howl sounded from somewhere deep inside his throat.

“Oh, Spike,” Twilight said, shaking her head involuntarily as her voice and legs started to waver, “why?”

Spike only howled and roared and growled as best he could through the binding around his muzzle. The glaring magenta magic pressed into his scales, warping them as he struggled.

“Spike,” she said, raising a hoof towards him. He turned away. Twilight frowned, stepping forwards –

His neck flicked, and his head hurtled towards her like the end of a whip.

Twilight raised her shields.

And Spike’s head slammed into the barrier, his entire body shaking like a spring from the impulse.

Twilight barely felt the power draw. She folded the magical barrier until he was wrapped in it, writhing like a snake inside a log just big enough for its body.

Stepping back, Twilight examined her hoofwork. She shook her head.

Her once-friend was trapped in a cocoon of her own magic, crippled by her own actions. Blood trickled down his jaw from the wound at the roof of his mouth, and his nostrils were filled with more blood than air. His front legs lay slathered on the ground, simple slabs of useless meat.

Pitiful. Horrific. And all her fault.

She trotted closer, ignoring the muffled growls that now curiously sounded like whimpers to her ears. Trapped, Spike could not move away – yet he continued to glare at her. Little puffs of dragonfire burst out of the sides of his jaw, in time with his huffs of breath, mixing with the crimson spewing out of his nostrils.

Twilight scrunched up her nose to ward off the smell. Her hooves, dripping with blood and strips of skin, sang with pain as she stepped upon a ridge of vitrified dirt. Scowling and gritting her teeth, she ignored them.

She knelt down in front of his snout, and saw both of his eyes swivel around to focus on her. “Spike! It’s me, Twilight!”

No, it wasn’t. Twilight wouldn’t have broken her oldest friend’s ribs, blown out his kneecaps, and then trapped him like an animal in a field of her magic. Twintel would, but not Twilight Sparkle.

Even if they were both one and the same.

She felt the heat roll off the small bursts of fire coiling above his snout. If she closed her eyes, she could trick herself into thinking that she was in some remote cabin somewhere, with a warm fire keeping the cold night at bay.

The sun reached down until it almost touched the horizon. The sky and snow lit up into a brilliant fire of orange and red as the heavens themselves seemed to burn. Clouds drifted across the sky, curling and splitting like smoke hanging above a massive funeral pyre.

It was beautiful.

She turned her back to it, and looked at the dragon.

There was nothing left. All of her tears had fallen. The anger and hate had vaporised like the snow, to be carried to some far-off place by the uncaring wind. Blackness remained.

There was nothing left.

This whole endeavour had ended with nothing but ash and blood beneath her hooves.

With all the blood spilled, all the time, money and effort spent to find Spike and prepare for the final confrontation, she’d never even considered this possibility: that Spike couldn’t be rescued in the first place. That he had become the monster she was chasing – and that he wasn’t the only one.

That she was too late – far, far too late.

Sterfgeval. The Crying Mountain.

She looked at herself, reflected in his eyes against the fire of the setting sun, once more.

There was just one more fight left. Just one more. For him.

“Spike?”

Even the last phrase Spike would hear from her was weak and indecisive. Honest. No more aliases, no more delusions – he deserved to know her. Her, the pony that had sacrificed everything. The pony that had stopped at nothing.

Spike deserved that much. He deserved more, much more.

But she couldn’t give him more.

She could only give him the kindness. The mercy. Peace, permanent peace. No more struggling against the world and the greed and the bloody horror – just simple existence in the afterlife. And after that? Who knew?

And perhaps one day, she’d join him. She smiled.

Yes. She’d like that.

It would be his last few moments in the Known World. His life would be taken by his former caretaker, in an act of compassion twisted until it was indistinguishable from spite. All the pieces were set, and there was only the final move to make.

“Spike, please.” Twilight shifted over to the left. From there, her magic could lase straight through his eye and into his brain. Hopefully, it would kill him instantly. “You… you don’t recognise me, do you. At all.”

All she got in response was struggling, huffs, and the quiet splatter of blood on black earth.

She sighed, a huffing, raspy sob of a sigh. “Spike. I’m so sorry.”

Her vision blurred as hot liquid spilled over her eyelids. “Wherever you are, forgive me.”

As she charged up her horn, she saw Spike’s expression change.

As ley wound up around her form, running up her glowing tattoos and coiling around her horn, his eyes seemed to widen.

As she put every gram of power she had into the spell, making sure her last act of mercy would be swift and kind, he seemed to fall slack.

With recognition or fear? Or pity?

Twilight knew she would never know.

The spell erupted from her horn, a great beam of magenta magic screaming outwards just as she closed her eyes.

The cannon sounded one last time, a lonely salute.

7 . Reflection

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Chapter 7: Reflection
By N00813
--
“Do you ever think about what you’ve done?”

Archangel looked up at her question. Across the campfire, his cold blue eyes seemed to hang unsupported in the midst of flickering tongues of orange, against the backdrop of night-time sky. He shifted, and the she saw the tiny gleam of oil painted over every black feather. The illusion broke. “Maybe.”

He pulled a stick out of the fire, shaking the char off the meat speared by it, and waited for it to cool. The falling embers burnt brightly, before they were extinguished when they hit the black ground.

She waited. A few metres away, the Jackal sat against one of the wooden wheels bolted onto his cart. The arms and armour on the back of the vehicle had been wholly replaced by pile upon pile of massive, high-grade diamonds. The rock hound himself was looking at the two of them, his beady eyes never straying from the fire.

Awkward silence degraded into still, stagnant quiet. In the distance, far behind them, the sounds of a vicious slaughter faded into the chirping of crickets and the crackle of the campfire. She could see the orange glow of burning huts creeping over the tall Zebrican grass.

Her eyes drifted back towards the cart. The diamonds glistened orange and blood-red in the firelight, almost as if their cores were burning or bleeding. She shook her head.

Archangel tapped a black talon against the meat, and then ripped it off the stick, before cramming it into his mouth. She grimaced.

“That used to be someone, you know,” she said, gesturing to the stick with a lavender hoof and hiding a shudder beneath her cloak.

Archangel shrugged, wiping his claws on the dirt. “Everything used to be something else.”

She slumped against cold rock. The howling wind quieted. Snow shifted around her, painted the same shade of red by the dying sun as the blood pooling a few metres from her leg. Some of her own blood dripped from the end of her hoof to join the pool.

She stared outwards, over the entirety of the landscape that presented itself to her. Under the light of the setting sun, every tree in the massive forest below seemed to burn like embers in a bed of coal.

She felt her head twist towards the body of the dragon behind her. The Great Dragon. The Scourge of the South. The Black Death.

She shook her head, before wrenching her gaze away from the shadows that now began to cling to the dragon’s corpse. The tear tracks framing her face had dried, the drops themselves long having reunited with the snow and earth at her hooves.

“In the end, mate, what you can do, is what you will do.”

A low rumble started behind her; the Great Dragon’s inner fire started to consume his body. A sudden flare of heat smashed into her side and cloak, whipping the ends of the fabric around her torso. The attached hood fluttered as best it could, trapped in between the burst of scalding wind and the solid form that was her neck.

Still, the stench of blood wouldn’t leave her. She looked outwards, through the roiling air.

“Nothing else you can do…”

On the horizon, the sun was slowly swallowed by the maw of the earth. The teeth of mountains stood resolute and strong, even as the sun’s light bathed them in fire.

The first cracks and pops sounded out behind her. Her head felt like it had been glued onto a broken statue of a pony. She closed her eyes. There was nothing but blackness.

The crackling reached a crescendo. The drumbeats of fire, the hustle of the observing wind and a low, keening moan swirled around Sterfgeval’s summit. In the absence of any other sound, nature’s funeral song rushed into her ears.

She opened her eyes, just as the first scale floated past her shoulder, suspended in mid-air. It spun and twirled like a dancer as invisible currents caressed it, lifting it higher and higher into the sky. A trail of golden embers followed behind, glowing against the darkening sky, indistinguishable from the stars as they sparkled.

And then another scale drifted past. And another.

Like cherry blossom leaves whipped up into a storm by the gentlest of winds, the golden scales spiralled upwards and outwards, forming a shimmering golden canopy over her head.

She took in a deep breath. The cold sharpness of mountain air, the spicy, electrifying taste of loose ley and the stench of coppery blood rushed into her nostrils.

“Stay safe… Best of luck.”

She chuckled mirthlessly.

The sun sank below the horizon in full, the last few dregs of blood-red light fighting a losing battle against the oncoming black of night. Overhead, the pieces of dragon flickered more and more dimly as they continued to ascend, in their journey towards the stars. She never took her eyes off them.

Some time later – it could have been a second, a minute or ten times that – the last golden scale flared, outshining the brightest star of the night, rivalling even the moon in intensity. For a second, it looked almost like a miniature sun, as if day had come by early.

And then it was gone. Blackness returned, full and encompassing. She lifted a hoof – but all she could see was darkness.

Shaking her tail to dislodge the flakes of snow stuck onto her cloak and coat, she pushed herself up. A small spell humming on the tip of her horn lit up her surroundings, and she turned around. A dragon skeleton looked back at her, its eyes empty sockets and its mouth set in a permanent grin.

She looked upwards once more. The stars sat in place, cold and distant observers to a fleeting, unimportant event. She looked back down. There was a piece of ivory, coloured in flickering magenta light, beneath one of the Great Dragon’s claws. She yanked at it with a tendril of magic, and the claw disintegrated into separate bones.

It was a skull. A long-snouted dragon skull, scored around the end of the nose and the eye sockets, and blackened. She turned it around and around.

For a second, hot anger bubbled up inside her gut. She tossed the skull back into the pile, where it landed with a clatter. A stray gust of wind swept over her, and she felt cold again – inside and out. She tried to reach again for the anger, but it had dissipated into some deep crevice of her mind. Now, all she felt was tired.

She charged up her horn, lifting the bones with the soft hum of magic and setting them down inside the cave mouth, on top of the massive pile of gold and gems. She stopped for a moment, and stared. The gold and the ivory of bones seemed to meld together, and in the magenta light, they looked like dark islands in the sea of black blood coating the stone floor.

For a split-second, the rock seemed to change into the middle of a blood-drenched dirt road, and the skeleton of the Great Dragon turned into the corpse of a griffon bandit. His chest was torn open and his yellow beak encrusted with flecks of fresh red over splatters of old brown. Even as his face was creased in pain, there was an acceptance and serenity in his eyes that made him look triple his age.

Then his face changed that of a rock hound’s, and the dirt became sand glued together by shockingly red blood. This time, the head was severed from the body, looking up into the sky with one eye and into the ground with the other, even as his torso lay twitching on its stomach. Denza’s face was etched with fear, with the ice-cold certainty of his fate and the hatred he took refuge in, in the midst of his hopelessness as she hacked his head off with Pinkie’s knife.

A blink of her eye later and the cadaver of a black-scaled dragon replaced Denza’s. Spikes jutted out from the edges of its face, curving backwards and outwards. Its face was locked in an eternal snarl, amber eyes unmoving, snout scales cut across to reveal the pink muscle and sliver of white bone beneath.

And then Spike’s corpse was there, his frame shockingly small amongst a pile of bones and gold many hundreds of times his size. In a heartbeat, the infantile snub of his snout lengthened into that of the Great Dragon’s. His body dissolved into a shapeless shadow, growing and growing until he was the width of the cave, and solidified as a mass of purple scales and viscera. His face was peaceful, almost mockingly so, as blood coated his lower jaw and stained the scales. She choked back a sound in her throat, and closed her eyes.

When she opened them again, the body she saw there for a split-second was her own. Lush purple fur was draped on a frame of broken, near-juvenile bones, and the violet eyes stared glassily outwards, without a hint of life in them. Her face was sombre and resigned, and at that moment, it made the image-her look much, much older.

What’s the difference? she mused. What made Spi – the Great Dragon so different? What made me so special? So just? So right?

She couldn’t think of anything.

I used to think that I was doing the right thing. Saving him at the cost of everything I’ve done, the blood I’ve spilt and the people I’ve put down.

The right thing. Now, I’m not sure what that even means.

She thought for a second, and the emptiness in her heart only made itself more known. Nothing. Nothing at all.

She remembered the funeral rites. She might not have known the Great Dragon, but she wanted to think that she knew the dragon he used to be. Bitter irony settled on her tongue, as she shook her head. A stranger performing familial funeral rites for another stranger.

Her horn glowed. Her tattoos lit up, white-hot stripes on her skin. Rivers of magenta ran over the cave’s ceilings and walls, flaring up for a moment in brilliant pink, before subsiding.

There was a moment of peace, when she could hear the wind howling quietly.

Then, with an almighty crack, the cave crumbled. Thousands upon thousands of kilograms of rock fell, a rumble that rivalled thunderstorms in power and volume. Dust and sand spat outwards, whipping her striped mane backwards and forcing a squint from her eyes. She blinked rapidly. The almost-unnoticeable weight of slick tears ran down her cheeks, following the older, dried tracks. She ignored them, waiting motionlessly until the growl of falling stone quieted.

Rubble met her gaze instead of the cold black hole that was the cave mouth. Cracks ran up from the roof of the opening into the surrounding rock, and little showers of dirt rained out from in between them, covering the rubble-pile with a minute spray of earth.

There was nothing more to be done. She shook her head, staring into the rocks until her eyes watered as the icy wind scraped against the tissue. This was the final resting place of the dragon Spike and the mare Twilight Sparkle.

Twintel released a breath she realised she’d been holding, and turned back towards the lip stretching out from the mountain. The village below seemed dead, deserted – only the faintest orange flickers told of civilisation within its boundaries.

It was a goal, if nothing else. Something to work towards. Akila had been right, though the shaman hadn’t known at the time. There really had to be something in your life to work towards. Because if there isn’t – if you have to choose between dying for nothing and living for nothing – then you don’t really have to choose at all.

The lights below burned weakly in the encompassing darkness. Then, someone closed their curtains, and one of the tiny specks of light was extinguished. The dark night grew even blacker.

Something inside jolted her into action, and a little voice in her head told her that she had to move now if she didn’t want to be swallowed up by the inky night. Reach for the fire, it said. Anything is better than nothing.

She thought about pain, about essays written in blood, about the emptiness yawning inside her. About darkness, about sacrifice, about salvation. About scales and balances, fire and hope, chance and probabilities.

About doing the right thing.

With a running jump, she launched herself off the mountain and into the dark night sky.

8 . Ember

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Chapter 8: Ember
By N00813
--
The sun beat down mercilessly on the city of Dromedor. In the port district, inside a little booth just a hair’s width away from the harbour’s wooden planking, a young pony stood. His eyes squinted as they tried to adjust to both the darkness under the shade of an overhanging awning, and the glaring white-yellow sand just a few centimetres beyond.

He yawned. Despite – or perhaps because of – the blindingly bright sunlight reflecting off the whitewashed walls of nearby buildings and the vibrant colours of hawkers’ stalls, his eyes threatened to slam shut even as he shook himself awake yet again. Sweat flung off his body in little droplets. He sent a quick prayer, thanking the gods for granting him short fur, and followed it up with a plea to speed up time.

As his ears flopped back into their rightful places, the sounds of the busy port reached him. Seagulls chirped and screeched as their silhouettes danced in the sky. Waves sloshed against the harbour’s wood-and-stone supports. The words, laughter and shouts of hundreds of people in the nearby market degenerated into an undecipherable murmur in his head. A cough sounded in front of him.

He looked upwards, eyes blinking as they focused on the figure of a pony who was almost completely covered in a thick brown cloak. The oddest thing was that he or she didn’t seem to be in any sort of discomfort at all. A cold drop of sweat rolled down his back, and every nerve down the length of his spine tingled as it travelled.

Something was off. “How may I help?” he asked hesitantly.

“Ticket,” she said – her voice was high-pitched enough to be female – and he felt her eyes boring into his chest like a drill.

He stared stupidly for a few moments, before his brain caught up to his muscles and he found his hooves shaking as he reached for the stamp with a hoof, and a ticket strip with another. The other pony still hadn’t moved her lavender hooves. She hadn’t shifted at all. He could see silver-grey metal winding around her legs like thin, lethal snakes, as much a part of her as her skin. The power in there was almost palpable, even when she wasn’t using it.

His heartbeat raced as he caught himself staring, and he diverted his gaze away onto his own hooves, before stammering out, “Destination?”

“Equestria.” Her voice wasn’t too loud or too quiet. Nor was it dripping with malice or the unthinking joy that was often bundled along with insanity. He couldn’t figure out why it hung at his ears like lead, unnerving him as he stamped the first box on the ticket.

“Which ship?” His voice stumbled a bit as it came out of his throat. It was like staring down a hungry lion that would tear him to screaming pieces if he showed any hint of weakness. He gulped a glob of saliva, feeling the sloop run down his suddenly-dry throat.

“Soonest to depart.”

There it was again – the utterly, unbelievably normal voice attached to this otherworldly figure. Still lacking any obvious emotion, but managing, somehow, to chill his spine. He quickly shoved the finished ticket out, before remembering that he was supposed to be asking for money. “Er, payment. It’s two thousand bits or” – he paused to smack his dry lips together – “one thousand riyal.”

She turned to her side, and suddenly his mind was full of images of his own broken, bloody corpse, with strips of flesh missing as she sat in the cavity where his heart was, raw red meat dangling from her mouth –

The heavy thunk of a bag of coins hitting the wooden counter brought him out of those increasingly morbid thoughts, and he fumbled with the bag for a little while before pouring its contents into a counter. There was exactly two thousand bits worth of gold sitting inside the machine by the time the bag hung, limp and empty, from his hooves.

He nodded, and forced himself to raise his eyes to look at her as he reached out with the finished ticket grasped in hoof. He wished he hadn’t, and at the same time realised exactly why.

He recognised that look. It was the same distant, glassy stare that some of the old mercs in the bar would fall back on as they watched their alcohol warm up in the blazing sun. It wasn’t cold hate or burning anger or anything simple like that. In her eyes, a cold abyss sat where warm life had once been. There was only a tiny glimmer of light left, deep in the blackness, like a single burning ember in an extinguished firepit.

He shivered, instantly retracting his hoof once she had taken the ticket in a field of magenta magic. The tickle of energy dancing across his skin barely registered in his mind.

“Who are you,” he breathed, but she had already melted into the crowd.

Equestria Border Guard
Present your documents for entry
We reserve the right to deny access

Illegal immigration is a CRIME
Punishable by prison and deportation

Please keep order
We will punish troublemakers

Twintel had finished reading all of the three posters hanging on the walls. The colours had faded with time, but they were still legible. With a snort, she closed her eyes, before glaring straight ahead. This must have been the fiftieth time she’d found her eyes drifting around the hall.

Nothing had changed since her last scan, of course. No assassins lay in wait. There was no crackle of electricity that heralded a stray ley stream whipping towards her. No sudden splatters of blood against the stone walls.

Her ears only heard the shuffling of hooves against the tiled floor. Her eyes only saw the long lines in front, and behind her. Her nose only smelled the blend of stale, briny seaside air mixing with the sweat of hundreds.

It was all quite normal. She felt her face twist, the corners of her lips turning upwards.

“Next!”

She ignored the frustration and boredom drilled into the immigration officer’s voice as she stepped into the square on the ground in front of her. It was nothing special – simply a different shade of colour than the tiles surrounding it. Faded red inset into sickly green.

Her eyes roved around. The two guards in front glared, boredly, at her. The pony waiting in line behind her simply stared on, vacant eyes half-lidded, as his mouth stretched into a yawn.

She shifted her weight, hooves staying in place. The loose tile she was standing on scraped against the stone below it.

“Name.”

“Twin – Sorry.” She coughed, her greying fringe swaying in front of her face. “Twilight Sparkle.”

Twintel grimaced. She hadn’t used that name in years – no, decades. It felt wrong in her mouth now, bitter and ashen. Foreign. The syllables tied her mouth shut with her tongue.

Both guards in front of her raised their eyebrows, and their eyes lost the glassiness almost instantly. One of them aimed his horn at her, whilst the other walked over to her side. She turned slightly, keeping him in view. The immigration officer was silent, his face unreadable beneath the oversized cap of his uniform – but at least he didn’t seem so bored any more.

“Imitating an individual is a serious offense,” the moving guard said, from his position at her side.

Twintel snorted, her face splitting into a sardonic smile. “So I’ve heard.”

The guard narrowed his eyes, but as he opened his mouth, the voice of the immigration officer cut in. “Scan her.”

The scanning procedure was technically painless, even though the feeling of foreign magic running along her tattoos and nerves made her shiver and sweat. It was like the mithril-based ink had suddenly transformed into ice-cold liquid, flowing in wiry streams that wound around her body. The warm Baltimare sun suddenly burned viciously hot.

The guard’s eyes widened. Twintel raised both eyebrows, tilting her head towards him.

“It’s her,” he finally said, in a near whisper.

There was an ugly, pregnant pause. In the corner of her vision, a shape grew steadily in size.

“Come with us,” someone said, and she turned her head to fully face the golden figure approaching. He was covered in the armour of the Sentinels – the face of the Royal Guard. The golden metal glinted in the shafts of sunlight that punched through the windows at the rear of the hall, where a small crowd was gathering in front of the exits to the port concourse.

The two border guards made way for him. Twintel could see the squad of Sentinels further behind, spreading out with the obvious intent on surrounding her.

In her mind, she knew that if it came down to it, formation wouldn’t save them. There was enough magic in her reserves to kill them all, and after that, to obliterate the platoons that would inevitably follow. And she knew that killing got a lot easier after the first hundred.

“Very well,” she said, and he turned around as the squad assumed a loose arrowhead formation around her. The speaking guard was the tip, and she was at the centre.

Even as they trudged over to an unassuming door set into the side of the hall, she could hear the immigration officer shout out for the next one in line.

The room was a glorified cell. The door swung open, hinges creaking in protest. As Twintel passed it, she could see the many deadbolts set into its frame, silhouetted by the pale blue glow of a merrily humming power gem. A cushion, lumpy and yellowed, sat forlornly against two glaring white walls in a corner. A magical light, sealed with both wards and toughened glass, hung like a small, rounded stalactite from the ceiling. It cast a warm yellow light on the walls and floor.

Twintel stalked over to the cushion, before kicking it towards the centre of the room with a hoof. In the short time that it was near her, she was sure that the smell of urine had diffused into her nose. Perhaps she could clean it magically. She looked up to meet the glare of the last guard in the room, who was in the process of slipping out through the door.

It closed with a solid clunk and the tiniest screech of scraping metal, and flickered blue for a split second as the magical wards’ circuits closed.

A purple glow wrapped around the pillow, lifting it into the air. In a second, the magic dispersed – and the pillow fell, as soft, fluffy and clean as the day it had been made. If only all problems were that easy to solve, she mused.

Shaking her head, Twintel pushed herself to her hooves, and then ambled over to plop herself down on top of the pillow. She watched as displaced air from the collapsing cushion whipped years-old grey lint and hair into little eddies.

The currents changed.

A cough from above drew her eyes, although her ears had already tracked the intruder’s almost silent approach. Twintel closed her eyes and exhaled softly, before blinking them open at the pony before her.

Huh. She was shorter than Twintel remembered.

“What happened to you, my –” the smallest hint of hesitation “– student?”

The newcomer’s voice hadn’t changed over the years at all. It was still soft and light, almost as if she was singing the words out, and exuded care and kindness. Twintel found that she wasn’t surprised at all. It made sense, in fact. The Princess had more than a thousand years’ worth of practice and experience in speaking like this.

Twintel smiled, almost involuntarily, but Celestia’s face remained blank, her eyes wide and full of worry. The memory of an accident in a bright courtyard, back in the day, back when she was Twilight Sparkle –

The unicorn blinked. Twintel shook her head slowly, her eyes drifting towards the door. It was slightly ajar, but she still couldn’t hear anything outside. The wards, she supposed.

She took a deep breath, carefully measuring out her words and balancing her tone. Even then, it sounded empty to her, like she was reading out of a script. “I’m not your student, not anymore. I’ve read the papers, Princess Celestia.”

“Why?” Celestia breathed, almost whispering, the phrase sounding more like a plaintive cry than a question.

Twintel kept silent, turning her head towards the door and showing the side of her head to her Princess. The tattoos shone painfully bright under the room’s harsh lighting, silver-grey stripes that cut through her skin like frozen quicksilver. “I’ve spent twenty years searching for a dragon that, in the end, didn’t exist anymore.

“I’ve spent half my life researching friendship, and the other half going against those very principles.” With a twist of her lips, she inhaled shakily.

“You were right, Princess,” Twintel murmured, her gaze still fixed on the crack between the door and the frame. “Then again…”

Salty, sticky coastal air wormed into her nostrils. The smell wasn’t that different from all the other port cities she’d visited. All of them were pretty much the same.

“You usually are,” Twintel finished.

Celestia sighed, her shoulders slumping slightly against her frame. “I’m sorry, Twilight.”

“Twilight Sparkle is dead.” Twintel glanced at the Princess out of one eye, her voice quiet but even. Soft, yet utterly unshakable. “She was on her deathbed seventeen years ago. But she passed away only a year or two ago.”

Celestia’s eyes widened and her mouth began to draw open into a snarl – but then, she slumped, shifting back into her previous position, wings folding back against her side. “So… who are you?”

“I go by ‘Twintel’, now,” the unicorn replied, strands of grey mane falling over her eyes as she cricked her neck.

“Dimming Ember,” Celestia muttered, shaking her head. Whispers, rumours, and murmurs seemed to rush past her ears. They flicked, and the ghostly sounds disappeared.

Twintel turned her head back to look her former mentor in the eye, her ears flicking. “And don’t be sorry. It wasn’t your fault.”

The Princess held her gaze for a moment, before they both looked away in unison.

“You see, some souls die in battle. Some die in their sleep. And some die for no reason at all,” Twintel murmured, staring into and past a wall. Her tone was conversational, but the look in her eyes wasn’t.

Celestia recognised the stare. It was glassy and distant, looking out to some point no one else could see. The unicorn across from her might as well have been half a world away. In that moment, the Princess knew for sure that her old student wasn’t a metre away, speaking with her, but long lost in the darkness of the Known World.

And there was nothing Celestia could do about it except to try and heal the bits that had remained and returned.

Memories, of a wooden caravan, a desert encampment, a savannah clearing, and a frigid mountain peak, rushed through Twintel’s head. She closed her eyes, feeling the droplets of warmth collect in the corners.

“I’m sure you tried to do the right thing.” Celestia’s voice was as quiet as her own.

Twintel nodded slowly, and drew a wavering breath. She blinked, and suddenly the glistening in her eyes was gone. “Define ‘right’.”

The Sun Princess paused. She’d heard her fair share of such questions, but never once from Twilight. There was already an answer prepared in one of the corners of her vast mind, but she ignored it. Twilight Sparkle never asked a question without a reason deep inside her purple head. Celestia wasn’t sure about Twintel, though.

She settled on, what was in hindsight, the vaguest answer possible. “I’ll know when I see it.”

Twintel made a barking noise that sounded like a cross between a laugh and a sob, and her voice was suddenly bitter and full of venom. “Huh. Then maybe I did do the right thing.”

“I’m sure you did what you had to do.” Suddenly, Celestia found it very difficult to smile. She wasn’t sure she even believed what she was saying.

Twintel was silent for almost ten seconds, before she grunted and turned to face the wall. “No. That’s what everyone says. I didn’t have a duty or an obligation to kill him. I did it because I chose to do it, to save him.”

Celestia licked her dry lips for a moment. Her next few words were edged with horror. “It was Spike, wasn’t it? He was the one. And you killed him.”

Twintel tensed at the name, and turned to fix Celestia with a hard, cold, empty stare. The Sun Princess suddenly remembered how it had felt when she’d done something similar, a little bit more than a thousand years ago. Her heart turned into a ball of ice that sank slowly downwards towards her stomach. She was staring into the abyss, and the abyss stared back at her.

“Yes, it was,” Twintel said, her eyes still boring into the Princess’s own. She licked her lips, tasting non-existent ash on the dry skin. “But that’s OK. I did the right thing.”

Celestia couldn’t stop herself collapsing onto the ground. Her hind knees buckled as memories of Spike flashed through her head in spasms of colour and emotion. Playdates with her and the guards, his first birthday in the castle, the celebration they’d had the first time a little jet of flame had burst out of his mouth. In a split-second, all that and more crashed into the structures holding her mind together. She let herself fall against the wall, like a broken doll tossed aside.

Something inside Twintel cracked, fractured, and then disintegrated into a billion pieces. It was a feeling she’d gotten used to. She didn’t move. Her eyes remained focused on her former mentor as blood pumped languidly around her body, thumping loudly in her ears amidst the silence.

Celestia screamed internally as she tied her rampant, raging emotion into a tight bundle with two thousand years’ worth of discipline and experience, and locked it deep inside a cell in her heart. She could examine it later. The tears lining her face, she brushed off with a quick hoof. The crown on her head, she nudged until it sat where it felt right again.

Right on top of her head.

“I should have known,” the Princess muttered, her breathing hitching for just a moment before she regained control. Her face was frozen with shock that was melting into sorrow. Her eyes were unfocused, vacant. “The Guard search party simply disappeared. I should have seen it coming. I should have…”

Now that Twintel thought about it, there had been a small mention of a missing Equestrian military expedition in one of the newspapers about a decade and a half ago. The only reason she’d remembered it was because she’d sworn she’d seen some of the ponies in the picture before. You and me both, Princess, she thought bitterly.

Her ethereal, glowing mane fluttered weakly as she sighed, the sound mixing with the imaginary, far-away hiss of breaking waves. “They were my best. And so were you,” she said, looking forlornly at Twintel. “Why? How did it come to this?”

“I saved him,” Twintel murmured. “It was the right thing to do. It has to be.”

“You saved him from himself,” Celestia replied, equally softly, shaking her head insistently. Neither pony could meet the eyes of the other. “Had you turned around, many more would have died, and the world would have been –” she swallowed, face creased “– a worse place.”

Twintel’s laugh was mirthless, flavoured like ash and sounding almost like choked sobs. “Maybe. But I’d learned to become selfish when I was searching for him. Altruism doesn’t happen out there, Princess, as I’m sure you know. I’m sure it wasn’t my morals that led me to choose this.

“I’d lost track of who I was on my journey. I adopted measures that were once unpalatable. Intimidation turned into violence, violence into bloodshed, bloodshed into murder. In the end, I wasn’t me anymore. And S-Spike… he’d taken a parallel path.

“Maybe I’d lost sight of my goal, too. Maybe my definition of ‘mercy’ and ‘salvation’ had changed over the years. Maybe I wanted to play the hero again. I don’t know for sure.

“But I knew this for sure – if it wasn’t me, it would have been someone else. You and I both have seen the bounty. I’d seen his scales covered in blood, and that was the result of just twenty years. And I didn’t want him to suffer any more.

“If I’d left the mountaintop, he wouldn’t have left with me. He’d gone too far – for everyone. Even existing was a death sentence. You know, it’s ironic… the greed-growth both saved his life, and condemned him to death.

“Still, in hindsight, if I’d left, maybe I wouldn’t be feeling so empty now. Maybe I wouldn’t be suffering now. Maybe I could just forget about him. Well, that didn’t work in the year I’d waited before setting out on this whole misadventure. Now? Now, I don’t know…

“I knew, eventually, he was going to fall. The only difference would be who dealt the killing blow. Death by a thousand sword-slashes or a single blast? I made the choice for him. You might not think that’s ‘right’, but in the end, it was down to me, and I made the choice.”

Celestia listened to all of this, her mouth hanging open slightly and her eyes wrinkled. Emotions she’d thought long buried were whirling around her head, taunting her, telling her that she’d failed yet again. She couldn’t do much but nod mutely, processing all that she’d heard and discarding the answer. This couldn’t be happening.

Twintel’s voice had cracked at the end, and she growled, suppressing a scream of frustration and despair that clawed at her throat. Several haggard breaths later, she coughed, and settled into a practiced, neutral stance. Her voice was still in a murmur. “Any more questions, Princess?”

For the shortest span of time, a whisper of a smile spread across Celestia’s lips, but it never quite reached her eyes. “Why did you choose to come back?”

Twintel looked at the Princess, her face haunted. “I wanted to go home.”

The Princess’s own breath shook slightly. “What you want isn’t always what you get.”

“No. But you can always hope.” And sometimes, that’s all you have. A little ember of hope.

Celestia took a moment to simply exhale and inhale, blinking her eyes open before smiling just the smallest smile. Twintel could see how forced it was. The corners of her lips were the knots in a tug of war, with sorrow seeking to drag it down and willpower trying to resist the inevitable. “Very well. By the way, you have some old friends that want to see you.”

Old friends? Twintel racked her brain. Fuzzy shapes took form from the blackness that was her mind, but they didn’t sharpen into anything resembling comprehensible faces. The shapes weighed down on her brain like lead on paper, and she found herself pushing the images away before she sank into the darkness.

“Follow me,” Celestia said, her horn glowing as the door swung open under a sheen of gold.

For a second, Twintel’s mind flashed back to a memory. A field of golden flakes hung above her head, like burning, brilliant amber leaves spinning off into the black heavens.

She blinked, shaking her head, and recovered to see Celestia’s two magenta eyes stare down at her in concern.

“I’m following,” Twintel replied. The words bounced around her head for a fraction of a second before her ear twitched. “Ah. Apologies, Princess.”

Celestia’s frown deepened, and her eyes hardened into amethysts for just the briefest of flickers. “Twil –”

Twintel’s chest tightened, as if someone had clamped it in between a vice and was slowly applying pressure. Her face felt frozen in its blankness, as if the muscles were twitching beneath but the skin remained frustratingly rigid.

The princess closed her eyes, breathed in, and her face fell back into blank neutrality. “Twintel, there’s no need to call me that.” That forced smile slid off her face, to reveal the tiredness beneath. “Despite everything, I still –” she paused momentarily “– care for you.”

The same way you care for all your subjects. “Of course, Princess,” Twintel replied, after a moment’s hesitation. No bitterness at that, just a mutual understanding.

If Celestia picked up on that short pause, she didn’t show any sign of it as she walked through the doorway. Twintel pushed herself up to her hooves, hardened herself, and trotted behind her former mentor.

Another memory, of a bright and sunny Canterlot summer’s day –

She deepened her frown, eyes flicking between each guard as her hooves propelled her forwards at a sedate pace.

“Please walk alongside me, Twintel,” Celestia murmured, from up ahead.

Twintel did so. Experience had taught her that it was unwise to disregard a royal’s request. Especially so when she was surrounded by loyal guards. For some reason, that made one of her remaining heartstrings twinge with just the slightest hint of discomfort.

They walked out through a wide doorway into the public concourse. One path in the middle was bordered by guards and official tape, and on both sides, photographers stood with massive cameras poking out over their heads. The devices flashed like twinkling stars – or sparkling scales.

She kept walking forwards, ignoring the yelps as the Sentinels shoved the crowd back, the heat of hundreds of bodies and the gazes from a thousand eyes.

One of the guards opened the main door for them, and they walked on through. Celestia paused to thank the guard, who chuckled nervously – Twintel merely stood stock still, keeping her eyes forwards.

Light poured through the open doorway, almost burning in its intensity. She looked down, at the shadow cast by the doorframe. Light and dark, side-by-side, and all she had to do to go from one side to another would be few steps.

Hope sparked, deep inside her, the ember that refused to die. But like all fires, it’s a double edged sword. It can keep you going through the darkest times – and it can grow and morph to destroy you, and everyone around you.

She could almost feel Celestia’s soft, sad glance at the top of her head. At least it wasn’t an axe, she thought grimly, her lips twisting upwards. And then she stepped forwards, out of the dark and into the light.

White filled her vision for a moment.

9 . Epilogue: Welcome Home

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Epilogue: Welcome Home
By N00813
--
In the Ponyville sky, the sun smiled warmly downwards. Pegasi danced amongst small, rotund clouds. Earth ponies walked the paved stone streets, saddlebags straddling their backs. Unicorns were the rarest breed of all, and the few she’d seen kept a hasty pace as they went about their lives.

Even from a casual glance, one thing was obvious; Ponyville was a town now, not a village. Houses extended towards Canterlot, blurring into multi-coloured dots in the far distance. Town Hall’s flag flew above a new, red-stone building that was surrounded by glittering, moving shapes, and the old schoolhouse had been built with a fence surrounding the grounds. The incongruous, massive tree in the middle of the town had been abandoned, and a bronze plaque had been erected in front of the hanging doors. At her height, it was just a glinting speck in a painting.

As the chariot descended, Twintel found herself hunching away from its thin metal sides. No doubt it was enchanted to deflect spells or projectiles, but she wasn’t sure that the protection extended to the passengers as well. Keeping a low profile was almost second-nature to her. Common sense, too.

The cloak hung impotently in a saddlebag. Celestia had insisted that she took it off. After some hesitation, she had.

Behind and below her, steam whistles shrieked as a train slid to a stop alongside a long stretch of wood and stone. Soon, the train had unfolded its sides to begin the process of unloading all sorts of cargo and people. The station hadn’t been that big, the last time she’d seen it.

Ponyville’s wall stood to the east, a thin line of wood, metal and stone that its citizens hoped would protect them from the darkness in the forest on the other side. Even from up in the chariot, she could see the anti-air defences in the nearby Guard base, delicate-looking wooden constructs that hid their deadly purpose beneath their thin limbs.

The base itself was a great piece of flattened, thinly-grassed land sitting on what had once been the no pony’s land between the Everfree and the village itself. One side was bordered by the wall; the opposite side had a gate that opened into a wide dirt road, which snaked towards the town itself. White buildings, gilded with yellow paint, jutted out of the ground like teeth. In between them rushed a plethora of armoured figures. From her height, they looked like insects.

One patrol of pegasus guards banked towards them, then broke into salutes as soon as they saw the Princess sitting next to her. Twintel kept her eyes on them until they were mere dots in the blue sky.

There was a light touch on her back.

Adrenaline smashed into her bloodstream. Her heart rate doubled instantly as Twintel twisted around, her lips drawn back to expose teeth and her horn at the ready. She found herself looking at the Princess’ unfurled, snow-white wing.

As she turned back, she thought she caught the Princess’ sigh. But the exhale was so quiet that it almost mixed into the rustle of feathers on a closing wing, or the wind rushing past the chariot. Perhaps it was just her imagination.

They angled towards the base. Close by, she spotted a small cottage that sat beside a small, still brook. No light seeped through the drawn curtains. Although there were the remnants of hundreds of animals’ worth of burrows and nests surrounding the cottage, there was no sign of life. It was a miniature ghost town.

Below them, a thin strip of hard-baked grass and dirt rose to meet them. As they descended, Twintel began to appreciate the true height of the wall separating the Everfree from civilization. It rose ten metres into the air, a massive construct of what seemed to be solid stone with wood and enchanted steel weaving through like veins. Sapphire power gems were inset in regular intervals along its length, glowing bright blue as they powered the spells woven into the wall. A wooden system of steps that seemed to have grown out of the wall itself led to both the gem, and to a small platform that punched out just below the top of the wall. Pegasi trotted along the top, patrolling the length of it. They were armed with binoculars, whilst the few unicorns on duty sat near locked weapons racks.

Her horn felt a hint of warmth as a nearby section of the wall discharged a spell. Her eyes couldn’t catch the tell-tale blue flash, but she could hear the dying squeak of some small animal and smell the scent of carbonised flesh drifting in the soft wind.

The Princess stood up, and Twintel realised that they’d landed. “Follow me,” Celestia said, and leapt off the chariot onto the grass.

Twintel did. In the far distance, she could just about resolve Canterlot citadel’s white-gold spires. At this distance, they were as substantial as hairs. Tendrils of smoke from a thousand chimney pipes linked together into a cloud of wispy whitish smog that hung in the sky over Ponyville proper. Amongst the rolling hills of an apple plantation, she recognised a factory’s single smokestack, standing tall and alone amongst the greenery.

By her side, Celestia exhaled quite loudly, and Twintel returned her gaze to the Princess, whose wing gestured towards seven ponies in front of her.

Her mind whirred as her eyes passed over their forms. She knew she’d seen them before, but for some reason their names eluded her right now, slipping away from her mental grasp like skittish fish. Only Cadence’s name sprang to the forefront of her mind in those few seconds.

She frowned, stepping forwards a tiny half-step.

One stood off to the side. This earth mare had her mane cascading down her neck like a pink waterfall. Her sky-blue eyes were creased around the edges with obvious pain and sorrow, but they glinted with a deeper, more solid emotion. Still, the corners of her mouth were turned upwards, if almost imperceptibly.

Twintel’s frown deepened for just a moment, but she turned away to face another.

The only stallion in the group raised his head. He was a big white unicorn with an oddly striped blue mane, who seemed to hang off his gilded purple armour instead of the other way around. Awards decorated the breastplate, welded into the metal. With the way he carried them, it was as if they were pulling him into the ground.

Twintel saw the lines of grey running through his mane, his widening blue eyes, the way he seemed to drag himself forwards as if he was unwilling to approach her and yet was forced to. His eyes were layered over with bags, creased with wrinkles that extended to his temples and from there, tracked over his forehead. A dead pony walking.

He didn’t cry out, or scream, or burst into tears – he merely gaped at her, meeting her eye-for-eye.

By his side, Princess Cadence smiled warmly, but passively. An onlooker. Once the closest of friends – now, nothing more but an acquaintance in the back of Twintel’s mind. It had been twenty years, after all.

It had probably been only a blink of the Princess’s eye.

“Brother,” Twintel said slowly, after a pause. He opened his mouth, and then closed it, before Princess Cadence nudged him with the elbow of her wing.

Twintel turned to her side, where the saddlebag hung. With a tendril of magic and a short glance backwards, she took out seven small, steel tags. Most of them were blackened and deformed, physically barely recognisable, but she could sense the weak magic imprints humming in the metal. She tossed them in front of his feet, and the tags clattered for a moment before he picked them up with a hoof.

“I’d sent fifteen,” he muttered as he turned one of tags over and over, blinking repeatedly as he did so. “All fifteen…”

The group of mares had stood still whilst she’d interacted with her brother, but now, one of them strode out.

It was a light blue pegasus with a rainbow mane. She’d put on some weight since her time in the newspapers, Twintel thought, but she still had the powerful wing-muscles, lean legs and taut frame that had made her famous. It was the newly retired captain of the Wonderbolts, Rainbow Dash, and the most controversial one to date. There had been many allegations that her placement had been influenced by the infamous disappearance of two of her dearest friends about two decades ago.

And it looked like it had all taken a toll on her. Her face was haggard and lined with exhaustion and the remnants of recently departed stress. Her eyes, however, flickered with life – life that was flowing into her veins once more, confused and conflicted. Hope and anger raged in them, like twin fires.

Dash whistled, the sound reminiscent of the call of a solitary eagle. “What happened, Twilight?”

Twintel winced, and she turned her head to face another. Distantly, she could hear Princess Celestia introduce her to them. Re-introduce, that is.

Another one of the group, a white unicorn with an unreasonably impractical mane, made a little sound. Twintel’s eyes swivelled over to examine her. The white unicorn’s hoof was over her mouth, her azure eyes wide and dilated in horror. Even her white fur seemed to have become paler as she stared at Twintel.

Twintel looked down. As she moved, she could see the metallic tattoos shift with her skin. They glimmered under the bright sunlight, like silver snakes welded into her skin. She lifted a hoof, twisting it, and saw them gleam hungrily in the light of the burning sun.

Rarity. The name struck her out of the blue, like a long-buried memory. Twintel looked closer at her, noticing the bags beneath her eyes that had been covered skilfully by makeup, the grey roots of her mane and the sheer shock in her face. In the utilitarian, ordered environment of the Guard base, her flowing dress looked incongruous. A thin and delicate gold bracelet, carved into the likeness of pair of serpentine dragons chasing one another, wound around her hoof. Around the collar of her too-tight dress, a sliver of a heart-shaped fire ruby glimmered like a drop of fresh blood.

Twintel turned her gaze to the last two in the group, both of whom stood a little to the side behind Rarity.

A yellow pegasus with a short-cut pink mane and tail stood like she’d had her limbs broken, with the way she was shaking. Her gaze kept drifting towards the abandoned cottage in the distance, and despite her gritted teeth and low mutterings, there were drops of tears forming in the corners of her teal eyes. She looked like she’d been pulled straight out of work, judging by the white lab coat she wore. It was stained with splotches of translucent red and yellow-brown, and looked as worn and beaten as its wearer. When she noticed Twintel’s gaze, she froze, eyes wide in complete, utter fear. As Twintel looked on, that instant, primal fright melted into something else. It was cold and empty, devoid of emotion. Shock, and then dread, and then icy nothingness. It was the sort of feeling that someone would get when they were told that their friend had become a mass-murderer.

The other pony was an orange earth pony, whose straw-yellow mane was tied into a tight, no-nonsense bun. Her face was neutral – too neutral to be natural. Her jaw was set, teeth definitely not gritted, and her eyes burned with an odd cocktail of pain, anger, surprise and – despite all of her attempts to crush it – hope and joy. The wrinkles in her sun-worn face only made her freckles stand out more. Her massive musculature twitched for a short moment, before she settled back into that too-neutral look that had as many holes in it as the hat sitting on her head.

All had buried their pain deep inside them. They’d dealt with it over the years, and had learnt to live with it. Twintel could see it in their eyes. And now, she was back.

In them, cold, creeping betrayal fought with sudden, foreign joy. Encrusted layers of sadness wore down with every building wave of excitement. Naïve embers of hope battled against cautious, encroaching cynicism, and it looked like hope was winning.

Somehow, to Twintel, that hurt even more than if they’d simply shown pure and unbridled anger.

Finally, the pink earth pony stepped forwards, and almost everyone turned their gazes towards her. Twintel saw the look in her eyes, and her face tightened for a moment before she realised what it was.

Fatalism. Resignation blended with cynicism, with all other emotion boiled away to leave a hard core of simple acceptance. This one – Pinkie Pie, that’s who she is – had somehow known all along. She’d known, and she hadn’t stopped Twilight in the very beginning.

Hot anger and cold betrayal began to bubble up in Twintel’s heart. But when she looked at it, looked at herself and what she’d done and would have done, she found that she couldn’t blame Pinkie. What would she have done, even if Pinkie did beg her to stay? Why would they even think she was still alive?

The anger bubbled away, replaced by mounting emptiness that hurt more in its starkness.

“I don’t think I’ve met you before,” Pinkie Pie called out softly, with a painful smile on her lips. The lie was evident in her eyes as she stopped at a safe twelve steps away. “But welcome to Equestria. Welcome home, whoever you are.”

Welcome home indeed.

The End

Author's Notes:

This is the end of Schemering Sintel.

Spike's side of the story may come out later. There will probably be no direct sequel.

Fitting music: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-L5JsI5hv0

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Thanks to the Blender Foundation for the main inspiration: the short film 'Sintel'. You can watch it legally, for free, on Youtube or by downloading it. (I recommend downloading).

Thanks to hlissner, for building the expansive WTWE universe. Unfortunately, it's still in revision, so the lore here might not match up completely to final WTWE lore.

Thanks to my pre-reader / editor type for the first couple chapters.

Other inspirations (that I can remember, in no particular order, and with varying levels of influence):
Heart of Darkness (book)
Mass Effect (game trilogy)
Spec Ops: The Line (game)
Far Cry 2 (game)
Lord of War (film)
Blood Diamond (film)
Macbeth (play)
A lot of fanfics (some of them non-pony)

Schemering Sintel

by N00813

1 . Present Times

2 . Recollections

3 . Violence

4 . Bloodshed

5 . Murder

6 . Death

7 . Reflection

8 . Ember

9 . Epilogue: Welcome Home

Side-Story