The Magic of Animosity

Rational thought wasn’t an ability the Maximus exactly had.  It wasn’t mindless, but it certainly couldn’t think, either.  It was more like…instinct that drove it, rather than thought.  Sure, it could problem solve or make a split-second decision, but at the same time, it didn’t have the ability to actually ‘think’ about something.  In fact, trying to understand the Maximus’s thought process is something that none of us exactly have the ability to do.  Perhaps that’s what makes explaining what goes on in its head so difficult.

Nonetheless, the Maximus was ‘thinking’ about the two creatures that had just escaped its grasp.  It had never seen a unicorn previously, but it didn’t take long for it to ‘realize’ that ponies with horns on their heads were a serious threat—it had ‘known’ ever since it saw Trixie try to destroy its barrier.

It needed to feed.  It had an endless appetite that constantly required filling.  Having reached the end of the already-dug-out mines, the Maximus had to begin digging out the magicane itself.  But after what it had experienced with the purple unicorn in its cave, it began to ‘wonder’ if it even needed magicane anymore—the energy it felt when it consumed the unicorn’s body was just as strong as when it absorbed the non-renewable rock it was constantly searching for.  It ‘hoped’ that there weren’t any more unicorns to challenge it, but at the same time it also ‘hoped’ that there were more—perhaps more that were less cunning, though.

That aside, it ‘knew’ that the two ponies needed to be dealt with.  And it was prepared to make its attack on the small town that it had trapped above its hive, paralyzing the place for when the Maximus was finally prepared to strike.

And so it dragged itself across its massive cave, pulling itself along with the claw that was already extended so far that it had reached the surface, and like an octopus it squeezed its black body into the tunnel, stretching out and cracking the sides of the small opening as it did so.

“LOOK OUT!”

Braeburn yelled out to the ponies closest to the shattered Sheriff’s office, advising them of the large chunks of woods that were falling back down from the sky—as if the ponies weren’t aware already, what with the large crunching noise that accompanied when the massive black claw shot out of the hole in the demolished building.

Both Twilight and Trixie were extremely exhausted.  They had just been through a living hell trying to escape and neither had any usable magic left in them.  Despite the earth-rumbling splintering of the Sheriff’s office, Twilight had passed out and wasn’t waking.  Trixie, on the other hand, had just enough energy left in her to keep herself awake, but she found that she was far too weak to move.

Trixie gritted her teeth and grunted hard as she made another attempt to scramble to her hooves.  She dug her front hooves into the hard dry dirt in front of her and pulled in to move, but the saddlebags strapped to her back felt as if they weighed a half a ton each, and she only got more dirt on her belly and the back of her cape as she scraped against the ground.  Both she and Twilight were dirty and sweaty; the dark-gray and yellow dust thinly coating their skin was only cleared away in thin strands by the thick drops of cold sweat that had accumulated and ran down their foreheads and necks.  Both ponies’ manes were mangled, and there were multiple strings were sticking out wildly in different directions.

Braeburn heard the magician grunting behind him, and he darted around to see Trixie struggling on the ground.  He quickly offered the mare a hoof to help her up, but Trixie used what little strength she had left to swat it away.

“Trixie doesn’t need your patronage!” she said weakly.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” Braeburn scolded.  “You two need help, and so do we!  You two’re th’ only ones that can take on those—”

The stallion cut short when he heard the massive hand hit the ground, demolishing another house that was in the path of part of its arm.  The hand gripped into the ground and looked as though it was trying to lift up the earth, pulling with all its might.   Meanwhile, the Odium that had made it ahead of the hand were spreading out and looking around at the town, quickly analyzing what there was to see.

Trixie looked to her left to see Twilight unconscious on the ground next to her.  “Twilight Sparkle!” Trixie said loudly, but to no avail. ‘Drat.  What the heck are these Appleloosians supposed to do now?!’  Trixie was trying her best to consider her options and think about how to combat the incoming Odium in her condition. ‘Wait a minute.  Twilight Sparkle said something to the effect of…what was it?  The Odium consider us a threat—because we’re unicorns!  That’s it!  I don’t know if this will help…I only have a tiny bit of magic left in me…!”

“Hey, simpletons!” Trixie yelled out at the townsponies nearby.  This got their attention—and their contempt—long enough for her to say, “Get over here, I have a quick illusion spell that may keep the Odium at bay!”

The settlers gave a quick glance to the black ponies slowly—threateningly—making their way over as they shape-shifted to match their soon-to-be victims’ bodies, and without a second thought the Appleloosians hustled up in front of the azure unicorn.  Trixie guessed there were a good fifteen or so; she could only hope that she had enough magic for all of them.  It was a pretty simple illusion spell, but Trixie was trying to run with the meter literally on ‘empty’.

Trixie groaned slightly and closed her eyes hard while trying to get any remaining magic in her into her horn.  A few seconds later, the unicorn’s horn glowed a deep blue, and so did the foreheads of every earth-pony in front of her.  Then, in a quick flash of light, each of the settler ponies looked up at their heads…to see that each of them had a horn on their head.

“Well, I’ll be…” Braeburn said softly, glancing at the new appendage sticking out from his flowing mane.  Granted, it wasn’t a real usable unicorn horn—one could pass a hoof through it and see that is was just as tangible as a hologram—but it looked very convincing.

And it was quite convincing for the Odium, too, when the earth-ponies turned back around with confident looks on all of their faces, and they glared at the black copies of them with evil grins while the Odium froze in place.  They didn’t understand what had just happened—they could have sworn that only a second ago, these ponies did NOT have the all-powerful horns on them.  While having the eighteen of them under the Maximus’s control would have been fantastic, they knew that, since they had had so much trouble with only two, there was NO WAY they could take on another dozen and a half.  The Appleloosians took a unified step forward at their adversaries, and the Odium quickly took a single step back.  Just as the settlers were confident enough to take on the black ponies, the claw that had been a block away lifted back up from its earth-pulling and hovered over to the fake-unicorns’ aid.

Braeburn and the other ponies stopped mid-step and stared wide-eyed at the story-high black claw.  “Uh…Trixie?” Braeburn started, but he turned around to see that Trixie had also succumbed to exhaustion, and she was lying on the ground, eyes-closed, looking almost calm; unlike Braeburn, who was starting to freak out as the claw lifted higher into the air, getting ready to smack-down the unicorns in its view.

The earth-ponies made a run for it, dispersing in all directions just as the giant claw collided with the ground, making the ones that were right near it when it landed trip over the shaking earth and land face-first into the ground.  The claw made a move to grab the ponies that were closest to it, when a sudden noise made it freeze.

*CRACK*

Everyone slowed down or stopped in their tracks.  The Odium all darted their heads to the south, while the claw stood motionless in mid-air as if someone had just pressed the ‘pause’ button on it.  Nearby ponies that saw the Odium also turned to look to the south, and then they saw it.

There was a long vertical crack in the barrier’s surface; it looked like a lightning bolt had been frozen into the black wall.  The crack was as thin as a hair, but the white light emitting from it could be seen from the opposite side of town.

*CRACK*

The fracture began to split, and more hairline cracks formed off the edges of the main break.  The claw regained life, but instead of going back on the offensive, it slammed into the ground right beneath it and appeared to be pressing down on the ground as hard as it could.  Through the pony-sized fault in the barrier, all of Appleloosa could hear the commanding voice of a familiar princess.

“ONCE MORE, WE’VE ALMOST BROKEN IT!  READY…FIRE!”

In a blinding flash of every color of light imaginable, the immense collective power of one-thousand unicorns blasted through the futile black barrier, which apparently was a slab of darkness over ten feet thick.  Giant chunks of the barrier shattered like glass and fell down to the ground below as the crack widened and continued to take out pieces of the wall.  By the time the shattering stopped, a massive gap was showing in the center of the south wall, up to eighty feet wide near the center, and it gave a clear view of alicorns Celestia and Luna, both flying high above a massive fleet of unicorns whose population exceeded that of Appleloosa itself.

Before the princesses could even fly into Appleloosa, the Maximus finally made its appearance.  The claw had been pushing down with all its might to get the giant Odium to the surface as fast as possible.  The ground that the wooden remains of the Sheriff’s office stood on began to bulge, and then a long, thin strand of dark amorphous material with two massive white eyes shot out of the ground, taking larger and larger portions of the earth with it as it widened with its ascent.  A fifty-foot diameter of dirt around the epicenter of its arrival turned a darker and darker shade; the black goo started to bubble out of the ground as if someone had just struck oil.  It was taking too long for the Maximus to complete its rising from the ground—with so much mass and so little room to maneuver in, trying to come out of the stone and sand was like trying to force a loaf of bread through a spaghetti strainer.  Even so, it met eyes with the two alicorns staring it down from a distance.  It had seen a flying pony before (when Twilight and Trixie were bolting), but what concerned it were the large horns on their foreheads.  The Maximus ‘knew’ just by looking at them that they were the most powerful of any of its enemies.

It was still emerging from the ground, but the Maximus lifted its house-sized claw and shot its arm at the alicorn sisters.  Luna squinted her eyes angrily at the incoming projectile and flew towards it.  Just dodging one of the four fingers of the claw, Luna continued to fly alongside the slender black arm rushing by her as she made her way to the Maximus’s body.  Celestia, who stayed behind near the barrier, stayed still in the air and waited for the claw to come to her.  Just before the attack hit, Celestia’s horn glowed a pale yellow and she vanished in a burst of light, appearing a second later on top of the Maximus’s arm.  Her horn was still flaring angrily with magic, and looking down at the arm, her body enveloped with a deep-red roaring fire, and Celestia took off from the arm into the sky.  The Maximus had been too focused on the incoming Lunar Princess, and didn’t have time to dodge Celestia as she darted back down and collided with the black arm in a burst of rose-fire, swiftly and cleanly slicing the arm in half.

The Maximus didn’t appear to be all too concerned with its loss of an appendage, and instead redirected its attention to Luna.  Unfortunately for it, Luna by now was almost in its face, and her dark-blue magic flared as she propelled faster and faster towards the monster.  Luna’s magic coated her entire body, and she used it to giver herself an added push as she barreled down straight into the giant white eye of the Maximus.

Like a bullet, Luna charged through the putty-like body of the giant black glob, entering the eye’s surface and coming out through the back of its head in a stream of black splatter that sprinkled the houses and ponies beneath it.

It didn’t move at all after Luna’s attack, except for the slight swaying that occurred from the small amount of wind that was trying to blow in from the crack in the southern wall.  For a second, many of the Appleloosians had thought that the battle was over—that the Maximus had been killed.  Celestia and Luna knew better, though.  This creature, it had no brain, it had no heart, it had no organs or thought or feelings or intelligence or life.  It only had an insatiable hunger that it didn’t even know WHY it had.

It only ‘knew’ that it must continue to feed.

After having come out of its shock, the Maximus refilled the large gap in its body.  The long arm that was sprawled across the grounds of Appleloosa came to life, and like a giant serpent it started to slither around the houses and buildings, trying to find any ponies that it could consume, and turn into more of the Odium that served it.

The hole in the Odium barrier was widest in the center, and near the ground the crack was only a thin slit that the unicorns couldn’t immediately get through.  With a bit of effort and another barrage of attacks, though, they sent the remnants of the barrier flying, creating a large archway for them to walk into Appleloosa.  Dreamcatcher didn’t waste any time getting inside the town, and immediately she started out on finding Twilight and Trixie, which Celestia had tasked her to do.  While Dreamcatcher was able to track the ponies’ minds earlier, she couldn’t feel as strong of a presence from them, which the dark-green unicorn knew meant they must be either passed out, or dead—hopefully, not the latter of the two.

She was making her way to the location of the Sheriff’s office, where she had last detected the two unicorns, when from around a corner a giant black arm slithered around, the claw being only ten feet from Dreamcatcher.  It paused for a moment, but then it made a beeline for her.    Dreamcatcher scowled at the dark hand that was trying to take her; she spread out her legs and she dipped her head down to brace herself, and her horn glowed white.

A torrent of fist-sized, shining white bubbles then shot from the tip of her horn and impacted the claw, hitting it as hard as if the bubbles had been rocks.  Each successful hit made the claw flinch and recoil a few feet farther away from the Head Captain.  Just before the attack finished, some of the magical froth managed to break off the hand’s thumb, inducing an abrasive cracking sound before the thumb snapped and collapsed to the ground.  The arm didn’t appear phased from the loss, but it did back off from Dreamcatcher before slithering away in the opposite direction.

Dreamcatcher noticed a large crowd of Appleloosians making a run for it, but they were going the wrong way.  “Hey!  Make for the break in the barrier!  We have plenty of soldiers there that will protect you and escort you out of town!”

They stopped and immediately made for the south wall without a second thought.  Dreamcatcher nodded to herself in satisfaction before continuing to Twilight and Trixie.

There was far too much going on in the small town of Appleloosa to be able to give a detailed explanation of it all.  The Maximus had finished its ascent from the ground and was a smooth black sphere once again, floating only a few inches over the ground of Appleloosa; after clearing out of the tunnel, the Maximus was now out of the way of the other Odium behind it, and they were swarming out of the hole in the ground, hundreds of them; the unicorn platoon were swarming out their own hole, the gap in the south wall, half working on escorting out the frantic Appleloosians, half fighting back the Odium that were trying to take down as many ponies as they possibly could; Princesses Luna and Celestia were giving the Maximus their undivided attention, shooting fireball after light beam after explosion right into the mindless creature’s face to keep it at bay.  Appleloosa was slowly being turned into a disaster zone; the right arm of the Maximus wasn’t helping, as it continued to swallow pony after pony that was unfortunate enough to scramble in front of its maw.

The ratio of ponies to Odium was keeping relatively the same.  Each time the Odium claimed another victim, an Equestrian unicorn would clear away the evil sludge from a different Odium.  Unfortunately for the Equestrian side, anyone that was cleared of their black prison was in no way ready to fight their adversary, or even run away; they all had been fed off of for far too long, and required a fair amount of time to completely recover from having their brain sapped.  Nonetheless, the unicorn soldiers were hard at work, making their way around the small town and finding any Odium or dazed ponies they could.

Celestia and Luna were still giving it their all to keep the Maximus from joining the fight on the ground, flying around its head and shooting off spells like annoying gnats to the giant black sphere.  The Maximus made a few attempts to ignore the alicorns, but each time it made to give a pony its attention and attack it, it suddenly found a quarter of its head blown off into a shower of thick black droplets that splattered across the adjacent ground.  If it had ‘nerves’, the sisters were certainly getting on them right now.

Dreamcatcher was darting around like crazy trying to find Twilight and Trixie.  She kept going closer and closer to the Maximus, and she knew she was tempting fate.  Thankfully for her, any stray Odium that met up with her immediately ran away, most likely because of what she had done to the Maximus’s arm earlier.  Dreamcatcher was getting dangerously close to the fifty-foot-tall monster swatting at the Princesses flying high overhead, but she felt safe enough, considering how it seemed too preoccupied to notice her.  From the map she was able to develop in her head from other Appleloosians’ knowledge, she knew she wasn’t very far from the now-destroyed Sheriff’s office, where she could only hope the unicorns still were—alive.

The Maximus was practically overhead as Dreamcatcher rounded the final corner, around a building that had been reduced to a pile of logs and splinters.  There, she saw them: Twilight and Trixie, laying out in the middle of the open square of ground in front of the Sheriff’s office.  They almost looked peaceful, were it not for the scene around them.  At this range, there were no other ponies, and all the Odium had moved down to the frontlines where the fight was going on.  Nonetheless, the evil darkness hovering above, the shattered buildings all around the flailing Maximus, and the terrible condition the two unicorns were in made the scene look terrible.

Both Twilight and Trixie were lying on their sides; with their coats covered in dark-gray dust from the mines below and the yellow sands of Appleloosa, Dreamcatcher could barely tell that this ‘Trixie’ mare was a deep-blue color underneath all the dirt.  ‘Trixie’ was wearing what Dreamcatcher considered to be a completely ridiculous outfit, with a crunched-up pointed wizard’s hat, and a star-studded cape that had lost a lot of its luster, looking no better than the mare who was wearing it. ‘Who on earth is this girl?’ Dreamcatcher thought.

Her own thoughts aside, the dark-green unicorn captain lifted up the two ponies with her magic and quickly brought them in close to her. ‘It’s a miracle the shadow didn’t take these two.  Perhaps it’s because they were already knocked out, and wouldn’t be of use…?  Eh, none of that matters right now—I gotta get back to the others!’

With her new cargo in tow right behind her, Dreamcatcher made off for the south wall, which still had the massive crack in its middle.  The Head Captain didn’t take notice of the two ponies as she brought them along, and Trixie was slumped over at an angle, her neck twisted so that her head was upside-down, and her tongue was hanging out of her mouth.  The azure unicorn’s breathing was becoming somewhat strained; by chance Dreamcatcher looked behind her for a moment and saw Trixie’s awkward position, and quickly readjusted the unicorn, flipping her rightside-up and accidentally making her chin smack into her chest.  This happened to wake the exhausted unicorn, slowly but surely.

“Hnuh?  Youlbllabkld…”  Trixie sounded like she was trying to reason with somebody, with her tone of voice, but Dreamcatcher couldn’t tell what the heck she was saying, so she slightly knocked the unicorn on the back of her head with a bit of her magic.  “Bgth—OW!  What in the name of—why is The Great and Powerful Trixie being bounded by some lowly unicorn?!”

Dreamcatcher shot Trixie a very cold look, and the magician immediately shut up.  Unfortunately for Dreamcatcher, Blanc, and Ferrous, the Head Captains—despite their high rank and prestige—were virtually names unheard of outside of Canterlot Castle.  “Right now,” the dark-green unicorn said, “I’m the one who’s saving your life, so how about you shut it?”

Trixie nodded quickly with her lips pursed together tightly.  Even she realized when it wasn’t appropriate to insult a lesser pony—or at least whom she considered a lesser pony.  Which also happened to be everypony.

Meanwhile, high up in the sky, Luna and Celestia continued their midair waltz with the Maximus’s massive claw.  At this point, it was all they could do to keep its eyes fixed upon them and not the town below, which was constantly flashing in a random area with a unicorn’s spell.  Combine the lightshow below with the buildings that were continually being leveled, and one would think a fireworks show had gone awry, and that the pyrotechnics were going off without being shot into the sky.  It was distracting for the Maximus, to say the least.

Celestia was keeping one eye on her enemy, and one on her sister as she flew over to Luna to speak.  Luna noticed her sister flying in towards her, and made her way over as well, meeting in the middle.  Celestia called out several feet away, “Sister, we cannot keep this up all day!  The shadow is getting bored with us!  Eventually it will set its sights on the Appleloosians, no matter what we do to it!”

Luna cocked an eyebrow at her sister.  “Oh really?  You really think that nothing we do will keep it at bay?”  As she said this, her alicorn horn shone with her royal-blue aura, and then another layer appeared over it, then surrounded the two layers with a third, and a fourth, and then another three, before there was a gradual layering over a yard thick of seven coats of Luna’s magic centered around her horn.  She gave Celestia a cocky smile and she nodded her head towards the Maximus, just as its claw started to reach for the two.

“Don’t go showing off,” Celestia scolded.  “We may have a massive amount of magic, but there’s no point in wasting so much at once.”

“Too late,” Luna replied childishly.  Luna aimed the tip of her overcharged horn straight at the Maximus, and at the claw that was only several yards away from her and Celestia and gaining ground.

And then she unleashed all the energy right at the shadow.

The layers of her magic shot off in quick succession, with the first forming into an arrow-tipped lightning bolt of lunar aether.  It connected with the palm of the claw, and without even pausing, the attack continued straight through the arm, peeling the limb into five sections that split off to its sides.  Just as the initial arrow left the arm and went into the Maximus’s body—all of this happening in milliseconds—the second and third layers turned into massive shining blue cones that fired into the giant white eyes of the creature, drilling straight through the Maximus and leaving behind two triangular holes.  The arrow of the first attack then exploded inside the malformed sphere, and a ripple effect clearly showed on the outside of its body.  Then the fourth layer shot off, and instead of hitting the Maximus, it hit the ground beneath it—coating the sandy ground with Luna’s telltale dark-blue magic.  With a rumble and a quick shockwave, the circular area of ground the magic was sitting upon gave way; the earth fell into what looked like a bottomless pit, as the bottom couldn’t be seen and the sand was never heard hitting a floor.  The fifth layer went off, and it surrounded the Maximus itself—which now looked like a shapeless mass, with two massive holes drilled into its head and its arm peeled like a banana down to the stub—with Luna’s glittering magic, just before the sixth layer shot at the creature and exploded in a bright flurry of stars over a misty fog of night sky, sending the Maximus spiraling down into the hole beneath it; it was the perfect size for it, too.  It scraped up against the hole’s sides and bounced back and forth between walls as it quickly made its descent down into the dark.  Luna’s seventh layer appeared to disperse from her horn unused, but when it did the sound of another splatter-filled explosion could be heard deep down in the hole.  Luna closed her eyes for a moment to breathe, and she turned back and faced her sister with a sly grin.

“I think THAT will keep it at bay for a while,” the princess of the moon replied.

“You’ve only made it angrier,” Celestia said, irritated, “But I suppose you’ve managed to buy us all some time.  Come; let’s find Twilight Sparkle, and the other half of the artifact!”

Luna regained a serious disposition, and with a nod the two sisters swooped down near the ground to begin searching for Twilight as black smoke began to rise out of Luna’s newly-created hole.