Don’t get provoked, kid, just stay calm. You’re on duty, remember how important your service is to the Princesses and the city. Keep a straight face, show no emotion and… well done, cadet!
“Anyway, sergeant, it looks like it’s my shift now,” a stallion called Lance Tail stated, snapping me out of reverie. “I feel bad for the guys, you know? They always seem to be getting the worst hours!”
I chuckled, knowing that the fellow guard was absolutely right. Still, it made me proud that even during the said worst hours – which manifested themselves in the form of rather disconsolate merchants of the Traders Guild – my squad kept performing admirably. Especially that young cadet, the latest addition to our team, who had just defused the growing tension all by himself.
“Guard the Fortress, sir!” Lance said, to which I responded with a nod.
Bah! The guys were really fond of that name, even if it was nothing more than a cramped booth with a table, two oaken chairs, a schedule of stationed guards’ duties and a small window overlooking the Aphelion Gate, a massive ivory arch being the main entrance to the Canterlot Castle grounds.
Our sentry post was nothing spectacular, and calling it ‘the Fortress’ was vastly exaggerated and far-fetched, but it was important to me and my squad. Besides, we were content with the state of things. We were Their Royal Highnesses’ soldiers, and we didn’t require – we wouldn’t require – anything more than that.
The stallion grabbed a steel-headed wooden spear from a weapon rack and paced outside.
Hailing from a family of soldiers, Lance always lived in the shadow of his brother, Sword Tail, who was also of the Royal Guard. Although the latter turned out to be better than his younger brother in almost every task during their academy years, and thus advanced higher in ranks, I believed he lacked a certain virtue that Lance had: a good heart. I mean, a really good heart. For Lance, being a guard wasn’t about shining with your armored flank during parades or diplomatic events. It was about proving that underneath the steel and gold surface there was a living, breathing stallion who cared deeply about the safety of every single citizen of Canterlot.
I watched through the window as Lance was relieving the other guard, Quick Bronze. With a certain ceremonial, the stallions raised their hooves and put them to their star-emblazoned chests, nodded, and then switched places in perfect unison. That marked the beginning of the next shift at the ivory arch.
Quick Bronze entered the booth.
“I tell you, sergeant, this kiddo will be a pride of the Guard one day!”, he put the spear away and removed his helmet – a mere piece of uniform, one could say. But there was something more into that. It was a sign of affiliation with all the ideal the Royal Guard adhered to: courage, duty, devotion, to name a few. And it was magical!
Few ponies did realize that the members of the Royal Guard weren’t all white and gray. Although there was nothing more heart-gripping and respect-inducing than a sight of perfectly aligned rows of almost identical soldiers, we actually came in all kind of shades and colors. It was the enchanted armor that made us all look alike, spreading the illusion altering our coats, manes and irises. Some high-ranking guards, for example captains, had a privilege of showing their native colors and thus marking out their position and expertise.
As Quick Bronze put his helmet away, his eyes went back from azure to dusk-violet shade. There was even a saying among the Guard: to know somepony to his eyes, which essentially meant knowing him very well or having served with him for a long time. And I knew my boys to their eyes, even the unicorn cadet.
“What about him?” I asked.
“You should have seen his face when these ponies of the Traders Guild came by with their remorse!”
“Was it… disoriented?”
“Unstirred!” Quick Bronze replied with a grin. “He talked them out of causing a ruckus, politely explained why they cannot see the Princess today and kindly asked them to clear the area. And they complied!”
I glanced outside. The merchants were still out there, although they moved a few good paces away from the gate. From what I reckoned, they were chattering lively but I could spot no immediate threat in them.
“I don’t know his background well,” Quick Bronze continued, “but choosing to join the Guard was a great decision. He fits so well!”
“Do you know why did he enroll to the academy in the first place?” I asked, to which the stallion shook his head. I chuckled in return and leaned forward.
“Our dear cadet, Zealous Charge, wanted to…” I deliberately paused for a while to intensify the drama, causing Quick Bronze to respond with a frown, “…impress his marefriend.”
“No kidding?” the guard’s eyes widened as he fell on the chair. “Really?”
“I know, right?” I replied. “We’re making all these promotional posters and campaigns encouraging to join the Royal Guard, talking about the importance and responsibility, and all we get is a bunch of wannabe brawlers who don’t have the slightest idea where’s left, yet alone right during the drills. And then a random colt who probably lost a bet turns up and becomes the most promising candidate!”
“She must be worth it,” Quick Bronze stated, rocking back and forth on the chair.
“She probably is,” I nodded. “He told me he’s taking her to the Acquarellion place this weekend.”
“Aw, the sophisticated restaurant? Then she is most definitely worth it! But how can he even afford that luxury, being a full-time academy student and all?”
“Academy scholarship.”
Quick Bronze’s chair movement suddenly stopped, landing loudly on the floor. Uneasy silence fell on us, and I knew exactly why. Using a military jargon, I’d say I just achieved a tactical victory, leading the conversation towards the issue of money, the only topic that was rather avoided by otherwise talkative Quick Bronze. And not without a reason.
“How is she?” I asked, looking at the stallion and catching a glimpse of sadness in his eyes.
“Didn’t get any better in weeks,” he turned away and paused for a while. Then he continued, his speech becoming a whisper with each word spoken. “I fear that… you know, she doesn’t have much time left,” another long pause. “Yeah.”
Remember what I told you about Lance Tail and his brother? Well, Quick Bronze didn’t have an easy life, either. In fact, what he went through would be enough baggage for two or three ponies. He grew up without a father – the less told about him the better – and had a pretty rough time on the streets of Canterlot when he was a colt. And I don’t mean those squeaky clean streets like the Promenade of the Rimway, I’m talking about dark alleyways deep in the less-than-noble parts of the city. Contrary to popular belief, Canterlot did have those districts. Perhaps not as wide as the corrupted city of Manehatten, but equally shady.
Somepony got him out of the world filled with violence, drugs and crime and offered him a place amongst the Royal Guard. Reluctant at first, young Quick Bronze could not only save himself, but he also managed to earn the academy scholarship, most of which he allocated to help the family budget and his growing filly sister, denying any luxuries to himself.
And now his mother was slowly fading due to some incurable disease, that kind of disease in which medication could only ease the pain and did not provide any actual treatment. I probably knew more than I should, but I always considered in my duty to take care and provide moral support for the rest of the guys.
“I understand,” I simply said.
Quick Bronze didn’t want to be patronized at all, but I felt he needed that once in a while. He didn’t want to bother anypony with his problems, which he shared – just like he shared his past – only with that certain stallion who helped him out.
“I’m going to check on the cadet now,” I stood up. “Guard the Fortress, Bronze.”
“Yessir!” he replied, straightening up and saluting as I was passing by.
I went outside to once again welcome the day, as peaceful and pleasant as every other in Canterlot. I immediately felt a gentle, soft kiss of spring breeze on my cheek. The fact that the Sun was rising in the east and setting in the west was something brought by Her Royal Highness, but the weather itself was something administrated by the ponies.
Unlike most places in Equestria, which depended on their pegasi Weather Teams to run the weather issue, our city had its unique, specialized Weather Corps, a team of skilled unicorns who excelled in realigning the cloud patters, bringing the rain and creating all sort of weather phenomena. The magically controlled weather was a great innovation, and although I didn’t really trust the magic itself, I had to admit that the unicorns could put it into a good use – I felt it in the gentleness of the breeze, in the liveable temperature and the rain which came usually when everypony was safely inside their homes.
I marched towards Zealous Charge, winking to Lance Tail. A corner of the latter’s mouth moved up slightly, but his face remained steady overall. He knew what was about to happen.
The instructors at the Hurricane Academy, named after a famous pony warrior of the past, had issued that every cadet’s individual progress during a field practice had to be monitored, inspected and evaluated by their superior officer, which in that case meant me. I never really liked the formalities, but I had to make it look like an inspection, at least. And fill a ton of paperwork afterwards.
I took a deep breath.
“Attention!” I exclaimed loud enough to cause a stir amongst the still blabbering merchants.
“Sir, yes, sir!” Zealous Charge replied with passion. He was so focused on his responses, so tense in my presence that he hardly even blinked. Truly, he was earning his name every day.
“Cadet, report!”
“Sir! No immediate threat to the Princesses or the Castle, sir! The Aphelion gate outpost guarded and secured!”
I trotted around the unicorn several times, like some kind of fearsome veteran trying to find a loose strap, a stain or a scratch on the armor – namely anything that would lower a cadet’s overall score and mark. I found none.
“Very well,” I said in a much less formal tone, nodding in appreciation. “Cadet, you bring honor to the Royal Guard. Keep at it.”
“Thank you, sir!” Zealous Charge beamed with pride. He tried to hide it, unsuccessfully, but I intentionally overlooked that, and simply walked away. He surely had a hard time with the instructors at the academy, I didn’t feel it necessary to put more pressure on him.
And just when I was about to enter the booth, I felt that something was wrong… with the air. The breeze was no longer gentle, but rather harsh, the temperature dropped palpably and I was under the impression that an unscheduled storm was about to rip the sky apart.
I turned around and saw a stallion approaching my guards. He definitely wasn’t a merchant – which merchant would wear a black cloak covering the top half of his face and body? Only his horn, gnarled muzzle and dark grey limbs with even darker hooves weren’t covered. That enough sufficed to classify the stranger as a potential danger.
“Hold right there!” Lance tail said, and the guards’ spears blocked the passage, denying entrance to the hooded figure. “State your business!”
The stallion raised his head and spoke. He sounded like any other stallion would, but there was also something sinister about him, something elusive in his voice. It’s difficult to explain, you just know that when you see a chap like that.
“I am here to speak with the Princesses,” the stallion said. “All three of them.”
“You are not allowed to enter the Castle just like that,” Lance tail continued. “State your identity.”
Maintaining a firm grasp on his spear, Lance paced towards the stranger. With his unarmed hoof, he reached towards the stranger and removed his hood. And just when he did, and we saw a spiky, white mane and unhealthy yellow eyes with slits for pupils, the unthinkable happened.
The unicorn’s horn got surrounded in a very dark, almost tar-black miasma – the sign of magic kicking in. The energy quickly moved to the tip and dripped – literally – on the stone ground below, spreading into a surprisingly big, black puddle. What was but a drip became a shade-like shape beneath its creator.
Tendrils black as the longest of nights arose from the puddle, some of them relatively short, and a few growing as tall as four times the average pony’s height. There was about a dozen of them, each one ending with a sharp, dagger-like spike trickling with dark miasma. They didn’t make any sound, but if they did, I bet it would be a hiss, as that’s what they resembled – a nest of blackened snakes dripping deadly venom from their fangs.
Before we managed to pull ourselves together, they sprung in all directions, the few shorter ones dashing right towards Lance Tail’s chest.
“LANCE!” I screamed and rushed forward in desperation. I barely made three steps when the biggest tendril hit and launched me in the air, sending back at the booth’s wall. I could only hope that Lance would somehow survive this.
But he didn’t stand a change. With a flurry of stabs he got stripped of his steel breastplate, then the two spikes impaled his body, rending the heart and lungs, no doubt. Reddened tips came out on the other side, ruthlessly tearing the skin on his back.
As he got lifted up by the tendrils, I saw his face twisted with pain and surprise written all over, and his mouth wide opened in a soundless scream. The internal fluids flooded his lungs quickly, so he was denied any last words, a strangled cry taking their place. He looked down at his chest, coughed with saliva and blood once more before becoming but a lifeless body of a soldier, stretched on the black spikes.
Quick Bronze reacted instantly. The booth door opened violently, and the stallion holding two spears dashed outside. I managed to rally and grabbed one of them. Quick Bronze roared a battle cry, took a running start and threw the other spear at the murderous unicorn. It was a good and steady throw, but it took only a single glance of the sadistically contorted face for the tendrils to move the corpse of Lance Tail and make it take the hit instead.
Two more holes were added to his already gashed figure, then he was released, cruelly thrown into the ground like a puppet, staining the white cobblestone with numerous crimson streaks. He rolled along the pavement and landed by the other side of the Aphelion Gate, with a broken piece of wood sticking out of his chest.
I joined Quick Bronze and tapped him on the side. He was clearly shaken by the fact that his spear desecrated the body of our friend even more. But it was not over yet. He drew a thin dagger from between his armor’s steel plates, a typical choice of secondary weapon for most guards.
“FLANK!” I shouted to Zealous Charge, something akin to a plan shaping inside my head. There was no need to deny that the whole situation was ugly, but as a soldier, I knew my priorities. We could probably save those civilians, but saving the kid – damned, innocent first-year kid who had found himself at the wrong time in the wrong place – would require more than just a simple tactical maneuver. I had to draw as much attention as possible to myself, at least until Quick Bronze would position himself. How to make myself more appealing as a target?
Improvisation! With a wild cry I shifted my weight to hind legs and lifted both of the fore ones at the same time, using the spear for support. However strange it would look – a pony walking on two limbs, psh – it seemed to be working. With my belly uncovered I had become an interesting option for the majority of the death-bringing tendrils, or rather their creator, but to be honest I couldn’t tell if the dark energy was under his control, or if he was possessed by it.
Zealous Charge moved to the other side and sparkled up his horn with harvest gold energy. He was now directly between the stallion and the merchants, protecting them with a transparent, arcane shield which appeared out of thin air. Blast! Although most of the civilians had escaped, those of weaker stomachs in the total number of three couldn’t even crawl away, but remained curled up by the ground, trembling with fear and wishing that the recent bloodshed was only some kind of terrifying nightmare.
“MOVE! IF YOU WANT TO LIVE, MOVE!” Zealous Charge shouted, pouring more and more energy into his shield, readying both the spell and his spear for the inevitable assault of darkness.
Only one of the merchants complied immediately as the other two were paralyzed with terror. And the worst thing was that even though Quick Bronze’s furious dagger storm and my crazy, spear-spinning dance – which turned out to be ineffective, as the tendrils were astonishingly agile – the evil unicorn didn’t focus on us. He focused on the kid’s side.
One particularly big and nasty extension of the unicorn’s dark magic fell on the Zealous Charge’s shield like a hammer dropped from the sky. The spell shattered into hundreds of pieces, then dissolved completely, opening the way for another set of tendrils to brutally perforate the two merchants’ bodies.
It was a massacre. Neither of the cuts proved to be deep enough to kill them instantly, but the repeating stabbing was a truly merciless torture, inconceivable by a sane mind. The merchants were writhing in agony and squalling with the amount of pain that would take down a dragon for far too long. Finally, their butchered bodies, surrounded by trickles of blood, joined Lance Tail in the peaceful embrace of death.
“KID, RUN!” Quick Bronze shouted, precisely verbalizing my only thought. I smacked the nearby tendril and looked at Zealous Charge.
He dropped his spear and tried to fall back, galloping away. That’s what I wanted for him, too – to abandon this place as soon as possible. He was just a kid, he had his whole life ahead! He did not deserve to share that dreary fate! Why did that damned stallion decided to invade Canterlot today!?
“SAVE YOURSELF!” I shouted.
And just when I thought Zealous Charge could get away, the tendrils grew larger and shot towards him.
“NO!” I cried.
Zealous got ruthlessly dragged back towards the darkness, waving his hooves in desperation and trying to grab something, but there was nothing to hold onto on the ground. The black energy entangled him, wrapping around his head, neck and body. The monstrous creation did no longer behave like snakes, but rather like jungle vines, sucking the life force of what they would have grasped.
But it was not enough for the insane stallion. Without a word, the vines extended and raised the cadet to a height of the ivory arch. And then I could caught Zealous Charge’s stare.
There was a fully justified fear of death in his eyes. Those weren’t the eyes of a young, studious colt. Those were the eyes of somepony who had to grow up much too soon. Who had seen things that nopony should ever see. Who was well aware that the battle was lost. He struggled to move a hoof to his head, and despite the restraining force, he saluted.
Tears came and watered not his eyes, but mine. Something inside me broke. I saluted back, but when the tendrils began to move, I turned away my sight and even closed my eyes. I didn’t want to look at this! But I couldn’t stop the sounds from reaching my ears.
In a complete darkness, I heard rhythmic pounding. Those were the strikes against a very dense surface of the arch. I thought that metal hitting ivory was the worst I could take, but then I heard several metallic clangs at the ground level – that was the armor pieces falling off, without fail. And the pounding didn’t stop, no. I heard the bare body smashed into the ivory arch with excessive force over and over again, as if somepony was trying to break the gate’s structure.
“NOOOO!” I heard Quick Bronze’s voice, guessing that something bad was about to happen and he spotted that. Which meant he didn’t turn away his sight. He was way tougher than I was.
There was a unpleasant crack heard. I knew that it couldn’t come from the ivory, it was way too durable. My imagination suggested me the rest.
I opened my eyes to see Zealous Charge’s bruised body falling from the top of the ivory arch. Just like that. Without but an ounce of respect, the dark magic released it and allowed it to hit the ground. The unnatural position in which it landed indicated that his neck and spine were broken in several places.
The blackened tendrils sprung towards me and Quick Bronze. I wasn’t fast enough, so they quickly wrapped around my throat and pressed me against the booth wall, but the other stallion dodged in time, so only his foreleg got bounded by the depraved force. We struggled, but neither of us could move.
“Celestia will grant me an audience,” the death-bringing unicorn spoke to Quick Bronze, his voice frustratingly calm as if nothing had happened. “Beg, if you have to…”
“AAHHH!” the stallion screamed in torment, as the tar-black miasma which motioned around his leg caused several gashed and frostbites. Or maybe those were burns, caused by some kind of magically produced venom or acid? I couldn’t really tell from that distance. Instead, I inspected my own body. I snorted, seeing multiple cuts oozing with blood and gore. I ignored them in the heat of battle, but now the pain was gradually waking up.
The cloaked stallion released Quick Bronze. I spotted that the guard’s eyes were also red of tears. We suffered great loses today, and there was nothing we could have done about it. Nothing.
“Or else,” the dark unicorn put on his hood, “I will destroy all of Canterlot.”
“Sergeant?” Quick Bronze glanced at me. How far he had come! The same reluctance that was holding him in the criminal underworld many years ago was now holding him by my side. And just like then, I was going to make that reluctance vanish so he could do what was really important.
“Just go!” I commanded, to which he complied and left me, moving towards the Castle as fast as he could considering his wound. “Warn the Princesses!”
I coughed blood. There was no hope for me, I knew that. I looked around the aftermath of the last five minutes or so.
I saw dead merchants – denied to express their concern to the Princesses…
I saw dead Lance Tail – denied to finally prove himself to his brother…
I saw dead Zealous Charge – denied to live a normal life with his marefriend…
I saw their numb, motionless bodies scattered around the Aphelion Gate area – pierced, bruised, broken, gashed, deformed…
“You will lose,” I tried to chuckle, but saliva and blood in my mouth made it impossible. I was breathing heavily as the tendrils were sliding around my throat. I felt the end drawing near, but I wasn’t going to make it any easier for the murderer. “Guys like you… always lose. Our Princesses… will kick your flank… you’ll… see…”
Judging by the fact that every single blackened tendril was coming down at me, I’d say my provocation worked. I could even count them now, there was a total of thirteen. Figures.
What should a pony think about before his death? It all depended on the individual, I suppose. I was wondering whether or not the service of my squad at the Aphelion Gate would be remembered. My relatives were long gone, my only family were the fellow guards. I was wondering if somebody would at least remember my name.
That’s what I was thinking about, staring at the air-slicing snakes. But to tell the truth, it didn’t really matter. Remembered or not, I was going to die in peace, filled with pride of my boys and the fact that I remained by the Fortress’ walls to the very end, performing the greatest duty of all: protecting the Princesses and doing everything in my power to protect the citizens of Canterlot. Perhaps it’s not exactly how I imagined my end, but at least I’d die happily, knowing that I fulfilled my duty.
The snakes were getting closer. I smiled and closed my eyes.
I fulfilled my duty to the last.
