Chapter ONE: Fire
Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
—Robert Frost
A liquid smile formed beneath her mask as the nozzle in her gloved forehooves oozed its molten annihilation, setting fire to wood, paper and wholesale knowledge. Fire, she mused—the notion burning as bright in her mind as the flames engulfing the library—was a beautiful, beautiful thing.
Fire was warmth. Light. Comfort.
Fire was scalding heat. Charred blackness. Blistering pain.
Fire was pleasing to the eye, with its ballet of dancing reds and yellows and oranges, but the charred things it left in its wake were ugly and ashen and steaming and terrible and black, black, black...
Black like the Mare-Do-Well’s mask. Her second face.
She gripped the flame-spitting nozzle like a destitute soul clinging to her only worldly possession, fierce firelight glinting in the opaque lenses of her second face. Her hat had fallen from her head back in the library’s “P” section, long eaten by the crooked yellow teeth of wildfire, and her cape flagged at her back, its edges singed and tattered. Her suit, though durable, failed to shield her from the heat. And that suited her just fine; she had no desire to hide from her own justice, nor deny herself the pleasure of being burned.
And what a pleasure it was to burn! To see things blackened and changed and marred and disfigured and gnarled and withered and ruined and dried and baked and…
So many words! So, so many—too many!—and yet never enough to articulate her feelings. That was the trouble with words, written or spoken, they always let you down in the end. Words, hah! What worthless things. They were used for speech, yet actions never failed to speak louder, and just one picture was worth a thousand of the little troublemakers. A thousand! What a waste! The cave dwellers of old had it right. The diamond dogs with their crude drawings and their hieroglyphs—they had it all figured out!
Finished setting the “Q”s ablaze, the Mare-Do-Well hurried on to the “R” section. Information was categorized so simply here in this middle school library, a refreshing change of pace from the grandiose archives that had burned so prettily in Castle Canterlot. Here, each letter received its own aisle, beginning with “A” and ending, of course, with “Z”.
She had a nice laugh back in “H”, where she’d burned books on such topics as Hearth’s Warming Eve; housewarming gifts; How-to books—How to Boil Water: An Idiot’s Guide to Cooking and How to Start a Campfire by wildness expert Pitching A. Tent (a most unfortunate name if ever she’d heard one).
But these were insipid inside jokes, cheap laughs; the real fun had been in back in the Royal Archives where title after title had blackened to ash and nothingness under her righteous jets of fire. She had burned books about business and accounting, marriage and family, government and monarchy, love and tolerance (the worst of the worst), law and criminality, life and death, good and evil (hah!), science and religion, evolution, philosophy, baking, history, martial arts, arson, romance, relationships…
…magic…
Rubbish! All of it! Rubbish, rubbish, rubbish!—fit for nothing but stoking her flames.
Oh, but the literature had been the worst of all. The fiction. What could be said about the fiction? Those books written by high-minded, pompous, arrogant clowns who thought their idle musings so important they must be written down and shared. Just more rubbish, and even less useful than all the other books. At least a book about medicine could aid in curing a pony of sickness; it served a purpose greater than the masturbatory satisfaction of clownish writers and clownish readers.
Hah! Masturbatory! The erotica, the printed pornography, the smut!—she remembered in a feverish fit of giggles—the smut had burned so quickly, so wonderfully!
Speaking of smut, she had moved now from the “R”s to the “S”s, not that she would find such delinquent writings here in a place of learning. By now the flames had already bounded ahead of her, leaping from “R” to “S” to “T” with the manic verve of a mass murderer, claiming one victim before gleefully springing onto the next.
A mad laugh reverberated from behind her second face as the Mare-Do-Well dropped to all fours and sprinted between the burning aisles. The flames roared around her, famished, even as they devoured shelf after shelf of ink and paper. And the masked mare roared back, her laugh, explosive, monstrous and infernal—an incendiary bomb detonating at the back of her throat. As she cackled, her sprint morphed into a crazed stumbling, an insane twirling, a mad campfire dance, her hose flailing like a second tail while kerosene swished in the twin tanks strapped to her back.
“A pleasure to burn!” she shouted to the empty room, or perhaps to the frigid winter night outside.
And then she heard their approach, her ears perking at the infamous clank, clank, clank of oppression’s army stomping her way.
Her chest seized, breath catching fast.
First came panic… then a half-formed plan… then a giggle… then a hushed whisper…
“A pleasure. To. Burn.”
She sprinted out of the library and across the green sweep of the campus quad. By virtue of being a Canterlot middle school, it was several times larger than any of the schools the Mare-Do-Well had burned in Ponyville, Fillydelphia or even Manehattan. It was practically a college campus, with several large buildings erected to cater to one specific subject.
The Mare-Do-Well darted into a building whose front entrance was marked ‘History’ (it seemed all too appropriate). She galloped down a dark hallway, rounded a corner, then bounded up a flight of stairs, taking the steps two at a time. She came to another hallway, this one lined with classrooms. Her eyes flicked from door to door. Her heart raced. Her frazzled mind computed, processed... and then scoffed and tossed caution to the wind, arriving at a perfectly random decision.
Room 451 looked promising.
She battered down the door with a heavy buck, rushed inside and sprang behind the teacher’s desk at the front of the room.
Everything was silent for a time. The masked mare looked out a window and saw flames dancing and stomping on the library’s back. Sitting on her haunches, she leaned her back against a desk leg and let the glow of the firelight lull her into a serene state. She felt safe. Calm. Her mind stumbled back to the library’s “S” section, and the mental image of a book cover jumped out at her. The title was…
…sun… sunlight… summer… sunlit summer… summer sunlight…
It sat on the tip of her tongue like a mean foal on a playground swing, kicking his stubby hind legs as he smirked at her. She shut her eyes and tried to focus on the book’s cover, but it was already burning in her mind.
“This is Captain Shining Armor of Her Majesty’s Royal Guard,” said a voice projected through a voice-amplification spell. “We have the school surrounded. Come out with your hooves in plain sight, and you have my word that you will not be harmed.”
The Mare-Do-Well couldn’t pinpoint the voice’s location; it could’ve been speaking from across the campus or right outside her door. She hoped it was the former. The other guards she could deal with... but if Shining Armor himself stomped in after her? She’d be captured for certain.
Her ears perked at the sound of iron shoes clanking up stairs. Her pulse starting to quicken. She hugged the brass nozzle to her chest and ran a hoof along her belt, checking her weapons. She had few. One gas pellet. A telescoping baton. A syringe filled with adrenaline. The flamethrower strapped to her back was nearly empty. She had enough kerosene left for one more burst. Maybe two.
As the clanks grew louder, the masked mare rose to her hind legs and trained her brass nozzle on the dark, opened doorway. She couldn’t see the guards, even with the firelight at her back, but she heard them shuffling about out in the hall.
“Hey, this door is open,” said a confident male voice that, thankfully, wasn’t Shining Armor’s. “We should check it out, she’s probably in there.”
“No, she’s too dangerous,” said another voice, this one tense with apprehension. “We should wait for Shining and the—”
“Quiet down, you morons,” came a third voice. “What if she’s listening?”
The Mare-Do-Well let out a crazed laugh, challenging the guards in the hall. Metal shoes clanked. Armor jangled. Voices murmured.
A dark figure stepped one leg through the doorway—and was dark no more as torrid jet of red-orange liberation raced toward his golden chest plate. A look of the sheerest terror imaginable lit his frozen face, and in the instant before the great reaching tongue of fire lapped him into blackness, a twinge of guilt plucked at the masked mare’s heartstrings.
In the too-brief collection of seconds before the guard’s end, the Mare-Do-Well came to know him intimately. She saw living fear swim through his bronze face, his cornflower blue eyes. She saw his two-tone sapphire mane already starting to catch, the tips of each strand blackening in slow motion. She saw his wings flutter open and start to beat, to flee, to whisk him up, up, up and away to safety...
...and then they flapped sporadically like the wings of a roasted bird, his feathers lighting and crackling and popping and hissing.
The smell of cooked meat stung the Mare-Do-Well’s nose seconds before the scream rocked her eardrums. The burning guard ran into the classroom with senseless animal sounds flying from his lips, tearing past the masked mare and crashing headlong into a collection of chairs and desks.
She glanced at him once, wondering if she might have known him, then fired another jet at the doorway, creating a curtain of flame between herself and the remaining guards.
And then she was out of kerosene.
Two pegasi darted through the red-orange curtain. One made a beeline for the Mare-Do-Well, hatred and indignation bubbling in his golden eyes, while the other, after catching a glimpse of the burning guard, slid to a sudden stop. His legs shook, knees knocking together. He looked to the golden-eyed pegasi—who had flown around the teacher’s desk and tackled the Mare-Do-Well—then back to the burning stallion, torn by indecision for a long moment. Then he vomited where he stood, wiped his mouth and stumbled back into the hall, coughing and wheezing under the odious smells of smoke and burning skin and hair.
The remaining guard and the masked mare tumbled into the wall furthest from the door—a confused ball of golden armor, dark purple cloth and tangled limbs. They thudded to a stop, the masked mare lying atop the guard’s chest, her pulse pounding, her breath already coming in huffs.
She quickly sat up on his waist, flung her head back and then drove her brow into the bridge of his nose, sending up a splash of liquid rubies. A groan fell from his lips, one she silenced with a well-placed elbow strike to the mouth. Bloody teeth broke free from their roots and hit the back of his throat, making him grimace and gag. It took two more blows to knock him out, then she sprang to all fours and sprinted through the door.
There were more guards waiting for her in the hallway, too many to fight. Thinking fast, the she ripped the gas pellet off her belt and threw it down a few inches ahead of her. It hissed as a cloud green-black smoke spewed from its pores, filling the hallway within seconds. She couldn’t see their faces contort with nausea through the dense smoke, but she heard the guards hack and retch and groan as vomit spilled from their mouths and acrid-smelling rivulets of urine wound down their hind legs.
She held her breath and sprinted to the end of the hall, where she pivoted on her front hooves and bucked another classroom door off its hinges. After staggering inside, she rolled her mask up past her mouth, bent forward and vomited herself. The gas was a special compound of her own making. Breathing it wasn’t fatal, but it wreaked havoc on a pony’s insides. She was usually more careful when using it.
The vomiting fit dehydrated her, making her feel faint, and more of the gas was slowly seeping in through the open door. She wiped her mouth and spat, leaving her mask rolled up as she sucked heavy breaths through her gaping mouth. She couldn’t stay here any longer, she needed a quick escape.
“A middle school of all places,” she thought aloud, a wry chuckle forming deep in her belly. “Oh, Mare-Do-Well, you damn fool. You’ve burned universities to the ground, you’ve decimated research laboratories, you’ve given the Royal Achieves a taste of fiery hell! But they’ll catch you tonight, won’t they? Catch you pilfering knowledge from their children.” The belly-deep chuckle rumbled up and out, a thick, ominous sound that billowed like black smoke. “Yes, tonight they’ll catch you in a middle school. And worst of all… they’ll write about it.”
She brought her breathing under control and fixed her eyes on the nearest window.
Then she sprinted.
As the window shattered, a thousand tinkling sounds fluttered off into the night. Frozen wind gusted all around her, rustling her tattered cape. She hit the ground and rolled to avoid injury, then she slid to a stop on all fours and looked out at the campus.
The eyes behind her mask spanned saucer-wide. There were dozens of them. Unicorns balancing stars on the tips of their spiraled horns. Earth ponies wielding spears. An eerie swarm of pegasi, hovering in the firelight like horse-shaped moths drawn to the burning campus. Each of them clad in gold. Each of them shimmering. Each of them primed to attack.
"Come on then!" shouted the Mare-Do-Well, drawing the baton from her belt. "Come and have your villain! Restore your precious harmony!”
They charged—a great stomping, flapping, clanking, sparkling squall of gold dust.
The masked mare placed the baton in her mouth. She sprinted forward and leapt and curled in mid-flight, spinning through the air like a tossed carriage wheel.
A pegasus guard swooped at her, spear at the ready, and when he was close, she uncurled and kicked her hind legs forward, her body perfectly parallel with the ground. Her back hooves blunted the guard's muzzle, shattering his nose, and he pitched through the air with an agonized yell before crash-landing on his helmeted head.
The instant her hooves touched ground, she wheeled to face her next attacker—another pegasus, swooping hawk-like, spear lancing out to skewer her.
She side stepped and swung her baton at his knee, striking with enough force to fracture the joint. A sickening crack echoed across the battlefield, and the guard dropped his spear, wailing and clutching his injury as he sank to the ground.
Next, bounding over the fallen soldier, she clubbed a unicorn between the eyes before he could fire a magic bolt, snapping his head back and knocking off his helmet. His bare head struck the ground, and her hoof struck his mouth seconds after, breaking his jaw and knocking him out cold.
Ironically, it was the books that had taught her to wage war with such ferocity. She deflected a kick with a cannon bone block ripped from the pages of The Intercepting Hoof, then countered with a pin-point elbow strike to the guard’s orbital bone, one of the many bodily weak points she’d learned while reading about equine anatomy.
She had the brilliant written works of Commander Hurricane to thank for her strategy. Hurricane wrote: “when facing a large diverse force in open combat, it is imperative that you strike down any and all unicorns first, as one well-trained unicorn can equal twenty earth ponies or pegasi.” The masked mare lived by such passages; they had kept her alive and away from her enemies clutches for years.
Moving with the grace of shadows, she kicked and jabbed and whirled and dodged and parried and struck and struck and struck, cutting them down in droves like a buzzsaw whirring through tall grass. She fought with the same blistering fury as her beloved flames, hell bent on destroying anything and everything in her path.
And then they swarmed her all at once, striking and stabbing from every conceivable angle. A golden shoe bludgeoned her temple, knocking her sideways into a spear point that grazed her flank, slicing into her costume. The kick had come from an earth stallion. The slash from a pegasus. Both low priority targets.
A magenta light flashed in her peripheral vision—a unicorn—several paces to her left.
Moving swiftly, she dodged under stabbing spear and jabbed a guard in the throat, then caught another on the knee, then sprang over two more, hurling herself at the light. If she could dispatch all the unicorns, then she might have a chance at winning, or at least beating back enough guards to facilitate an escape. It was a flimsy hope, but she needed something to cling to in the face of such insurmountable odds.
The owner of the magenta light fired a fusillade magic bullets that grazed the hem of her cape. Then he cried out when the baton struck his cheek, whipping his head to one side and knocking off his helmet. Strands of electric-blue mane covered the unicorn’s freshly lacerated face, and he staggered backwards, his bleeding muzzle pointed toward the ground.
The masked mare landed and took another swing, looking to finish off the unicorn. But the magenta light flashed again, and a wall of magic energy crashed into her, knocking the baton from her mouth as it ripped her hooves off the ground.
She spun through the air—head over tail, head over tail, head over tail—until a pegasus tackled her in mid-flight, driving her nose-first into the cold, hard ground. Her muzzle shoveled up blades of grass and chunks of soil as she skidded on her face, the guard riding her back, feathers dropping from his fluttering wings.
When she ground to halt, the masked mare tried to throw the guard off her back, but a pointed shoe slammed into her rib cage, stunning her. A muffled groan dissolved into her mask as another shoe crashed down on her temple. Her ears rang. Her head spun.
More blows fell on her prone body, along with a slew of curses and a few wads of spit from the more vulgar guards. They pummeled her with more insults than blows, calling her lunatic, murderer, traitor.
Idiots. They had no idea what they were talking about.
“Get the traitor’s mask!” one of them shouted, halting the downpour of punishing blows and sending up a wave of cheers.
“No!” screamed the Mare-Do-Well, thrashing as the mob held her down. “Don’t touch my face!”
Her shouting grew louder as a malicious pair of hooves tugged at her mask. She grabbed the hemline and held it for as long as she could, but the guards inevitably yanked it away, whooping like hyenas as one of them stuck it on the end of a spear and paraded it about like a flag.
“MY FACE! GIVE IT BACK!” she shrieked, a mad gleam in her newly-exposed bloodshot eyes. “I’LL KILL YOU! I’LL KILL EVERY ONE OF YOU!”
“That’s enough!” shouted the owner of the magenta light, an imposing white unicorn clad in purple armor. The guards fell silent as he approached the captured villain, but her wailing grew louder, fiercer.
“GIVE ME MY FACE!”
Despite the piercing volume of her screams, the white unicorn opened his mouth to speak. He hesitated a moment, then said: “By the authority of her Majesty Princess Celestia, I, Shining Armor—”
“GIVE IT BACK! I’LL KILL YOU!”
“…I, Shining Armor, hereby place you under arrest for your crimes against—”
“BURN YOU! I’LL BURN YOU ALIVE!”
Shining surrendered and turned his back on the wailing, red-cheeked mare. He wiped blood from the bridge of his nose, staining the fur of his forearm. His eyes fixed on the red spot marring his coat for a long time, as if trying to make sense of what it was.
“Lieutenant Phalanx,” he finally said, prompting a dark grey unicorn to snap to attention.
“Yes, sir.”
“Escort Twilight Sparkle to Castle Canterlot. If she resists, you have my permission to use force to restrain her.” He glanced over his shoulder at what remained of the once great Element Bearer. He listened to her shriek. Watched her trash in the guards’ clutches. “Use force, but no more than needed, lieutenant. She’s still my sister. Please… don’t hurt her…”
“Yes, sir.”
Shining trailed behind his fellow guards as they trotted back to the carriages waiting for them out on the street. He couldn’t see his sister’s thrashing any more, but he could still hear her screams.
“MY FACE! GIVE IT BACK! GIVE ME MY FACE!”
Just then, a squall of frigid wind gusted in from the north. It was fast, loud and bludgeoning, as if winter itself was trying to silence the madmare's shrieks.
