Written for the Equestria Daily Batpony Writeoff
I really shouldn’t be telling you this story. Not in the sense that it’s embarrassing, or that it’s the sort of story that ‘civilized’ ponies don’t talk about in public―I’ve got plenty of those, believe me. The problem has a lot less to do with me, and a lot more to do with the rules. Rules like ‘if you tell the guards, you get fitted for some nice concrete horseshoes.’ I wish it were only drowning that I’d have to deal with…
Since you’re so persistent, I guess I can humor you for one Nightmare Night story. But I have to warn you: the monsters win in this one. The ponies get eaten.
Let me start by saying that I’m not what you’d usually call a storyteller. Nice to look at, sure―and even nicer to hold―but not that great to talk to. The problem is that I’m a really fantastic liar, and what I’m going to try to tell you here is the truth. Cross my heart, and all that.
Now, it started late on Nightmare Night - late enough that you’d usually call it ‘November.’ I could tell by the chill and the aches. It takes a special sort of pony to sleep on a concrete slab without complaining; especially when you’re used to cloud beds. Windy, too; enough to chill a pegasus. The place smelled like clean air, and for some reason, copper and chalk.
I could feel somepony else against me, just as chilly as I was, which told me an awful lot about how I’d managed to find myself asleep outside. I was a bit too old for candy and costumes… well, most costumes, but that doesn’t mean Nightmare Night didn’t get to be fun for me too. I felt something wet, and sticky, and decidedly warm against my belly. Before you get giggling or offended, it wasn’t what you’d think. I wish it were; nopony would have been dead.
Copper was what got me to open my eyes. Not the feeling of the metal, or the color, but the stench. There was a wavy line of chalk drawn on the ground in front of me, separating my face from his; vaguely resembling the outline of the pony’s body.
His name was Wax Mold, and he’d been an acquaintance for a lot longer than it takes most ponies to become a friend. I must have really had too much to drink to wind up next to him on a rooftop somewhere. But even if I didn’t like him that much, I was too worried about the smell to notice that his eyes weren’t quite shut. My eyes saw the source of the hot wet feeling, and I just about threw up right there.
Blood was everywhere. That isn’t to say there was a lot; you don’t need to lose all that much of the stuff to bleed out, but at the time, I was a bit on the squeamish side. It seemed like it was too much to fit in anypony’s body. It freaked me out; left my eyes twitching and my gut doing ballet moves with fancy Prench names in my gut.
I shook Wax, and the chill I felt in his body told me the rest of what I needed to know. I ignored it, of course, and I kept shaking him. I must have shouted something stupid, but I don’t remember what it was. What I do recall perfectly were the words I got back in return.
“You aren’t gonna bring him back that way.”
It was the first thing my partner ever said to me, and on a better morning I would have slapped him across the face for it. That ‘morning’ I ignored him outright, shouting more or making promises or something else; I don’t really remember exactly what.
“Eyewitness―”
I remember that too, since it was what finally snapped me out of my confused and nauseated stupor. I had tears running down my face, ruining perfectly good makeup. I don’t mean to sound like a terrible pony, but most of it was the confusion, and the nausea. I’d never really liked Wax; enough to feel bad about what happened, but not enough to turn into such a mess. And that night, if you’ll forgive my bad Trottingham accent, I was a bloody mess.
It took me a second to realize that the words meant a pony was actually standing nearby. I heard his hooves pacing slowly toward me, and with my first lucid moment I got to thinking. Here was this stallion I’d never met before, wandering up to me out of the blue, telling me my name even though I didn’t know him. So, in my state of distress, I made what seemed like the logical assumption about a strange pony next to a dead body.
I spun around and smashed him across the jaw with both my forehooves. It didn’t seem to do much at all. Really, all I can say for my efforts is that I got a good view of the stallion.
He looked forty-something; maybe fifty, with a brown coat so dark it almost looked black beneath his hat. Most of it was concealed by a trenchcoat, though he wore it with a confidence and a security enough that it seemed to belong on him. It was probably as old as he was, judging by the tattered edges and the fact that he’d tied the belt in a knot for the lack of its actual buckle. He had a hat to match, too; wide brimmed and worn low so it kept his eyes hidden. He almost looked the part of a detective, though I wouldn’t have called his expression gritty or world-weary. Just… tired. Like he’d been awake too long.
He’d let my blow slightly tilt his head, and so his first response was to readjust his hat to sit squarely over his ears. For just a second, I took note that they were oddly hairy, as though his coat had gotten too long at their tips. I soon forgot that thought, though, when he lifted his jaw to look me square in the eyes, letting me steal a perfect look at his.
They looked like a unicorn had too much fun mixing a cat with a snake. Tall, thin slits served for his pupils, wrapped in a shell of gray that barely stood out from the whites surrounding them.
“Can you stand?” he asked, as if he didn’t care that I’d woken up beside a corpse. I was starting to forget it too, as crazy as that might sound; I’d seen dead bodies before, but never somepony as crazy as him. I nodded hesitantly, but it seemed enough to satisfy him. He brushed against me as he walked over to Wax’s body, and I felt just how cold his rough coat was again.
“Who are you?” I asked as he knelt beside the body, laying halfway sprawled over the chalk outline. Maybe he hadn’t heard me, but I was pretty sure he was blowing me off. It took me a breath to get at least a little bit of my strength back, even if the night air didn’t do much to warm me up. I grabbed him by the shoulder, feeling the coarse fabric of his trenchcoat. “Hey! You got a name?”
He glared at me for just a second, and his hoof moved to slap mine away. It stung, but what I took notice of was the whistle of the air from the speed of his motion. “Malt. Chocolate.” He spoke with a perceptible Manehattan accent, though unless he was some sort of spy, he hadn’t lived there in years. Too much of the sharp edge to his words was lost to the Canterlot way of speaking.
I didn’t give him a chance to focus on Wax; something about this pony and his stupid Nightmare Night costume set me on edge. “What do you think you’re doing with Wax?”
“Looking for… something…” There was something else in his accent, though it would probably be just as honest to say that there was something in his mouth. Occasionally, his words would hang on it. His hooves found no such obstacles as he rummaged them over the pockets of Wax’s cheap and bloody dinner jacket. Unsatisfied, he brushed his hooves up the sides of the smallish stallion’s neck, across the wide brow I used to mock for its cave-pony appearance, and up the length of his narrow horn. “Nothing.”
I was tired of being the bystander on the scene. “What were you looking for? And for that matter, what gives you the right to come up here and―”
“Guardspony,” he interrupted.
I told him, “You don’t look the part.”
He shrugged. “Not that kind of guard. I’m looking for a necklace. Silver locket, with a sapphire in the middle. Shaped like a shield, with silver clasps. You wouldn’t happen to know anything about that, would you?”
He turned to look me square in the eyes, and I understood that he wasn’t asking the same question that had left his lips. It didn’t seem possible that he knew, but I couldn’t take the chance.
I decided at that moment to do the only thing a sane pony could do, given the state I was in. I sprinted for the edge of the roof and spread my wings, hoping to get away before he could even react. It would take a much younger pony to even touch me before I was in the air.
He caught me well before I reached the railing at the roof’s edge. His hoof wrapped over my shoulders and dragged me to the ground. I heard his voice in my ear, and felt the chill of his breath on my neck as he held me still with a force that didn’t seem to belong to such a slim pony.
“If you try that again, Eyewitness, we’re going to have a problem. Got it?”
I nodded, and swallowed once. My calm was gone again.
“Glad we understand each other,” he told me in a forced whisper. “Did you like that stallion?” He cocked his head, gesturing to the corpse across the roof.
Maybe you can guess, but I didn’t exactly feel like spilling my whole romantic life to a stallion who had me pinned with my chin on the concrete on a rooftop over Canterlot. At the same time, I wasn’t about to lie to him. Fortunately, with Wax, there was a third option: the truth. “We were friends,” I told ‘Malt,’ letting him draw whatever he wanted out of my words. “Why?”
He didn’t answer at first. What he did do, almost immediately, was stand up and brush himself off. Once he was sure his ancient getup wasn’t dusty, he offered me a hoof. I slapped it aside, just to show him I could stand up on my own. He gave me another one of those shrugs, and then returned his slit-eyed focus to my face, before he finally spoke.
“I want you to help me. I need a hoof.”
I could smell bullshit even over the dried blood on my chest, but I wasn’t about to call him out on it. I knew what he could hold over my head, if I was stupid enough to ask ‘what happens if I say no?’, and I didn’t want any part of it. I was pretty sure of exactly what he couldn’t hold over my head, too, and I didn’t want to risk showing those cards. So I put on a little show. A long, wistful look at Wax’s body, halfway offset from the chalk outline, was enough to put the strange ‘guardspony’ off my scent.
“Why?”
“Because you knew him,” Malt told me. “And because you seem smart enough not to get in my way. If you cared about him, this is your chance to help catch who did this.”
Then I turned back to him. I knew I didn’t look as determined as I wanted, but I gave a singular nod anyway. “If it lets me find whoever did this,” I muttered, laying it on thick. “What do we do first?”
He looked at me, and grinned. He might have been trying to look happy or encouraging, but all I saw were fangs. Not the perfectly white plastic things you buy at the corner store for two bits, either; whoever did his was really good. Either that, or there was magic going on. I silently hoped it wasn’t the latter, but the idea was enough to steal all my attention. Suddenly, giving him the runaround and darting when he wasn’t looking seemed like a very short-lived plan.
“Let’s start by going over what we know. How do you know Wax?”
“He was a coworker,” I told him, truthfully. “I work for a construction firm. He’s a contractor.” That ended my short spree of honesty, but it might do a lot to explain things away if Wax had anything compromising on him.
“Interesting,” He reached into the breast of his jacket with a hoof, and produced a scraggly little cigarette that looked like he’d sat on the box. It went into the corner of his mouth, though he didn’t actually light the thing. “Did you know about his second job?”
“I don’t see why he’d need one. He was making good money.”
Malt took a drag of his cigarette, which was suddenly and inexplicably lit, before releasing an unexpected cloud of smoke in my direction. I found it easy to avoid a coughing spree as I kept my eyes on his golden slits, still barely visible under his hat.
“He was making more bits from his side job. He was a fence, and a second story pony.”
And a damn good one, I added mentally. But clearly not good enough to last forever. I glanced back at his cold corpse, and shivered at my own temperature. My wings moved of their own accord, but my feathers didn’t seem to be doing much for me. “No way…” I protested half-heartedly. Something about the strange pony before me said that he’d be more receptive to a quiet denial than, as the old movies might have put it, ‘a hysterical dame bawling against his chest’.
It seemed to have gone over well. He nodded slowly, and placed a gentle hoof on my shoulder. “Most ponies don’t know a thing about crime in Equestria; we’re pretty good at taking care of anything major before anypony gets hurt.” He stared up at the eerie, full moon on the horizon, and I followed his gaze. It had been a year and then some, but it was still strange to recall that there was a new Princess in charge of the big white rock. “He always stole jewelry, but this time, he took something more dangerous. I don’t have a clue if he knew The Mistress’ Amulet was magic, but clearly somepony did.”
My brow quirked honestly, of its own accord. I hadn’t known the thing was magical. All I knew was that it was valuable to somepony. That, and that it was clearly valuable enough to kill over. The thought put a different kind of chill in my gut.
His hoof on my shoulder gripped down, ever so subtly. “Do you know anything about him? Where he lives? What places he likes to visit? We need a lead, who knew him from his other life.”
I took my time about telling him what came to mind immediately. “Well… I have a few things in my apartment. A business card from a restaurant he liked. I’d like to get a jacket too. Maybe take a quick shower.”
He nodded. “Fine by me. Lead the way.”
I spread my wings. “You’re gonna have a hard time keeping up. Do you want me to come back?”
My assumption that he was an earth pony shattered when he shook his head. “I’m a better flier than you are, Eyewitness. I’d bet my wings on it.” And then he turned his head, and unbuttoned two flaps on his worn tan trenchcoat. Rather than pockets, they concealed slits for wings.
When he unfurled his wings, I knew he wasn’t dressed up for Nightmare Night. Costume wings don’t move like what he had. They were leathery, dark gray, and unnatural, attached to a stallion.
“What are you?” I cried out. If I’m really honest, I might have even called it a shriek.
He replied with the same flat tone that dominated all his words. “Guardspony.” And before I could press further, those same freakish wings lifted him up into the night sky.
You ever notice how nothing good ever comes from the phrase ‘crawling with?’ Sometimes, things are crawling with spiders, or rats, or mold, but you never hear about a place that’s crawling with candy bars or scotch. Well, my apartment complex was crawling with Guardsponies, and thus it kept pretty closely to the usual meaning of the term.
They weren’t “guardsponies”, like Malt, either. These were real, honest-to-Celestia golden armor types, and it looked like they’d pulled out all the stops. Some of them were carrying swords. I probably would have been stuck staring, halfway to turning tail and running like a bat out of Tartarus for a while. Before I really had the chance to think through how I’d get away from Malt and his freakish speed, though, one of them took notice of us.
Then I panicked, because I knew all chance of running away was out the window. Malt had been lying through his fake teeth when he told me things weren’t all that serious. The pony in the purple armor didn’t show up when things weren’t serious.
Shining Armor gave Malt a surprised look, and Malt glared back with an intensity that contradicted his weary attitude. The unicorn spoke first. “I wasn’t expecting you, Malt. Is this―”
“You know I can’t talk about it,” Malt interrupted. “Give me five minutes in the house.”
The Captain of the Royal Guard, whom I had never met but whose face I had seen on at least a dozen newspapers, returned Malt’s glare. “You can’t give me orders, Sergeant.”
“We both know who can,” my guide growled back. “Do we want to take things that far, Captain?”
Shining Armor, bane of single schoolfillies everywhere, made his answer clear when he turned away from Malt for something else to occupy his attention. I admired the way his developed chest shifted gently with his agitated breathing, and how his well groomed blue mane settled on his neck. That lasted until his eyes fell on me. Despite where he was staring, he kept speaking to Malt. Way to woo a mare, Cap.
“Is that the mare from―”
“Yes,” Malt replied, taking from me the pleasure of learning exactly where Shining Armor had seen me and what compromising part I had been playing at the time. My shaggy escort turned to me with his off-color eyes, and gestured his head toward my apartment. “Hurry up, Eyewitness.”
We went into the lobby, past Shining Armor, who I gave a flirtatious wiggle of my lashes to. It wasn’t as much fun as I’d imagined. Inside, the potted plants and worn seats of the reception area were surprisingly empty, in the absence of old Mr. Sawhorse complaining about losing his keys. A bit of crime-scene tape was all that Canterlot’s finest had added, and I had to admit the color did a lot for the drab room with the peeling paint. Still smelled awful, though.
My unit was on the third floor, and it didn’t take us long to get there. What I saw at the doorway told me most of everything I needed to know. The cracked wood near the knob told me that the door had been bucked in. The way the door hung loose on one hinge made it clear that it had been somepony strong doing the bucking. Unless it was Shining Armor out there, my money would be on an earth pony. The fact that they’d come when I wasn’t home informed me that they weren’t actually out to get me, but rather, something I had inside.
Inside, there wasn’t much damage. It hadn’t been a fight. It would be pretty weird for somepony to have a fight in my apartment while I was out. Instead, it was a mess of drawers pulled out of their cabinets and clothes ripped out of their closets and dressers. Whoever had broken in was looking for something. But of course, the guardsponies didn’t know that, because they didn’t know there was something to look for.
There were two of the big shots in the room, pacing around. One of them was a unicorn, taking pictures with a camera that belonged in the same detective movie Malt had wandered out of. I didn’t pay him any more mind than anypony else did.
The other pony in the room was an earth pony mare, slender for her breed, but with the sort of a face that made sure you understood that she could take you down even if you were twice her size. I might have liked her attitude, if it wasn’t camped out in my living room.
“Who’re you?” she asked, sounding like she was spitting on the expensive wooden floor with every syllable.
“I live here,” I told her with a bit of fire. She didn’t seem to believe me, and I didn’t feel like arguing with a guardspony, so I turned to Malt. To my disappointment, he seemed to have left me to the sharks, making his way back out into the hallway for another cigarette. “Oh, come on, Malt!”
I barely heard his muttered reply. “Take care of it, Eye; I’m on break.”
I groaned, rolled my eyes, and pulled my thoughts together. First, talking to a guardsmare. Like with Malt, that means I’m in accounting for a construction firm. If she didn’t buy it, I had cards and papers that would buy me time, and…
I never got to ‘second’ on my mental list, because something that could loosely be called a plan leapt into my head. I didn’t need to act to look the part of the tired, haggard, freezing mare. All I needed to do was drum up some pity from it. “Look, Ma’am, I’m sorry. I’m having a hard night, okay?” I added a little shiver, which I only half-intended. “But my name is Eyewitness, and this is really my apartment.”
She gave me another stare, flat as the horizon. “You’re Eyewitness?”
“I just told you that.”
The silence that followed was only punctured by the click and flash of that same old-timey camera. The guardsmare looked me in the eye. “Alright, Miss, would you be so kind as to account for your whereabouts last night at nine?”
I resisted the urge to gulp nervously. It wasn’t that I was about to give myself up, but because I honestly didn’t know the answer. I remembered meeting Wax around a quarter ‘til, but I didn’t have the slightest clue after that. “I…” The hesitance wasn’t buying me any favors, so I spat it out. “I was with a friend. Wax Mold.”
“Is that so?” Her gaze narrowed, trying to read my face. She didn’t seem to be getting anywhere. “Where’s this ‘Wax Mold’?”
Flabbergasted is a fun word to say, isn’t it? I think it does a good job of describing how I reacted; it took me a while to find my tongue in a way that made real words, instead of just mumbling noises. “He’s dead!” I basically shouted it into her face, and her ears flipped back. “You drew your chalk outline and everything! Up on the roof of some building by Sunrise Way!”
She stared at me like I belonged in a straightjacket, but she didn’t say anything. I wasn’t about to hold my tongue, but I also had better things to do. “Look, I’m already helping your friend Malt out there, okay?” She glanced to the door, and what I read off her face said that she might not even know the strange… thing that called itself Malt. I didn’t really care. “I want to find out who killed Wax just as bad as anypony. I need to go look upstairs, and then you’re going to tell me why the entire Royal Guard has camped out in my living room.”
I walked past her toward the door to my bedroom, fully expecting her to put a hoof on my shoulder, or order me to stop, or anything really. She was so silent, and so still, that I stopped in my own doorway to look back at her.
She was staring at the outline of a shady detective in the doorway. Malt’s face was barely illuminated by the tiniest hint of orange light from his cigarette. The smoke pooled under his wide-brimmed hat before rising to the ceiling. His head shook slowly from side to side, and though I couldn’t see them, I knew beyond any doubt that the golden slits he used for eyes were locked on the guardsmare’s face.
I slipped into my bedroom and closed the door before either of them could come up with a reason to stop me.
My mind was racing; I knew I didn’t have a lot of time. First glance went to my bed, though I didn’t really care about it. A small, one-mare thing, because I never brought stallions home as a rule. Bad place for hiding things, so I kept a few bits hidden in a pouch under the boxspring as a distraction. Next was the nightstand, even worse. I had a half-glass of water leaving rings on the wood, and a lamp left on, shade askew.
In the corner was my potted fern, which mattered more than the furniture. My heart stopped, and my blood would have run cold even if I wasn’t already shivering. Somepony had moved the dirt. A hole had been dug, right where I didn’t want to see one. Somepony knew; it was gone. I hadn’t told Wax, and even if he’d figured it out somehow, he was a corpse on a rooftop. Malt would have found the stupid necklace on him.
I said a few things that shouldn’t be repeated in any company, loud enough that I wasn’t sure if Malt, the mare, and the photographer could hear. I didn’t care. I should have been made off of that thing; four-hundred thousand bits. It wasn’t ‘noble’ money, but it would buy a nice house on the beach somewhere warm, and all the Mai Tais I could ever drink. The dream burst in a heartbeat, and all I could think of to fill the void was that I hadn’t eaten in twelve hours.
There was one more thing in the room that I cared about. Wax’s little card, with the address to that lounge he liked to meet in. I could picture the thing in my head: ugly orange stock, smudged blue print. It didn’t take long to find with my eyes, fallen on the floor beside the nightstand. I snatched it up, thinking about what was going on. I hadn’t really been lying to Malt. I wanted to figure out who killed Wax. I just didn’t want his help to do it.
I ripped off my bloody dress, not caring about destroying it. I wasn’t planning on staying long in Canterlot anymore. I threw on a light jacket that left my wings free, and turned to the window.
It was raining outside. I really didn’t care. I didn’t think I could get any colder.
The neon sign proudly proclaimed 1428 Gravel Lane to be ‘The in Set’, supposing you were half-blind, and couldn’t see the two lights that had gone out in plain view. It was supposed to say ‘The Swing Set’, but some clever six-year old had nicked the first ‘S’. If the owners were smart, they’d let the other lights burn out to avoid looking like a pegasus strip club.
I doubted they were that smart. It took a stupid kind of pony to open a jazz club on Gravel Lane. The fancy ponies had called the place Down Town for longer than I’d been alive, and it wasn’t just in reference to the altitude. Lots of ponies whispered about how much crime went on away from the golden armor and the ivory towers. They were dead wrong, but that didn’t stop the whispers.
I pushed in the swinging door, and shivered to myself. Water dripped off my wings, along with a few more feathers than I was really comfortable with. I wasn’t expecting a molt for a while, but I didn’t have time to worry about it. I stumbled inside to the disappointment that there was no live music playing. Instead, from somewhere overhead, an awful ‘spooky’ organ piece was playing, adapted to a jazz style. I still didn’t want anything to do with Nightmare Night, and it was at this point well into a November morning.
Four ponies dressed in jackets ranging from a cheap sweater to a blazer were playing cards beneath a green glass lampshade and nursing thick amber drinks on ice. The bartender was a filly younger than me, too occupied with wiping down tables to stand behind the stained and grimy bar itself.
My stomach grumbled, and I decided answers could wait a few minutes for the sake of food. There were a few bowls of mixed nuts on the bar, so I sauntered over and took one of the less sticky green vinyl barstools.
The first hooffull of nuts popped into my mouth without a care. Too salty, not much actual nut, but I didn’t care. I swallowed, and reached for a second bite. The room spun. My hoof slapped the bowl to the floor, spilling the B-list nuts all over the linoleum. I fell off the stool after them, and barely caught myself on my hooves.
Somepony asked me something; I assume they were wondering if I was okay. I didn’t want to open my mouth to answer. I rushed for the bathroom, lurching into a table and toppling at least two chairs in my journey across the room. Every step left my vision blurrier, and for the first time that night, I felt warm. My gut was on fire. I don’t know how dragons deal with it.
I’ll spare you the grimy details, but I crawled my way out five minutes later with a freshly washed muzzle and just as much hunger in my belly as I had when I sat down at the bar.
“You alright, ma’am?” It was the bartender filly, who’d managed to clean up after my spill and carnage, and now stood behind the bar. “I’d think you had to much to drink, but you don’t look that way to me, and you just came in.”
I nodded as I sidled up to the same barstool I’d taken earlier. “I’m fine now. Bad nuts.”
“I know what you mean.” She gave me a little smile, but I figured she was just trying to be friendly so I’d get a drink. “You sure y―”
I held up a hoof, and she was quick enough to catch the cue. I was more than sure I wasn’t okay, but I knew she couldn’t help, and I didn’t want to get distracted. I’d cut to Lady Highrise Memorial when I got a chance, but I wasn’t leaving without answers. The beach house was in my head again.
“Did you know Wax Mold?”
I was acutely aware of ice clinking in a glass behind me. It wasn’t that the noise had been loud, but that just about everything else had gotten quiet.
The bartending mare nodded, though I was barely paying attention when she told me about the singer he liked. She asked me why I wanted to know, but I ignored the question. My attention was on the quiet hoofsteps coming toward me from the card players.
“Who’s asking, sweetcheeks?”
“I’m a friend of his.” I turned around on my seat, and found myself nearly muzzle-to-muzzle with the biggest and burliest of the card players.
He was an earth pony, the color of mud, in a thick black jacket. If I weren’t sitting on the stool, I’d need to look up to meet his eyes. As it was, he was almost level with me anyway. He sounded like he gargled with a brick every morning. “I’m Cruncher.” In hindsight, it was one of the saddest and funniest names I’d ever heard, but you don’t laugh at a stallion that size. “Mind telling me your name?”
I shrugged. “Why?”
His hoof on my shoulder made his point much more quickly than his voice. “Because I’m asking nicely.”
Now, you have to understand, I’m halfway decent in a tough spot. My line of work sometimes leaves me between a rock and a hard place, and I wouldn’t still be around if I hadn’t figured out how to get out of these sorts of situations. Fortunately, this stallion hadn’t given much thought to the idea that the little pegasus mare with the innocent lidded eye for a cutie mark would put up much of a fight for a bruiser like him.
I brought my hind legs up from the edge of the stool, and bucked him right where it counts. He doubled over, giving me just long enough to put another hoof in his throat. Gasping for air with a much higher pitched voice, he dropped like a sack of your favorite vegetable. The bartending mare shrieked and dove behind the counter as the other three stallions got up.
I twitched when the one in the blazer brushed back his mane and lit up his horn. Two tables smashed together against the doors out of the building. That put me in a hard spot. The unicorn walked forward, brushing aside Cruncher’s pathetic form as he approached. “You’re Eyewitness, aren’t you?”
I didn’t say anything, but something must have flashed over my face. He smiled a little. I shivered. “That’s great. See, we were going to have to come looking for you, but now you’ve shown up here. I’m surprised you can walk with your chest the way it is, though.”
I looked down my bloodstained purple coat. I hadn’t felt anything, and the dried crust of Wax’s passing didn’t leave a lot to look at. I wouldn’t have paid it any mind if it weren’t such a specific remark.
Maybe that was what the unicorn had planned. While my chin was down, he brought a hoof around against the side of my crown. Hurt like Tartarus, and the room span worse than it had with the nuts. I stumbled, faltered, and fell onto my side. Even with the pain and the room shaking, I saw his movement; it didn’t take long for me to get up again.
I remember my old history teacher in Seaddle―and ex-Royal Guard―loved to talk about how ancient pegasi were a military power because of mobility, initiative, and logistics. I never did well in history, and the teacher was a pain in my flank, but I guess I did learn something from him. I just applied it to one-on-one instead of huge armies. I saw the unicorn’s horn light up again, and I knew I had to hit him before he got his focus together for a spell.
I threw myself at him, head first. The hit didn’t do anything for my crown, but it got the magic off his horn and bought me some time. He staggered back, and I took the few seconds of his shakiness to recover my hooves.
Then a chair slammed down over my back. It was a pretty awful way to be reminded of the other earth pony and the pegasus he’d been playing with, to be honest. I saw stars, and they didn’t go away when I got another buck to the ribs. I heard something crack, but it didn’t hurt enough to be one of my bones. That’s not to say it didn’t sting. I took another hit, and my mind wrapped it away so I barely felt it.
The next cracking noise came a good three seconds later, independent of any blow. The others must have heard it too, since they stopped hitting me.
The next sound was a solid crunch, from the direction of the tables by the door. The unicorn gathered his magic around his horn again, but he didn’t point it at me. Everything was quiet for a few long seconds.
Then the door burst into splinters. I didn’t even hear the wood. All I heard was the voice; or rather, the roar.
“One chance. Get away from her.”
Malt had lost his weird get-up, and with it, his equinity. I could tell it was the same creature I’d met earlier in the night, but now I felt wrong to think of him as a pony.
A burst of red magic from the unicorn flew across the room, striking the side of Malt’s neck, and burning a hole straight through it. You might think less of me for a smoking joke, but it didn’t kill the fanged monster at the entrance to the club. It didn’t even phase him. He just tightened his gaze, and widened his lips to reveal more of his vicious fangs.
“Wrong move.”
The last time, I’d been facing away when Malt moved faster than a real pony ought to. That time, I saw him. He raked the jagged edges of his wings down into the floor, tearing the linoleum with an unbelievable strength. The floor cracked and twisted, as he braced himself like a racer on the blocks. Then he snapped them back against his side, pushing with the strength of his legs as well as his wings; not so much flying as pouncing at my attackers. His shaggy shape wrapped around the unicorn’s upper body, and his momentum pulled them both over the bar.
In the confusion, I pushed up with my forelegs and bucked at the earth pony standing over me. For all the hits I had taken, I barely felt anything from the motion except the satisfaction of my hind hooves catching his chin. I was a lot smaller, but that barely made a difference. The force flipped him head over hooves onto his back, out cold and eyes spinning.
His pegasus friend wasn’t as fast to react as I was to recover. I put a hoof between his eyes, and then I swept his legs out from under him with a wing. He staggered to his side, and I laid down on top of him, pressing a foreleg across his throat and standing on one of his wings. I knew it hurt him, but he’d be fine in a few days as long as he didn’t try to fly with my hoof there.
“How did you know my name?” I asked him.
Before he could answer, we both heard a sound from behind the bar. For lack of better term, it was wet. What little struggling had been going on stopped. My imagination took over. If I had anything left in my stomach, I would have lost it then.
The stallion I had restrained panicked, shaking and trying to get away. “Let me go! He’s going to eat us!”
I was inclined to agree, but a growling voice beat me to the response.
“Answer the mare’s questions,” Malt ordered, climbing over the bar with his fangs once more well inside his mouth. His neck was impossibly whole, save for a patch of skin where his coat was missing. As I watched, the shaggy brown hair grew back into place. “Or I might.”
The struggling stopped, and the stallion turned to me. “O-okay. Uh, I, um… the unicorn s-said we needed to g-go to your a-a-”
“You took the necklace?” I snapped. “Where is it?”
Malt’s eyes shifted to me, but he said nothing. The quivering pegasus didn’t take long to reply. “W-we gave it t-to the u-u-unicorn.”
I glanced up at the bar, but Malt shook his head. “Not him.”
“N-no. Not B-brown. T-the one who… who told us your name. H-he said you w-were supposed to b-bring it t-to him. B-but you didn’t. S-so we broke in and t-took it. And t-then we gave it t-t-to him, and he t-told us to meet h-him in the p-palace gardens w-when we had killed you.”
Malt’s brow quirked. “He knew?” When I turned to look at the creature, he waved a hoof in front of his face. “You’re doing well, Eyewitness. Keep digging.”
If it had been a pony saying that, I might not have listened. I didn’t really like knowing that he knew something and was keeping it from me, but I settled for trying to dig it out of the pegasus. “The pony who met me is dead…” It occurred to me then. “I didn’t actually meet Wax.” I looked the pegasus straight in the eyes. His frantic breath was hot on my foreleg. “What does he look like?”
“Uh… Y-yellow, with a d-darker mane. Thinner, I guess… a l-l-little short…”
That explained a lot. He looked like Wax; at least enough from a distance that I could make the mistake. I wouldn’t call Wax short, but scrawny would have done him right. I had to wonder why he’d spared me… unless Malt had shown up. I turned to the creature nearby and wondered if he’d saved my life twice, or just the once. Either way, I decided I wasn’t going to say anything about my theory until I knew more.
I took my hooves away from the stallion on the floor, and almost immediately, Malt struck him on the brow. It didn’t look like a hard blow, but it knocked the pony out.
“Shining Armor’s ponies will pick these ones up,” he told me, delivering a similar blow to Cruncher’s brow.
“I had him,” I muttered.
Malt nodded. “You did a decent interrogation. But you needed me for the fight.” He tapped his chest with a hoof, and then looked down, as if slowly realizing that the absence of his old-timey getup also meant the absence of his cigarettes.
I looked away from him, but I had to admit he was right. “Thanks.”
“Someday, you’ll repay me,” he muttered. I’d heard better versions of ‘you’re welcome’, but I wasn’t going to say that out loud.
He made his way to the remnants of the door, ignoring the sniffling behind the bar that I’d only just noticed, and gestured with a leathery wing into the rain. “By the way: I was right.”
“What?”
He gestured to the carnage of The Swing Set’s main room. “You ran off on your own, and we had a problem.”
I grumbled, but he took off before I could say anything. Ahead, amidst the fresh November rain, I could see the ivory towers of what I called Celestia’s palace. I had to remind myself that she wasn’t the only pony who owned it anymore, but as I pursued Malt, it occurred to me that the Nightmare Night stories might not be quite as fake as Celestia’s sister wanted everypony to believe.
I saw the unicorn who looked like Wax sitting under a weeping willow beside a pool. Floating on the water were tiny candles , which bobbed gently with the ripples from the rain. I trimmed my feathers to glide down quietly, and landed behind the tree alongside Malt. He patted me on the back with a leather wing that seemed just as cold as I was, and gestured for me to go ahead. He said nothing, but I understood that he meant to be there if something went wrong.
I hesitated only for a second before walking forward. The curtain of the willow’s leaves parted for my wing, taking me out of the rain and some of the chill. I approached slowly, but he heard my wet hooves on the grass.
“Have you taken care of her?”
I froze. It wasn’t possible. I knew that voice.
“Wax?”
He must have had the same thoughts. His head snapped like a bowstring, looking at me with intense, shaking eyes. “No. No, you aren’t supposed to be here. Why are you even alive? You can’t―”
“I can’t what, Wax?” I paced forward, in part so that I could stop him if he tried magic, but mostly because I wanted an explanation. “You were dead!”
“Me?” He reached out a hoof toward me, slowly, like he still couldn’t believe it.
I nodded. “I saw. The blood all over your chest. They drew a chalk outline; I woke up sprawled halfway over it. Even the guardsponies―”
“It was for you, Eye.” He didn’t shout, and his voice didn’t shake, but his hoof was going mad. “From right here.”
I looked down to where his hoof had reached, and I felt his coat. It was warm. So much warmer than mine. He brushed down on the dried blood; it came away easily with the water from the rain. Beneath, I saw it. A slit, two inches long, right over my heart.
It answered so many questions, but I could have filled a library with the new ones that arose. For a moment, we were both paralyzed, standing there staring at one another and struggling to come to grips with the impossible.
Had he stabbed me too shallow? That had to be it. The chill was an infection, or a sickness from lying in the air. Right? Dead ponies don’t just get up and walk around.
After a half a minute, emotions started to catch up with the greed for answers. “We worked all those jobs. The bank in Trottingham. The stagecoaches.” That was a whisper. “We were going to be set. We were going to get out.” That was a sentence, as cold as I was. “All I had to do was meet you on the rooftop with the necklace. But you betrayed me.” That was angry, but controlled. “You tried to kill me!”
“It wasn’t supposed to hurt!” he yelled, as if I were somehow the one who’d done wrong. “You weren’t supposed to get up again, or start talking to that pegasus who showed up. And you were supposed to have brought the necklace! I couldn’t risk him figuring out what had really happened, or that I was alive. It was supposed to be easy; just one last job and then I’d be out…”
That was when I broke. My hoof whistled in the air. The sound finally snapped his stupor, and he recoiled from me. He wasn’t fast enough to dodge the first hoof. “Where’s the necklace?” I shouted, as punched him in the face. “Where?” Again, and again. Blow after blow, he didn’t say a word. I gave him the chance. I held my hoof back, but he wouldn’t speak, and time and again, my emotions beat my patience.
“Stop!” He finally managed, struggling to hold up his hooves. He was bleeding, just a bit. Not nearly as much as I had. “Please, Eye, I didn’t―”
“Did you want the money all for yourself?!” I shouted in his face.
“There was never any money!”
I held back my hoof, panting as the chill went in and out of my lungs. I didn’t want to believe it. Would you? I felt my beach house and my peaceful, legal life slipping away. A few hours earlier, I wouldn’t have even considered the words. But with a hole in my chest, and my whole life disappearing before my eyes, I wasn’t in my right mind.
“What does that even mean?”
“Please!” He begged, gesturing feebly to my waiting hoof. “I already gave it to them, Eye! They threatened Candy!”
She was somepony important to him, but my mind couldn’t grab a face. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t buying his convenient lie. I swung my hoof down. It stopped behind my head, before it had even come into view..
I struggled, but the hoof holding mine was too strong. It wasn’t hard to guess who, without even looking. “Let go of me, Malt!”
“Take care when thou assume to whom thou speak.”
It was a mare’s voice. Not loud, but in its own way terribly, terribly powerful. I turned backward, and saw the cosmos, mere inches from my face. It swirled, and danced, and wrapped around a beautiful, haunting, impossible face of a mare nearly twice my height with a coat the color of a summer night sky.
“Princess?!”
She glanced at me briefly, and then turned her eyes toward Wax. I realized the terror of her power not in moving an enormous stone, but in something far simpler. There was no delay at all. One moment, her horn was plain blue. The next, a bolt of what I might call watercolor lightning struck the stallion before me. He fell onto his back.
I shook in her grip. Had she killed him? I wanted my answers. She wouldn’t release me, but she did turn to me. “Stop.”
I didn’t, at first. She simply waited, and the truth was that I couldn’t do anything about it. She had all the time in the world, and the luxury of waiting for me to give up.
I didn’t stop for her. I stopped for the eyes. The little army of slitted eyes that walked under the willow by the pond. Yellow, green, purple, blue, silver, red, and more. Creatures like Malt with bat wings. Unicorn-things with horns that curved up and backward, ending in viciously pointed spikes that glowed in the same tone as their eyes. Monsters whose hooves ended in what looked like claws, digging into the ground with every step.
Malt walked up to me, and put a hoof on my shoulder. It was firm, but it didn’t try to move me. I had to imagine it was his attempt to be gentle. It didn’t calm me on its own, but it did finally get me to realize how stupid I was being, fighting Luna like a newborn foal.
The instant I stopped, she released me. I didn’t know the first thing about meeting royalty, so I put my hooves down, and bowed until my muzzle was touching the grass.
Luna spoke again with that voice of controlled power. “Ninth Brother, is she able to perform the duties expected of her?”
Malt answered the question; it wasn’t hard to recognize his tired-sounding voice. “I think she’ll do fine.”
“Do fine at what?” I asked him.
My only acquaintance among the monsters walked forward, looking the part of the detective with all the answers. “I was never interested in the necklace, or whatever else you stole. I came to see if you could do our job.” One of his wings gestured to the other creatures standing silently around me. His eyes turned to Luna. “She did a good job reading me, and a better job lying her way past Armor’s guard. She even lost me at her apartment, for a bit. Not terrible in a fight, either. She’s smart enough, and she’s got guts.”
“But she only figured it all out when the unicorn told her?” It was the first time I’d heard one of the other pony-things speak: she was a little unicorn creature with a surprisingly gentle voice for all her fangs. “She did not even know she had perished?”
“That’s mostly my fault,” Malt muttered. “Wax here faked his death when I showed up. Some spell to hide his body heat and whatever. I could smell he was still alive, but I figured I’d let her find out on her own. Which she did. She’ll do.”
“Then all that which remains to be seen is if she will.” Luna spoke the last word with a chilling force. Her hoof moved toward me, found my chin, and dragged it up so that I was staring into her eyes. “What is thy name?”
The olde time Equiish threw me off for a moment, and my delay seemed to irritate her. I picked up quickly when her brow tightened. “I’m Eyewitness, Princess.”
“Eyewitness?” Her head tilted slightly. “And thy Destined Mark is an eye. What manner of blessing does it represent?”
I had an easier time with her odd speech on the second pass, and I was expecting it a bit more. “Uh… I see crimes a lot.” It was stupid, given what Malt had revealed, but it was also a habit I’d picked up over all the times I’d been asked about my special talent.
“How do thou see crimes?”
“Well,” I turned to Malt briefly, and realized that he had to have heard everything anyway. Maybe they all had. “The way I always said it, Princess, was that I was always a witness to a lot of crimes. Because I’m a thief. Really, I notice things about ponies. I can see it in their faces when they’re lying to me, or what they’re expecting, or what they want to hear. It helps me talk my way into places.”
Luna nodded. “We had known of thine ‘occupation’.” There was an audible disdain for the last word she’d thrown out, as if she wanted the idea out of her mind as quickly as possible. “Thou spent thine life taking the hard earnings of others in order to bring thyself joy. These actions were not out of need, but simple desire. Greed. We have seen thy soul, Eyewitness. And we find it wanting.”
My heart stopped as she paused, and turned to the pond. Was she threatening me with Tartarus? I only lost those terrible thoughts when her wing beckoned me over. “We shall be utterly frank. Thine life was taken this night.”
It was strange. A simple sentence that matched what I’d been told and feared was all I’d gotten. Yet in a way, that was far easier to accept, even if I disliked it, than the doubts and disbelief I’d come to on my own, and through Wax.
“We judged thy soul and found it wanting, for thine greed and thy apathy towards the damage of thine actions. But we also saw the spark of redemption.” She gestured to the moon. Her moon, I suppose. “We, of all ponies, ought know of such things. So now, we offer thou a chance to redeem thyself. Thou shalt join the ranks of our Night Guard, or thou shalt accept thy fate.”
“The Night Guard?” I asked, looking back. “You mean like Malt?”
Princess Luna cocked her head, sort of like a cat. “I recall no ‘Malt’...”
One of the bat-winged ponies approached the Princess. She was a mare, taller and more athletic than me, with a grayish coat and a mane that hung down over one of her eyes. “Princess, ‘Malt’ is a name Ninth Brother uses.”
Luna seemed concerned. “Ninth Brother, thou have given thyself a name?” Malt showed no particular emotion, but he gave a firm nod. The Princess seemed upset. “We shall discuss this later.”
“So you’re going to turn me into one of those… things?” I asked her, once she turned back to me.
“They are called thestrals, and they come from a magic older than Equestria itself.” Luna looked me in the eye. “And thou can already count thyself amongst their number.”
I shook my head. “But I’m not… I don’t have creepy wings, or―”
“That’s a matter of appetite,” a rather small unicorn thestral, coated nearly in black, told me. “Have you tried to eat?”
I nodded. “But I couldn’t…”
“We only eat one thing,” another thestral added. He was a pegasus, and absolutely towering, in a midnight blue that seemed to go well with the Princess. “Your first meal will grant you our magic and make you one of us. The Night Guard.”
The thestral mare―the one who’d ratted out Malt―picked up where the giant left off. “We give up our names and our lives so that we can avoid the temptations that brought us to this state. Your family will be given a false body to bury, if you have one, but you will not see them again. From now, you will serve the Princess for one hundred years, or until she deems that you’ve earned and proven your redemption. Then you will be released to the Summer Lands. If you betray your duties, or turn back to your old ways…” She let the sentence trail off, and waved a hoof away, but it wasn’t hard to guess what she meant. “You do not sleep. You will only need to eat once a year, and drink perhaps once a month, unless you are wounded. But there are prices.”
I nodded for her to continue, but she deferred to the unicorn thestral who’d spoken earlier.
“If you die as a Night Guard, your soul goes nowhere. No Summer Lands of paradise, no fires of Tartarus. You wander this land for eternity, going slowly mad, until you wind up like a Windigo, or Draconequus, or some other horrible spirit and one of us has to hunt you down.”
I wanted time to take that one in; to think. I’d never been much of a religious mare, in case you hadn’t guessed. The Night Guard didn’t give me a chance. The thestral mare picked up again.
“The other price is what you have to eat, and what you have to drink.” She smiled, and licked her lips in a way that sent shivers down my already frozen spine. “Vamponies weren’t something that just got made up, after all.”
I turned to Princess Luna, mouth hanging open. “Do they just kill―”
“There has not been a public execution in Canterlot since our return, Eyewitness. Nor in Bitaly, or Trottingham, or Prance. We will not condone the deaths of innocents, but if there were no ponies who did evil, there would be no need for the Night Guard. Take this one.” She turned toward Wax, and lowered her horn to point toward him. There was no magic; only the significance that she chose not to use a wing or a leg. “We see no spark of redemption in him. He hath committed murder―and not just against thee. As co-sovereign of Equestria, we sentence him to die this night.”
Luna turned to me. “Dost thou accept thy place amongst our Night Guard, to serve us and earn redemption?
I swallowed, and nodded.
Luna nodded in turn. “Good. Twelfth Sister, the elder Night Guard will care for thou, guide thou, and assign thou in thy service.” Her wing swept toward the assembled thestrals, who gave me various nods, winks, and blank stares. “Until we speak again.” And in a brilliant flash of blue and stars, she was gone.
Everything was quiet, then. There were crickets in the garden somewhere, and the little drops of rain that couldn’t seem to put out the candles on the pond. I stood there, freezing in my own dead body that didn’t seem to fit me, until the same mare who spoke earlier walked over to my side. She said nothing, but her wing wrapped around my shoulder. Somehow, the leathery flesh didn’t feel as cold.
“What do I do now?” I asked, finally, unable to take the silence.
“You join us,” she told me.
I shuddered. I could guess what she meant, but I didn’t want to think about it. “What’s that supposed to even mean?”
Malt walked over to my other side. His hoof took my shoulders away from the mare, and he guided me to Wax’s unconscious form. I shook in his grip, but he held me steady.
“It’s still Nightmare Night, isn’t it, Eye?”
I didn’t say anything, but we both knew the answer.
This time, the coppery smell didn’t sicken me. When it was done, I wandered over to the pond to wash off my muzzle. I didn’t feel a thing as I rubbed away the last of that coppery ooze, but when I was done, I looked at myself in the puddle and I saw a stranger.
I never said the good guys lost. But the monsters won, and the pony did get eaten.
Oh, and next time we talk: I get in trouble for going by ‘Eyewitness.’ The Princess prefers Twelfth Sister.
