Chapter Five

New Additions

Twilight wasn’t sure what had happened, but something drastic must have changed. She had without warning been woken up and escorted to one of the houses in the city, distinct only by the fact that it was set slightly apart from the rest. She had received no more visits from Flim or Flam, nor had any other ponies bothered her, except to bring meals three times a day. This in and of itself was odd as until then her meals had been sporadic and inconsistent. Not to mention nowhere near as appetising.

She sat staring at her breakfast, which consisted of a lovely looking daffodil sandwich with a healthy side of hay and a glass of orange juice in utter bewilderment.

She had been in her cell like any other evening when Flam had arrived and escorted her to… where exactly? She found she couldn’t remember. Some vague recollections about some blissfully painless nightmares floated around in her head, but she had awoken to them dragging her here.

A light. Yes, she remembered a bright white, soothing light that had washed away the pain. She sought it out now and found it, sitting in the back of her mind like an idle guardian, waiting for its need to spring into action to arise.

Twilight glanced down to her stub of a leg with a wince, both of pain and of sadness. Another wince followed when she turned further around and looked at the mangy tuft that was all that remained of her beautiful, comforting tail. Her eyes began to water and tears threatened to fall, but the light pulsed in the back of her mind and she felt the sorrow lessen.

Was this Celestia’s light, somehow sent across all the distance from Canterlot? Twilight couldn’t see any other explanation, though if she was capable of sending this calming radiance, why hadn’t Celestia come to rescue her yet?

None of it seemed to add up, so Twilight concentrated on picking slowly at her breakfast, suddenly bored with all the nothing going on around her.

It wasn’t until mid afternoon that day, over a week since she’d been moved out of the prison cell, that somepony came for her. Flam himself, knocking on her door as if she was anything other than a prisoner, with him as her captor. She couldn’t keep the blank stare off her face as he stood on the doorstep, clearly waiting for an invitation to enter. The scene was so absurd that she would have burst out laughing had she not forgotten how.

Flam seemed confused himself, even moreso when he said: “If you’ll come with me Princess, I’ve got something to give you”. WIth that, he turned around and walked a little distance from the house before turning around, no longer just assuming that she was following.

Twilight was very tempted to not follow, just to see what the vile unicorn would do, but her better sense of judgement overruled the urge and she limped out the door. Walking with three legs was possible, but it wasn’t easy, or quick.

It was a long walk through the city that Flam took her on, but a peaceful one. It felt as if an enormous weight had been lifted off her withers, like she had been granted a great freedom. She stopped several times to look at the scenery or at market stalls, not able to suppress a worried glance to her companion for permission. He was not throwing her food like a dog, either and she picked and ate a few pieces of fruit by herself.

Eventually, they arrived at a large building somewhere inside the industrial district, just after noon. The term ‘large’ did not do the colossal structure justice, however. It stood taller than any of the surrounding buildings, consisting of many stories, roofed with curved domes. The entire exterior was spotless white with the exception of the windows, which were all black-tinted and opaque.

Flam barely gave a glance to the wonder of architecture before him, simply striding in through two tall glass doors that opened autonomously before him.

The room they entered was just as clean and white as the exterior, with a high ceiling featuring a bright light suspended from a long cable. A tall reception desk awaited just inside, at which sat a mare who was busy writing some sort of letter.

She did not look up as the pair entered, though it wasn’t long before she signed the sheet with a flourish, folded it in half and slid it into an envelope, which she then teleported away with her magic. Only then did she look up and, upon seeing Flam, gave a courteous nod of her head.

Flam trotted up to the desk and asked in a polite tone: “Is he ready?”

At the mare’s nod, Flam made a delighted noise before heading off through a door on the side wall. This turned into several windowless corridors and very soon Twilight had completely lost her sense of direction. She couldn’t tell if that was the intention behind making the path to wherever they were going so convoluted, or if it was simply a result of the layout of the building.

They came to a halt in front of an unassuming door, as white as the walls with no other blemishes or markings. It slid open silently, simply moving sideways into the wall and the pair walked in.

Inside stood Flim and Twilight flinched and couldn’t stop herself from cowering a little behind her escort, the somewhat nicer of the evil twins. The object of her terror merely rolled his eyes, turned his back and started arranging some tools on a shiny steel bench.

It was then that Twilight took stock of the room she had just entered and just then, almost ran straight back out screaming, as she would have had Flam not moved to block the doorway.

The room was lined with benches, all of them lined with tools and knives and jars. From the walls hung saws and scalpels and scissors and directly in the center, near where Flim was arranging a set of tiny screw drivers and pliers, was an angled table with four manacles designed to hold a pony in place.

It was exactly like her torture room up the mountain, if a bit more sterile. Heart pounding, vision narrowing, Twilight almost blacked out with fear and residual pain, but a brief flash from the light in her mind swept it all aside.

Suddenly calm, she took a closer look at the contents of the room. There was none of the cruder instruments of the mountaintop torture chamber, like the clubs and hammers. The saws were less toothy and more precise and there were no knives or cleavers or any of those more savage cutting implements. This led Twilight to the conclusion that this was a surgery, rather than a room of torture, but what could they be doing with her in here?

Flam was gazing admiringly at the table next to the manacled bench, or rather, at what was on it. A pristine white cloth covered something long and thin, and when Flim pulled the cover off, Twilight couldn’t make sense of what was beneath.

The first thing she noticed was that it was entirely made out of metal. precisely cut overlapping plates formed in a vaguely cylindrical shape, jointed in two places. At one end, there was a vicious-looking claw-like thing and from the other protruded a huge multitude of needle-thin wires.

All in all, it looked like a clawed leg.

Oh…

Flim and Flam only smiled, at each other and at her, before manoeuvring her onto the bench and strapping her in. She was too dazed to even try and resist. Flim approached with the leg held in his magic and slotted it neatly onto Twilight’s stump.

Then the real torture began.

~~~~~~~~~~

She had screamed. Celestia help her she had screamed. It had been more painful than any of the other tortures. Worse than the cuts, worse than the broken bones or the burns or the tartarus-damned spray they used on new wounds. Not even the newfound light in her mind had been able to do much to dull the agony.

What was probably only several hours had seemed like an eternity as they took each of the hundreds of tiny wires and, using magic finer and more precise than anything Twilight had ever seen before, they had attached them all individually, one by one, to what remained of her leg.

“We’re attaching these wires to your nerve endings!” one of the brothers had shouted during the operation. Twilight’s mind, even nearly blinded by pain as it was, still saved that information away for later analysis.

She had struggled and writhed about on the bench, but the shackles held her firmly so she could barely move, let alone get free. Her mind had nearly shut down from the agony several times, but always just as she was about to achieve blessed unconsciousness, that sickly sweet smell would pervade her senses and drag her unceremoniously back to the pain.

It had been three days since that nightmare, many multitudes worse than any mountaintop torture session and still she lay in a daze on the bed in the house they had dumped her in. They took care of her. Many ponies came and went, fed her and bathed her, gave her water. One had explained that they couldn’t give her anything for the pain because that would dull the nerve endings in her leg, which could undo all the work that had been done.

The white light was a constant presence in her mind, always shining to take only the absolute worst of the pain away. Only the worst, because even it knew that if the nerves didn’t take to the wires they had inserted, they would have to do the operation all over again.

It was an uncomfortable compromise, uncomfortable being the understatement of the century, but Twilight endured. She endured because of her friends and family that were waiting for her at home. She gritted her teeth and bore the pain, even managing to walk around a little. If she exerted herself too much, blood would start welling out of the join between her flesh and the metal, at which point her caretakers would politely but firmly escort her back to bed.

Every night, Twilight would lie awake, grasping for her tail that was no longer there, unable to sleep with the terrible fear that would grip her mind every time she felt herself drowsing off. She wasn’t afraid of dying in her sleep, as she almost had after she lost her leg. Instead, she feared the nightmares, the pain and torment she had experienced almost every night of her imprisonment so far.

She also feared that she would wake up back on the torture table with a scalpel or bludgeon or cleaver poised above her ready to strike, that her days in the city had been a dream and her return to daily torture and pain the reality. Eventually exhaustion would overcome her and she would succumb to sleep’s embrace, empty dreams of dark rooms and faceless ponies with multicoloured eyes playing through her mind to be forgotten on waking the next day.

Every now and then Flim or Flam would stop by to check on her, make sure she had everything she needed and to inspect their work, to make sure that the new leg was taking to her body. They encouraged her to get more bed rest, though never threatening to chain her to a wall as Twilight thought they would. The brothers were civil and well-mannered, even quite respectful and all it served was to confuse her even more.

One thing she found hard to get used to was her ‘claw’. It had four long talons protruding out the front, with one shorter but thicker out the back and to the side for balance. It was designed to clench and grip things, similar to Spike’s claws or the front appendages of a griffin. She was forced to limp around, almost as bad as when she only had three legs. Her new limb was obviously made for walking on, if only she could get the claw to cooperate. All it seemed to want to do was clench into a ball and Twilight was only just starting to get the hang of moving her talons, or ‘fingers’ as she had heard Spike sometimes refer to his as.

One other thing that plagued Twilight’s nightmares was Spike. Her poor little baby Spike, turned into a monster for a twisted experiment. Was he even still alive? If it weren’t for the magic inhibitor the brothers had left on her horn, she would long have blasted her way out of this tartarus-cursed house to search for him.

As a test, she once attempted to give a brief spark of her magic, just to see if the block was still in place, but had found herself completely paralysed with fear. Her limbs locked up and her mind went blank, all spells forgotten in a haze of panic. She had lain on the floor shivering and shaking with sobs until one of her caretakers had carried her back to bed. She never even thought about trying again.

It was only a few more days before the bleeding stopped, her veins sealed up by some magic the brothers had concocted. She could finally walk around on her own indefinitely without needing to lie down every now and then. It was a few days after that when Flim and Flam both appeared outside the house early one morning, Flam slightly respectfully, but Flim was obviously wanting to be elsewhere.

“Come with us Princess,” Flam said, not quite a command, but not something that could be ignored.

Without a word, Twilight followed, not sure what to expect. She was quite surprised when the twins led her out of the city, into the surrounding area. Twilight heard their destination, long before she saw it. Shouted commands echoed around the countryside as, upon rounding a corner of the city wall, Twilight beheld an enormous flat area, bordered on one side by the wall, another by the mountain face.

Ranks upon ranks of ponies were there, wearing identical mottled camouflage vests, formed up in regimental lines being put through their paces of on-the-spot exercises by several ponies wearing slightly different vests, who were somehow shouting commands in perfect synchronisation despite being hundreds of pony-lengths apart. Every pony there was a unicorn and not a single one so much as batted an eye as Twilight was hoofed a vest and led to a gap already waiting for her in the front row.

“You will train, Princess.” Flim stated monotonically before striding off with his brother without another word spoken. Twilight hesitated a moment, before her vest was seized in a creamy coloured aura and forced over her head.

“Are you hard of hearing recruit!?” Demanded a burly unicorn wearing a commander’s vest who seemed completely indifferent to the fact that he was addressing an Alicorn.

Twilight blinked. “Um, no?”

The same aura wrapped itself around a large chunk of her mane, which had only just started to regrow, and forced her head to the ground with a jerk. “Then listen to the sergeants and push up!”

Twilight forced her head back up and was about to make an indignant reply, but she felt a twinge behind her horn at the cold glare of the sergeant and her blood ran cold.

Doing as she was told, Twilight followed the example of the fellow trainees around her did push-ups to the timing given by the shouting ponies. Several minutes later, Twilight was experiencing the odd sensation of having one leg completely exhausted, while the other continued on, endless in its mechanical endurance.

Next, it was on to jogging. The sergeants gathered everypony up into loose formation and they all ran steady circles around the enormous area. It was tough going as Twilight’s years of reading books and avoiding physical exercise began to show. Even with the earth pony’s endurance granted her by her Alicorn nature she was panting hard before too long.

After an hour or so of jogging laps, Twilight was relieved when a halt was called, but no rest was waiting for them. They were back on the ground doing sit-ups before Twilight could even stop hacking and wheezing for breath.

After sit-ups it was on to what Twilight equated as crouching for an extended period of time before standing back up again and repeating the process, like she had seen Rainbow Dash doing on occasion. Dash had called them ‘squats’.

After a very short length of time, after several other core body exercises and cardio-fitness training, Twilight was hurting all over, but every time she so much as slowed down, one of the sergeants would glare at her and a twinge of pain would blossom behind her horn, jarring her into picking up the pace again.

Very soon, Twilight lost all feeling in her muscles, retaining just enough control to complete the monotony of exercises that continued on throughout the entire day.

And the day after that. And every day for the entire week, with every third day a half day of training, with the other half as a brief respite to rest her tired muscles. Every day Twilight would be escorted from her townhouse to the training field, every day she spent either drilling dull physical fitness or running through gruelling obstacle courses with the scores of other ponies, not once ever speaking to a single one of them. She managed to keep track of the days, being exposed to the sun, but Twilight soon lost herself in the crowd, another grunt in the mob, another brick in the wall.

When Flim and Flam gave a speech about a month later, she found herself cheering along with the other unicorns at the declarations of assured victory, how the ‘soft Equestrian Princesses’ couldn’t hope to match the might of the united unicorn race.

Part of her, buried by the weight of torture and training, screamed and thrashed, denying the words coming out of her own mouth with a vehemence that would have surprised her had she been aware of it.

Eventually, after what seemed like months, they stopped all the meaningless drills, as she could maintain the push-ups and sit-ups and anything else they threw at her for as long as they wanted her to. It was at that point that, every day after a quick hour-long warm up jog, they would do live fire training exercises, crawling through mud under barbed wire whilst dozens of unicorns sent hundreds of energy blasts over their heads. Some ponies died, losing their nerve and sometimes bladders in the middle of the field, jumping to their hooves and getting blasted. On more than one occasion it was the pony nearest to Twilight who leapt up, only to cover her with their blood and misery as they died.

The first time, she was shocked, unable to move for several minutes after a grey-coated, brown-maned unicorn had begun screaming in horror before leaping up and taking a bolt of pure magical force to the head. She lay there staring at the corpse that was missing the crown of its skull as the light died from his eyes, until she felt the familiar twinge in her horn and she knew, somewhere, somepony wanted her to keep moving. She had wept for the stallion as she crawled, her tears swallowed by the combination of dirt, water and blood she was crawling through.

After the twelfth pony lost their life nearby, she stopped grieving. After the fortieth, she almost couldn’t bring herself to care. They were all faceless to her, without voice or personality, without independent thought or emotion. Just as she was starting to become.

The only time she felt like herself was back in her house where she still couldn’t sleep on the bed. She lay curled up in a ball against the wall in the far corner every night, as far away from the door as she could get, clutching at the ragged ends of the tail she no longer had and trying desperately not to fall asleep. She would cry, sob and shudder until the early hours of the morning when sleep would finally claim her, dragging her into a world full of faceless ponies occupying distant memories that she could no longer fully recall or claim as her own.

~~~~~~~~~~

Twilight couldn’t have said how much time had passed - days, months, years even, she didn’t know - when, during their normal morning walk to what Twilight assumed would be another day of drills and training, Flam deviated from their usual path immediately out of the front door. The change was jarring, shocking her into an unusual sense of awareness that she normally lost by the time she left the house. She turned to Flam to ask:

“Where are we going?”

“You’ll see Princess, you’ll see” was the only reply she received.

They were walking for several minutes before Twilight started to realise what route they were taking. She said nothing as they continued and before long, they arrived at a familiar building.

The large concrete front with small, high windows lining all sides dominated the sky as they approached the warehouse. In her mind’s eye, Twilight could almost see the lines upon lines of huge metal ponies walking out of the massive sliding doors that now confronted her.

She suppressed a shudder at the image as Flam led the way inside.

The lights clacked on in a confusing ruckus and Twilight was expecting to see more of the metal monstrosities. She was right.

But not in the way she expected.

Instead of hundreds, there was only one, different from the others she had seen. It was bigger, standing almost half again as tall as the others. The first thing Twilight noticed was that it was designed to look like her. It had a mane and tail that were shaped just like hers used to be, even displaying the highlights in slightly darker shades of silver metal.

The resemblance was unnerving and uncanny, even down to the intricately detailed wings that were folded along the pony’s flanks. Twilight realised with a start, that she had barely thought of her wings since, well… she couldn’t remember. She stretched them experimentally and winced at how still they were with disuse.

Flam stood quietly, almost reverently, as she stared. The first questions she wanted to ask all involved why: why did they have a huge metal version of her sitting in their warehouse? Why did they choose now to show it to her? Why show it to her at all? And why did the shining light in her mind suddenly feel a great deal stronger?

Instead, all she did was stare wordlessly as the stallion grew more and more uncomfortable. Eventually, this seemed to grow too unbearable for him and he broke the silence.

“This one is yours Princess. Your very own MAC Commander unit.”

It took a few moments for this to sink in.

“Mine?”

“Yes. This machine is the pinnacle of Unicornia engineering and magical might. Her shell is made of overlapping plates of unicorn steel, crafted and aligned to allow for fluid, perfect movement. The inner workings, however, are a combination of mechanics, magic and bio-organics. Your own flesh and blood was used to grow these parts.

Twilight found herself confused. Not at the technical aspects, part of her mind was listening and understanding with rapt attention and fascination. The part she was confused about was another ‘why’ question.

Why give this to her?

It was clearly staggeringly powerful, a mighty weapon that could change the face of any war. Twilight had studied many of Equestria’s ancient wars and even just one of these could have won any one of them in a day or two, when many of them had lasted years.

Surely the brothers did not think that she would fight on their side. Looking back, everything they had done to her had been torture. From the eternity she had spent on the concrete slab to her sudden confinement in her house. The new leg, while convenient, had been torture too. Even her training, for a time, had been arduous and exhausting. Surely they couldn’t think that they could make a turncoat out of her, especially after all they had done.

“Why me Flam?” he gave her a puzzled look.

“Why Princess, who else?” A proud fire began to grow in his eyes as he spoke. “You are the only being who is even capable of powering up this beautiful piece of technomagical genius. With this at our head, even the fabled Diarchy of Equestria will be unable to stop us.”

Twilight gaped. “You’re mad! I would never do that!” was her automatic response. At least, that’s what she wanted it to be. Instead, she found herself saying: “of course, none will be able to oppose us.”

An odd sensation began crawling its way through Twilight’s mind. It felt like a bug or a worm was crawling through her head, between the folds of her consciousness. She suddenly started feeling like the idea of leading an army against Equestria was a perfectly reasonable and appealing one. Part of her rallied against this idea, driven by the light that was still growing in her mind as well, creating a war between ideas and presences inside her head.

Flam was completely oblivious as he ushered her over to a lift that sped them up towards a platform situated behind the pony’s head. As they arrived, a hatch opened in the back of its skull, revealing a small, completely empty space. The cavity was shaped vaguely like the inside of a pony’s skull, but had a perfectly flat floor. The room wasn’t very tall, only about half again as tall as Twilight was and about twice as long. Flam motioned for her to enter.

The doorway was thick, four to five hoof-lengths of steel that explained the cramped space. Twilight’s body was on autopilot as she stepped inside as Flam slammed the hatch behind her.

Instantly, the internal war in her mind ceased – as did all other activity – as a brilliant, icy consciousness washed over her, completely overshadowing her own. A feeling then began to grow, a feeling that was not her own: contentment. A feeling of satisfaction, growing as the new consciousness pulsed in time with the light in her mind, until they merged and Twilight realised they had been one and the same all along.

Finally

The thought echoed through Twilight’s entire being. It was distinctly feminine and contained a mixture of her own youthful energy and Celestia’s timeless wisdom and compassion.

Hello there, little one.

Twilight glanced around her. “Um, hello? Who are you? Where are you?”

I am all around you, and part of you, as you are now a part of me.

Twilight’s mind was blank for a few moments, before suddenly becoming engorged with questions, but she was good at dealing with that and quickly had her mind ordered into a list sorted by priority.

“Who are you?” she asked again.

I have no name, the voice replied. None but you even know that I exist.

“No name?” Twilight mused. “How can you not have a name? Everypony has a name.”

Nopony has deemed to grant me a title, little one. Though perhaps a suitable name such as Skylia would be appropriate.

Twilight recalled her lessons at Celestia’s School for Gifted Unicorns, as well as her later personal study into ancient Equestria. Skylia meant ‘Sky Guardian’ or sometimes ‘Light Guardian’ or ‘Guardian of Light’ in Ancient Equine.

“Appropriate indeed,” she conceded. “Well Skylia, it’s nice to meet you. How do you even know ancient equi-“ Twilight was interrupted as a stab of pain shot its way through her mind, sending her reeling, stumbling into the wall near the door.

“Princess!” Flam called from outside. “Princess, can you hear me?”

“Y-yes!” she shouted back. “I can hear you.”

“Good! I’m going to start the power up sequence!”

Twilight was in the middle of wondering what this meant when a whine began from below, faint at first, but grew and soon it shook her from her teeth to her hooves.

Suddenly, the whine stopped and the inside of the cockpit came alive with action. The walls began to glow with a magic violet light as some kind of gleaming silver apparatus started to rise out of the floor. Several equish words flashed in amongst the light, too quick to read or follow, before all simultaneously changing to a perfect representation of the inside of the warehouse, down to the tiny Flam standing over by one wall near the door.

“W-what is this Flam?” she stuttered, unable to properly formulate any coherent thoughts.

Flam sighed. “That is your control cockpit Princess, now if you’ll step over into the harness, we can get started.”

Twilight warily approached the “harness” that had risen out of the floor. It was a slightly raised oval dais with four shallow depressions where a pony could stand, surrounded by a ring of thin, round pillars as tall as her flank. There was a small gap at the back to allow entrance, so she gingerly stepped in.

The hoof-grooves were perfectly sized to fit her hooves, she saw as she entered the ring, down to the front-left being claw-shaped to fit her prosthetic limb. She clenched her teeth and her claw at the memory before stepping into them.

The effect was instantaneous as thin tendrils of magic energy erupted from the pillars, several from each one, with two noticeably larger threads reaching from the two poles at the front. They snaked around her for a moment, seemingly searching for something, before converging on her in a flash of blinding light, then everything went dark.

Author's Note

So hey, me again, years later, revisiting this old fossil of a fic. I suppose not as old as some, but it'd be a shame to let it stop here, so I'll keep posting chapters and try to keep writing further.

Love you all lots.
~ True Blood