All Skin and Bones

by redsquirrel456

Rating: mature
Tags: King Sombra, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Alternate Universe, Human, Other, Original Character
Length: 5634

In a world of chaos, a young necromancer dips into the forbidden arts to set the world right again.

In a grim world that has spun out of control, a young human mage travels to a distant land with the intent of making the world a better place.

But some things go wrong for very good reasons, and do not wish to be set right again.

Written for Obs' The Most Dangerous Game contest! In the last four hours before the deadline.

Published 2014-06-28 06:00:02 UTC
Last updated 2014-06-28 06:00:02 UTC

All Skin and Bones

A cold grey barnhouse held lonely vigil over a cold grey farm in front of a cold grey forest. The paint had long since peeled away from the facade, leaving only the bare bones of creaking wood planks and broken windows that eternally gaped towards the mountains in the distance. The town it overlooked was foggy and decrepit. Most of the buildings had been gutted by fire or overgrowth long ago and were nothing but skeletons now. Wild animals peeked out from cellar doors, birds roosted in chimneys, and nothing that knew a human’s footsteps dared come within miles of the place.

It was perfect for Paul.

Gravel hissed and crackled under the weight of the bag he dragged behind him over the farmhouse’s front yard. It was a good haul today, though that meant a sore back and aching limbs. He’d gotten tired of carrying it two miles back, mostly due to all the pointy bits poking him every time he took a step. The farm’s empty windows watched him from afar, wide with curious anticipation, and he greeted them with a grim smile.

“Yep,” he said. “Today’s gonna be a good day. Slightly less shitty than normal, I mean.”

He gave the bag behind him a hard shake, making it rattle. Esther barked from inside the house, her pointed ears poking over the windowsill before her pointed face and little black nose reared up. She only ever barked once when he came by. Afterwards she watched intently as he came to the door.

Stairs croaked, rotting planks groaned underfoot, keys jangled. The door opened with a groan and he walked inside, giving Esther a cursory pat on the head as he passed her. The old sheep dog wasn’t quite as jumpy as she was in years past, but she kept the loneliness and the chill of winter away when summer grew short and nights grew long, as summer was wont to do. This year’s summer had lasted many months longer than normal, and almost stretched into the new year.

But then came the cold and the damp and the mud as the Moon grew restless. That was when Paul started his journey, and the Moon still ruled when he came to this land. It still ruled now, two months later. The day was long since over. He hoped the harvests had brought enough in for everyone back home.

He dragged the bag past the kitchen and through the living room, brushing past some tattered bits of cloth he’d never bothered to wipe up, and dragged the bag upstairs to his study. It was a large room for large projects, and Paul had taken to it like an owl to its roost. Skulls and masks and yellowed parchments covered every available surface, had already drowned the large table he found when he first got here. Though it had been many years the furniture was still salvageable. They had made things to last back then, when they still called this land their own.

A manticore looked down from above the doorway like a grim trophy, teeth bared in an eternal snarl. He liked it up there, not out of pride but what it reminded him of: every time he left this room, he was entering the maw of danger. But this next batch he’d dug up from roadsides, collected off dusty floors, snatched from the lairs of timberwolves, this could make it all worth it.

He grabbed the bottom of the bag and upended it.

Bones of every shape and size spilled onto the floor.

Leg bones. Skulls. Bits and pieces of vertebrae. Hoof fragments.

All bleached white and brittle, some cracked open by the jaws of scavengers, others left inexplicably in peace. He’d had to dig for some of them, and cursed his luck when he saw how many had been cracked by his shovel or his pick.

He went to a cabinet full of magnifying glasses, scrying sticks, and old journals, and spilled them out on the floor next to the bones.

“Not a single horn among them,” he said to Esther as she nosed through the offal alongside him, sniffing at this and that. “But they’re not the only ones who can do magic now.”

Esther panted.

“No, no,” he whispered. “Still so much to sort through and so much to catalogue. The job will take another month or so, at least. Unless I get lucky and find another horn. Fragments won’t do. But it’s only ever fragments apart from that first one. Curious, that.”

Esther looked up at him and let her tongue hang out of her mouth.

“Maybe it’s true,” Paul said, “and they made sure not to leave anything. Maybe horns just don’t keep like other bones. They’re more magic than flesh, after all.”

He sat down cross-legged and put on his spectacles and work gloves, opening the first book: Anatomical Study of the Hoofed Kind.

“Time to go to work.”

Hours passed as he recorded, measured, and categorized as much as he could. There was a preponderance of earth pony bones out here, which explained the farmhouse and the rotting fences surrounding fields of overgrown vegetation. Only one bone out of all the rest truly interested him: a femur of prodigious size he had collected from the skeleton of a male earth pony on the side of the road. It had been scattered amongst a pile of other pony skeletons, the circumstances of their deaths mostly unclear, but he had been able to see the signs of magical destruction: bones fused to bones, skulls exploded in ways even guns couldn’t duplicate, and a statue with its head chopped off. Some wizard had been especially imaginative in conjuring the deaths of that group. Paul wondered who had won.

“But you,” he whispered to the femur, “you will tell me everything and more. I know this one’s special, Esther.”

Esther looked up from where she’d been napping on the floor.

Paul held the femur delicately between his fingers, feeling the heft. Even after so many years it didn’t feel hollow. “This bone isn’t like the others.”

Esther licked her lips.

“Mmhmm,” said Paul. “It’s still alive.”

Esther yawned.

“Well, not in the way that it used to be,” Paul said with a shrug. “But I can feel it. It hums. It whispers. There’s magic in this bone yet. Maybe just a few embers left, but it’s there. The stallion who owned this leg must have been a real monster. I’d hate to see what it took to bring him down.”

He didn’t hear the whispering with the gloves on. They were specially treated to keep him from distracted by things like that when he was going through the tedium of measurements, and too much direct contact might spoil what was inside. It had surprised him when he was rummaging through the bone pile; he brushed away a unicorn foal’s skull and suddenly heard a far-off voice gibbering madly in his head, which quickly turned into a sonorous song that reminded him of gypsy folk tunes. Then it became painful, and he had recovered from the shock to remember the gloves.

His lips were suddenly very dry, and when he licked them he tasted only parchment and dust. “Let’s see what he has to say.”

Paul walked downstairs, clutching the bone tightly to steady his shaking hands. Esther followed in his shadow, but he barely felt her presence. Every step brought a new bead of sweat to his brow. Professionalism and months of failure had deadened most of his sense of excitement, but there hadn’t been a find like this since he’d started. You just didn’t get remains like this back home, except within the secret vaults of the most powerful wizards, and Paul knew those old windbags would hoard their treasures sooner than give it up for the good of all.

He descended into the cellar beneath the farmhouse. When he first claimed the house as his own he had found rotted food of every variety down here along with an abominable stench that never quite cleared up, and a room of expired cider and smashed bottles.

The cellar was large enough for his needs, and he had converted it into a laboratory.

Esther stayed at the top of the stairs as usual, whimpering and pawing at the doorjam. Paul knew the anxiety was only partly because of the spell wards, and partly because of the reason he kept his gun cabinet in here. The wards would keep anything strange from getting their hands on it from outside, and if anything went wrong, he could defend himself from within. Most things in the world could eat magic, but he hadn’t met one that swallowed bullets and lived.

He approached the operating table.

“Back so soon?”

He expected the berating, sibilant voice from the corner of the room and approached the table without breaking stride, eyes fixed on the femur.

“Ignis,” he whispered, and every arcane torch in the room lit up so he might behold the fruits of his labor.

On the table lay the almost complete skeleton of a pony, mismatched and ugly. The forelegs and skull of a unicorn, the shoulders of a pegasus, the spine and ribs of an earth pony. It still wasn’t finished, and one of the joints didn’t quite fit together, but that didn’t matter. Not now that he had this wonderfully perfect leg bone. Paul approached the table and stood over the cadaver, at a loss. He knew what to do next, but he feared the consequences of destroying all he’d worked for so far.

“You really must invest in some dimmers, wicce,” said the voice. It came from the darkened southeast corner of the room. No matter how many lights Paul placed down here it was never illuminated, but he made out the barest hints of the glass container he’d made for this particular piece, and the pointed shape within. “These infernal mage-lights hurt my eyes.”

“You have no eyes,” whispered Paul.

“No eyes that you know of,” grumbled the voice.

“Quiet. Do you have any idea what I’m holding? This is almost as good as a horn.”

“You hold your doom, wicce. You know that as well as I do.”

“I can refine it now. I won’t need to go searching. A whole piece of the puzzle right here.”

Paul turned away from the freakshow on the table and retreated to the far west wall, to another long table that housed his work station and ingredients. He worked under the shadow of the pegasus wing bones he had scrounged together. One was whole, preserved with an entire pegasus inside of a cave, but they lacked the distinct whisper of magic the femur presented him with. The other was just as mismatched as the skeleton.

He set the femur down on the table and began drawing out the runes in chalk. He brought a pot of water to a boil and dumped in firebane, soleil dust, and a stick of licorice. He didn't care to measure it too closely to standard. The ingredients mattered less than the intent. The purpose. The soul.

“I’m almost disappointed, you know,” said the voice.

“Why is that?” asked Paul.

“That you’ve kept me for so long. Even your elders, as pompous as they are, would recognize the danger of keeping me here.”

“You’re powerless,” Paul answered as he stirred the pot. “You proved that long ago. But being powerless doesn’t mean you aren’t valuable.”

“I suppose you would say that.”

Paul stopped stirring for just a moment.

“You’re very presumptuous,” he said.

The voice snickered. “More perceptive than anything else. You are very eager to prove yourself.”

Paul stopped talking. The voice droned on in its inimitable, bored yet malicious way. “A young man abandoning everything he knew on a mission to do the impossible. I’m sure you had many doubters in your home country. Many naysayers. Many who doubted your value.”

Paul took the pot off the burner and set it down next to the femur. He picked up a small chisel and gave the bone a quick whack, delivering the piece he knocked off into the still bubbling mixture.

“In all the times we’ve spoken,” said the voice, “you never told me exactly why you were trying to do this. Such bull-headedness is the calling card of a need to prove something. I believe you weren’t appreciated as much as you liked, perhaps even… powerless.”

“Not anymore,” whispered Paul, watching the bit of bone dissolve in a flash of glowing embers. He whispered the words and watched the runes on the table start to glow. The buzz of magic sent his fingers tingling.

“Ahh,” hissed the voice. “So it’s true. You’re just as pathetic as you are sad. You’re a child trying to make his mark on the world, and you reach for the stars… or is that one star in particular?”

Paul felt eyes on the back of his neck. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, he knew it was no illusion. That thing was watching him.

“You already control magic, boy. It obeys your beck and call. But you and your kind will never understand it the way she did.”

Paul picked up a small dropper, collecting several drops of the magic-infused water from the pot.

“No,” said the voice. “No, you can’t be that foolish. I’ve warned you of this before. You are not strong enough.”

“That’s what they said of all great wizards,” said Paul, turning away and making for the door. “Before they were great, of course.”

“You are no wizard,” hissed the voice. “You are a child. Worse, you are an obstinate one. You delve into dark places and dark practices because you think that makes you great. Proves your bravery. Proves your willingness to take risks. Well I know darkness, you little foal, and I can tell you the darkness doesn’t care for wizards or heroes or even villains. It consumes them all. But you are none of those, either. You are worse.”

Paul touched the doorknob.

“Necromancer,” the voice purred.

Paul took a deep breath of the room’s scent. Decaying plants. Dry bones. Whatever kind of stench that thing in the corner emanated. He’d never been able to put his finger on it.

“I am whatever I need to be.”

Paul closed the cellar door, collecting Esther on the way out. They went to the fallow fields behind the farmhouse, and Paul held the syringe close to his chest. He didn’t need a specific kind of plant for the next part of his experiment, but he hoped at least for one with healthy roots. He chose a thick tangle of vines at the edge of the field for that reason, noting how wide the leaves and green the vines were.

He held out the dropper and let out the single precious drop he’d been carrying.

It hit a leaf without a sound, sliding off and disappearing into the tangle of vines below.

“Now,” whispered Paul, “we wait.”

He waited for another two weeks. During that time he found no more bones with as much promise as his vaunted femur, and the voice in the cellar said very little to him. He appreciated that, since it usually had very little positive to say even on a good day.

Then, one night, he was awoken by the sound of Esther barking and scratching at the back door. He threw on his clothes and snatched up the dagger he kept at his bedside, charging down the stairs to look over Esther’s head and into the darkness.

“Show me,” he whispered, and slipped into Esther’s skin. The dog was used to it by now, but it had been a while since they’d done it, and she resisted a little before giving in. He opened the door and let her charge into the darkness, enveloped by her sharp senses. Oftentimes the smells overwhelmed him, but he had learned to simply ride her mind and let her point him to whatever might be wrong. It was smell that triggered her this time, but not any she or he had smelled before.

It smelled of earth, but not quite. It was earth that was dry and musty, dirt that hadn’t felt the touch of a single raindrop in seasons. It was the smell of his bones and books, but there was a strangeness to it he couldn’t identify.

Esther leaped into the tangle of vines he’d chosen two weeks prior and started digging at the dirt around it.

“No!” Paul shouted into her mind, and she shied away with a whine and a whimper. Paul commanded her to be still, but her nose quivered and her tail wagged like an out-of-control pendulum.

She and he watched the dirt intently.

It bulged upward.

Esther bolted, and Paul stormed back down into the cellar.

“It’s too soon!” he bellowed at the darkness.

The voice didn’t answer.

“Too soon,” Paul grunted, flinging open the gun cabinet. He picked up the shotgun inside, putting two rounds into the breech with shaking fingers. Next he went for the bottles of dragon’s breath, glowing sickly green in their case.

“It’s too soon!” he shouted over his shoulder as he ran back up the stairs, leaving scattered cartridges behind, arming himself lastly with his old shovel and a lantern he commanded to light as he burst out the door.

He ran barefoot over brambles and hard roots, towards the sound of Esther’s desperate barking. He ignored the chilly air, his uncomfortably greasy unwashed hair clinging to his scalp with cold sweat, and the thorn he picked up in his foot along the way.

“Esther!” he shouted. “Heel!”

She came running to him, wild-eyed with fear, but he charged onwards towards the vine patch.

The patch of dirt Esther saw had been breached from below. Something wet and squirming and grasping reached up, a thick tendril with a blunt, stumpy ending.

“Oh, shit. Shit fuck,” said Paul, steeling himself. Even from here he could tell it was all wrong. This wasn’t his magic. It wasn’t the quiet whisper of the bones he collected, either. It was a screechy, maddening noise, the sound of nails on a chalkboard all over his brain and vibrating in his very bones.

He dug his shovel into the ground next to the writhing abomination and lifted the dirt.

A malformed potato-shaped lump peered up at him with beady, undeveloped eyes. The tendril, attached to its body, reached up for him. Hungry, pleading, mindless, whatever. He didn’t care. It was too soon and this monster was disgusting.

“What the fuck,” Paul said. Esther ran in mad circles not far away barking her head off, uncertain whether to run or pounce on the thing.

Paul raised his shovel and drove the sharp end into the lump’s skull—or at least, where he thought the skull might be. It went in with a loud squelch. The tendril swirled and tried to grasp the shovel handle, but that just made Paul feel even more disgusted, raising the shovel and driving it down again and again. Black ichor stained the blade, along with meaty bits of stuff that Paul couldn’t even begin to guess at. He kept stabbing until the lump stopped pulsing and writhing, and then dropped a bottle of dragon breath into the hole. It caught alight so suddenly he was forced to step back, and the stench that came up from the burning was unbearable.

Then he heard the sound of more earth being moved behind him, and then another in front, and another behind.

He went to the next hole and dug down.

Two tendrils. A lump that seemed to be in the middle of splitting in two, with a thick trunk between them. This one was larger.

“No no no no,” Paul whispered, stabbing downwards with the shovel in disgust.

A seam burst on the upper bulb of the creature, and something that looked like a mouth gaped at him, trying to bite at the shovel as it stabbed into its body over and over, or perhaps it was trying to make words or some other thing that Paul didn’t want to see right now.

“Where the fuck are you coming from?” he asked the creature as he set it alight, moving on to the next, and the next. A madness gripped him, a consuming need to destroy the things before they born, or delivered, or whatever the hell the earth pony magic he’d extracted was doing. It became a mechanical, automatic, and somber affair.

Each little beast he found had a little more definition than the last. Two tendrils became four, tendrils became legs, stumpy ends became hooves. None of them were any good, though—they were all boneless and thrashing pounds of flesh that squirmed and grabbed and tugged, not understanding the pain Paul brought on them and wishing only for it to be gone. Action, reaction. One had half an ear that wouldn’t stop twitching even as it burned alive in the green dragon breath.

The last one had a true eye.

It watched him the entire time he killed it in judging silence, wide and lidless. The mouth line opened and closed like a fish gasping for breath.

Paul burned that too.

It wasn’t until he realized he was out of dragon breath that he had combed an area about thirty feet in diameter, was covered in dirt, and had left his shotgun behind. Esther had long since abandoned him and run back to the house.

More patches of soil were being overturned.

He dropped to his knees and watched as a hoof burst out of the ground, this one fully supported by some real muscle and bone, and grab the earth. A half-formed head followed, sunken in on one side. Paul reasoned the skull beneath must have been mostly missing.

Paul stood up, let out a resigned breath, and approached it.

“You’re not what I need,” he whispered. “Not at all. You’re not supposed to be. You put one thing in and get another thing out. That’s magic. It’s like math. One thing in, one thing out. One bone, one potion, one body. That's what I wanted, what I told to come out of the ground. Where are you all coming from?”

“Freesh,” the moaning pony-thing said through lips that were rotting and growing at the same time. “Freesh eff.”

Paul killed this one with his gun. The report echoed off the distant hills and rotting skeleton buildings of the nearby town and then subsided.

The sound of scratching hooves on dry dirt soon replaced it.

Paul ran back into the house, barging into the cellar to collect more dragon breath and cartridges.

“Not supposed to happen,” he muttered to himself, and then whirled on the dark corner the voice inhabited. He stalked towards it, shaking his lantern like a sword. The shadows retreated only grudgingly.

“Why is this happening? What did I do wrong?”

The red-tipped unicorn horn in the glass case didn’t answer.

“Tell me. If those things get in I don’t know what they’ll do. Unstable homonculi, fucking zombies, what are they?”

“I warned you,” said the voice. “Many times.”

“About what? The undead?”

“This is what you wanted,” said the voice. “To give life.”

“Not this! This isn’t life!”

“Not life that you control,” the voice rumbled, growing in volume and ferocity. “That’s what you really wanted, isn’t it? That’s what you people always want! You don’t want miracles, you want pets! You don’t want magic, you want your guns and your rituals and your tall towers! You want lines in a script and instructions on little pieces of paper!”

The horn conjured—no, emanated—some kind of dark, inky shadow.

“And that’s why you want to bring them back. It’s why you want the Sun and Moon back. You want it all under your control.”

“No!” shouted Paul. “I wanted to help them. To save them! To help everyone, everywhere!”

“Don’t lie to me about the heart behind power, boy!” the voice snarled. The shadows began to take form now, and Paul saw jagged cracks appear in the air around the horn, reaching towards the glass.

“You can’t get out,” Paul whispered. “The room is warded.”

“The door is warded, you massive idiot,” the horn gloated. “It is the entire earth you are contending with now.”

The cracks reached the case, seeping into the glass. Paul heard it splinter.

“And the earth has lost patience with you.”

The case burst open, showering Paul in glass shards and throwing him to the ground. The cracks didn’t stop once the case was open, crawling down to the ground, searching, reaching. Paul scrambled back on his buttocks.

The cracks reached for the table and the skeleton resting on it. “I know all about the lust for power and control and the need to subvert and usurp. Why do you think they all left us on this stinking, disgusting world? Why do you think I’m not in Tartarus where I belong? What better hell on earth than to have to share it with you delusional monkeys! At least I was honest with myself! We all belong in the dark, but you make up your own lights and pretend you aren’t as bad as I!”

The cracks reached up the table legs, grabbing the skeleton with disturbingly hand-like motions. The bones jumped to life, coming together with loud clicks as the shadow magic substituted cartilage, muscles, and skin.

“You put the magic back into the ground. You set it free,” said the voice as the skeleton shuddered and rose up of its own accord. Long legs stretched and reached down to the floor, holding up a body that Paul had assembled.

“You brought ponies back to where they didn’t want to go, Paul,” said the voice as the now animated skeleton stalked across the cellar towards the horn. “I can’t imagine they’re happy with you. It is the only reason they would give me agency again. Perhaps if I kill you, I will be shown mercy. Life as a horn isn’t much, but it’s something.”

The skeleton reached into the case and grasped the horn, jamming it into the skull and replacing the horn stump that had been there before. “I feel their rage. They wanted it to fade. To die. To be allowed to end. But you reached in and took what wasn’t yours, and put it back into the earth they left behind.”

“One drop,” Paul whimpered.

But it could have been one drop or a thousand; it didn't matter. Only intent.

Paul raised his gun and fired. The shotgun pellets vanished into a cloud of darkness that manifested seemingly without effort.

“Oh, oh, oh,” the skeleton purred. “I can feel it again. I can feel the magic once more. Yes, that’s it! I am truly me again! And the first thing I will do is kill you!”

Paul ran for the stairs. He didn’t know how he made the door without the body or the entity inside killing him, but he didn’t question it.

He got to the top and saw Esther wrestling on the ground with an earth pony and a pegasus missing one wing, whining so high and so loud it was like a banshee’s scream. She was a tough old dog, but the ponies were stronger and far more vicious. Esther had sunk her teeth into the belly of the pegasus and ripped it open, spilling dark oozing blood—if that even was blood—onto the old wooden floor.

But the pegasus was just using its own body as a distraction. Paul cleared the steps in time to see the earth pony raise a hoof and casually bring it down on Esther’s head with a wet thump.

“You fucker!” he screamed, grabbing his gun by the barrel and swinging the butt into the pony’s skull, sending it flying with surprising ease. The pegasus tripped on its own guts trying to catch him, and he thumped its head with his gun until it stopped moving.

Esther was dead. He saw her brains all over the floor and saw her glassy sightless eyes, like the eye of that thing in the field, asking why, why, why.

Why, why, why, he screamed back at the earth pony as he smashed it until the butt of his gun cracked.

“I was going to help you! I was going to help all of us! It’s you! You didn’t want to come back! You left us here! This is your fault, yours! You made me do this! Fuck you!”

The cellar exploded behind him. Smoke billowed up the stairs.

“I’m coming for you, boy! I am stronger with every moment! Your wards will not hold forever! I have wings now! I have the wings you would have given your new god! Run so I can chase you!”

The back door, already forced open by angry hooves, was full of staring, mindless, angry eyes.

Paul made for his study, listening to the heavy stomp of hooves behind him. He turned and saw an alicorn made of shadow, its blood-tipped horn pointed at him like a third eye, turn the corner and spread misshapen, bony wings made of mist.

“I’ll let them eat you, boy! I’ll let them eat you!” it screeched.

Paul disappeared into his study, looking up at the skull hanging above the door and the bones lying all around him. They hadn’t come back to life. Perhaps because they hadn’t touched the ground he had tainted with the old magic.

He picked up a stray bone fragment and stabbed himself in the arm, screaming as he ripped himself open, letting his lifeblood spill over everything. He only needed a drop or a bucketfull, it didn’t matter, only the intent.

His intent was to kill.

As the jet-black alicorn made its way up the stairs with its horde behind it, a monster burst from the study and met it mid-stride. A manticore’s skull was mounted on a mangled heap of bones and dry skin, spilling blood from every crack and hole. So great was its girth it tore the farmhouse walls apart as it moved, shrugging aside old wood and shadow magic alike. A paw the size of Paul’s head, made of a grotesque collection of teeth and broken leg bones, smashed the alicorn across the face and sent it spinning back down the steps, tumbling over its followers.

Paul the manticore waded into the confused pile and the massacre began. Paul needed only to move and things died, ponies screamed wordlessly and beat at him with futile blows of their hooves. He returned them with furious swipes of his bone claws, crushing bodies like paper. The farmhouse collapsed, or it might have and he just didn’t notice because the air was full of smoke and fumes and blood.

The alicorn ploughed into him, blasting off chunks of shoulder blades and spare vertebrae with magic from its horn. They wrestled on the floor, tearing the house apart around them as they threw each other into walls, couches, ponies.

"How does it feel?" the voice crowed, tripping Paul with a lasso made of darkness and leaping upon him, blasting him apart with bursts of magic. "Isn't this what you wanted?" it hissed, crushing part of the manticore skull with a hoof blow. "Isn't this the body you made to be their vessel? How does it feel, boy, knowing it will kill you?"

It was so focused on killing him it never saw Paul's tail snake up behind it. A stinger made of broken ribs stabbed down into mismatched shoulder blades and tore the alicorn away, throwing it to the ground. Paul pounced on it, using his girth to keep it down. He swatted away flailing hooves and beating wings, reaching for the gnashing, thrashing head. He took it between his paws as it screamed obscenities and curses.

With a single grunt of effort he crushed the skull to dust. Thick strands of shadow clung to him as he searched through the mess for the horn, that damnable horn, the first he’d ever found and had been useless, deliberately useless to bide its time until now.

He picked it from the muck, ignoring the biting, clawing ponies that still lived and willingly impaled themselves on his body, and stuck the horn between his teeth.

“NO!” the voice screamed in his head. “YOU DON’T DESERVE THIS!”

Paul bit down.

A cold grey wreck of a house held lonely vigil over a cold grey farm in front of a cold grey forest.

The trackers found Paul sitting in the midst of it, cradling Esther’s body in his arms.

A zebra acolyte approached him first, flanked by two griffons and a veritable army of human guards. For a moment he was almost overcome with sympathy as he saw the young man and his dead dog. Then he saw the bones littering every square inch of ground, the blood, the horrific scar on the man’s arm, and all pity shriveled in his chest.

“We have been looking for you for a long time, Paul,” he said in that thick accent all zebras had.

“I know,” said Paul, looking up.

“Come with us,” said the zebra. “You are under arrest for the practice of necromancy, grave robbing, and conspiracy to return a dangerous, outlawed magic to the world at large.”

Paul blinked. As one, the trackers flinched.

“Well,” he said in a hollow voice. “I’ll come with you. No need to be scared.”

He stood up, dropping Esther’s body.

“Nothing but bones here now.”