Chaos Marks Them All

by Kharn

Rating: mature
Tags: Princess Luna, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Other, Spike, Adventure, Princess Celestia, Crossover, Human, Main 6
Length: 329865

The main six traverse the world of Warhammer Fantasy to flee their destinies to bring the End Times as they are being consumed, body and mind by the will of the dark gods of Chaos.

CANCELLED, Reason here
The gods of Chaos stir again to play their Great Game. Through the manipulation of the Ruinous Powers, entire races and nations are displaced and scattered from their homelands in a strange new world. Here is a world which has been slowly and irreversibly losing a great war against countless and diverse foes for many millennium.

The High Elves of Ulthuan hold back the tide of their vengeful brethren, the Dwarfs of the World's Edge wage an unending battle against the limitless and barbaric greenskin hordes, and the mighty Empire of Man stands as the bulwark against the Great Terror, connecting the age old Alliance of Order. If the Empire were to fall, it would spell the doom of the Old World.

Six mares find themselves at the center of the next great incursion. The chosen of the dark gods rallies the peoples and beasts of the north to war once more, and the Empire shall be beset as it has not known since the age of the Heldenhammer. Can the rising tide of Chaos be turned, or will the world be drowned in blood?
(Warhammer Fantasy crossover. Big thanks to Setokaiva for proofreading and editing)

Published 2012-04-15 15:44:00 UTC
Last updated 2019-06-20 02:32:38 UTC

Chapter 2: Meeting of the Fates

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Chapter 4: Sadistic Mutation

Twilight flipped to the next page. Blank.

“Mark of Chaos? What’s that, like a cutiemark?” She looked at her flank and the radiant pink star encircled by several lesser stars. Turning back to the book and turning back, the previous page became blank, only one line spanning the top.

You still have an assignment.

The pages began turning back on their own, whirling by chapter after chapter. “No! Stop, go back! What’s the Burning Mark?” Twilight hastily ordered, fumbling with the pages to get them to stop. She slammed a hoof down on the book to block the other pages and the flurry ended.

Svart Tal av Khaos - Black Speech of Chaos it spelled across the top and a wall of unintelligible text below. “Oh… right, but what about the others? What were those names?” she tried to turn back to the last pages but they fused together into a wood slab at her attempt. “Well… how am I supposed to learn a whole new language that looks and sounds like gibberish?”

The letters slowly illuminated and peeled, ascended from the page, emitting a shrill sound of a thousand whispers. Twilight quickly backed away, but was blocked by the wall as the floating symbols shot around her head. She frantically swatted at them but upon shattering in midair, they quickly reformed.

“No, no leave me alone! I’ll learn it another way— Aagh!!”

An orb of mystic text engulfed her head and rotated rapidly, whipping her mane about, emitting a low droning buzz. Her eyes strained and stung at the cryptic light show and her throat quickly grew sore. Thousands of voices filled her head, screaming and howling in their foul language. It felt like her head was being torn open.

“Make it stop! What’s this supposed to do? Hvordau denatuer!?” She momentarily froze. The orb disappeared.

’What did I just say?’ Twilight was flabbergasted at what she’d uttered. ’How did it do that? I... I understand it!’ Rubbing her eyes and with a pounding skull, she tried to remember the Equestrian language.

“Whoa... effective... but, ngaah... unpleasant.” she said, getting back on the cushion.

A deformed, fleshy clock suspended over the dresser squawked repeatedly, startling her. The arms both were at twelve and a loud metallic gnashing echoed through the room. Twilight looked to the origin of the sound. The helmet of the empty Chaos Warrior armor was now pointed at her.

“What the hoof is it doing?” She thought, already inured by several relatively benign scares.

Its leg components jerked clumsily, lurching one foot in front of the other, until it was in full locomotion toward her. She jumped aside as it tried to grab at her. She tried to run around it the long way, hugging the wall to the door; but the armor threw its gauntlet and grabbed her by the tail. It floated up and back to the armor with a handless arm outstretched. With the gauntlet back in place, the armor threw Twilight over its shoulder, wrapping its arm around her torso.

“Let me go!” she barked at it and knocked its helmet. It flew away from its body and shot back, slamming her in the face before resting over the opening in the chestplate. It tightened its grip, nearly crushing the breath out of her and took to the hallway.

Fluttershy managed to gather herself after some time. Her eye still hurt after a blood vessel had popped and she didn’t know how to take back what she said in her fit of rage. Her outburst was apologized for a hundred times.

“It’s so horrible. Sanity, conscience just… disappears, like the time one of my animals got rabies. Oh Celestia, what did they do to me?” Fluttershy explained sorrowfully. She was shivering, her teeth chattering, but everyone else was getting moist with sweat. “I mean, look at me!” She pulled at her mane and her hooves came off streaked red. “When did my mane get dyed!?” she cried, shaking her hooves at Rainbow Dash. “Oh, I’m just so sorry, Appl—Applejack!”

Turning around to apologize again, Fluttershy’s jaw dropped in horror at how far her friend’s ailment had gone, and so quickly. Rainbow Dash peered around and was grasped with the same dread. Applejack was lying nigh-lifeless. The only thing indicating her attachment to the mortal realm was the weak heaving of her chest, showing she was still breathing. Her expression was of sheer agony, but she was unable to speak due to her larynx being swollen beyond use. Sores and ruptured boils, leaking pus and blood cratered Applejack’s body like a checkerboard. Necrotic cave-ins exposed shriveled muscle and bone. Her coat and mane was grown over with green and brown mold and algae. Her body became disproportionate as some parts were deflated from necrosis and others swelled with fluids. Flies buzzed and crawled across her, some squeezing under the dying rings of flesh.

“Put something on, Applejack!” Rarity barked, holding a bump on her shoulder. One eye was half-closed and sleepy, the other bugging out wildly. “That’s no way to present yourself under the Great Raven’s eye!”

The door to the room suddenly burst open, drawing all their attention. Four large figures walked in arguing amongst themselves, but broke upon seeing the cages. “Blood and bile!” one filthy figure exclaimed, rushing over to Applejack’s cage and dripping bodily fluids across its path. The ponies shrunk back from the miasma of filth surrounding it. “This is too soon!”

Tentacles, what were once intestines, slithered from a large corroded hole in its abdominal armor. One strip was wrapped around a rusty key and fit it into the lock. The others threw the door open and it reached in to get Applejack out. Entering the space, a blue figure adorned with a bird motif, crystal eyes embossed on its armor, stopped before Rarity’s cell.

“How could you care for such a creature, Feytor? It’s an expendable tool, nothing more.” it said cynically.

Feytor glared angrily back, holding a limp, dying Applejack in his arms. “Grandfather Nurgle loves all his children and those blessed by his refulgence, Melekh. Though he is god of death, I need this one alive.” He tilted his head to the side until it fell over on his shoulder, held by a string of skin, revealing a large nest of flies lining his throat. They flew into Applejack’s mouth, ears, and under flaps of detaching skin. Coursing through her body, they looked like a thousand rats running around under a moldy carpet. He lifted his head back upright, “That should keep her alive until she receives Nurgle’s mark.“

“By the Daemonette’s eye, there you are!” a brilliantly adorned pink figure mirthed in glee at the space next to Pinkie Pie. He reached in and shook an invisible hand.

“Ohmigosh, you can see him!?” Pinkie bleated. He turned to her and she was unnerved by his tight pinkish-purple skin, veins pulsing underneath, whiteless eyes, and fang-lined circular mouth.

His voice was velvet, and sounded innocent as a child. “I’m surprised you can. Why, any friend of his is a friend… of… mine...”

A long, black tongue rolled from his mouth and maneuvered in the pink pony’s direction. She was not only unafraid, but uncontrollably drawn to it, mesmerized by the fluidity of its motion, its shimmering sheen. Just before making contact, a crimson and brass-clad figure took him by the shoulder and spun him around.

“Like the pleasure-seeking whelp you are, Styrkaar, you forget the task at hand at the slightest opportunity for gratification!”

“Peace, Haargroth; we have time,” he said as he retracted his tongue, “She’s just getting into it…” He started making erotic motions, passing a talon-nailed hand down the khornate’s chestplate.

Haargroth grabbed Styrkaar by the chestplate and pulled him face to face, “Bring her to receive the mark or I’ll take her head and yours!” He shoved him back and took Fluttershy’s and Rainbow Dash’s cages by handles on their tops. They were violently swung about as he exited, heading toward a large yurt.

“Fine, then.” Styrkaar huffed dejectedly as he pulled a key and unlocked Pinkie’s cage.

“Hey, where are we going?” she asked, bouncing around him.

“To get some work done. It’ll be like going to a beauty parlor.” he responded.

“Ooh, great! Ya know, I know a couple of spa ponies that work in Ponyville. You’d love that place and he would too!” she said, pointing and following the imaginary friend. Feytor and Melekh had already left along with Applejack and Rarity. Styrkaar led Pinkie out, holding the door for their invisible companion.

An elliptical Chaos star covered the door, the arms twisting and bending with raw eldritch energy. The armor suit approached the door with a capitulated Twilight over its shoulder, long since given up on trying to break free. An eyeball at the center of the star opened and stared at them. After a moment, the door cracked out of its frame and it entered.

The room was full of arcane devices. Torture, maiming, and sick pleasure were a few of their employments.

“One step closer to freedom, Kandor. On the platform.” a low voice said. The hollow suit nodded and carried Twilight to it, passing the origin of the voice. She looked up and saw Archaon following close behind.

“I’ve had an evolution of thought, and decided to abandon the assignment. It stifles linguistic diversity.” he said.

“So... so the whole ‘attack of the magic letters' thing was pointless?” she asked sorely.

“To expect consistency from Chaos is to expect a bloodletter to mate with a daemonette.” Archaon chuckled.

Twilight scowled back, “What’s so funnYYYYYY—“

The suit vaulted her over its shoulder onto the platform, landing her right side up. Before she could do anything, two large iron claws sprung up from the surface and gripped her torso, holding her in place. Another came up and clenched itself around her neck with almost choking force. The suit stood at attention beside the stand.

“One thing about this world that has driven me to insanity, even by Chaos’ standards…” Archaon strode to a fire pit. With her head held still, Twilight could only follow him with her eyes, “Is that your kind thinks so naively; so sure that things will turn out well in the end…” he said, reaching for an iron rod hanging over the edge, “But let me tell you.“ He pulled up the iron rod. Orange-hot coals fell off a white glowing head, hissing with heat.

“You and your friends are going to help me unleash Warp on earth.”

He swung the end of the rod in front of her face. A Chaos star was fixed on the end, braced away from the rod, a hole in the center. She glared at it in trepidation, following it as it swung.

The door opened again, and Archaon turned expectantly. Haargroth and Melekh, carrying cages with Fluttershy, Rainbow Dash, and Rarity came in. They threw down the cages and the occupants were dazed by the shock.

“My lord.” Haargroth said with deference, kneeling on one knee with Melekh. “We are here to claim our steeds to ride with you to the world’s ending.”

“Good,” Archaon intoned. “Where are Feytor and Styrkaar?”

“It’s very difficult for Feytor to move quickly, having contracted every disease in the universe, sir.” Melekh said.

Just then, garbled yelling came from the hall, “My lord! It’s almost passed on!” Feytor plodded in, carrying a deformed pony-shaped blob pulsing full of flies, soaked in pus, bile, and blood. “My lord, I must administer the mark of Nurgle immediately or it will be useless to us!”

Archaon looked at the near-corpse in Feytor’s arms. “Quickly, then.” he said. Feytor ran through the flaps into the other space. “You two, add their marks.”

Haargroth and Melekh stood and took Fluttershy, Dash and Rarity toward the adjacent room. Dash was staring at Twilight with surprise, and Fluttershy was still recovering from hitting her head on the cage. Styrkaar entered with Pinkie Pie bouncing at his side. Archaon simply motioned him on to follow the others.

“Hey, Twilight!” Pinkie called with a wave. “Swell place, isn’t it? The girls and I are gonna get body art and it looks like you’ve got something special lined up for ya!” Twilight was rendered mute by the claw’s tight grip on her neck. She could only look back in confusion and apprehension.

“This star was forged with iron from the Armor of Morkar the Uniter, the first Everchosen of Chaos.” Archaon said, tapping his chestplate, “Your Burning Mark ought to be exactly like mine.”

He parted the mane around Twilight’s horn, exposing the collar still around it. Hand on the latch of the collar, he maneuvered the branding iron so the hole went around her horn, her forehead glistening with sweat. Twilight squeaked, panicking, waving her legs at him but was held too far away by the claws and couldn’t muster a scream. Archaon pinched the latch and the collar popped off. Just as the first sensations of a splitting headache began rushing in, Archaon thrust the white star down.

“He is lucky he got the best magic user in this land.” Melekh said, looking at the silhouette of a large figure bearing a rod down on the shadow of a pony, thick, smoke-like clouds billowing from the contact point. A loud whistling sizzle, followed by screams of excruciating pain permeated the space.

“Oh I khould dew vetter, eef eet woult earn your shavor.” Rarity drooled, teeth becoming misshapen. Her coat appeared abnormally stretched, bulges jutted around her body, her horn had shifted to a temple, bent forward and an especially tapered swell began protruding from the other side.

“So long as she doesn’t use magic like a coward. By sword and axe the slaughter takes place, not through some... light-show!” said Haargroth, throwing a bucket of water on Rainbow Dash, soaking her wings through. She squealed and shivered from the cold sting. “Can’t fly with wet wings,” Haargroth boasted, as if to prove some intelligence.

Feytor was already looming over Applejack’s bloated, near-lifeless corpse after setting her down on a rusting, corroded table. Three tentacles slid out from his armor. “Buboes, phlegm, blood, and guts…” they approached Applejack’s flank and opened, lined with teeth at the end. “…boils, bogeys, rot, and pus. Blisters, fevers, weeping sores…” They attached on each apple of her cutiemark, biting hard and pumping something into it, “…from your wounds the fester pours.”

The sizzling in the first room stopped. The pony on the platform was dropped into the smaller armored figures’ arms, limp as a ragdoll and all three departed.

“If you could step up here, and we can begin.” requested Styrkaar. Pinkie bounded up onto a counter, folded down from the wall, decorated with celestial and crustacean-like images.

“Ok, so…” Pinkie started, “how about a clown face, or confetti, *gasp* oooohh, I know! A—“ Styrkaar pushed a handful of white powder to her nose and in her rambling, she accidentally inhaled it. She quickly went silent, eyes instantly dilated and dropped numb on the counter.

“Now then, let us begin.” Styrkaar drew several chemical vials, knives, spools of thread, and needles from his belt.

Haargroth carried Fluttershy’s cage to a large cauldron of red liquid. She started shuddering at the sight, “No…no, NOO!!” she screamed, batting her wings frantically, bashing against the inside of the lock of the cage. Haargroth suspended her over the vat, “No, please! Not again!” she pleaded.

He looked into her eyes, streaming with tears, “Why do you despair? Rejoice, being in the Blood God’s service.” She shrieked as the cage dropped into the liquid and gargled on it as it rushed into her mouth. Bubbles continued to break the surface a long time after she’d gone under.

“G-g-get her out! Sh-she’ll drown!” Dash chattered.

“She’ll be fine!” Haargroth blasted back, “You, now!”

He took up Dash’s cage and toted her to where Melekh simply observed Rarity’s shifting form, stroking his chin. Some breaks appeared in her skin, bone protruded from several split lumps. She jerked and rolled, groaning in pain as her uncontrollably growing bones clattered on the steel floor of the cage.

“Make room, shape-shifter!” Haargroth bellowed, shoving Rarity near the edge of the table. “Hold her down, sorcerer.” he said. No response; he turned to Melekh. He was still staring at the writhing Rarity, whispering something to himself. Rainbow Dash contemplated what may be in store for her as her friends had been affected so badly. “MELEKH!” Haargroth furiously shouted. Melekh snapped to him in surprise, stopping his whispering. Rarity stopped rolling and just lied still, whimpering.

“What?” he exclaimed, irritated.

“Force down the pegasus…” Haargroth said firmly.

“I am not some animal handler!”

“Need I remind you of who will take her?”

Melekh yielded, coming closer, and Haargroth snapped the lock off the cage. Seeing an opportunity, Rainbow Dash lunged for the loose door, hoping to blow past them. Reaching the edge of the opening, she slipped on the water and tumbled out, landing sprawled on her stomach. She tried to stand up but felt some downward force pinning her to the surface. Melekh held his hands over her with a pulsating haze emitting from his palms. Haargroth unsheathed a small dagger and put it to Dash’s cutiemark.

“What’s that?” she asked nervously, unable to see the blade.

“Remember, it’s a mark. You’re not cutting her leg off.” Melekh warned.

“I like cutting the limbs off.” the blood knight grumbled.

Dash was suddenly awash with fright, “Cut my leg off!? What’s he doing, you bozo!?“ She futilely struggled under Melekh’s influence.

“Silence!” demanded Haargroth. Slapping his gauntlet over her mouth and infuriated by resistance, he viciously plunged the dagger into the cloud of her cutiemark.

The mouthed tentacles detached from Applejack’s cutiemark, dripping coagulated ooze, leaving three large black buboes in a triangular formation, connected by inflamed veins. Another set grew over her other flank. The flies poured out of her body, back into the recesses and cracks of Feytor’s armor. He rolled her over and looked into a collapsed hole in her chest at a deflated, mold-coated pair of lungs and a swollen, plaque-encrusted, leaking heart.

“Beating but not breathing... excellent. Styrkaar, how is the pink one?”

Styrkaar was returning the tools to his belt and looked to Feytor, obscuring Pinkie. “Still a work in progress, not quite there yet.” He glanced at the red vat Fluttershy had been submerged in. The liquid was no longer around the top, which earned a curious eyebrow from the pink figure. “Wasn’t the level higher when you put her in, Haargroth?“

Haargroth ignored him, focusing on carving radial arrows around the circle. Styrkaar went over and peered into the tank; the liquid was well over halfway down and there was no sign of a leak in the cauldron. The ring of the cage could be seen poking out of the top; he reached in and pulled it out, gasping at what he saw. A reflective red mass sat up, saturated, dripping with the red fluid.

“Put me back.” She whispered angrily.

“Oh, no…” Styrkaar muttered, “You’ve been in there long enough, and… did you… drink it all? It’s not supposed to be drunk!”

“Not all, just please put me back. I’m sooo thirsty.” She stammered out, motioning toward the nearly empty vat.

“The weakling is right.” Haargroth said, licking his bloodstained dagger and resheathing it, “You’re done. And what did he mean when he said you drank the blood you were supposed to be initi—”

Fluttershy let out a piercing screech, startling Styrkaar so much that he dropped her cage on the floor. She started thrashing about in the cage, making it jump around.

“Put me back! I’ll die of thirst!” she screamed; Styrkaar kicked the cage to silence her. Fluttershy hit her head on the bars with such force, it knocked her unconscious. Haargroth released Rainbow Dash’s mouth and an episode of wailing and whimpering ensued.

“Finally, some music!” Styrkaar said at her lamentations.

Melekh heard the door in the adjacent room open. “Who is there?” he called, keeping his hands over Rainbow Dash, “You had better have purpose for interrupting us.“

“FOR SIGMAR! FOR THE EMPIRE!” the silhouettes called out from the other side. A series of deafeningly loud pops and bangs erupted and the flaps were punctured by invisible forces, one of which lined up with Haargroth. A large hole appeared in his forehead and he collapsed over Rainbow Dash, nearly crushing her under his weight. Melekh’s hands burst with light but was also instantly felled, falling over Rarity, being punctured throughout his back by her protruding bones. His hand fell in such a way, the crystal eye in his palm shone before Rainbow Dash’s eyes, entrancing her. Styrkaar and Feytor advanced on the assailants, holes punched in their bodies by unseen penetrators all the while.

DIE, UNHOLY SPAWNS! the assailants roared. THE SPECTERS OF DEATH HAVE COME!

Styrkaar howled in agonizing pleasure as he was hit again and again. Feytor couldn’t feel a thing. “MAY NURGLE’S ROT TAKE YOU ALL!” Feytor garbled, storming into a room full of smoke and sparking flashes.

“Burn! Burn with the fires of change! The false god is dead!”

The shrill voice was on the very edge of her hearing and faded away as Twilight’s senses rushed back to her, bringing only pain. A blunt, throbbing force pounded in the side of her head, and putting her hoof to it, it gave way, sinking into her cheek like a pillow. She felt hard, broken shards in the screaming area that started to move. This worms-under-the-skin feeling intensified the miserable sensation until, in one large pop, apparently along the length of her skull, the movement stopped and a flare of relief jolted through the area. Twilight sighed in content and wondered what in Equestria happened.

She managed to open her heavy eyes, brought her hooves before her and gasped at the sight. The fur around her hooves had receded to just below the wrist joint, exposing a bony surface like a stallion. Bewildered by this, she slowly clapped them together and small sparks flew out from between. Curiosity stirred and she rubbing them together, creating red sparks that turned to yellow then white then blue as she sped up. A cloud of black smoke coalesced around her hooves and before finally coming together. A loud metallic grinding drew her attention and the ethereal display fizzled out. She sat up to find the source of the noise, to see she was in her old but now defiled chamber.

Blast marks and small, smoldering craters covered the walls and floor. An image flashed in her mind, bringing on a splitting headache, of a unicorn furiously firing bolts of lightning and energy at a chaos warrior, deflecting it with its shield.

The dresser appeared severely burnt on one end, several drawers scattered around. A large crack in the mirror was slowly mending itself.

Another flash; the unicorn had its horn rammed into the warrior’s shield, smoke escaping from where the shield contacted its forehead. The warrior smashed the unicorn off against a wall hanging mirror.

Head throbbing from the hallucinations, she turned to a corner of the room, nearest the door. The empty suit of chaos warrior armor stood in shambles, heavily dented, burnt and scarred all over. It now carried a large shield in one hand with a small hole punched in it, a star burned around, and a dull iron mace in the other.

Once more the vision returned. The unicorn scrambled up atop the dresser and jumped at the warrior viciously. It intercepted the mare in midair, smashing her aside with a large club to the face and throwing their unmoving body away.

The cushion to her side abruptly burst with a balloon-like pop. Twilight jumped back at the flurry of feathers, tumbling off whatever she was sitting on. Another metallic crunch. She followed it to see that the armor had turned to face her new position, crouching perfectly still behind its battered shield with its mace at the ready.

She’d fallen off the mattress, apparently, and was surprised why it hadn’t produced the joy-buzz it had before; even more so that she seemed longer than the mattress, as it was twice her size not a minute ago.

Getting back up, a tuft of mane fell across her face. As she brushed it back, a faint sizzling sound started and her hoof quickly grew hot. She cringed at the sting and remembered the supposed ‘Burning Mark’.

She rushed to the mirror which, along with everything else in the room, appeared somewhat smaller. The mirror was now at eye level. Coming upon it, Twilight was shocked by the creature looking back.

Her mane had darkened to an inky black and there were only a few pink highlights left. Seeing her body in the reflection, despair quickly took hold. She appeared much larger than what seemed like minutes ago, standing much taller, but quaking in desolation. An arrow, charred black on her skin, pointed down between her eyes. She noticed the collar was still gone and used her magic to part the mane around her horn.

There it was, a large eight-pointed star burned into her forehead, centered cleanly around her horn. She felt her breath shorten and a sickening mixture of sadness and nausea well up. She sat down before the dresser and threw her head down on the surface, facing the tattered suit. She heard an airy whoosh as her head hit the surface and a tugging feeling at her sides, but didn’t care to look.

“Why despair, mortal?... *gasp* Rejoice in the part you play.” A gurgling voice echoed from everywhere.

The cornered armor began to quickly shudder and rust over, the red and gold colors turning all manner of sickly greens and browns. Its parts rattled, dropping the shield and mace.

“You shall accomplish... *gasp* great things under us.” it said, shambling toward her in a ghoulish gait.

Twilight panicked. Without thinking of it, her horn spontaneously lit up and a fuchsia barrier, lined by various symbols and text of Black Speech, enclosed her. The suit stopped before the shield.

“Come, now... *gasp* Let Grandfather Nurgle see the friend of his child.”

It pulled a circular object from its belt. Twilight crawled back but the dome kept her under. It flung the ring at the dome and a hole opened, retreating from it. It clamped around her horn and the dome shattered in fading shards. An icy sting ran through her forehead as the suit approached.

“Be still...” It said, slapping a slimy glove on her shoulder. “I mean... *gasp* no harm to a future lieutenant... *gasp* of the Storm of Chaos...”

“L...Lieutenant?” she stammered, repulsed by the decaying, suddenly friendly armor.

“Ah... *gasp* I’ll let the Everchosen tell you, but that is not... *gasp* why I am here.” It held her other shoulder, speaking in a disturbingly paternal tone. “Look at you... *gasp* what changes have been made in only... *gasp* six hours! And the damage you have done to Kandor’s shell before he did you in.” it exclaimed, swiveling a finger in a large hoof-shaped dent in its helmet. “I wasn’t... *gasp* expecting this!” it said, reaching to her side. The tugging sensation returned and Twilight finally turned to see it. In its hand was a bat-like wing. She could feel its fingers running through the grooves, examining its structure. Twilight flushed with fright and both wings responded, shooting out and up in a flight-ready position.

The suit wheezed in laughter, returning to the corner where it first stood. “Embrace these gifts... *gasp* bestowed upon you and the others... *gasp* I am most eager for you to meet my new herald. *gasp* She is beautiful...” A violent seizure overtook the suit. Trembling violently, the rust and molded paint shed off and the dents and scars popped back to shape.

“Wait!” Twilight yelled, rushing to the suit. “What happened to my friends?”

“We have plans for you all.” It garbled, fading silent.

Red and gold reemerged on its figure. Twilight was still buzzing with questions. She lifted its floating helmet back to look inside the chestplate for the voice, finding only hollowness inside. The helmet slammed down on her head, still looking in the torso. Even the suit seemed to panic, frantically grabbing at Twilight to get her head out of its neck segment. It managed to shove her back and quickly took up mace and shield. Twilight was scared back as it started rapping its shield with the mace, jumping at her aggressively until she was cowering against the wall.

Eventually it stopped and laid down the shield. It grabbed her mane, pulling her to the door, struggling against her resistance due to her increased size. It threw the door open and dragged her out kicking and shouting from the tension. Once in the hallway, it threw her to the ground and brusquely motioned her to stay.

Twilight rose back to her hooves, and watched tensely as the suit approach a door next to the one she’d been dragged from. The hall was wider than she first remembered, with a door to the left and four on opposite sides down the other way.

It struck the door once with its mace and a faint yelp squeaked from in the room, followed by incoherent babble which turned to a vicious snarling and scratching at the door. The suit appeared to ignore this and unlocked it. As soon as it cracked the door open just slightly, a large blur of yellow and red bashed the door open and tackled the suit to the ground. Twilight flinched at the surprise and glared at the gold-colored pegasus, mane apparently weighed down with some red liquid, looming over the grounded armor bearing an expression of unnatural rage. The suit threw her off toward Twilight, leaving a red streak from her mane as she slid across the floor. A bout of feverish shivering seized the pegasus and her expression turned from anger, to pain and sorrow. Twilight recognized the fearful whimpering, as only one pony could sound like that.

“Fluttershy...?” she whispered, bowing her head down. The pegasus shot up and threw both forelegs around her in a tight embrace. Her mane whipped around and splattered them both with the red fluid.

“Oh, Twilight!” Fluttershy bawled, red tears streaming from her eyes. “What’s happening to everypony?” She pulled a wad of mane down before her face and started twisting it, red trickled to the floor. “This! It comes from nowhere! I wrung out my mane so many times but it just gets soaked again from nothing. When I woke up in that room, my mane and everything in there was dry, but now…” She led Twilight to the room and was aghast at the inside. Everything, walls, floor, fixtures, even the ceiling were dripping bright red.

“Goodness...” Twilight muttered, unknowing of what it truly was.

“I’d fall into spells of such random anger and just toss about for a while and come to a minute later. At one point, when I woke up, I was just… bigger. Like you! And uh, sorry for the…”

Twilight remembered she was still smeared with the substance dripping from Fluttershy’s mane and tried to wipe it off, to no avail. “Why aren’t you covered in it?” Twilight asked.

“My coat soaks it up like a sponge.” Fluttershy sighed. She let her mane drip on her coat and each drop disappeared between the hairs. Extending a wing, she wiped Twilight clean, the material soaking into the appendage.

“That’s, um... interesting.” Twilight said, actually unsettled by the conduct of this kindness.

The suit had gotten up and already opened another door. Out stepped a white pony, twisted and contorted in form, bones jutting out in all directions through her skin. Two glowing horns, bound by a collar of Khorne each, protruded from the sides of her head. Long, jagged teeth had grown through her lips, the bottom row piercing the top lip and vice versa. She proceeded uneasily, twitching her head back and forth and small sparks of barely controlled magic arcing from her horns. She tried to make light of her appearance and fake a smile but, straining her lips against her teeth, could not.

Another chamber opened. The suit motioned for the occupant to come out, nothing. In frustration it slammed its mace on the floor with such intensity a shockwave rattled the floor and rang in their ears. Rainbow Dash emerged, easily recognized by her multicolored mane but bore no significant deviations, save greater size and a severely dimmed, dark blue coat.

“Hey, guys.” she said, jittering. “Uh, Twilight. Those wings may look cool, but they’re too small to fly with.” By her tone, Rainbow Dash seemed very nervous about something, covering her flanks with her wings. Fluttershy expressed the pangs of pain and mounting anger. The steady dripping of her mane accelerated to something of a faucet tap.

“Hey Rainbow Dash, what are you hiding there?” She hissed and darted before her. “You got your mark, didn’t you? Let’s see it.”

Rainbow Dash backed up, “Uh, yeah, but it’s not... um…”

Fluttershy moved to pry Rainbow Dash’s wing from its concealing position. The struggle quickly degraded as Fluttershy’s aggression escalated. The only thing that prevented it from turning violent was a puff of pink that pushed them apart, bearing a smile so wide, as to be the stuff of an unsettling dream.

“Good morning, everypony! Wasn’t that night at the spa amazing? Whatever that stuff was my artist gave me, it sure helped ease the muscles but at the same time gave me a feeling you wouldn’t believe!”

Her eyes were dilated to such a degree, they were merely black discs centered with a bead of white. Somewhat tightly, her skin was drawn over her head. A fissure down the back of her neck was held shut by sewing string, masterfully looping back and forth in a strong bond. Her mane hung perfectly flat and straight down, as if brushed untold thousands of times.

“Look what he gave me!” She turned and showed in the place of her cutiemark, a symbol of curves and dyed different shades of pink, blue, and purple. “It’s just like the one the artist had, and I like it!”

“It’s really creative, Pinkie.” Fluttershy said after calming down.

“Oh! And check this out!” Pinkie reached into her mouth and pulled out a long black tongue. She kept trailing out more lengths of it for some time before it finally came to an end. She took up the end and twirled it around her head, wrapping in itself, piling higher and higher atop her head, until it formed a large slimy turban, blue saliva streaming down her face. “Tada!” she yelled, waving her forelegs in a jazz-hooves fashion. She glanced over their expressions expecting looks of amusement and wonder but was met with faces of revulsion and disgust. Seeing she’d failed to impress her friends, removed the headpiece, crammed it back into her mouth, and swallowed the knot whole.

A loud crash and cloud of orange dust swept through the space. The suit stood by a fallen door, broken off its corrosion-disintegrated hinges. Inside, the room hosted a miasma of decay and malady. Every metal surface was coated with it, shedding rust like a red snow. Flies and maggots filled the air and covered a throbbing blob in the center, riddled with countless sores, boils, rips in the flesh and necrotic patches. The flies swarmed to the mass, stuffing it with their number until the makings of limbs grew out and its deflated neck and head swelled to normal proportions.

“Applejack, you feeling alright?” Rainbow dash asked, approaching the doorway.

“I-I can’t feel much a’ anyth—” in mid-sentence, her jaw tore from her head, ripping her weak cheeks like wet tissue paper. A swarm of flies burst from her exposed throat, caught her jaw and maneuvered it back into place. The torn skin melted back together. She struggled to stand, dragging a pile of entrails leading from the floor to her torn abdomen.

“How are you gonna walk with… that?” Rainbow Dash asked, backing away from the stench.

“It ain’t really a problem. I done figured out a way around it, and more.” The sagging intestines wrapped around the other organs and lifted them back into her abdomen, holding shut the flayed strips of skin. “Ya see that, Rarity? Who needs magic to do stuff with their mind now?”

Rarity scowled back. The suit struck the wall to get their attention and motioned them all to follow. Applejack trailed last, teetering on each step.

“So where do you think he’s leading us?” Pinkie asked Twilight.

She remembered the episode of the suit being green and ‘friendly’.

“Promotions?” Twilight responded. Pinkie burst out in laughter.

Chains restraining and arms pointed upon them, a voice started on the other side of a majestic doorway, decorated with heavenly, prophetic images. The two alicorns held their stoic, strong composure, even as the two-legged soldiers at their sides held wood- and iron-framed muskets trained on their heads, watching for the slightest slip-up.

“On suspicion of consortium with the Ruinous Powers and seeking the ruin of the Empire of Man, but allowed continued life by the will of His Most Imperial Highness, Emperor Karl Franz von Holswig-Schliestein the First, Grand Prince of Altdorf, Count of Reikland, Protector of The Empire, you are brought before Him to speak your proposal, self-proclaimed Princesses Luna and Celestia. Bring them forth!”

Chapter 5: Chaos Is a foul Temptress

“Sigmar be merciful on you both.” A man in regal military uniform said, pulling on the chains that bound their legs. The immaculate gate creaked open and he led them inside. The chains restraining their legs reduced their movement to only short steps, as they were only so long.

The room could have been mistaken for a cathedral proper. Stained glass spanned the entire back wall, blazoned with the image of a massive Gothic Iron Cross. Centered on it was a great skull, missing several teeth, wrapped in an olive leaf halo. The gold molding of a griffon, grasping an oddly-shaped hammer in its forelegs was embossed on the floor. Two great statues of noble swordsmen loomed over the side walls. Up a fifty-step staircase, upon a platform adorned with carvings of a twin-tailed comet, in a throne sculpted like a blazing sun, sat an armor-clad figure, an olive leaf halo around his head and a radiant, golden sun atop his helmet. He stared lazily at Luna and Celestia as they were guided across the room, which took some time. The vicious bronze jaguar perched on his helmet gave a different aura about him. They stopped before the staircase and were met by a robed figure looking on them with utter contempt. A dozen scribes prepared to record every moment of the encounter.

“Your form betrays your intent, Chaos spawn.” he scoffed.

Luna maintained a posture of dignity. “Our intent is that of peace, and we seek your… benediction.”

The robed man became enraged at her request. “We would not show an agent of the Darkness benevolence! Do you think us that naïve?” He struck Luna across the face, twisting her head to the side and wiping his hand on his robe, though nothing had come off.

Luna’s eyes flashed white, “You dare assault the Princess of night!?” she shouted in an unearthly booming voice. Her horn started to glow brightly. “You shall pay for this transgress—!”

A soldier pointed his stick to the ceiling, which emitted a thunderous bang. Sparks, fire, and smoke bellowed from the open end, sending Luna reeling in fright. Celesta remained focused on the seated figure.

“Your Highness…” she finally said, giving a respectful bow, “…we and our subjects have come here to seek refuge from this force, which you call Chaos.”

“Do not address the Emperor directly, mutant!”

“We are not products of Chaos. Our city, Canterlot, was attacked by them. We tried to save our citizens by casting a spell to escape, but there was a great interference and we ended up transporting everypony to this land.”

The robed vizier wasn’t buying it. “Chaos is nigh-indiscriminate toward what it attacks. The fact that they slaughter their own kind is nothing new.”

“No.” said a young and rich voice, yet tempered by a grave wisdom borne of many years of burden and service; the voice of a leader. The collective attention of nearly all present in the room turned to the throne, and to its occupant.

“Since the coronation of the Everchosen, their hordes have united under Chaos Undivided. In these times, there are hardly any large conflicts among them. Tell me, colonel Jaeger; what happened when your men found them?”

The man released the chains in surprise of being called on by the Emperor, and quickly took them up again. “Well, your Highness, I, ah, was commanding a regiment of the Company of Honour, returning from Auerswald to Altdorf. One evening, we saw a great burst of spectral light over a hill. I assumed it was a Warp rift opening, so we prepared to advance on it and slay what daemons may have emerged. But as we crested the hill, we were met by them with pleas for sanctuary. They had many injured, and a few had to be preemptively put down due to Nurgle’s Rot infections; their guards threw down their weapons at our feet, even these two, exhausted as they were likely from the transportation spell, and gave themselves up. We’ve kept them all in custody since, and in time, they worked their way up the legal chain to an audience with you, my liege. We haven’t been able to tell if they’re Tzaangors, or simply mutated, sentient horses.”

Luna scowled at the colonel. “Mutants!? A whole two thirds of us bear wings or a horn. That is not an abnormality!”

“And no horse in the Empire has either, or talks.” said the robed man. “So does that mean only one in three of you deserve to live, then?”

“Anyone who has managed to best my bureaucracy is untainted, Norsten.” Franz said. Everyone looked at him in confusion. “Since the beginning of my reign, I have tried to forge the most byzantine, the most purity-permitting system of law in the Old World. Not even The Great Schemer could work it without unwittingly divulging every detail of his plans on paper. Tell me, advisor; how many of those who have gained an audience with me through the administration has spoken ill of the Empire?”

“N-None, sir,” Norsten answered timidly.

“And how many spies, assassins, saboteurs, or deceivers have come through that door?” He pointed to the large gate behind them.

“None, my lord.”

“So what makes them agents of the Great Enemy?”

“They are not human, my lord!”

“The Lizardmen in Lustria are not human, yet their entire existence is to combat Chaos and its followers.” He stood, and all the men knelt where they stood to their risen Emperor. “I have made my decision. By the grace of Sigmar divine, I grant the princesses and their subjects amnesty and sanctuary in Altdorf. A new Equine district shall be built, similar to the dwarven and elfish boroughs to house the refugees and, seeing as those before me are deposed monarchs, I shall offer them boarding in the palace.”

Celestia and Luna let out sighs of relief and exultation and the robed advisor stood, still baffled by the Emperor’s ruling.

“A thousand thanks, kind sovereign!” Luna said, as the soldiers unbound their chains.

“We will try not to impede on your tasks.”

After both were escorted from the throne room, Franz descended the staircase. He looked out through the stained glass windows, down on the courtyard of the palace. The advisor walked up to his side.

“My Emperor... why have you pardoned them so austerely?”

“Whether we use them for axe fodder or we integrate them for long-term cooperation, we need allies in this war,” the Emperor said. “The elves are too self-centered in their own ways of fighting Chaos, and the dwarves are barely holding back the Greenskins. I feel a new storm is on the horizon.”

“Ugh! We’ve been walking forever. When are we gonna get there?” asked Pinkie, bored out of her mind.

“It’s only been like five minutes since we started and this is the eighth time you asked!” Rainbow Dash yelled back, annoyed out of hers.

“Well how big can this place be? On the outside it was way smaller.”

“They seem to break the laws of physics all the time, Pinkie. I’m surprised that you’re surprised.”

The hall eventually let out to a large foyer. The entire far side was dominated by a protrusion of a massive demonic face with a door, embossed with an eight-pointed star fit in its maw. A stone draconequus head, shattered at the neck, hung upside-down.

“Discord...” Twilight muttered in sad realization.

The suit led them across the space and they looked at the face with apprehension as its eyes seemed to follow them.

Just as the suit reached for the doorknob, a spark spontaneously shot from it and the suit hesitated. Gradually the glimmers built up until the knob looked like a hundred firework sparklers. It melted onto the door and the white-hot metal spread over the surface. The suit backed away, as this was apparently not what it expected. From this great white rectangle emerged a figure wearing little more than a loincloth, flesh mutilated and scarred, carrying a bloody scourge. Their mouth was sewn shut and hung around their neck was a sign that read ‘Repent’. They wildly attacked the suit, flogging at it furiously but fruitlessly as it had no flesh to flay. Several more, better-armed and beaten madmen sprang forth shouting a motley of litanies and diatribes. One of them, wearing armor with a high collar and an iron ring around his bald head bore no scars and egged them on as they brought the suit to its knees.

“You six! Through the portal!” he yelled, striking the suit with a large hammer, causing the chestplate to buckle with a loud crump.

Marauders appeared in the adjacent halls, alerted to the commotion. Seeing the six still stood glaring at the struggle, the bald man turned to them and smote Applejack. She went flying, knocking the others like bowling pins into the glowing passage and it sealed behind them.

“Die, brave Sigmarites! Die and atone for your sins! In His glorious name!!” He cried and charged the approaching marauders.

“Wake up darn you! Wake up! They’re coming!” A voice frantically cried.

As Twilight came to her senses, she felt small thuds alternating on different sides of her face which gradually grew to hard blows. Something wet splashed over her face and she sprang up gasping.

She found herself face to face with a brown pony sitting on her chest, holding a tuft of Fluttershy’s soaking mane over her face. He jumped off and helped Twilight up.

“Come on, we have to go, the Orks are coming!”

“Orks, wha?” she muttered in a daze.

“No time. Fluttershy, help her out.”

They hastily exited a dilapidated barn on a farmer’s property. The brown pony led them into a large outcropping of foliage on the far side of a dirt road where Rarity, Applejack, and Pinkie Pie were also hiding. Rainbow Dash was nowhere to be seen. Twilight poked her head up to look down the road and saw several figures in the coming down.

“Get down.” he whispered loudly and pulled her back under.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Shh!”

The figures drew nearer to their hiding place. They varied in size and appearance with large lower jaws, short, apelike heads and rough green skin. The biggest of them, covered in pitch black armor painted like a checkerboard on one shoulder, stopped before where they hid. THey got a good look at its predatory teeth, almost glowing red eyes, and many scars.

“Dere’s a ‘umie ‘ut, boyz! Let’s get ta crompin! WAAAGH!!!” it yelled and they all stormed toward the farmhouse screaming in kind.

A small green creature with a massive nose fell off the ork’s back. As it got up frustrated it saw a red line on the ground leading straight to their hiding spot.

The brown pony looked to Fluttershy, whose mane was dripping on the ground and back to the creature. “No no, go away…” he nervously whispered.

Just before it reached the shrubbery, the large ork called to it.

“Oy, gobbo! Get back ova e’re!”

The creature frantically ran back as fast as its short legs would take it. The large ork proceeded to smash the door to the farmhouse and force its way in.

“Ok, they’re going to be occupied so we should go now.” The brown pony said.

He poked his head out and surveyed for any more orks. They were all sacking the house.

“Let’s go!” he jumped out of the bushes and took off in the opposite direction the orks came with everyone in pursuit. As Applejack came out, she caught on the branches of the bush, tearing the skin off her leg, exposing a mass of flies just underneath. She ignored it and kept running after.

“Who sent you, lapdog!?” Archaon shouted as the empty suit of armor, sporting several new heads around its body, cranked a stretching rack. The victim howled in pain, muffled by the high collar of his chestplate. When the rack relaxed again, he laughed.

“All my disciples have been saved in the eyes of Sigmar thanks to his assistance, now I wait to join them. He, in new form, helped their souls be restored and He shall aid in your defeat again. If you are going to, kill me quickly. My pupils wait for me in the bleak lands of Morr.”

Archaon roared with rage, shoved the suit aside and cranked the rack rapidly himself.

“You shall burn, heretic!” the racked man bellowed as he quickly split in half and fell silent.

“It has been a mixed day; destroying the coward god Discord, a bounty of lives from the towns, and the six magic jewels from the latest raid. Traded off by assassins killing my original lieutenants, The Dimension Traveller returns and has taken the replacements before I could tether their souls to Chaos, and an elf that came with the assassins made off with the green and purple dragon! What use he’ll be to them I don’t know, being so close to a Chaos Spawn now. The Traveller could have taken them anywhere, anywhen! I’d need something to track them through space and time, but…” He noticed a collar of Khorne hanging on a spike on the suits pauldron and grinned under his helmet.

“Bring those three impertinent fillies to our sorcerers and prepare to return to the Wastes. I’m sure the unicorn and red head would be elated to see their sisters again.”

After some time of running, the brown pony with an hourglass cutiemark led them to a small ring of tents concealed on the inside edge of a forest. A large metal cart with a banner, displaying the image of an ornate hammer, hanging by a pole lay beside the most decorated tent. He said they could call him Doctor Whooves as he was known in Equestria. It seemed like the early evening but must’ve been daytime due to little light coming through a miserably overcast sky.

“Ten years!?” It couldn’t be that long since I last saw you, we met yesterday and you don’t look a day older!” Twilight screamed.

“This calendar says so.” He reached into a box at his side and held up a stately calendar. “See, 2535 I.C. When we met, it was 2525. Oh, and look…” He put a hoof to one of the squares, “Emperor Franz turned forty-six today. Well, happy birthday. You know, Warp travel is very risky. Getting it to go not only where you want but to go to the right time as well is very difficult. I’m more used to… other means.”

“Who were those guys that got us out of that weird building?” Pinkie asked.

“Flagellants, and a slightly more deranged Warrior Priest. They came around looking for a fight to be ‘redeemed’ in, and I found ‘em one. In return, he’d get you all here and we could use the stuff in their camp here since they’re gone.”

“Well some plan he had, usi’n me like a billiard ball. T‘snot the best way to be rescued, but why not do it sooner; ‘fore we were all turned to freaks!?” Applejack carped.

“I didn’t think he’d do it so quickly. When I saw you come through the portal I blamed myself for being too late, spending too much time finding a better distraction to send first. Now I’ve got five big…” He paused and analyzed their new stature, “…ger problems on my hooves.”

“You j-just w-waited?” Fluttershy stammered, shivering. The fluid cascaded from her mane like a waterfall and appeared to start boiling. “You knew what was gonna happen and did nothing?”

“Are you ok?” He asked nervously. “Your mane is, uh…” He followed timidly as the fluid flowed on the ground around him. Fluttershy stood up and staggered forward.

“Looking for a better distraction? Were you trying to put on a show; to make some grand entry?”

“Now Fluttershy, ‘member what ah told ya before they separated us agi’n. Just calm do—“

“You… let them make me a monster!” She spread her wings, twitching erratically.

“I said I’m sorry, but this can work to our benefit! The mutations you’ve been imbued with can help us survive in this world!” he said, curling up to avoid the shrinking, bubbling ring.

Just before Fluttershy brought a hoof crashing down on his head, a buzzing black cloud engulfed her face, blinding her vision.

“Ah didn’t want it to come to this!” Applejack yelled, struggling to stand with a now-missing leg.

The flies drove Fluttershy reeling back. Applejack hobbled up to her and stuck a hoof under her nose. The putrid vapors emanating from her decaying skin quickly rendered Fluttershy comatose. She let the torn abdominal skin hang open and manipulated her intestines around Fluttershy’s legs and dragged her to one of the tents.

“How are you doing that?” Whooves asked with intrigue.

“Dunno how. Just uh, link to the brain ah guess? When ah first found out, mah nose was itch’n and ‘fore ah scratched it with a hoof, these things were already there. Ts’even got teeth that did the scratch’n! How does that happen?” She lifted one up. Small serrated teeth stuck out from the open end. “Then there’r these dang flies!” she raised the leg her skin had been torn from. “Ts’like ah don’t even have real legs ‘nymore, just these fellas movi’n me when ah mean to.”

“Insects replacing the bones and muscle in your limbs? That’s beyond atrophy.”

From deeper in the forest, a rabbit’s body, hanging lifeless floated into the ring of tents carried by a cloud of flies.

“Now ah dunno what this is about, but git that thing away from me!” Applejack yelled but the carcass still drew closer.

It touched down next to her. The flies making up her leg, carrying maggots, descended on the body and quickly broke it down. Rarity and Twilight were revolted but Pinkie enjoyed herself, rolling around in a thorn bush just outside the ring.

“Ah said git!” Applejack moved to kick away the carcass but her leg locked up and neither would any other leg move.

The grubs returned to the torn area just below her flank and used sewing like methods to attach the meat from the rabbit. The fix was seamless, the flesh rotting like hers as it was applied. When done, the flies refilled the new limb and Applejack regained control.

“Ha ha! Brilliant!” Whooves laughed.

“That’s not funny, she’s falling apart.” Rainbow Dash’s voice sounded. Twilight felt a feathery brushing against her side but saw nothing there.

“Rainbow? Where are you?” Twilight called, looking around.

“I’m right here. What, you need your eyes checked?”

She felt a thump on her shoulder. Rarity started humming incoherently through her punctured lips, tapping the collars on the horns on the sides of her head.

“I think she’s got something.” Whooves said, going to her. “You know, there’s a latch on these you can undo riiiight... here.”

He flipped them both at once and they fell off. Rarity tensed up as white lightning suddenly shot from her horns in all directions, some tendrils struck the ground, leaving smoldering blotches. Many were directed toward the origin of the voice next to Twilight. The air it coursed around started sputtering erratically different vocal sounds. Dark blue feathers materialized over the ground and the appearance of a tuft of rainbow colored mane. The wave of feathers rippled to the ground until it revealed a Pegasus completely covered in feathers, puffed out. Pinkie just laughed and clapped at the light show, leaning up on the thorn bush and was disappointed when it ended.

Rainbow Dash cringed and twitched from the shock, her body steaming and some patches burnt. The feathers settled and merged into her coat, as if they weren’t there.

“Aha!” Pinkie shouted, “Now look who can’t see their best friend’s friends! You’re lucky he disappeared or he’d be all ‘In your face’!”

Twilight unlatched her collar, slightly embarrassed it was so easy as opposed to paniking and pulling at it.

“I think we’d better be on our way. We have to go to Altdorf.” Whooves said. “I was teleported here along with the princesses of Equestria last year and they might be able to help you with—“

Twilight sprang up, “Wait, what? Celestia and Luna are here? How has it only been a year; I thought you said it was ten?”

“Alright… here we go.” He sighed and took a deep breath. “When we first met, in Imperial time, it was 2525, now it’s 2535. The flagellants I sent to get you here went through the portal, back ten years and pushed you to present day. The princesses, at the same time tried to escape Canterlot being ransacked and conveyed the refugees fleeing Archaon’s advance across Equestria and the whole population of Canterlot, amazingly, not only across space but time because of Warp interference, to 2524 on the outskirts of the Reikland province where we were kept in the most horrid of conditions until they got the Emperor to grant us amnesty for basically one reason; we haven’t tried to kill any humans yet, and most everything else in the world is.

“So far the past year, the ponies have been largely accepted by Imperial society because of their abilities; flying, earth ponies being on average physically stronger than humans, and using magic that doesn’t kill everypony around the caster. Because of this, the people of the Empire and Kislev can share in a slightly higher standard of living but little has changed in the big picture since the war against Chaos has been going for over seven thousand years and the arrival of a new race just adds more meat to the grinder and more potential heretics for Chaos to exploit.

“Now as I understand it, you all were supposed to be mere riding animals for Archaon’s lieutenants and Vardek Crom after he got resurrected but since assassins snuck in among his party and killed the lieutenants, and thankfully not anypony here before being killed themselves, he was going to ensnare your souls to Chaos and make you his right hand mares; but then I came along with the crazy Sigmarites and saved you before then. Now he’s trying to rebuild the Wastes to launch another attack without any assistance from his would-be lieutenants; but he still got Crom back. Some things might not add up, but then again the whole of existence is just a bunch of wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey... stuff. Any questions?”

Rainbow Dash raised a hoof, “Uh—“

“Good! Let’s be on our way! Take anything we might need for the trip, leave everything else for the bandits!”

He jumped onto the cart and kicked over the pole and banner, “This would draw too much negative attention from non-Imperials, which we may see a lot of. Looks like there’s room for everypony and the stuff, but it’s a long trip and somepony will have to pull… volunteers?”

“I could maybe use my magic to get it to move. Having the same mark Archaon has may have boosted something, I’m guessing.” Twilight answered. She tried to focus intensely on the cart as it was very large, thinking she could only be able to make it move slowly at first. Her horn glowed and the cart suddenly shot back, out from under Whooves who fell to the ground. The cart slammed into a tree with great force, nearly knocking it down.

“Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry!” she exclaimed, trying to get him back up with magic again.

His body twisted and contorted, dragged across the ground like a ragdoll. “Ack! Just stop, stop!”

He finally rolled across the ground to a stop and got up himself.

He bent and stretched, rolling his joints. “Please, just… get the cart. And think small.”

Pinkie Pie and Rainbow Dash gathered what little food was in the camp and wrapped up some of the tents. Rarity collected tools and money from the priest’s tent and Applejack helped lift the still incapacitated Fluttershy and salvaged materials onto the cart.

“Wait a minute.” Rainbow Dash said. “If there’s a fight against Chaos and we’re all Chaos infested or whatever, how will we make it without getting attacked or something?”

“The Old World is so permeated by the influence of Chaos, it even infests the Empire. The most you’ll get from anyone less crazy than witch-hunters is a dirty look, unless we can find clothing or something to hide the changes. Otherwise, they can be just as hospitable to Chaos cultists as to devout Sigmarites. What was that you did with the feathers when Rarity shocked you?”

Rainbow Dash was bemused by the recollection. She looked at where her cutiemark once was, now stung by a scarred-over Chaos star. She winced at remembering the pain and indignity of getting it literally carved out of her. She wished it just hadn’t happened. That she was light blue again with a lightning bolt cutiemark, laying a beat down on Haargroth right then. A wave of feathers rolled down her body, changing from dark to light blue and the star seemed to disappear. In its place a white cloud and red, yellow, and blue lightning bolt appeared as the feathers melded back into her coat.

“Brilliant!” Whooves exclaimed. “Alright everypony, mount up!”

They all boarded the cart and Whooves pulled out a map.

“Ok. We’re here, just south of Kislev’s capital. Altdorf is here.” He dragged his hoof halfway across the map to the southwest. “Between here and there, we need to keep away from heavily forested regions because they’re full of Beastmen, but considering we’re animals they might actually… never mind. We move at day and set up camp at night until we reach Sylvania, then we move at night, rest during daytime. First south along the World’s Edge Mountains, then turn west through Sylvania…” He went over a black blob on the map in the middle of the Empire with no information over it. “Then Stirland, Averland, Wissenland, and finally Reikland. Along the way we have to avoid Orks, Skaven, Beastmen, Lizardmen, Chaos warbands, Witch-Hunters, Warrior Priests, Dark Elves, Night Goblins, Ogres, Giants, High Elves if they have Chaos-seeking Dragons, and Flagellants because they won’t be so friendly seeing you all looking like this. Any questions?”

Rainbow Dash raised a hoof again. “Uh—“

“Excellent! Miss Sparkle, if you please.”

Twilight focused very little on the cart to move it. Her horn barely illuminated and it rolled forward. She maneuvered it past the tree line and onto the dirt road, headed south.

“We cannot wait to be rid of this dreadful place.” Luna ranted. “After this day, the ponies’ district will be complete and we move to our new domicile.”

“I agree. Being restricted to the palace for a year has been monotonous. What does this city even look like? We were carted in in boxes, but they face so many enemies. I knew from the beginning earning their trust would be difficult.”

A whirling, dark mist engulfed Luna and she assumed the façade of Nightmare Moon. Celestia donned an array of clothing adorned with radiant suns and flames.

“The humans have never seen Nightmare Moon. Are you sure you won’t startle them?” Celestia cautioned.

“We believe it would fit the occasion, and we will not need to put anything else on. You are lucky there is an order already existing that corresponds to you, sister; the Knights of the Blazing Sun. But why are we escorted by the Black Knights of Morr? We both may be dour but we do not deal in death!”

There was a knock at the door.

“Your Highnesses, we await to escort you to the festivities.” The voice of a man called out.

“Are you prepared to wish the Emperor another wondrous year, sister?” Nightmare Moon asked.

Celestia fixed her tiara and nodded.

They exited the room into a “T” intersection of halls. Down one way were ten knights clad in armour of bright yellow and black, a sun displayed on their chestplates and shields. Down the other, men in pitch-black panoply wearing dark grey masks designed like skulls. Though both groups did not speak, the latter were deathly silent and still.

“See? The knights are not troubled.” Nightmare Moon said, the knights following them down the stairwell.

Celestia was still wary, “They are elite warriors. They’re supposed to be fearless.”

After navigating the halls they’d been confined to for nearly a year, they approached the ballroom door.

A courier on the other side heard hoof steps and rustling metal through the door and proceeded down the first flight of stairs, to the top of the second, and called over the room.

“Announcing the arrival of the rulers of the Equines…” Much of the congregation below quieted down and looked to the door as it opened. ”…Princesses Celestia and Luna-aaaaaah!!”

Night descended and they set up camp some distance from the road, on a short ridge so as not to be seen by passersby. Applejack couldn’t sleep in a tent as she would deflate into a blob when the flies left her body as she slept, taking up the entire ground of the tent. Only three tents fit on the cart, so they paired up. Fluttershy had recovered and earnestly apologized.

“Cyberponies, shore up the left side! The Daleks cannot pass here!” Whooves mumbled in his sleep.

The feeling of something crawling over his mouth, and an intensifying pressure on his legs woke him up. Believing it must be some lurking wild animal or worse, he tried to get up and confront the being but was pinned down, staring at the ceiling of the tent.

“Aw, you’re awake? Darn it!” A high-pitched voice grumbled. Whatever bound his mouth and legs started dragging him across the ground until he was suddenly face to face with a more wide-eyed than normal Pinkie Pie, standing over him, sweating profusely. Her eyes were completely consumed in blackness and several dark tongues slithered from her mouth, dribbling blue slime.

“Well, as long as you are…” She said in a disturbingly aroused manner, “I gotta thank you for waiting to save us. You were right, these gifts work sooo well. Every feeling, sensation… “ she started wrapping his face, “…magnified. And I started thinking, how good can this feel?”

Whooves knew well the effects of the mark of slaanesh. He let out muffled shouts and struggled to break loose. Pinkie was only stimulated more and giggled at his squirming. Her tongues tightened as she laid herself down on him, forcefully gliding up and down his body.

“I’m gonna need total cooperation, Doc. And come on, smile! This is gonna be awesome.“

A few tongues slithered into his mouth and nose, coursing down windpipe, esophagus, and up into his skull. He couldn’t help but uncontrollably laugh, despite barely being able to breathe, as they tickled their way through him.

“And what’s this?” She said, poking something high in his head making his leg jerk with each touch.

Whooves eventually found himself writhing in a horrifying ecstasy, choking on Pinkie’s tongues as she fondled him inside and out, covering him in her perspiration, and giggling maniacally.

“This feels important.” She said, licking a small lump at the base of his brain and vigorously poked it.

He immediately went limp but was still awake and feeling, hoping the worst was over. Pinkie drew all the appendages back into her mouth, savoring the taste of his fur and entrails and brought her face to touch his.

“Now…the real fun begins.”

“Skaven are even worse than we read in the palace library.” Luna said, somewhat trying to forget the evening by admiring the bedroom of hers and Celestia’s new home. “The ferocity… the despair in its eyes as the knights struck it down.”

Celestia hung up what was left of her sullied dress, “At least you made up for the Nightmare Moon scare in helping restrain it. The people came within an inch of simply fleeing for their lives when they saw you!”

“To think they would be used to strange sights… but the Emperor was right. Nobles are blissfully ignorant of what is out there. And the squalor of this city is horrific. Their people, our own subjects, if they’re not an ignorant noble or thieving merchant, they live in absolute poverty! Only in the Elven district have we seen some iota of civility toward the lowest-ranking residents.” Luna dove onto her bed and threw her face in the pillow. “Pray this nightmare be over soon.”

Chapter 6: Da Greeniez iz Commin

Pinkie Pie felt the oddest ticklish, squirming sensation in her belly as she woke, followed by the unmistakable taste of chocolate swilling in her mouth. The murmur of a small stream nearby added to her serenity and relaxation. She put a hoof on her belly, feeling that it was much bigger than expected. She didn’t remember eating anything before sleeping, let alone something that swelled her stomach to such size. It felt amazing, the sheer feeling of fullness. She put a little pressure on her belly as it started to ache.

*Buuuurp* “...Mmm... Much better.”

She rolled onto her side and was surprised to hear her belly shout as it fell with her. She curiously put her ear to her round paunch and heard frightened, muffled talking. She felt it thrash about inside her.

She sat up, trying to manage her rioting insides. “Oh my gosh, what is that!?”

Its panic made Pinkie’s stomach abandon it. It gave a heaving convulsion, stuffing what she’d eaten back up her throat, but it was huge for her esophagus and she immediately choked. Her belly heaved on, forcing the reject up and up until a pair of slime-covered legs popped out her mouth. The mass crushed her windpipe in her neck, breath was impossible. The lightheadedness felt like a sick glee, she almost liked it. She grabbed the legs and yanked hard, bringing the glob out with a wet pop from her lips. It plopped onto the ground and Pinkie clutched her raging stomach.

"Oooh... what did I eat last night?" she moaned. "I haven't felt like this since Applejack helped me make those cupcakes."

The blob twitched, then waved its hooves in the air frivolously. "I'm alive! I won! Oh god, that was one of the worst nights of my life!" it garbled in a familiar voice.

"Won what? D... Doc, is that you?"

He staggered to get up, shook off the muck, and put on a dazed smile. Most of his fur was gone and some of his skin was discolored.

"What the hay were you doing in my stomach?" she asked, a million other questions roaring in her mind.

"You ought to know. You put me there." He picked up a small green stone that fell out with him, bit it in half with a pop of ethereal mist from the stone, and rubbed the inside on his balded hide. Brown fur started growing back. “Ah warpstone. A million and one uses!”

"When...how!? I just woke up and suddenly, bleh."

Whooves tried to remember, making all kinds of inebriated faces.

"Of course! Nopony ever remembers having a psychotic breakdown, paralyzing and using somepony's body for hedonism, cutting themselves open with a beastman's sword, stitching three stomachs onto theirs and putting the victim inside before closing it and falling asleep for an hour and a half! I must say the only part I think I enjoyed was the stargazing, just staring straight up though because I couldn't look anywhere else before you ran off, dragged back three dead beastmen—heaven knows how you killed them—and cut out—"

"I didn't kill anything!" Pinkie burst out, "I would never, ever, ever!"

"Well, whether or not you killed them, they sure didn't show up looking like that."

She looked to where he pointed and immediately turned away, sickened at the sight of three bodies piled together. They had the distorted heads of goats and a bull and legs of the same nature.Their torsos were split wide open, entrails strung around them like streamers. Pinkie vomited up several rocks and the trunk of a bush, yet more debris.

"Yeah, you got hungry after a while, thinking everything was candy, and ran out of those, so stuffed me in to fill in the space."

Pinkie finally noticed a rectangular pattern of fine stitches outlining her entire torso. She felt along the ridges of string, caked in her own dried blood.

"You seem a lot less chipper." he said, watching her frantically inspect the seam.

Even Pinkie Pie couldn’t make light of a drastic incident like this. "Why would I— This is terrible! W... Why do you sound so happy?"

"Ugh! Your breath was like laughing gas and there was a lot of breathing while you used me."

Pinkie exhaled on her hoof and smelled it, producing a joyful buzz in her head and a short bout of giggling.

"Well, um... can we just find everypony? I have no idea where we are."

"Right! they must be wondering where you dragged us off to. I think it was, mmm... that way. Allez—" He tripped over himself and faceplanted.

The others fared little better. When Twilight woke, she found herself biting into Fluttershy’s bleeding mane. Her startled yelp jerked Fluttershy to wake abruptly and lose herself in the throes of rage.

"Flujerschy, I schwear I jijn joo eet on purpushe!" Twilight shouted through gnarled teeth, teleporting around Fluttershy to avoid her swinging hoof, bristling with what seemed like metallic spikes.

"No! You did! You're trying to take it from me!” Fluttershy pointed a shaking, accusatory hoof at the purple mare. Her face was twisted into a furious beastial snarl. “I'll rip those fangs out of your face and use them to cut out your heart!"

She took another swing at Twilight, but she teleported behind her. Fluttershy ended up shattering a rock, the pieces rocketing all over.

"Vut I joneefen know hwea these cae fruhm!”

"Stop...TALKING LIKE THAT!"

She brought it over again, and again Twilight flashed out of its way. Fluttershy's weaponized hoof planted itself in Applejack's deflated body, resting like a drop of water, a dome with eyes. She was still sleeping, despite the ruckus. Flies from about the area swarmed into her skin. She slowly took shape and stood, coughing up coagulated blood and stumps of cavity-riddled teeth that had been collecting overnight.

"*yawn*... Oh, Ah gotta tell ya’ll the dream ah had. Ah was back home, worki'n on the farm when outta nowhere, somepony hit me with a rock 'n ah didn't feel a thing."

As her inflamed eyes came to focus, she saw Fluttershy, bearing a confused and furious expression, slowly pulling her hoof out of the side of her face. Bits of shredded muscle and skin came off with the barbs. She sighed, but was a little comforted that Fluttershy wasn’t still trying to hit her.

"You're going to try to put me out again?" Fluttershy growled.

"Long as yur finally learni'n who yur friends are, ah won't have to; but ah never wanted to, last time."

"F-friend...maybe. But her..." she pointed to Twilight who backed up at the motion. "She's a liar! Stealer!"

Applejack wrapped a tube around Fluttershy's cascading mane and stuffed it in her mouth. She drank the fluid as it flowed in.

"Whatever this stuff is, it seems ta calm ya down, so... feel'n any better?"

The spikes on her hoof receded inward and she started to cry. Twilight slowly walked over and patted her on the back.

"Eet'sh okay, eet'sh arait. Looksh like hwe founj a hway to conrol eet."

Fluttershy threw her hooves around Twilight, scraping her neck on her teeth. Twilight's abnormal teeth snapped back into line with painful speed.

"I'm s-so s-sorry. I d-didn't mean it." Fluttershy cried.

Rainbow Dash swooped by and landed, looking around confused. "Hey guys, um... where's the Doc, Pinkie... and all the stuff?"

"Where were you? And where's Rarity?" Applejack questioned.

"Rarity's magic must have gone crazy last night and we both woke up at the bottom of the hill. Now when you see her, don't mention the eyes and arm."

"The wuh?"

"Just don't talk about it! We don't want her to blow up from shock."

Rarity crested the hill, gazing around puzzled. Applejack, Twilight and Fluttershy too noticed that nearly all the supplies, the tents, food, even the cart Applejack had been sleeping on, was gone. Few things remained and one new object stood tall. A pole with a poor carving of a scowling moon and a sign under it saying "Yoo dun got looted."

"Spit it out, right now...." Whooves demanded angrily.

Pinkie shook her head, her cheeks puffed up.

"Now!"

She spat out a wad of wood splinters and leaves she'd gathered.

"Come on! I didn't get hurt on the thorn bush yesterday. Why can’t...I..."

Her pupils suddenly dilated, turning her eyes completely black and she started drooling and sweating profusely. She smiled and licked her lips ecstatically.

"Oh, bullocks..." Whooves said.

Before he could try to get away, Pinkie lashed her tongues out, bound up his legs, and pulled him into her lap. She squeezed him so tightly, it felt like they’d suddenly splice together if she held him any harder.

"Hey, you're alive!” she chimed. “Listen I'm sorry about last night, it was my first time and I wanted to try keep it clean. Not like what those nasty Demonettes I saw do. That's just disgusting."

"And using my face as a flank scratcher was clean?"

"It was experimentation you said, right? So one experiment failed.” She licked broadly across his face. “Did you enjoy last night? I sure did; the fun, the food, and those three nice guys that lent me their stomachs."

"You cut it out of them!"

"Well they're not using them now, are they? Can't let it go to waste."

She turned him upright, let out another tongue and caressed his torso.

"Ok. You've got to be some slaaneshi demon possessing Pinkie or... or some incepted personality."

"Nonononononono. You ever hear the story of the pony who split their personality in two; still the same pony but a whole new side of themselves to explore?"

"Yes. The bad half ruined the original's life. Nearly got himself arrested or killed many times. What, you're gonna try to stop everypony from reaching Altdorf?"

"Oh no, I'm gonna help; but I wanna have fun along the way, especially with you, Doc."

Her jittering motions reduced into a slow swaying and she started emitting intense body heat. Her sweat stung his nose like a concentrated perfume and her tongue's grip tightened.

"This thing between us, I want it to last and mean something."

"I've only known you for a day, and you abused my last night! There's nothing between us! You're just going mad!"

“Oh, I've been there for a while. As far as I'm concerned, it's Hearts and Hooves day every day and you're my very special somepony. Even if you keep going back and forth from tasting like coffee to chocolate." She held him tightly to her body and stroked his back, drooling on his head, and pretending to eat his mane, biting it and pulling lightly with her lips.

"Mmm... I think the taste of coffee'll grow on me."

He was rendered speechless by her chokingly sweet stench and constricting grip, senses overwhelmed by her playful, almost sensual feel-up of his body.

"Oh zog this, I'm outta e're." A bush shrilly said.

A small green-skinned creature, just like the one that nearly spotted them near the farmhouse came strolling out of a bush and started walking away. Pinkie immediately let Whooves drop to the ground and stared at it.

"I don't care 'ow da boss wont'd me ta spy on ya, I ain't gonna wach yoo two go at each uvva' like squigs in mayt'n seezin."

Pinkie snatched the creature up with her tongue and brought it closer, tying up its arms and legs.

"Oh my gosh, a giant gummy bear!" She exclaimed

Whooves struggled for breath as he got up.

"Pinkie, whatever you're going to do just wait a minute." He took a few more breaths of better air. "A goblin? Why were you spying on us?"

"Wot's it to ya, ya git?"

"Doc, are you actually talking to a gummy bear?" Pinkie asked.

"I ain't no furilly beast, lemme go!"

"But candy's made to be eaten and I lost everything I ate a while ago."

The goblin's eyes widened and his cowardly nature came spilling out.

"Oh Gork, pleez don't eat me! I'll tell ya evrythi'n, evrythi'n!"

Whooves looked at Pinkie, staring at the goblin intensely. "No promises, but we'll see what happens. Now why were you spying?"

"Cuz da boss told me to. We was gonna loot ya camp, see, and we saw da pink one sneeki'n off wid you on da ground. Dey looted ya stuff and I went afta ya. Lost ya fer a woil, but fawnd ya agin!"

"You were raiding our camp!? You better not have hurt anypony there!"

"Naw, dat's not da way da Sneeky Gits do dere wurk. Whoy kill peeplz up wen day can stew in dere not havi'n stuff? Corse dere was useless stuff we didn't wont, a map, gold coins. Good luck us'n dat against da WAAAGH!!!"

"The whah?" Pinkie asked.

"No ya drooli'n git, WAAAGH!!! If ya dunno wot a WAAAGH!!! iz den yooz gonna get stomp'd fer sure!"

"Damn it, a WAAAGH!!!?" Whooves muttered darkly. "When does it start?"

"I dunno. Weneva da Warboss n' boyz wants ta start. I got all ya kwestchins, yeah? I dunno nuffin else."

"Fine. We're done. Pinkie, please don't actually—"

*crack*

Pinkie twisted it's head sharply and it went limp and silent. She quickly dislocated her jaw, stretched it down, stuffed the goblin down her throat and swallowed it whole.

"Good god, what'd you do!?"

"What? you said you were done asking questions, and I'm not letting good candy go to waste."

"O-ok... Uh... We have to find the girls and get moving further west to avoid the WAAAGH!!!. We set up right next to the World's Edge Mountains and the orks will come a-sweeping down from there."

"Well, I know the way back. You took us waaay off course."

She wrapped him up with her tongue, forcibly rubbed her muzzle to his, and tied him down to her back.

"You really had no idea where you were going." she teased, and ran with him in the opposite direction they came.

A hundred fires burned in the arid mountain air. Squigs growled and bounced around, goblins fled from any squig bigger than them. hundreds of greenskins gathered around the largest building among the huge, crude encampment.

“Ooze da one ta kick da 'umies' arse!?" a strangely dressed ork, carrying a staff of bones and his skull missing at the top, exposing his brain, screamed to an audience of more "ordinary" greenskins.

"Da Orkz!" They shouted in return.

"'Ooze da one ta stomp all da stunties!?”

"Da Orkz!”

“Ooze da one ta ruff up da elfses!?”

"Da Orkz!”

"Ooze da one ooze gonna get da best fight EVAH!?"

"DA ORKZ!!!!"

The greenskins clamored with excitement, swinging their crude swords in the air and throwing about goblins. The weirdboy's brain coursed with green lightning, absorbing the sheer orkiness emitting from the others and he howled at the sensation.

From the tent behind him stormed out the biggest ork of them all, missing an eye. He swung around a huge battleaxe and held it over his head.

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!!!!!!" He roared, sending all the orks into silence and the goblins running in panic.

"Round up all da clanz 'n tribes yooz can find! Da Deff Skullz, Bone Crunchaz, Bad Sunz Boyz, evry one! Tell 'em Grimgor's invited ya all to da biggest fight EVAH! Wen I got back from beat'n dat Kay-oss Warboss Arkayon, I want'd ta make my comeback loud 'n show da hole wurld ooze still not just Warboss, but WarLORD of da greenies! Ta start da WAAAGH!!!, I'm gonna treat yoo all to a 'ead splod'n contest wid my weirdboy usi'n one ah dem new magic Kay-oss ponies!"

A few orks carried in a bound up unicorn, chattering madly and a chaos star branded on their neck. The weirdboy sat on the ground and the unicorn was thrown beside him. They sat and lay for a while, the orkz beating each other's teeth out, using them as money to place bets on how long the unicorn would survive. Eventually the unicorn started to ramble more loudly.

"This p-p-p-pressure, its i-i-in my head, growing, and growing. Oh gods, just take my soul now and save me!"

He thrashed and screamed about more and more wildly as the wierdboy sat quiet, staring at him blankly, until his head split lengthwise, his liquefied brain pouring from his cranium. Grimgor took the weirdboy by the arm, his brain smoking but still cheering himself, and held him up.

"Da WAAAGH!!! is on! Rouuund up Da Boyz!!"

"Damn merchants. Filthy middlemen stealing half the profits of my crops..." The farmer grumbled to himself. "And you. Wasting money on a music box!? We could have spent it on food, seeds for next year."

He brought his fist down on the earth pony's head.

"Ow! We had a better yield this year. I thought we could afford it when you sold off the crops."

"You mean you! Haven't you learned by now that merchants will swindle you of all you have?"

"I...I guess not."

The man pulled a small box with a crank out of his sack.

"Fifteen florins for this?"

He opened it. Half the pins were missing and many of the cylinder bumps were worn smooth.

"And it doesn't even work! Let me tell you, we are not living together, you are stuck living with me. It's my land, my money, and you don't spend a cent outside your pay. Understand?"

"Yeah." the pony replied sadly.

"Good. When we get back, you're only getting half your usual feed... Oh Sigmar, my house!"

As the property came into view down the road, the farmhouse was reduced to a pile of rubble, the barn barely standing. A dark, fading cloud hung over and three creatures running around it.

"Damn Chaos!" the farmer cried and drew an old pistol, "A hundred and fifty florins might finally pay off now."

As they got closer, the creatures appeared to be three fillies, searching the debris. Before they could make out the white one, it went into the barn.

"You two!" he called, aiming the pistol as he approached. "You come through that portal?"

"Y-Yeah." The orange pegasus answered quickly, jittering.

"Did you do this?" he pulled back a lever at the back of the stick.

"Nowejustgothere!"

She went back to throwing away pieces of the house.

"Then how did this happen?" he asked, keeping aim.

"Are you sure this is necessary? They're just fillies." his tenant pony said.

"You heard her. They came through a Chaos portal and anything, anything out here could try to kill you, no matter how outwardly benign." He looked at the rotting skin hanging out of the pony's saddlebag. "Where on god's earth did you get that awful thing?"

"Found it hanging on a bush. It might be good fertilizer."

The orange pegasus ignored them and threw back a metal face with a large jaw, landing at the farmer's feet.

"Orks." the farmer sneered at the familiar looking carving and put the pistol at his side.

The yellow filly gasped and ran to the tenant. She snatched the rotted skin, smelled it deeply, and wheezed a putrid black gas.

"Applejack's been here! Do ya know where she is now?"

"Uh...no, and you're going to make yourself sick breathing that."

A scream resonated inside the barn and a plume of fire came bursting through the wall. They all scrambled out of the way.

The farmer aimed at the white unicorn. She was bristling with feather-like scales, legs sprouting many spindly fingers and claws. Short bursts of multicolored fire spouted from several mouths around her body.

"Sweetie Belle, not again!" The orange pegasus scolded. "That's like the millionth time!"

"II'mm nneeww ttoo tthhiiss, ookk!?" she said, three mouths across her head speaking at once, leaking smoke.

"Begone, heretic! Your kind is not welcome here!" the farmer yelled, his aim shaking.

The yellow filly stepped up, "Hey, don't be pointi'n that at my fiend!"

"This thing can't be your friend, it's a monster!"

"It was an accident! Put that down!"

"Regardless, anything so deformed by Chaos must die!"

He started to pull the trigger when something took his arm and turned him away. He was startled at the thing standing where the yellow filly had moments before and put the stick at the decaying filly's chest.

"What are you, vile spawn!?" the farmer cried.

"I'm Applebloom and I said put it DOOOOOOOOWN!"

A dark fluid gushed out of her mouth onto the farmer's face. He pulled the trigger and a hole burst in her chest, skin, muscle, and chunks of her lungs burst out her back. He fell screaming, his hands over his face, steaming and sizzling. Applebloom felt into the hole in her chest. The putrid fluids dripping in hardening and closing it.

The farmer eventually fell silent, his entire head and chest dissolved. The tenant pony frantically scuttled back as the three approached. Applebloom's mouth still spilling acid.

"Well, thanks for at least telli'n us she's not here. Which way do ya think we should go?"

The tenant quickly pointed down the way he and the farmer came, trembling.

"Thanks! Scootaloo, Sweetie Belle let's go!" she said and they ran down the road.

"Man,I'mgonnabethelastonetogetmycutiemark?" Scootaloo moaned, looking at the three necrotic patches on Applebloom and wispy patch of glowing scales on Sweetie Belle.

"DDoonn'tt wwoorryy, yyoouu'll ffiinndd yyoouurr ttaalleenntt ssoonn. HHaavvee hhooppee. bbeessiiddees, yyoouu ttaallkk ffaasstt, tthhaatt'ss ssoommeetthhiinngg."

Applebloom cringed. "Ugh, don't say ‘hope’."

"So, you're trying to say you got a vision last night that they'll come back here?" Rainbow Dash asked.

Rarity hummed positively.

"And you're ok with the, uh, eyes everywhere and the big arm on your shoulder?"

Rarity hummed unintelligibly for a few seconds and grabbed Rainbow Dash's hoof with the gangly bone arm, shaking it like a greeting.

"Right..." Rainbow Dash took to the air. "Well I'm gonna go not do nothing like everypony else here and actually try to find them."

Rarity pulled her back down and motioned to wait. She held the arm in the air, palm open.

"What, you waiting to catch something?"

"Hey Rarity, Catch!" Pinkie's voice sounded from the bottom of the hill.

Something started screaming and Rarity sat with the arm still up. The screaming quickly grew louder and the Doctor landed square in her palm.

"Oh thank you, Rari- oh, my goodness..."

He was bewildered by the new appendage and a dozen gazing eyes as Rarity put him down.

Twilight held him by the shoulders looking hysterical. "Doctor, we have to go back to Equestria. I remembered those four chaos leaders saying they'd destroy the world if we didn't listen to them, especially Tzeentch! These guys are monsters, juggernauts—"

"Hold on hold on." he interrupted. "Tzeentch threatened you? He's a trickster, a con-god. All four of them have been trying to take over this world for over seven thousand years, and they're not making much progress."

"R-really?"

"Yeah, none of his plans ever work. As soon as one plan fails, he makes sure another picks up on a different course, which means... he knew I'd get you out of there and we're already playing his game."

"I wanna play!" Pinkie said, her pupils shrinking.

"Oh thank goodness you're normal again."

"Was I any different?"

"Where'd you two go, anyhow?" Applejack asked. "Only reason we didn't try to go after ya was cuz Rarity said you'd come back."

"You don't want to know, really."

Pinkie's eyes turned black for a moment, "Are you sure you don't wanna tell her?"

"Yes. Fluttershy, what happened to your neck?" he said, eyeing two dark grey scars.

"We found a way to curb her fits, and she scraped her neck on my teeth." Twilight explained. Two sharp teeth shot down from the top row. "Ow."

Whooves inspected the scratches. The surface underneath was clearly metallic and hot to the touch.

"Fluttershy... do you feel any heaviness, or heat?"

"Not really, just a little stiff at the joints and warm in my chest."

Her breath was sultry, like a fiery wind in his face.

"And did scraping your neck hurt?"

"Not at all, I didn't notice."

He took a piece of a sharp rock and started shaving the fur off her chest, sparks flew off as it hit more metal.

"What are you doing?" Applejack asked.

Whooves kept working. Fluttershy tried to sit still, fearfully anxious of the glowing object he was uncovering.

"Just a second... oh, dear."

He stood back and they all stared at a triangle with two pairs of parallel arms stretching from the top. It was a shaped hole in her chest, her brass heart coursed with brightly glowing fissures, small spurts of fire erupting from it with each beat. Fluttershy quickly panicked, hyperventilating. Her iron lungs forming glowing fractures, all her insides illuminating from the building heat. Smoke and sparks started seeping from her mouth. She snatched away the rock the Doctor used and feverishly shaved herself more. Smoke turned to wisps of fire as her inside glowed orange. Her mane boiled.

Twilight moved to stop her but the Doctor put his hoof out. "No. We should see."

Fluttershy frantically shaved the fur off her legs, back, head, until the rock was ground to dust on her metal skin. By now she was glowing white on the inside and she bellowed pure superheated air. She looked around at her handiwork. Brass ran down her spine and formed her leg joints and wings. The rest of her was heaving, living iron and steel.

"W-w-what's happening to me?" Fluttershy asked, sobbing.

"Have... have you ever heard of a Juggernaut of Khorne?" Whooves asked in a low voice.

She shook her head.

"More chaos mutations. This could be the end of it, or it could be just the beginning. This is exactly why we're going to Altdorf, and we have to move now. There's a WAAAGH!!! coming."

"A whah?" Rainbow Dash asked.

"No, a WAAAGH!!!"

"What's a WAAAGH!!!?"

"Well, orks really like to fight. Just the noise, the action, and thrill of beating the heck out of everything, it's all fun and games to them. Once in a while, they all get together under one leader, a Warboss, and try to destroy the world for laughs. They'll come from the World's Edge Mountains, and look what's right over there."

He pointed to the huge mountain range in the distance.

"But whut do they get from destroy’n the world? Why would they want ‘ta do something that’ll hurt ‘em?" asked Applejack, trying to console Fluttershy.

"If you ever ask an ork about his motivation, he'll do one of two things; beat your skull in, or say 'Cuz orkz iz mayd fer fighti'n 'n winni'n!' and then beat your skull in."

"So nowhere's safe if they go after tha’ whole world?"

"I'm afraid not. The most we can do is find somewhere that can stand against the orks, which is why we're going to Mordheim, the only major Imperial city to be completely ruled by Chaos."

Rainbow Dash tilted her head curiously. "I thought we were trying to avoid Chaos."

"The hordes of Chaos are incredibly strong, and the whole population of Mordheim can take up arms to defend the city. Really, it's the closest, safest place. Do we still have the map?"

"Yeah." Rainbow said.

"Good. We'll have to head further inland and hoof it since most of everything's been stolen. On the way, I'll have to teach you all something."

"We've been over this a thousand times, they will not let your people go." Franz said "Do you not remember the last time you tried to open a portal to Equestria?"

"I know it didn't work—" Celestia started, fixing her horn into the spike on her helmet.

"A Bloodthirster almost came out before you could go in. The ruinous powers want you here, and I'm not going to risk unleashing warp and high water in the Empire so you can get slaughtered. Do you see that there?"

He pointed to a massive siege tower moving closer to the city walls.

"They will use that to take the eastern wall. Our troops must hold the wall long enough for the ground cannons to shoot out the base of the tower. After that, fight like mad."

The palace cannons began firing into the sea of ratmen surrounding the city. Nightmare Moon jumped.

"I'll never get used to the noise of the horrible things."

"Well you'd better, the Empire's full of them." He lowered the visor of his helmet and mounted his griffon. "Have you ever been in battle before?"

"The last time we'd been at war was hundreds of years ago."

"Then the Skaven will be a rude awakening. Try to learn to kill with conviction." He turned around to his knights. "Reiksguard, will you fight with me!?

Clad in gleaming, rippling silver, they returned, "You are our Emperor! We live to die at your side and in the name of Sigmar!" They shouted.

"Then do not keep me waiting! Fight hard and Sigmar fights with us!"

He struck his shield with his hammer, producing an deafening thunder and a jubilant roar echoed through the city at the sound. The griffon took off to the east wall and the knights rode down the palace steps, into the city streets.

Celestia and Nightmare Moon turned to their soldiers, clad in similar armor as the Knights of the Blazing Sun and Knights of Morr. A few seemed to be shivering with fear.

Celestia started, "My brave guards, there is not much that can be said as to our current circumstances but know this. Our lives have been changed forever. As long as we can remember we have all lived in a time of unbridled peace and harmony, but now we must fight for our very survival."

Nightmare Moon stepped forward. "Those things out there, they will not accept peace, they will not negotiate, they only want all of us gone. Most humans still do not see our worth, our power even as we fight alongside them on far off fields. Our people live in fear of this city even in their new homes. What better way to seal friendship with them than right here, defending their capital and fighting alongside their emperor?"

The guards felt nostalgia hearing that long lost word, friendship.

"Franz is almost to the battle, and we must aid him. Show the race of men what we are made of!"

They took off, pegasi guards following, unicorns and earth ponies trailing the Reiksguard.

Franz's intuition was spot on. Not many Skaven were here, duped by their incompetent leader. Amidst the cacophony of swords, cannon and muskets, the Emperor and Celestia held the line while they seemed to lose their third in the smoke. Deathclaw scooped up claw-fulls of ratmen, throwing them across the fields and his rider batted the heathens with his mighty hammer. In a single sting, a stormvermin lost its head.

Celestia tried to telekinetically slow the siege tower. It was engulfed with her golden magic, but kept its trundling pace. The rat ogres at the bottom pulled with superhuman strength. She took a chance, diving on the haulers and pulled up, just in time to spear one in the head with her horn spike and avoid blades. The headless body collapsed, tripping the other pullers and the tower stopped.

She threw the head away and surveyed the area for her sister. The black mare was nowhere to be seen.

The noise... oh the horrible thunder, the screaming, the death...

Luna relinquished her Nightmare Moon visage, shaking in terror as the roaring battle raged above. Each pound of the cannons made her flinch. After a thousand years of silence in the silent lunar atmosphere, the sudden cacophony of blackpowder arms was too much.

“Look at me, I’m in a gutter! I cannot be a coward... come on!” she prodded herself.

She held her ears down and made her way on hoof to the walls, keeping her head low so the dances of death couldn’t be seen. She raised it when she got to a gunnery post, the cannoneers still loading the rounds that would shatter the tower’s base. Luna looked through one of the ports; the tower was moving again with the skaven horde crowded around it, eager to climb and slay the defenders. She breathed deep and put on a hard exterior.

“We must hurry, soldiers! The vermin are almost upon us!”

She aided one of the gun crews in shoving in the powder charge, wad, shot, and prime the gun. Inspired by her presence, the room quickly picked up and soon, the guns were ready.

“Train on the base of the tower!” she commanded. A dozen cannons turned to the wood and iron monolith. Luna knew her heart would leap in fear at the report. “FIRE!”

She heard the beginning of the discharge of the guns, but the sheer volume immediately made her ears ring to the point where she only heard the high-pitched note. The guns lurched back from the massive recoil. Smoke clouded the battery to the point where no one could see a foot ahead of them.

Luna’s expectation held true, her breath was sharply shortened at the boom of the artillery and she swore she was on the verge of a heart attack. Luna’s hearing slowly returned and she heard the Skaven screaming on the other side of the battlements. She looked again through the gun port, through the smoke and ash, to see the tower listing heavily toward the gun battery. Its whole right side wheels were blown off and the exposed inside was full of shattered corpses and flowing blood. the ratmen fled like insects from the tower as its structure moaned, buckled, and collapsed with a thunderous crash.

The gunners burst into cheers and readied for another salvo to plow through the remaining Skaven. Luna felt she had done her part, and left the battery hastily, not pausing to acknowledge the thank you’s of the crews. She felt sick and mentally berated herself for almost abandoning aiding the defense.

“Luna!” her sister called from above. Celestia landed before her with a look of relief that she was alright.

Luna couldn’t tell her she’d fled, even if she mustered herself to come later. She’d work to expunge these fears. “We think our time on the moon has made us a trifle lacking, sister.”

“We’re lucky this wasn’t a larger attack. Did you help the cannoneers?”

“Absolutely.” Luna saw the chance to make herself more pronounced in the effort. “The artillery was loaded more quickly and, as you can see, the Skaven are in utter rout.”

What her sister said still gnawed at Luna’s mind. A bigger attack. But there were already thousands. How many more could there have been; tens, hundreds of thousands?

There was a loud whistling, almost musical, like that of a train, and a large explosion on the other sides of the wall. Luna jolted again in fright. Luckily Celestia was already looking to the noise’s origin and hadn’t seen her fear.

“I think the Divine Right is helping clean up the rest.” Celestia said.

“The steam tank? Yes, probably. I... I will help tend to the wounded further in the city. Good fortune to you for your tasks.” Luna took off, not giving Celestia time to respond. She wanted to get away from the hellish thunder more than anything at that moment.

“Good luck.” Celestia said. She knew Luna couldn't’ hear her as she speedily flew, but it was something to give in response. A congratulations seemed in order for the main battery crew men.

Chapter 7: One Gate in the North

"Hello!? Hello!? Somepony please be there!" Fluttershy cried, banging on the door of a two-story building. A chipping sign hung over the door ‘Wayfarer's Eden’. The blows of her iron hooves dented the metal supports and woodwork of the entrance.

Whooves caught up to her, pushing aside the iron black pegasus. "Stop that! You're breaking the door down."

The sound of spilling bits of metal rang inside, followed by a deep, angry voice. "Dammit! Elf, get the door. I have to start over."

"Elf? Oh dear." Whooves muttered. "Everypony uh... go around the side of the building. Hide there."

"Why? What's an elf gonna do? It sounds prissy." Rainbow Dash scoffed.

"Just trust me, you do not want elves to see anything affected by Chaos. They’ve been fighting against it for seven thousand years."

"I'm not going anywhere." She stubbornly disappeared in a flurry of feathers. "I wanna see it."

Whooves put a hoof to his face and sighed, "Fine. Everypony else hide."

They crept around the side as latches and locks were undone on the other side of the door. As it creaked open it revealed a tall, thin figure wearing a silver armored skirt, gold trimmed chestplate, and a tall helmet with a blue tuft streaming from the top. Further inside was an extraordinarily short man with a large beard picking up gold coins from the floor.

"Not another one of you filthy things." The elf sneered.

Whooves studied the Elf, taking a moment to decipher his familiar face. "Ghaldri?"

The elf squinted, immediately suspicious. "How do you know my name?"

"What, you don't remember- oh yeah, pony. hmm..."

"I'll say you sound familiar."

"Ah! Tiranoc field, 2076? Bloodletter had you on the ground and..." He rolled his hoof, trying to get the elf to remember.

"The Doctor threw a rock in its face, barely distracting it long enough to kill it. But how do you know? There have never been your kind on Ulthuan." He looked down into Whooves’ eyes pensively, stroking his chin.

"In his hand the sword of Khaine did promise power untold..." he said.

"While god of war and god of murder battled for his soul." Whooves replied confidently.

The elf stood upright, looking frustrated. "One by one the daemons fell and elf lord he stood tall..."

"For should he fail upon his task then mortal world would fall."

A small smirk broke Ghaldri’s frown."Upon the Isle beneath the fight, wise mages cast their spell..."

"And daemon minions howled in anguish, cursed to an eternal hell. I can do this all night, you taught me these."

"Great Asuryan, what happened to you?" the elf gawked at him.

"It would take more time to explain than there is sunlight, which looks like an hour left. Four hundred years has not been good to you."

"Ow... ow... owowowow!" Fluttershy slurred. There was a thud around the side of the building.

Ghaldri reflexively drew a gleaming two-handed sword, inscribed with an unknown language and stepped out. Rainbow Dash stepped back to avoid him.

"Who is there?" he called, "Show yourself!"

"Right, about that," Whooves said nervously, "I'm travelling somewhere with some friends and they're not in the best condition. They've had a really bad run in with Chaos and need help to control their mutations."

Ghaldri lowered his sword slightly, taking a moment to consider. "Resisting Chaos in body and mind is what a graduate of the Tower of Hoeth knows well."

"It's... a little more severe than that."

"It is nothing I cannot handle. It would be good to show the superiority of elven skills." He covered his nose. "One of them is infected by Nurgle, it seems."

"Yes. I don't want to tell her this is only the beginning, but--"

“What!?” Applejack staggered out from around the corner, desolated. "Ya mean there's more ta this!?"

Ghaldri tied a blue cloth over his nose and mouth.

"Havi'n mah guts spilli'n out on the ground, skin falli'n of in patches, flies replaci'n mah muscles and there's more!?"

"Unfortunately."

Ghaldri held his sword to her face to stop her. "You've almost got the worst kind. By the end you may be just one step from Chaos Spawn. Now please step back, your stench is ghastly. And the invisible one, is she possessed by a Horror or the Changeling of the Conspirator?"

Rainbow Dash reappeared. "How did you know I was there?"

"Moving patches of disturbed grass.” Ghaldri smirked, “Only men and these stunty dwarfs are so dull not to see."

"Oy!" the dwarf yelled from within the house.

The others came out, whereas Fluttershy ran inside scared out of her wits and Ghaldri scanned over them. "The Arch-Enemy has only begun his work. Come. Your internal war against Chaos begins soon. You should be grateful to be hardened by a Swordmaster of Hoeth!"

"Elves, still as arrogant as ever." Whooves said, shaking his said.

"Not arrogance, honesty."

"They can't stay unless they pay up." scolded the dwarf.

Ghaldri threw a small bag of coins onto the counter. "I was going to kill and hang those beasts along the road for free, but you paid me up front. I suspect that's what scared her."

He pointed at Fluttershy, quivering on a sofa. It's legs bent under her weight. The dwarf emptied the bag on the counter and let the coins run between his fingers.

"Well, heh, make your putrid hides at home."

Twilight nudged Whooves as the others went inside. "Doctor. Before we go in there's something you should see."

She led him to where they hid. A crude mace lay on the ground.

"This came out of Fluttershy's leg."

"Did you notice this earlier?"

"Well, she went crazy this morning and her hoof was all spiky, just like this. It's like she absorbed it somehow, but from where?"

"The goblins must have hit her with it and it got stuck."

"What!? Don't they know they could have-"

"Killed her, yes. I told you it's what they do best, just killing for fun. We should keep a close eye on what else happens to her."

"Hey Pinkie, where'd your stitches come from?" Applejack asked.

Pinkie stroked her stitches sadly, "I have no idea..." her pupils ballooned in size. "Actually I think it's starting to come back. Oh, yeah!"

She rolled out a tongue wrapped around a threaded needle, leading down her throat. "Why do you ask? You want some, too!?"

She moved very close and Applejack stepped back.

"Kinda." Her intestines held up her stomach, where it ruptured with a large hole. "Think you could patch this up and uh, me up ta here?" She pointed to just below her lungs.

"Talk about heartburn! Step into my office."

"Is there somepony else here?" Rainbow Dash groaned, covering her ears. "I hear like a thousand people whispering."

"Nope, just the elf." the dwarf said.

Rainbow grunted with a building migraine, flying upstairs and massaging her temples.

Whooves saw Twilight staring at Fluttershy’s bleeding mane, slowly, unconsciously licking her lips. He nudged her out of her shallow trance. “Be careful, she might notice you looking.”

"Oh, please don't remind me." Twilight mumbled, "I woke up with that in my mouth."

Fluttershy definitely heard that. "Well Doctor, I tried wringing it out but it just came back,” she said softly. “At least it's not dripping and nothing had to get hurt."

Twilight winced at the words and felt a tingling sensation in her abnormal teeth. She couldn’t help but picture the sight of flowing blood, sweet, thirst quenching... ‘No’. "So uh, we've had a long day, I'm kind of thirsty so I’m gonna go get a drink." She hastily darted into another room.

Whooves followed her, seeing her operate a well pump into a bucket and tried to drink it but immediately spat it out like it was medicine, feverishly wiping her tongue.

"Ugh! why does the water everywhere taste horrible!?" she spat.

"Maybe it's not water you need now." Whooves said knowingly.

"Ohh, no. I can already see where this is going and I'm not going to drink what falls off another pony! I don't care if nothing got killed making it, it's not right!"

"Just connect the dots. The wings, teeth. It all points to some kind of Chaotic—”

"Don't say it! I'm not becoming some bloodsucker!"

"I was actually going to say the Furies, but that's probably more accurate."

A fit of violent coughing seized Twilight. Black blood trickled from her mouth and she sat faintly as her fur started to fade to a sickly pale purple.

"Listen, very bad things will happen if you don't try." Whooves cautiously said, pulling her mane out of her eyes.

"No! I'm not going to—"

Her mane suddenly blew upward and the mark on her forehead burned like cinders. It started to grow, the arrows extended to her nose and cheeks. She held her head, pounding in pain.

"Fine, I'll do it!" she cried. The mark cooled but still spanned her face. She cleaned around her mouth with the water. "But what if she goes off again?"

The Doctor shrugged. "Maybe if you ask really nicely?"

"That's crazy."

"Well, how else are you going to get it without surprising her?"

"I think she'd be willing to oblige." Ghaldri said from the doorway with Fluttershy by him.

"Ar-are you sure there's no other way?" the iron mare asked.

"Unless she wants to go out and kill for it, there's no substitute. Bucket."

Twilight used her magic to empty the bucket of its remaining water and flung it to Ghaldri. He caught it and set it down next to Fluttershy.

She looked at the bucket timidly, then him.

"Go on." he nodded.

Fluttershy wrung out her mane into the bucket, a copious amount Twilight smacked her lips at. She picked it up and just stared at the red fluid, swirling in unnatural ways, and carried it to her weak friend. It sickened Fluttershy, thinking about where this drink came from and where it was going. The purple mare took the bucket and hesitantly glanced into it. She looked to the Doctor once more for any way out of having to do it, but he merely shrugged and said,

"Cheers?"

Twilight slowly put the rim to her mouth, tipped it up, and Ghaldri departed into the main room. It went down easy, feeling so wrong but tasted so good. Each sip made Twilight feel more sick and revitalized at the same time. She almost wished the bucket wouldn’t go dry, but it was quickly emptied.

“Thank goodness that's over."

"Until you have to do it again,” Whooves warned. “How do you feel?"

"Much better. I don't know if that's a good thing, though."

"So, you like my suit?" Ghaldri chuckled as Rarity marveled at his immaculate armor. "Though you're tainted, you have good taste."

He took off his helmet, showing his long blonde hair and pointed ears. Rarity took the helmet and studied its design. The gold trim, ruby at the forehead and metal wings sprouting from the sides.

"So what are you doing away from Ulthuan?" Whooves asked.

"I am on a quest for a loremaster of the White Tower. There's a new expedition coming to the Old World, and I'm going to join them."

"Done!" Pinkie chimed, retracting the needle into her mouth.

Applejack sat up and looked over the expert stitching up her torso.

"Boy, that's mighty fine work! Where'd you learn to sew?"

"I never learned how!” Pinkie exclaimed gleefully, “It still looks really sloppy."

Applejack stared at her confusedly. "Whutchu talki'n about? It's perfect!"

"No it's all wrong."

"Well ah thank ya anyway. Now what's this business with yer eyes? First they were black n' white, then all black, red 'n white, now blue like normal."

Pinkie looked in a mirror hanging on the wall. Her eyes were blue as before she had been taken. Slick eyelashes crested her lids. They turned red.

"Ooh, this is much better. I gotta show Doc tonight."

Her eyes turned blue again and she bounded upstairs, "I feel kinda tingly all over. Like, more than usual."

There was a voice coming from one of the rooms, frustrated and muttering. "Orange, blue, red, green, pink..."

"Rainbow Dash?" Pinkie called out.

She strolled down the short hall and the agitated whispering and sound of ruffling feathers grew louder.

"Grey, black, magenta, bush, guh!"

She peered into the room the noise came from. Rainbow Dash sat before a mirror appearing as a bush with her chin on the counter.

"Pinkie, what did I use to look like?" the shrubbery asked.

"How'd you forget?"

"I don't know. I just lost it in these dang noises I keep hearing." Even without a face, Rainbow looked tired, angry.

"You're light blue, silly!"

Her leaves whipped around and she turned dark grey.

"What the..." She tried again. Bright green. "Come on! Focus!"

She tried many times but never achieving her original sky blue color.

"Try me! Try me!" Pinkie said ecstatically.

Rainbow Dash looked her over and assumed an identical image.

"Meh. I've seen better... Oh my gosh why didn't I see this before? You're just like the changelings that attacked Canterlot!"

"But it's so stupid that I can't change back! What was it the elf guy said about a changeling?"

Downstairs, Rainbow asked Ghaldri just that.

“The Changeling...” he thought. “It is a very cruel daemon trickster created by the dark lord of change. It can assume any appearance, look like anyone, and played lethal practical jokes on anyone it pleases. If you share its powers, learn to use it responsibly.”

"This entire world is completely mad." Luna said, in too much dread to speak consciously. She gazed over the sea of bodies of men, giant rats, and ponies, fading in the sunset.

"When the going gets weird, the weird turn professional. It's beautiful, isn't it?" said Franz. "The sight, the smell of death and victory."

Luna couldn’t believe him, proud, happy even at the dead. "Beautiful? This is tragic! So much death... destruction."

"Your unicorns were an invaluable asset, princess, loading muskets in seconds instead of a whole minute."

"Most of our soldiers are dead."

"Last time the Skaven were here, in the Skavenblight period, all the people died. This whole city was starved empty and burned to the ground. You've helped save millions."

"At the cost of hundreds of thousands." Luna said bitingly.

A large metal box trundled over the bodies, leaving three lines of crushed corpses behind where its wheels rolled. It was intricately decorated with a massive cannon protruding from the hull. Steam spewed from an exhaust pipe at its rear. A rat's claw shot up from under the bodies and a Skaven crawled out up to its waist. The Divine Right, one of the Empire’s most prized steam tanks, turned to it, dipped the gun down and fired. Bodies and limbs flew sky high and rained over a large area. The body of a pegasus, half its head missing, landed before Luna.

"This is beauty to you!? What does all this achieve? Nothing is gained, only lost."

"No one dies in vain, for all life is merely death postponed,” Franz said firmly. “For every soldier that has fallen, the Empire gains time to survive. Millions die in battle or are simply slaughtered year after year. Battles like this, child's play! Our enemies are legion. The Empire has been at this for twenty-five hundred years; the elves and dwarfs, for over seven thousand, and if what your sister has told me about you both is true, that you both are immortal, you will be at this forever."

Luna took off from the wall, fed up with him. A procession of mourners, human and equine, and cultists of Morr walked out onto the field to interact with the dead.

"They'll warm up to this... eventually."

Soft moonlight poured through the windows of the wayfarer’s station. All were asleep save Ghaldri, maintaining his greatsword in the main room downstairs.

Pinkie Pie crept down the hall to the Doctor's room, being particularly careful when passing the stairs as she heard sliding metal and soft singing below. She nudged his door open and it spitefully creaked. She froze at the gently and the noises below stopped. After what felt like a very long time of silence and stillness, the singing and metal grinding resumed. She slowly closed the door and tip-hooved toward the Doctor's bed.

The stench of strong perfume woke him up. he turned over and was met by a hoof to his mouth and Pinkie lying in the bed with him in a seductive pose.

"Hey there." she whispered, batting her red eyes. She wrapped her tongue around his mouth and took her hoof away. "Notice anything different?"

He certainly did. Her body was more slim and curved, her coat was oddly smooth. She was devilishly attractive. Whooves pulled her tongue down.

"Please, not another night of this. Can't we just be friends and call it a day?"

"We're already friends,” Pinkie said lustfully. “Really close friends." She embraced him tightly, pressing his face to her chest and resting her head on his. He struggled and squirmed as he was cut off from air. "I just wanna enjoy the time we have together again, but it's ok if you just wanna sleep. I won't be a problem." He eventually passed out from being smothered. "I wish we could be alone like this all the time. Oh, well. I have you all to myself all night again, that's all that matters."

"Hheeyy, ccoommee bbaacckk! II jjuusstt wwaanntteedd ttoo aasskk aa qquueessttiioonn!" Sweetiebelle yelled into a house. A man had come to the door but upon seeing her and the area around, slammed it in her face.

"He'snotgonnaansweritagain. Neitherdidanyofthesepeople." Scootaloo said snappishly, pulling another charred body onto a small pile.

Sweetiebelle sneezed and the mouths across her body erupted with flames, igniting the entire hovel.

*sniff* "Aallrriigghtt. Aapplleebblloomm, wwhhaatt aarree yyoouu ddooiinngg?"

The rotting filly’s face was buried in a man’s torn-open torso. She lifted her head out, chewing on globs of meat she bit out of it. "Hm? Just havi'n a midnight snack. Ah got a real hankeri'n fer somethi''n like this."

The meat dissolved quickly in the acid pooling in her mouth. It was tender and delicious, like a favorite food Apple Bloom had just discovered.

"It'sbiggerthanyouare. Youactuallygonnaeatthewholething?" Scootaloo asked.

"Long as I'm still hungry, yep." She plunged her face back in, slurping up the body's intestines like pasta. Twenty feet of organs filled her belly to swelling.

"Ok,soweaskedthewholevillageandnoneofthemknowwheretheywent. Forallweknowwecouldbetotallylost! Thatbigspikyguyisn'tgonnabehappy. Shouldwestayhereforawhile?" Scootaloo said. It was getting very annoying to Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom to hear her talk faster than they could hear, but there was nothing they could do.

Applebloom glanced at the pile of bodies and grew ecstatic. "Ah think so, fer sure!" She immediately went back to devouring the corpse.

"Good god, is she purring!?" Whooves thought, staring at Pinkie sleeping on top of him, a thick blue substance dripping from her mouth onto his face.

He tried to get out from under her but she stirred when her head dropped. He froze, hoping she'd fall asleep again. Fate would not be so kind, and her eyes opened.

"Good morning." she whispered, shifting herself to get more comfortable. "You were making a lot of noise while you slept., keeping me up too. I found something to quiet you down.”

She wiped her mouth of the blue sludge. "This went right over your mouth. Ya wanna know how how I put it there?" He frantically shook his head no. "I'll take that as a yes."

She tore the old seal off, stinging like wax, fit her mouth around his muzzle and licked all over his mouth. She closed her eyes and groaned with delight at her free reign over him and his futile struggle to push her off. She sat up and lifted him into her lap when she was satisfied with the new layer. The goo hardened into a sticky gel over the same material that was already there, holding his mouth shut.

"Promise me nopony'll know about us." she said, resting her head on him.

Whooves looked at her, confused.

"They wouldn't understand and might try to separate us, but you don't want that, right?" She shook his head for him. "I knew it. Because I don't even wanna take the chance. If they found out..." She wound her tongue around his head, "I don't know what I'd do."

She sharply twisted his head and his neck cracked. A shock of relief rang through his whole body.

"I noticed you had this crick in your neck so I thought I'd straighten it out. You get what I'm trying to say?"

He nodded himself this time.

"Thanks, Doc."

She rubbed their faces together, peeled off the gunk around his mouth and left him alone on the bed. As she approached the door, she looked back.

"I'm thinking about expanding my scope. Maybe mess around a little with Rainbow Dash, or Twilight. Rarity would make a good back scratcher. But you'll always be my favorite. Don't let them know that. It's gotta be a surprise."

Her eyes turned blue and her demeanor became more upbeat. As soon as she opened the door, Twilight swung down, teeth out, hanging upside down from the ceiling. Bony horns stuck forward from the sides of her head, nearly jabbing Pinkie's face.

"Boo!" she whispered loudly.

Pinkie reeled back on edge. "D-did you hear any of that?" she muttered.

"Hear any of what?"

"Nevermind."

"What are you doing in The Doctor's room?"

"He was just uh, telling me a story. What are you doing hanging from the ceiling?"

Whooves moved closer but kept his distance from Pinkie. Now he wanted to tell Twilight right then and there. She’s crazy! She thinks she loves me! But whatever a pinkie promise was, or its consequences, he couldn’t break it.

"I'm not sure how I got up here, but come on. I want to try something. Stay quiet."

She put her front hooves to the ceiling and led them to the room where Rarity and Applejack were sleeping. Twilight stood over Applejack and hung down by her hind legs.

"Hey, Applejack... yoo hoo." She said, poking her. " Wait a minute, look at that."

She pointed to Applejack's leg. Through a hole they saw bone and some spindles of actual muscle but it was largely hollow. Applejack shifted and opened her eyes.

"BLAAAGH!"

She held a blank expression. "T’aint scary, sugarc- HNNNGG!"

Applejack clutched her chest and pulled her skin aside. The chambers of her heart were beating erratically and abruptly stopped. The rate fluids were leaking from her body slowed dramatically.

"Uh... whut was that?"

Whooves took a look and became distraught. "Don't overreact, but... I think you just had a heart attack."

"Wut? That's crazy, Ahm still alive!"

"Yeah, but maybe not in the way you think."

“What?” Twilight suddenly fell from the ceiling. "Applejack, I'm so sorry! I don't know what happened!"

Applejack pressed her heart. "Well I've been falli'n apart for a while, uh, maybe ah had it commi'n?"

"This may actually work to your advantage." Ghaldri said, previously unnoticed in the doorway.

"And how's this a good thing?" Applejack sneered.

"You are all going to Mordheim, yes? You may gain favor among the followers of Nurgle."

"Applebloom! Whereareyou!?" Scootaloo called, looking around at the mutilated bodies. What little flesh they had left riddled with bite marks and partially dissolved.

"Youseeher, SweetieBelle?

"II tthhiinnkk II hheeaarr ssoommeetthhiinngg iinn hheerree."

Sweetiebelle peered into a dilapidated shed where there was the sound of tearing meat. Applebloom was scarfing down chunks of a dead cow, actually struggling to swallow it. Her stomach was distended as she was eating faster than the caustic acid could burn it off. Sweetiebelle got closer and saw Applebloom's eyes were rolled back, completely white and she didn't notice her approaching.

"Aapplleebblloomm, ccoommee oonn. Wwee hhaavvee ttoo kkeepp llookkiinngg."

She kept eating the carcass.

AApplleebblloomm, lleett'ss ggoo!" She thumped the aloof filly on the head and her eyes rolled down.

"Huh, whuh?" Her voice was raspy due to her throat being overstretched and backed up to her mouth in chewed up meat. She was content to at length not be hungry. "Finally, ah thought i'd never get rid a this hungry feeli'n."

Her body let off mold spores and gases after she finally stopped. Sweetiebelle's nose spontaneously caught fire at the smell.

"Wweell iiff yyoouu'rree ddoonnee, wwee hhaavvee ttoo kkeepp sseeaarrcchhiinngg."

"Alright, just uh... help me up."

"Eeww, nnoo!"

"Well, ah can't get up right now without help."

Sweetiebelle stuck her head out the door "Ssccoottaalloo! Sshhee'ss iinn hheerree! Sshhee'ss ttoo ffaatt ttoo ggeett uupp!"

"Why, you..."

Apple Bloom abrupty regurgitated, pushing out much of what she'd eaten and got up herself.

"Let's just go. Now ahm gonna be hungry again in a minute."

"What made you think it was a good idea to sleep in the fireplace, and how did this get here!?" Ghaldri scolded, trying to pull a fire iron out of Fluttershy's neck.

She just remained quiet in embarrassment. The fireplace was warm after all, and her metal body couldn’t get enough heat. She was always cold otherwise. Ghaldri lost his grip and Fluttershy flew back, slamming into the wall. A helmet shook off the wall onto her head. With the visor obscuring her vision, she tried to take off the helmet but her hooves stuck to it. She fumbled about blind until she crashed through the steel door.

"Could somepony help me... please? She said, muffled under the steel dome.

Rarity stepped up, grabbing FLuttershy’s foreleg with her new appendage. She pulled powerfully, but too much for the incipient bodypart. It fractured, producing a sickly crack. As Rarity screeched in pain, the fissure discharged a great amount of electricity and shocked them both. The shock from snapping her arm and the discharge forced Rarity to try to scream, tearing her lips into strips against her unruly teeth, but not free. The door and helmet buckled and folded inward around Fluttershy as she grew furious and struggled against the surge to break Rarity's arm in another place. The shock went on, building in intensity. Eventually more arcs reached out struck the other ponies.

"Let go of me!!" Fluttershy screamed, crushing another segment of Rarity's arm in fury.

Ghaldri covered his eyes against the blinding flash. When all was quiet, he looked again. All that was left was seven smoldering Chaos stars burned onto the ground around him. Everyone was gone.

"Doctor!” he called out, eliciting no response. “Pity. I wonder if they'll end up killing each other."

He took off walking down the road, singing.

"And on this day we bow our heads to he who world did save, Aenarion the Proud Defender, Aenarion the Ever Brave."

Chapter 8: City of the Damned

“Is everypony alright?" Whooves asked.

There were a few incoherent mumbles. Only a couple sounded like an actual ‘yes’.

"I think so,” Twilight said. “Just a headache. Where are we? Where’s Rarity and Fluttershy?"

She lit her horn and discovered they were all in a cramped closet-like space. The smell of burnt fur and sound of Rarity’s whimpering was clear. The stricken, quivering mare had her ossified arm hanging over her back, a very visible and long crack running from elbow to wrist. Twilight immediately helped her balance it as not to put more strain on the fractured bone. It wasn’t worth asking if she was okay, not just because her lips were shredded.

"I told ya I wasn't full of it! Did you hear that!?" an scrambled voice shouted, apparently from beyond the space. It was very loud, a low vibrating effect so strong they felt vibrations in their very bodies.

Applejack peered through a crack on the edge of a door. There was a short hallway with just a couple other rooms. The walls were fleshy, almost perspiring, and bore several fanged mouths and living orifices whose tongues hung down, idly swiping and curling. A humid heat hung in the air that smelled of alcohol and other sickeningly powerful odors.

"I can't hear anything over your blasted shouting." another voice mumbled.

"Whut 'n tarnation is this place?" Applejack said. She took the doorknob in her teeth to open it, but quickly lost her grip as it corroded and melted at her touch. “Oops...”

“Oh good going, Applejack,” Rainbow annoyedly muttered.

“Sorry, but I think I hear somepony comin’.” Applejack put her eye back to the crack, only to meet a bright red iris returning the stare. It was rimmed in a shattered glasses lens on a white fuzzy face. Eventually it went away, closing the crack as they pushed off.

"I'm not messing with you this time, they're really here! I was right, so hand it over!”

"Not until I see too. Help me up."

They listened to the awkward back and forth ensuing on the other side.

"Alright open up."

"I can't use it like that." the accented voice said.

"Does it go in this way?"

"No, it's upside down."

"Like this?"

"The edge goes on this side of the strings! Do you not see the tooth marks already there?"

"Oh."

There was a squishing sound, the twangs of string and creaking wood. The Doctor felt a sharp pricking at his side and barely made out the offending object in the darkness, a crimson spattered arrow point on a wheel of seven more. Behind that was a small altar brandishing a couple of equine skulls.

“Oh no... Not here, not yet!”

“Doc, what’s the matter?” Applejack asked.

“It’s too soon, you’re not ready-” He silenced at the grunt of one of the outside ponies and the strange sound of their hoofsteps, which seemed to be one normal hoof, but the other metallic, a step clink, step clink. “Just be on your guards and don’t believe anything they say at face value.”

"Are you sure you're not just inebriated again, seeing things?" the outside accented mare mumbled.

"You know I don't know what that means."

"Intoxicated?"

"Uh..."

"Drunk? On another high?"

"Hey I haven't shot anything up for a whole six hours. That's a personal record. Now you look in there and tell me my dreams are fake."

"I will!"

The doorknob jiggled, but the melted other side refused to budge. The others quietly backed from the door and Twilight accidentally stepped on Fluttershy’s face. The iron mare was frozen on the floor, smoking and her face in a snapshot expression of pain and rage. The door and helmet that had been stuck to her were gone and Twilight swore she was... bigger.”

The door wobbled in its hinges at the effort of the outsiders.

“Come on, open! Rrrr!” A string shot through the hardwood, silvery and almost invisibly thin if not for its shimmering reflection of the light. It started cutting around the doorknob with the precision of a surgical knife but the speed as if it were cutting through air until it fell out of place. The door flew open and everyone’s mouth hung agape.

There was a taller, gray mare with only two legs on her left side, but walked bipedally. The other side was nothing but a giant mouth down the length of her body, lined in predatory teeth and gripping a cello whose silver endpin provided the other leg. Her black make was elegantly coiffed and around her neck was a strange tie with a rubylike gem in the center.

The other wore the most smug grin and was covered head to hoof in staff and music note tattoos. An electric-blue mane blazoned like a hedgehog on her head and in her glasses, only a few shards of purple glass remained. Her voice sounded scrambled, as if synthesized from a broken mix table.

“Now what did I tell you! I’m getting the wyrdstone!”

The grey pony shook her head. "Wait! Can't we talk about this?" The unicorn had already run into another room.

"Blast." she grumbled and cast her eyes to the others. "You just ruined my entire day."

A pink blur blasted up and zealously shook her hoof with a smile that looked like it would split her head in half. "Hiya! I'm Pinkie Pie! What's your name and that giant violin is so nifty, where’d you get it?"

"It's a cello!" she stammered and wrestled her hoof back. "My name isn’t important and you all have to leave-"

"YEEEAAAAH!!" The unicorn wailed, clumsily charging from the room. Her nose was smeared with a green powder and her horn crackled with wild magic as her eyes were dead set on her friend.

The gray mare swiped a hoof at her. "No no no Vinyl, not yet— Uugh!"

The unicorn thrust her sparking horn through her chest, making the mare drop her cello with a swath of limp tentacles spilling out after, and the unicorn raised her over her head, cackling with vicious eyes.

"Your soul's mine again!"

Rainbow Dash took a callous step forward. “Hey, what do you think—” Whooves slapped a hoof over her mouth.

“Don’t intervene,”

Shimmering white smoke streamed from the puncture wound and the victim grew pale and limp. Once the process apparently completed, Vinyl craned her head back and threw the mare on her back.

"Come on everypony! Lemme put her down so she can get a better look at you!"

“D-doctor...” Twilight stammered, “What was that? Who are they?”

“Followers of Chaos.” he said warily. “For now, we just follow along, but don’t take anything they offer. Understand everypony?”

They nodded and followed VInyl to where she threw her friend on a chair and rearranged her into a less contorting position. They seemed to be in some kind of apartment, furnished with all manner of archaic and, sometimes living, decorations. Patches of animal hide were nailed across the walls and it just looked like a musician’s shop of horrors.

“Everypony, I want you to meet Octavia.” Vinyl chimed. “Octavia, I want you to meet the fig...ments of my imagination!” Octavia was silent, with little enough energy to raise her head and retract her tentacles, but still couldn’t believe her eyes. Vinyl got up in her face. “Five weeks of nightmares, visions and dreams, you said were for nothing!” The light on her horn concentrated in the tip and departed as a shimmering orb, the size of a large marble. She teasingly wafted it under Octavia’s nose and took pleasure in her tortured, euphoric reaction to the sweet scent. “But look who was right! Mares and gentlecolt, this is what happens when you lose a bet to me!”

Vinyl chomped down on the ball, it's light visible as it traveled down her throat. A loud, static humming grew louder from within her chest. Her shattered sunglasses glasses filled in and her cheeks ripped like fabric, expanding her mouth into a screaming maw. She inhaled deeply and belched the ethereal smoke in Octavia's face.

"Hot damn it feels good to win!" she shouted. Her deep toned noise became somewhat nauseating to everyone else. "You guys have no idea what it’s like to feel this! I owe you a favor!" They backed away slightly when she stepped toward them. “What’s wrong? You guys act like you never seen a mutant before! What about you?” She motioned at Pinkie Pie. “I didn’t get the opportunity to thank you for getting me the gig at the royal wedding!”

Pinkie shrugged sheepishly. "I dunno... Watching somepony take somepony else's life...ball. You don’t seem very nice.”

Vinyl howled in laughter. "You shittin’ me? Look at yourselves. Look at Octavia, me. You think ponies like us survive on sharing and tolerance here? Mare, fuck that! You gotta fight for the right to live. You're gonna be met with the same hatred, the same on-sight death warrant anywhere you go in the world.”

“That can’t be true!” Pinkie Pie spoke up. “There have to be someponies who are nice and wanna make friends.”

Vinyl rolled her eyes behind her shades while setting a dial on the door to the black section and opened the it.

The area on the other side looked like Tartarus itself. All the structures were deformed, twisted, many seemed alive as they heaved and breathed through mouthed doorways. In the distance, massive dark spires reached into a dreadfully dark sky of black clouds. The inhabitants matched the place well, sporting mutations ranging from extra mouths, limbs and weaponized body parts, to hulking spiked armor and brandishing tremendous weapons not meant for mortal hands.

Before Vinyl could close the door, a snapping, gnashing face jumped and got caught in the gap, animalistically snarling and screaming with a blood-spattered mouth and wide centerless eyes.

“Shit!” Vinyl snapped as she tried to hold the door against its face. ”Kick it!” Rainbow did just that, bucking his face so hard, they heard a crunch of bone before the door slammed shut. Vinyl turned the dial to blue and the banging at the door instantly ceased.

"You see what's out there? This place'll eat you alive, literally. Listen, not everypony out there cares to make friends. Almost nopony out there but the nurglites give two fucks about you or anypony else. So what’ll it be? Or do you wanna walk out there on your sorry flanks?”

“I think we’ll need a place to stay,” the Doctor said with a nervous smile.

“Alrighty then. Follow me.” Vinyl set the dial on orange and opened the door. It let out to a small hallway lined by doors with different numbers. Theirs was 569. They followed her to the one next door.

"Pinkie, wait." Octavia whispered weakly before the mare left with the others. "Could you get my cello?”

"Okey-dokey!" Pinkie bounced down the corridor and brought back the hole-riddled instrument. “So how does this work exactly?”

"Just put it in here." Octavia opened her fanged jaws which let out some tendrils as Pinkie Pie brought the cello closer. They wrapped around it, pulled it into her body and the maw crunched down, fitting its teeth into the holes. “Thanks.” The strings plinked out of place and moved like an arm for her.

“Oooo!” Pinkie beamed, “How can you do that?!”

Octavia smirked. “I made a deal with a devil...”

In the hall, Vinyl banged on a chosen door, muttering to herself. "Come on out you snaggletooth bimbo."

"Hwahn meenute! Hwee are khoming!" a girl inside yelled back gleefully.

A while later, the door opened. The occupant appeared to be a young woman, with purple hair, abnormally long, misaligned teeth and clad in black rags, exposing several tattoos of the different chaos marks. Across her back, on hooks pierced in her shoulders hung a large star. She smiled in an excited gasp.

"Oh hai nay-boar!"

"And goodbye." Vinyl said and in an in quick succession, sucked in enough air to fill her chest like a pufferfish and screamed at her at an ear-splitting pitch. A visible distortion of air stripped away the girl’s skin, muscle, and collapsed her ribcage as she was blown clear across the room and landed splayed out in a bloody heap.

"So what do you think of your new place?" Vinyl asked with a smile.

The others were speechless, wide-eyed and Twilight stuttered, “Y-you just... killed her outright!”

“Yeah, so? It’s a dog-eat-dog world.” Vinyl took a slab of torn meat from the body and shoved it in Applejack’s mouth. “So eat, dog!”

Applejack vehemently spat it out while Twilight berated the unicorn. ’Sweet Uncle Apple Buttes, that’s disgustin’! It’s so bloody and gooey and salty... and chewy... and flavorful...’ By now she was just staring at the body.

“...And a complete disregard for the sanctity of life!” Twilight concluded firmly.

Vinyl’s head was hanging back in a bored stupor. “You done? Good. Make yourselves at home. I gotta make a new entrance!”

Vinyl ran back and Twilight turned to the Doctor with an air of concern. “Are we really going to trust her on this?”

“We don’t really have any other options other than walking out around and asking nicely for somepony to abandon their home. Their only response would be an axe to the skull no matter what you say. I was really hoping you could get help from Ghaldri, just a day of fighting training, but after Rarity went off like that, poof, there went any chance we had of experience before this.” He massaged his temple and sighed. “This is the best we can do right now, and you at least kind of know Vinyl, right? You must Pinkie Pie must have introduced you to her after the wedding in Canterlot, I assume.”

Twilight readjusted her position in supporting Rarity into the room and tried to remember. “Oh, yeah! We did meet up after the party. Maybe she is returning a favor.”

“I’ll see if I can get rid of the body...” mumbled Applejack as she unconsciously licked her blistered lips. As everyone explored the room, she dragged the body away in her teeth by the hair, into Vinyl and Octavia’s apartment. The stench of the fresh corpse was playing on her senses. It smelled as bad as cow pies, yet so intoxicating at the same time.

“I know where you can finish that.” Vinyl smirked. She closed the door behind them and set the dial to the sector of a putrid green color. Telekinetically grabbing the body, she snapped the door open and threw it out. She watched as Applejack’s eyes became glassy and even more dull. Her mouth hung slightly ajar before letting out a deep throated moan and shambling after the prize. As she passed, Vinyl quickly shouted, “Room 569 Satin Street Lofts!” and slammed the door shut again, turning back to orange.

“Don’t mind me, Tavi,” she chuckled at the incapacitated mare. “Just making renovations.” In another huff of air and scream, Vinyl blasted a hole in the wall leading into the commandeered room, sending everyone on the other side reeling in shock. "Everypony ready for a day on the town?"

“What was that about?!” Rainbow said with her hooves wiping dust and splinters off.

“Needed to make more room. Mare’s gotta have her space.”

“Well some warning next time you try that would be nice.”

“Meh... party pooper.”

“I’m no party pooper-”

”I gotta go to work and Tavi can’t work the dial, so unless you wanna hoof it to wherever, let’s go!”

Twilight finished helping Rarity get situated in the bed with her broken arm in a comfortable position.She needed to find out some way to treat her injury. Being apparently able to hold vast amounts of energy, she’d have to learn more about it to even begin to find out what to do. This meant diving into chaos magic. "Is there a library or something like it here?" Twilight asked.

"Libraries... No idea, but it’d be where all the tzeentchians in the city are huddled together." After setting the dial to blue, Vinyl opened it for her. “We’re in 569 and 570 Satin Street Lofts unless you wanna get lost.”

“I’ll remember, thanks. and Can you guys take care of Fluttershy? She’s still in the closet and-”

”Hurry before the boring-rays get in!” As Twilight stepped out, Vinyl had one more warning. “And If you see any pink or blue monsters with a giant mouths and four arms that shoot fire, don’t interact with them.”

Twilight hesitated and quirked a brow. “What?”

SLAM

Rainbow Dash looked out the window down onto the streets, letting the address sink into memory. She opened the window and poked her head out, looking into the sky and the looping and winding architecture. “I think I’ll just go this way. Fastest way in or out of here.”

“Remember,” Whooves said, “Be careful out there.”

Rainbow rolled her eyes and before jumping from the outside outcropping said, “Hey, Element of Loyalty here! I know to be careful. I’ll even go with Applejack and see the sights together. Speaking of, where is she?”

”She went out first, somewhere safe... I think.” Vinyl mumbled.“Pinkie, you wanna come to the Tome of Corruption with me? Plenty of booze, stallions, and kicking music!"

“Do I!” She sang, and bounced past the unbelieving Doctor who followed close behind her.

“Why?! I just said don’t listen to her! You cannot go... with her...” He stopped when Pinkie looked back her lips in a beguiling grin and her eyes turned a lustful red. “A-actually, go ahead,” he muttered nervously.

“Gee, thanks Doc!” Her long tongue lightly licked just at the tip of his nose.

Vinyl also noticed the stallion was pretty close. “Yo Doc, you coming too?”

He wiped the spit off and said, “No. I have my own business to take care of. I’ll just go out the front door of the building,” he said and hastily withdrew to the commandeered apartment.

"Alright then." Vinyl said "You got Fluttershy covered, Tavi?"

"Unfortunately," she mumbled.

Vinyl spun the dial to pink and the air quickly filled with irritatingly sweet and succulent smells.

Octavia waved the strings in the air. "Don't waste my soul on getting a better drunk buzz again."

"Oh I'd never do that again..." she laughed and slammed the door.

Octavia heard the clatter of metal down the corridor. “Fluttershy? Are you alright?” There was no response, but more metallic slamming, clunking, and the sound of things being broken apart with pained growls. A shadow extended as the sound got closer. The silhouette showed a pony holding one of Vinyl’s decorative speakers, and devouring them one by one. Slowly the pony grew in size.

’It’s absorbing the metal?!’ Octavia readied her strings and kept as quiet as possible as Fluttershy came down the hall. Her iron-plated face was first into view. ‘Slaanesh save me, It’s a juggernaut!’ The bloodshot eye swiveled at her, locking sight for a long time with the unmoving, breathless pony. ’No! Don’t come any closer!’ Fluttershy’s snout sniffed her, pushing her onto the floor like a curious animal. Octavia couldn’t help but get teary eyed at the spikes and burning heat coming off Fluttershy’s body. ’I don’t want to die... Please... A mouth of knife-sized canines idly rumbled as the machine-pony inspected her, then planted her rear on the floor.

“It’s not killing me...” Octavia whispered. She worked up the nerve to look up into her snarling face. “You... You’re not going to kill me?” Fluttershy didn’t flinch from her looming posture and let out a stifling, heated breath in her face. ’Music soothes the savage beast... Just play.’

A dark cloud materialized around her foreleg which contorted it into a bowstring. “You like music, beastie? How about this?” she touched the bow to the strings and started to play.

’Is this even right?’ Applejack thought. The corpse was cradled in her hooves, still frozen with the same big, dumb smile. ’Dog-eat-dog... right?’

She closed her eyes and put her teeth on the neck, then bit and pulled away as quick as she could. The flesh and muscle tore off, dripping with the gir;s bodily fluids. Despite the taste, when she saw the bite area, the sight made her drop it and let the meat fall from her mouth once more.

“No, no. Ah shouldn’t be eat’n people! I’m not...” Her eyelids started to grow heavy, and she let out a yawn. “Some kinda... darn carnivore...” She blinked, and suddenly was a few feet closer to the body. Another blink, and half the body was gone, the rest of it covered in bite marks. She found her mouth clasped over its skull and tearing off strips of its scalp before succumbing to the sleep-deprived feeling.

“Mom... so adorable! ...we keep it?”

Applejack’s vision slowly came back, as well as what was left of her senses, bringing back the taste of meat. There was a human in front of her, a little girl, who was pushing something into her mouth as she absentmindedly chewed on it. The girl was covered in chicken pox and paper-thin skin that exposed parts of her skull in some places. Her bright smile was full of jagged, cavity riddled, green teeth and she patted her head while feeding her with the other hand.

Applejack jumped back with a yelp and the girl gasped and tugged at a woman’s dress. “It’s can still think! Oh please, mommy! I wanna keep the pony!”

“Sorry, sweetie, but we don’t have anywhere to put it.”

They didn’t even acknowledge Applejack’s panic as she grabbed the object that was sticking out of her mouth and pulled out an entire human arm that was shoved down her throat. She wreched at it, coughing up more chyme and meat pulp, and stumbled back over a street curb.

“Aw...” the girl pouted as her mother pulled her along. “Bye pony!”

Applejack found it almost impossible to sit upright as her body felt clogged with... whatever might be there. A man came into view, little of him spared from boils and lacerations, wearing a conically pointed burlap sack over his head and a giant scar like mouth stretching down his torso and helped pick her up.

“Sharp nose. You were amazing in finding those bodies!” he choked. “I watched you drag them out of places I never thought one could be found!” Applejack could only muster a choking breath that resulted in more pulp spilling from her lips. She found her abdomen swollen and crawling with maggots, her neck was equally as distended. She let out another coughing rasp with a confused look.

“I swear you have a gift! You just kept eating and eating, and would have kept going long after your abdomen rips open and dumps everything on the ground. Do you still feel pain?” he quickly drew and thrust a knife into her chest, eliciting no reaction of pain, but surprise. “Incredible! You’re dead! A zombie that can still think!”

The blade had cut through Applejack’s esophagus, enough to let some back-up fall out to free up her windpipe. “Ah ain’t a zombie!” She pushed him back and finally got a good look at where she was. The streets were moss-coated, cracked and ran with thick streams of pus in the storm gutters. A fog of mold spores and decomposing gases brought visibility of the rust and filth caked buildings to near zero. People infected with any number and kind of diseases and disorders meandered as if in perfect health.

“But of course you are!” the man laughed. “Compare yourself to me. You are far more rotted and festering than I could ever hope to be. And I saw you eat through five of the dead in an empty trance.” He put a grimy claw on the back of her neck. “I would actually be most appreciative if you would lead my corpse cart.” He motioned to it, a massive, rickety wagon pulled by several mewling, disease ridden people and ponies who had their harnesses more hooked into them than on them. The unmoving, fly-infested cargo was piled high. Applejack’s eyes widened in horror. “It’s a thing of monstrous beauty, no?”

“No...”

His unseen smile faded, like an artist whose work was insulted. “Oh? What’s wrong with it?”

“All these ponies are miserable!” Applejack exclaimed. “What are ya, blind?”

"Nonsense! Their screams are of joy! Listen."

He pulled out a barbed whip and cracked it at the pullers, catching one of the people's faces and ripping it clean off. They howled in pain, clawing at the exposed muscle underneath. The man took the face off his whip and held it to Applejack.

“Pain is pleasure, death is life. I will need help gathering more.” Applejack stared at the severed face for a while, blinked, and the face was gone from the man’s hand. “I trust that’s a yes? You can sit up on top with me.”

She backed away and shook her head, hardening her posture. “No. No!” And took off as fast as her weighed down body could carry her, regardless that she didn’t know where she was or where she was going.

“Oh wow...”

Twilight gaped in awe at the monolithic structure before her. Sculpted like a dark pantheon, the library rested atop a great hill. Countless knowledge seekers traipsed in and out and Twilight took her first step in.

Bookshelves stretched up into a foggy, shimmering atmosphere, hosting shifting and rearranging staircases that connected the upper floors. Pink and blue creatures Vinyl mentioned constantly scaled the shelves, taking books down, re-shelving and rearranging. Those who lost their grip and fell disintegrated in mid-air, their essence drifting into the shelves.

As Twilight navigated the walls of shelves, she saw those partaking the the books utilizing arcane forms of magic she’d never seen before. Not all of them were that alluring though as some used these spells on one another, turning them into masses of useless, flailing bones and body parts.

She eyed an encyclopedia and book of spells so she could get to know more about this world and just as she began pulling them from their place, Something grasped her neck, holding her head back, and she felt something else, cold and sharp, pressing lower down.

"Hai der nay-boar..." Twilight’s breath stopped and she froze. “Du yoo remembur meh?

She carefully nodded " J-j-just please. We didn't want to take your home. We didn't know Vinyl would-"

"Vut yoo let her jo eet anyhwey. Hwee voth know hao teegs wurk heer. Tayke hwat yoo whant, and keel anywhan who- AYYYEEEEE!"

Twilight flared her horn with light, blinding the girl and bolted when she stumbled back. “Come on wings, lift... off!” She flapped as fast as she could, but had no coordination. She looked up to the sound of rapid bootsteps and the purple-haired girl was sprinting along the top of the shelves. ’How is she so fast?!’

Twilight took a turn, and now the girl had to jump across the shelves’ narrower side, but still she kept up. Twilight barely made it to a moving stair as it took off, leaving the pursuer to find another route up. She was most unsettled by her vicious, dagger-toothed grin.

“Safe for now. Where do I go? Where do I go?!”

The stair connected with the next floor and Twilight cautiously stepped off and went right. GOing down another hall, she kept her eyes alert and looking all around for any angle the psychopath could come from. She passed a mutated mint-green unicorn and-

“Ow! Watch it!” that snapped. Twilight had accidentally stepped on her foot and in the split second she took her sight off the shelves,

“YAAAAAAAHHHH!”

Tackled to the ground, a knife was placed right atop Twilight’s head, ready to be punched down.

“Hey Cultist.” said the green unicorn idly.

“Hai Laira! Nao... Leettle chrikster ali-pony. Yoor head weel luk guud on teh market.”

"I-I'm sorry! Please dont-"

"Are yoo shkared?” She whispered right in her ear.

Twilight nodded, tears beginning to gather in her eyes. “Yes! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!”

The girl squealed in laughter and vaulted backward off of her. "That eez all hwee hwanted to heer!”

“Wh-what?”

“Eet’s enkonveenient ghetting keel’d, even eff teh gods don’t let ush dai.”

Twilight picked herself up, putting a hoof on her aching head. "How did you come back? I... I saw you get...get...."

"Teh jark gawds tell us tey weel need us een tirty-ayt towshand yeerz, so hwee are hwayting and they keep ush alive unteel then!"

Twilight gawked, "Thirty-eight thousand years? How can you wait that long? How old are you?"

"Hwee lost count after hwan toushand shixty!" she shrugged The girl took a seat by the green unicorn. “Come! Ai broat yoor buks!”

“We’re alright now, right?” she hesitated. “Water under the bridge?”

“Yeah mang! Hwee kuul! Heer.” Cultist reached back and took off the encyclopedia that hung by its strap on her star.

Twilight took it in a magic field and opted to sit on the other side of the unicorn. Cultist took notice, bounced over and sat next to her, uncomfortably close. A thought hung off the tip of Twilight’s tongue, just begging to be asked.

“Your name is really generic, uh... Cultist is it?” she said. “Don’t you have another name?”

The girl shook her head. “Nehmes are just laybelz to idenchify indeeveeduals. Hwee are nohwan but hwan uv many who weel turn to the dark gawds.”

The figure opposite was a kaleidoscope of mismatched body parts covered in feathers, fur, and scales with a disproportionate human-like body, and an uneven number of gnarled sausage-fingers and toes.

She tried not to look at her as she read. "Uh...Twilight. Who’s your... friend?"

"Lyra." The deformed unicorn added.

Cultist tugged at Twilight’s wing a little before she snapped it back. "Yoo reemind us of a vludtirster."

"A what?"

"A bloodthirster." Lyra said. "Look in the encyclopedia."

The book itself was filled with moving images of creatures, warriors, and weapons. As Twilight flipped through the pages, she came across the same creatures that were scaling the bookshelves, Horrors. Demon slaves that are originally pink and split into two blue copies when they are killed. She looked around at them as the pink ones tended to the books madly, cackling litanies and praises about Tzeentch, and the blue ones bickered and fought with each other.

"Darn it!" Lyra exclaimed, having split apart the skin, bone, and muscle of her limbs in a failed spell. "What is this?” After another jolt of magic, she managed to fuse them back together into their ‘normal’ shape and caught Twilight glaring in wide eyed astonishment. “What?”

“Wh-what did you just do to your arms?”

Lyra wiggled the nubby little digits, cracking a few of the joints. “Well I was trying to make them more normal. You don’t know how many spells I’ve tried for transfiguration. Look at a human’s hand. The fingers are longer, thinner, and their palms aren’t folded over themselves.”

"You’re trying to become human?”

“Yeah!” Exclaimed Lyra as if it the most obvious thing. “I already worked out the midsection,” She pointed to herself, from the neck down was a clear human shape, strong and ladylike, “I can walk perfectly fine on my feet, but there’s still these smushed up clay balls of hands I’ve got and I haven’t even gotten started on my head! Think about it. Our heads are huge in proportion to our bodies compared to the normal horses of this world.”

It was definitely something Twilight would have to look into. ‘normal’ horses, and perhaps there was a transfiguration spell slowly working on Rarity.

‘Our heads aren’t that big...’ she thought, turning another page. The image was a giant beast with a canine face, huge, bat-like wings, wielding an axe and whip in each hand. It swung and swiped its weapons wildly at a huge army bearing countless decorations of hammers, suns, moons, and twin tail comets. It took up man and pony alike, crushing them in its hand and let their blood drip into its mouth. Her likeness to it was similar; her teeth, horns, and wings.

"Yoo fly like vludtirster Twailait??" Cultist asked.

"No. I can’t fly and... I don't look anything like this." she said hesitantly.

Cultist giggled, “Yesh yoo do!”

“No I don’t.” Intending to ignore anything else Cultist had to say, Twilight flipped across more pages. When she stopped there was a picture of a man in a beige suit with a red bow tie, holding a small metal object glowing green at one end.

Cultist cringed. "Ooh. That eez a vad man. He hortsh kay-oss a lot."

"The Doctor?" Twilight mused, reading the title under the picture. "I know somepony that has the same name."

"Are tey teh saym pherson?"

"I don't think so. The one I know is a pony. This one's human."

She hastily turned the page and found a rampaging rhinoceros of iron and brass. Under it read ‘Juggernaut of Khorne’.

"Is this... this is what he was talking about!” She watched the monster tear through rank of soldiers, impaling many on its bladed horn that stuck straight from its face, and leaving eviscerated corpses in its charging wake. “Oh my gosh... Fluttershy...”

"Your friend’s a juggernaut?” asked Lyra with a voice of concern. “Jeez, as if this city needed more than one tearing everything to shreds.”

Twilight weighed the options, the possibilities. "Well, somepony I know is looking after her. Who knows, she might not still be mad when she wakes up.” ’Octavia has it under control, even immobile! I saw how she cut through... solid... brass...’

“Oh my goodness.”

Chapter 9: The Gods Shall Have Their Prize

"Please don’t let it have happened! Please!” Twilight huffed as she sprinted through the apartment building’s halls in a tidal wave of panic. The numbers on the doors went by in a blur, 567, 568, “569! Finally!” She pounded a hoof on the door. “Octavia? Fluttershy? Are you okay?”

A bout of rough coughing answered, followed by a raspy voice in Octavia’s accent. “Just fine! Fluttershy, get the door will you?”

It sounded like a tumbling pile of metal in there, then heavy stomping before the iron mare greeted Twilight with a dizzy, but calm smile while a fog of smoke was blowing passed her.

“Hey, Twilight... ” she wheezed. “Come on in.”

She did and pelted Fluttershy with questions, trying to speak through the stifling haze. “Are you really alright? Did anything happen when you woke up?”

Fluttershy didn’t even seem to hear her as she sat back where Octavia was, in a pile of broken and melted speakers and metal trinkets. Octavia handed back a strange receptacle and with her own receptacle held and lit a candle under the base. A solution of green powder and water quickly boiled and she deeply inhaled the smoke. Her eyes fluttered in a trancelike buzz before letting out the white, wispy breath. When Fluttershy did the same, her smoke came out black.

“Everything was fine when we met,” she finally spoke. “I think I just scared her a little with how I look.”

“But we got passed it,” continued Octavia. “She really liked some of my music, and we had some good conversation.”

Twilight sighed in relief. “Fluttershy, are you smoking?”

She nodded and with a smoky breath said, “Wyrdstone...”

“When its boiled vapor is inhaled, it promotes the utmost serenity and ease,” said Octavia, half asleep. Her pipe was tipped a little too far and spilled its contents on the floor. “Oh, blast... Now I have to clean this... up...” She struggled to get up, but with most of her energy stolen away, barely rolled around in her seat. “Can you get me a cloth, Twilight? Vinyl should have a couple in her room. Third door on the left.”

Even just at the corner, Twilight shot one last look to make her worries finally satisfied, and went for a cloth.

“Third on the left,” she muttered and entered the respective room. It was a nightmare of a mess. Records, glaives shaped like records, and music equipment lay helter skelter with no rhyme or reason. Even more so, were two dozen empty vials and test tubes of differently colored chemicals. Twilight breathed through her mouth to avert the stench and got to searching. Finding nothing in one corner, she turned around and was met by a pink face that was frighteningly close.

“Ah! Pinkie!” she jumped. The soundproof room door was suddenly open when it hadn’t been before. “Pinkie, were you waiting in there to spook me?” The pink mare gave no answer and only stared blankly, her head hanging down with half-closed eyes and slowly drooling on the floor. Twilight waved a hoof in her face. “Pinkie? Yoo-hoo.”

Pinkie finally reacted, coughing up several vials like those scattered about the room and slumped over into Twilight’s hooves.

“Pinkie! What happened to you?”

A syringe was deeply embedded in her shoulder, the interior of the capsule was stained in many colors. Twilight yanked it out and Pinkie lurched upward, stretching her mouth impossibly wide and glomping down over Twilight’s body, moving down to her abdomen in a split second and forcing herself further with lightning efficiency. To the unicorn, it was a terrible blur and she suddenly found herself enveloped by squishy, undulating walls in pitch blackness and being lifted upside down off the ground.

Pinkie swallowed and the unfortunate, thrashing pony quickly had her haunches and hind legs engulfed in the black maw. Twilight felt something open just below her head. and soon meet another surface that ominously grumbled as she was deposited inside, stretching and expanding it to take her whole body. The saturated atmosphere was barely breathable. New air only being brought by the aperture periodically opening slightly.

“Pinkie!” Twilight snapped as the flesh surrounding her started moving and gurgling louder. She fought against the slippery surfaces to orient upright and lit her horn to see where she was. A tight black sack, churning and secreting purple slime from its walls that slowly pooled around her. Twilight heard Pinkie Pie breathing just above her, her lungs pressing down on her head with each sharp, short gasp.

’No...’ Twilight whimpered unbelievingly. “There’s no way she just... no reason she’d-”

BUUURRAAAAPP

Twilight froze in terror as it sank in. By that point she’d been pushed into panic, beating against the walls of Pinkie’s roiling stomach and shouting at the top of her lungs which only came out as muffled to near silence by the thick enclosure. Pinkie actually seemed to be enjoying her squirming as she moaned and kneaded her belly in Twilight’s face.

She pushed back and thought, ’Teleportation! I can still get out!’ Twilight tried to muster the necessary magic through her horn, but the stifling acidic air made focusing almost impossible. Compounding it, was that as her horn glowed, the magic was being drawn back out and absorbed into the stomach walls. It made a low, drawn out groan and Pinkie squealed in delight. Still, Twilight thought she could make it work and put all she had into putting the spell together even as she was overcome with lightheadedness and quickly lost air as Pinkie’s esophagus had closed. She soon lost feeling in her horn, then her limbs. Limply laying with her face against the labouring gut, she took her last conscious breaths before blacking out.

Fluttershy heard a thunk down the hall. and scratched her chin. “Didn’t Pinkie Pie come back in a while ago?”

“She might have.” Said Octavia. “Hmm...”

Twenty minutes earlier

Pinkie Pie stared into an iron wall with legs. Looking up, it also had a head and a sheepish grin.

“Hi, Pinkie Pie.”

“Holy cannoli! What happened to you, Fluttershy?!”

“I’m... not sure.”

“Not sure?” Octavia said from behind her. “I just told you that you came lumbering down the hallway, absorbing every bit of metal you touched!”

Pinkie giggled, “Just like a sponge.”

Fluttershy stepped aside to let her in. “Octavia said I was really scary and she has an idea for a treatment to get me back to normal. Wyrdstone, I think. What did you come back for?”

“Oh, Vinyl left her headset and a couple of special colored wires for her soundset here.”

“Good luck finding them.”

“Thanks!”

Pinkie trotted into the mess of Vinyl’s room and went rummaging for the desired items.

“Headset, check!” she said, throwing them around her neck. “Blue wire, copper wire, red leather, yellow leather— Ow!”

A sharp pain jolted through her shoulder and she found a medical syringe buried in her shoulder. She looked up and saw a rat passing by on one of the upper shelves, across a display of other injection needles and vials of several different substances. A powerful burning sensation grew where the needle punched in that advanced through her bloodstream and suddenly, Pinkie felt very, very happy as the world melted around her.

She extended her tongues up and dragged down the entire array of chems and needles, plugging one into a vial, filling it and stabbing it into her leg. This brought a different jolt, of a ticklish delight that brought out the most hysterical laughter.

Again and again, she experienced all the different substances, letting each wash over her senses in a completely new rush each time, but it wasn’t enough. The craving in her mind demanded more, so much more. She inverted the display over her mouth, ravenously gulping down the contents, even the glass vials themselves. Her stomach groaned and wrought a debilitating pain.

She stumbled around, clutching her rioting gut and collapsed in the soundproofed room. She tried to use her tongue to hold the door for balance, but only managed to shut it as her insides burned.

“Twilight,” Fluttershy called lightly, poking her head into Vinyl’s room. “Are you in he— AAAAHHHHH!”

She shrieked at the snoring pink blob balled up in the corner. Its huge, churning belly was distended as large as she was. The contour it was stretched around clearly looked like an entire pony.

Fluttershy put her back against the outside wall with a hoof over her mouth. She felt sick from the sight of the bloated animal, her mind racing a million miles a minute even through a wyrdstone haze.

”She... P-pinkie at-te...” She heard the door of the other apartment open. and a familiar voice.

“I suppose this will last us until—”

“DOCTOR!” Fluttershy screamed. The Doctor immediately ran for the source of the cry and found Fluttershy quivering against the wall in horror. “Pinkie P-p-p”

“Fluttershy, breathe!”

She gasped and said in sharp, forced breaths, “Pinkie... Pie... ate... Twilight!”

The Doctor’s ears flattened at the sound of a messy belch from in the room.

“Good god!” he snapped as he approached the glutted mare.

“How do we get her out?”

He looked at the stitches that still crisscrossed Pinkie’s torso, but thought against his first idea for another. “Try holding her upside down.”

Fluttershy took Pinkie’s hind legs and raised her high so she dangled freely like the carcass of a slain game animal. The contents of her stomach sloshed down and started sliding back up her throat. The Doctor opened Pinkie’s mouth and saw a horn come into view at the back of her mouth. He tilted her head back so the esophagus was lined up and soon Twilight’s head slipped from her lips. Fluttershy couldn’t bear to look, for even the wet sounds induced a feeling of nausea.

Despite the stinking muck, Whooves helped keep Twilight from hitting the floor to hard and guided her body out until gravity brought the last of her out of Pinkie. He put a hoof on Twilight’s chest and sighed in relief when he felt a heartbeat and her breathing.

“Fluttershy, let’s get Twilight out of here and see what we can do,” Said Whooves. He looked around at the spilled chem containers everywhere, and the design of the room and assumed, “This must be Vinyl’s room. She’ll probably have an idea of what happened to her.”.

Fluttershy reluctantly toted Twilight from the room and The Doctor followed. "Hopefully Vinyl will know what to do when she gets back."

Before Whooves completely shut the door, his eyes went wide as a black claw, much like a crab’s, shot out and blocked the door between the wall. Pinkie Pie put her face to the gap, wordless but frothing with a wickedly wide smile and her pupils shrunk to pinpricks. Opening her claw, she forced the door open wider against Whooves’ effort. Fluttershy rushed over and tried to help shut the door but, unaware of her weight and momentum, forced it to slam shut, squeezing the claw back to the other side. Pinkie giggled and chattered incoherently for a while, before her mirth finally gave way to a long scratching noise.

"Dooooc... Dooooc..." she moaned longingly.

Whooves quickly began moving several heavy objects to block the door and sent Fluttershy to the other room to take care of Twilight. Pinkie was still pushing against the door, but it was made to be pulled. Even so, the makeshift barricade made Whooves feel just a bit safer.

Fluttershy tried to focus through her wyrdstone-clouded mind as she dried Twilight with a blanket. Where Rarity was situated, her sheets were very low, as if she weren’t even there, and a small flow of dust blew out from underneath and out the tiniest cracks in the closed window. Twilight seemed well intact despite being entombed for some time. Her breath was weak, she was very pale and Fluttershy saw drops of blood trailing from the corner of her mouth.

The first thing Fluttershy's foggy conscience thought to do was wring out her bleeding mane for her to drink as had to be done the night before. She did so over Twilight’s mouth and helped her get it down, recalling the nostalgia of aiding wounded animals at her cottage in Ponyville. Twilight coughed and unconsciously covered herself with the wet blanket, shivering.

With her taken care of for the time being, Fluttershy turned to the other bedsheets to check on Rarity. She gently lifted the covers up and found only a shrinking pile of dust underneath that was slowly blowing out the window.

“Rarity!” Fluttershy put her hoof on the dust which only scattered it more and it too went for the window. “No! Stop! Come back!”

Chapter 10: Seed of Corruption

Rarity cracked her eyes open, feeling stiff as a board and acutely aware that the bumpy surface that was under her not a minute ago was replaced with something much harder. She soon discovered it was a cobblestone floor. She tried to stand up but her spine locked up.

“Ah! My back! My back— wait...” she put a hand to her mouth, which was finally free of her jutting teeth. “I can talk again, wonderful! Now if I could just stand... up...” Her forelegs felt very different and she quickly realized why. She didn’t have them anymore.

“What!? I thought I only had one!” She held out two skeletal arms, Inspecting them inquisitively and found that one of them only had four fingers. A small cloud of dust blew down and gathered on the stump, hardening into the last long digit.

She got to trying to stand again. Her back wouldn’t cooperate with walking on all fours and she felt something wiggling on her feet. “Why do I have feet?! You know what, no. One thing at a time, old girl.” She used her arms like canes, working her way up to stand on two legs. “Where am I?”

She was huddled in the corner between a stair stoop and the open street. Some one, a pony, had her face buried in a human body’s chest, and when she momentarily picked her head up, Rarity recognized her face.

“Applejack! Oh thank goodness you... Applejack?”

The fetid mare’s crusty eyes were viciously set on her. She swallowed a mouthful of spongy lung tissue that fell right back out of her blown-open abdomen. Applejack made an empty, deep moan before slouching and staggering in Rarity’s direction.

“Applejack, you’re scaring me...” Rarity backed up and was quickly up against the corner as the corpse-mare drew closer. “Applejack!”

She lunged at Rarity who put her hands out to resist, locking one around her mouth and the other holding back the rest of her as she thrashed and snapped with her slavering jaws. For the first time ever, Rarity was glad to feel another uncontrollable shock coming on that electrocuted them both.

Applejack fell over to the side and Rarity slumped down. Both of them were steaming but Rarity fared better having been the source. Applejack twitched and was otherwise motionless for some time, then yawned and steadily got back to her hooves as if nothing happened.

“Aw, jeez,” she mumbled. “How’d I get here? Rarity! What ‘n tarnation are ya doin’ out here? Didn’t Twilight put ya in a bed ta rest?”

Rarity nodded. “I don’t know how I got out here. And you... attacked me.”

Applejack gritted her teeth, but tried to say calmly, “No, I didn’t.”

Rarity showed her her blood and grime covered hands and Applejack felt the grooves her choking hold made on her neck. Rarity shook the filth off in disgust.

“Are you at least in the right of mind now?”

“Always was.” Applejack helped Rarity up. “I’m not a zombie, okay?”

“Fine, fine. I really just want to go back to the apartment.”

“Where’s that? I’ve been wanderin’ this place for Celestia knows how long.”

“569... Satin Street.”

Rarity stumbled, latching onto Applejack for support. Her hand came off with more of her thick secretions on it "Eeewww..." she moaned. "You're disgusting!"

"First complaint ya made since ya can talk and ah already miss when ya couldn’t talk. T'aint like ah chose this."

"Just help me get back please, please? I don’t think I can walk on two legs yet."

"Lucy, I'm hooome!" Vinyl shouted, kicking the door in and balancing several packs of beverages.

Octavia’s face took on an expression of disappointment, seeing Vinyl plastered again. It was made most evident by the fact that she wasn’t even using her magic to carry the containers. "You couldn't have found something more productive to do?"

"Shut the ffffuck up! I still got paid." Vinyl slammed the cargo down in the kitchen. “And where’s Pinkie Pie? I couldn’t use half my shit at work!” She looked through the hole in the wall she bore at Twilight, curled up and shivering in a lethargic daze. "Wow, what happened to you, Twinkle Hooves?"

Twilight didn’t speak, her eyes emptily staring straight ahead.

“Pinkie Pie apparently had an episode,” said Whooves. “It looked like she had injected herself with a lot of these chemicals in your bedroom—”

“She shot up all my chems?!” Vinyl screeched.

Whooved stuffed his hooves in his ears as the room shook around her. “Vinyl, just hear me out—”

“Son of a bitch!” She charged down the hall, blasted away the barricade and threw the door open, being immediately grabbed by several gripping tongues that yanked her inside.

Whooves and Fluttershy rushed in as Pinkie wolfed Vinyl down. The iron mare grabbed Vinyl’s hind legs and pulled, quickly ripping Vinyl free. Pinkie leapt at Fluttershy, engulfing her head. She immediately let go and screamed as her saliva boiled from Fluttershy’s body heat.

“She tried to eat me...” she muttered, letting the fluids boil off her head and dropped Vinyl. Her lips curled into an angry scowl, then a vicious mask of rage. “You tried to eat me!” Fluttershy jumped at the reeling Pinkie, tackling her to the floor and twice struck her iron hoof across her face.

“Fluttershy, stop!” The Doctor tried to grab her, but her body temperature soared to the point where as soon as he laid a hoof on her, a bit of his fur got singed and she kept besieging the pony.

Fluttershy picked up Pinkie and threw her across the room, bellowing a low beastial roar that she caught herself in and slammed her hooves over her mouth.

“Oh my gosh.” She stared in abject horror at the work her hooves wrought. Pinkie’s tongues dangled loosely and a multi-colored fluid slowly dripped from her nose and mouth. The same substance stained Fluttershy’s hooves. She folded her forelegs, not wanting to see them and hunched over with gathering tears.

“What did I do...? I’m a... a monster...”

“Fluttershy, listen to me,” Whooves said, helping up the coughing and gagging Vinyl. “Pinkie Pie is very sick right now. She’s not in control of herself. Understand?” She half nodded. “Now I need you to bind up her legs and mouth with whatever you can find.”

“At least I don’t have to beat the crap out of her now,” Vinyl spat.

“Do you know how to cure her?” asked Whooves. “You are the one who made these things, right?”

“Yeah, but I never saw anypony take so much at once. The effects might wear off in a few days, or they could be irreversible, but maybe if you get her to take some herbs I know of, they could be slowed down.”

Rainbow Dash’s chest heaved as she waited, sweat rolling down her temple and her hooves on the lever. Her gaze was seelt fixed on the opening ahead, but it didn’t stop the pain in her wings from grabbing her attention now and again.

Whatever that thing is, its taloned claws, long beaked snout and, leathery, devilish wings, somehow it could see right through her disguises, her transformations. She didn’t even know what she did to draw its wrath, but it hounded her like a daemon of Tartarus nonetheless.

She was ready for it now. The lever was a component of a tremendous cannon beside her, perched in a tower overlooking the great walls of Mordheim. Its steel and woodwork frame supported a ribbed bore ending with a gaping bony maw, like the screaming skull of a bull. The weapon itself seemed to creak and moan of its own accord and Rainbow tried to ignore the dark red fluid dripping from its open mouth.

She saw it in the distance, the gargoyle, the fury, closing with the speed of a falcon and sounded a screech that sent chills up Rainbow’s spine. Her eyes met with the creature’s and she was frozen, unable to move, her muscles refusing to act out of fear. It was just before it got to the entrance that it howled again, so close and loud it snapped Rainbow back to reality and in shock, she threw the lever.

The cannon screamed and in a thundering hurricane of blasting flame and smoke, the monster was engulfed and disappeared. Rainbow watched the rippling fireball continue to travel over the wall like a comet, and down, down, until it detonated in a tremendous plume of white-hot energy.

She still spent a couple more moments registering what had happened before thrusting a hoof in the air and hooting at the top of her lungs.

“Mother bucker, YES! Oh my Celestia!” She leaned against a barrel as her legs felt weak, but she would have little time to rest as she heard footsteps from the door to the stairs.

“That’s the last time I let Yorgalek distract me!” The spike-clad dwarf shouted as he barged in. “You get out of here!”

Rainbow bolted for the opening in the tower as he pulled a blunderbuss from the sling on his back and fired prematurely. The shower of lead pellets merely struck the cannon, but Rainbow still felt a spike of pain get rammed into her flank.

Her fight or flight instinct compensated for the burning aching of her wings as she made a beeline for where the others were holed up. She landed on the 5th floor’s outcropping, seeing that Rarity and Applejack were also coming in from the ground floor, she opened the window and poked her head in on a very strange scene.

Pinkie Pie had her legs tied up tight, thrashing and squirming like a worm with a large cretaceous claw where a hoof used to be while Vinyl telekinetically held her mouth shut. The Doctor rummaged through a sack and held a red moss covered rock in Pinkie’s face, catching her attention.

"What the heck is going on here?"

“Rainbow, thank goodness you’re back” Said Whooves relievedly. “We could use another hoof here— Ah! She’s eating my leg!”

Indeed, Pinkie had made it to his shoulder before Vinyl pulled her head back and shut Pinkie’s mouth.

"Did you just feed her a rock?” Dash snickered.

“Yep! Looks like she’ll eat anything,” Vinyl laughed while Whooves shook the spit off his leg. “So we don’t even have to bother scraping the crap off the stuff it grows on.”

“But... Why?”

“Short and sweetly, she’s higher than Cloudsdale. That’s also where she got this little gift from.” Vinyl poked Pinkie’s claw which strained to open against the ropes binding it.

“Okay, Pinkie’, here’s a nice uh... peanut brittle bar.” Whooves held up a moldy slab of wood and she devoured it with the same gluttonous hunger.

Rainbow stepped in through the window. “So whatever’s on all those things is supposed to help her?”

“In one way or another.”

Just then, the door knob melted. “Consarnit, not again! RAAAGH!”

Applejack bucked the door open with rust flaking from her mouth, and the knob disintegrating as she walked in with Rarity. She cast a burning pink eyed gaze at Vinyl.

“Scratch!”

“Hey zedhead! Looks like you two had fun— Oh shit!”

Vinyl jumped as Applejack charged her, leaving a dent against the wall on impact. Unphased with her liquefied greymatter, Applejack quickly recovered and took after Vinyl until a shimmering purple wall shot up between them.

“Applejack, What’s gotten into you?” Twilight said in concern.

“She did sumthin’ ta me! I’ve been eatin’ meat non stop for hours evidently and I dun even know I’m doin’ it!”

“Because you’re a zom—”

“Shut up! Twilight, look at me!”

Applejack got to her hind hooves and showed her exploded underbelly. Twilight couldn’t help but turn away from the sight of her infested and sagging insides and inadvertently drop her shield.

“Applejack... you... It just might be getting worse. We might need you to stay in here if that’s what you’re going through.”

Vinyl took advantage of their distraction to sneak to Octavia as she felt sick and her glasses started to crack.

“That time at last?” said the weak mare.

Vinyl was doubled over and unable to speak, managed to climb up onto Octavia’s lap and position her mouth over hers.

“Do you see what I’m saying, Applejack?” said Twilight.

Her head sank low. “Yeah... Well... I still miss bein’ able to use these like arms though.”

Applejack packed her intestines back in and was distracted by the sound of Vinyl violently coughing over Octavia’s mouth. She actually appeared to be regurgitating something and sure enough, Octavia’s saliva coated soul came tumbling down into its owners gullet.

Even Applejack had to cringe in disgust. “It’s like a momma bird to a baby...”

“Sorry, Tavi,” Vinyl Sputtered as her maw shrank and glasses shattered, “Some of my lunch might be in there.”

Regaining color, Octavia pensively rolled her tongue around a couple times. “Peanut butter and... squig? Where did you find squig meat?”

Vinyl wiped her mouth and grinned snarkily. “Orks.”

Octavia gasped, “Orks!? You did not go messing with those brutes again!”

“But they’re so easy to fool! I literally just said, ‘Oy, look ovah dere! It’s da boss!’ And they dropped to their knees, pleading in that direction like a bunch of babies long enough for me to get away before they realized it was just a goblin.” Vinyl rocked around in laughter. “And all you guys should have seen what they did to that goblin. I never knew they had so much blood in them!”

“Write this one down for the history books, scribe... This is my greatest blunder.”

It was the first time he’d encountered an ork WAAAGH!!! and he was so sure, felt so ready, but it was not to be.

The putrid air stank of blood and smoke, and the dead. An endless roaring of this ubiquitous battlecry rattled the reiksmarshall’s suit. Further down the hill, he watched his men fight for their lives against the green menace, and some were in rout. The Orks stretched on like the green, foamy sea of Eternity’s Crossing.

“Reiksmarshall Shining Armor!” His attention went to the young messenger boy on horseback. “The right flank is collapsing!”

He could see it. The line was growing thin, but there was another anomaly, among the orks. It felt like the general direction of their horse was changing, going west instead of south. Shining spotted bats circling the moon and put on a half-smile.

“Looks like the Vampire Counts are drawing them away.”

He scanned the ridge of the hill. Here was the concentration of the artillery. Cannons, mortars, and helblasters, lined up in an impressive battery of firepower. He was also flanked by his bodyguard, the Reiksguard Knights, who were clad in gilded armor, once polished to a mirror finish but was now dulled by the dust of battle.

Shining himself wore similar attire, but was decorated in a way that made him stand out. Most pronounced was the peacock-styled array of red, white and blue feathers atop his helmet.

He turned to his gunnery sergeant. “Bombshell, how’s the artillery?”

“All loaded and ready to fire.” he responded quickly.

“High explosive shells?”

Bombshell smirked. “Giving the orks some fireworks.”

“Good. Give the order now.”

A vicious grin curled Bombshell’s face as he raised a small flag and bellowed, “Bring down Sigmar’s hammer from the heavens! FIRE!”

The world lit up like a sunless daytime for a micro instant at the simultaneous report of three dozen guns and the atmosphere was instantly choked in their smoky plumes. The artillery shot backward form their own recoil and some unprepared crewmen even stumbled from the concussive force of the blast. The helblaster volley guns continued their salvo of scything fire and after a couple of seconds, the orks lit up like New Years Day.

Craters were blasted out of the landscape, swaths of greenskins took thousands of shards of shrapnel and debris, dropping like flies among their brethren. Entire bodies were eviscerated, heads popped sky high like champagne corks where the barrage was most concentrated, and some of the orks finally knew fear.

Yet, for all that, the greenskins were unrelenting and it would still take time for the orks to be sufficiently distracted toward Sylvania.

“Order the retreat,” said Shining.

The bugleman raised his instrument and blared away a trill from the Lament of Morr.

“Tired of getting our flanks kicked I see,” Locked Stock muttered.

Shining said nothing as he aggressively pushed by him. The artillery were hooked up to their carriages and the blotched banners fluttered solemnly as the remaining forty percent of the army slowly trudged off the field from the rear.

Chapter 11: Claws at the Corners

Getting help from Vinyl could only take so much of a toll on Twilight’s nerves and body before she opted to find her own sanctuary. She’d still picked up some maneuvers for self defense, but using her as the punching bag was the last straw. That, and Applejack was starting to reek worse than usual.

“Warface, warface, I got it.”

Twilight anxiously stood before the slightly rust coated door of room 428, a bead of sweat ran down her forehead.

“Rainbow Dash had told you what attacked her. You’re lucky something worse didn’t try to tear you a new plot!” VInyl had said while swiping a wet cloth over Rainbow Dash’s bleeding flank. “On the streets, you could be murdered for a piece of bread. In the spires, the city lords drink the souls of ponies like us with their dinner. No mercy! No regret! You or them!

“Unlearn everything you ever thought you knew about friendship and pick this little tip up; everypony dies with a smile.”

And the smile Vinyl enacted was burned into Twilight’s memory, looking so willing, so content with death. The ‘warface’ Vinyl was so strict about was a very effective psychological weapon. The first time Twilight tried the warface, Vinyl connected a slap to the face.

“Bullshit! You didn’t convince me!”

It still stung.

Twilight readied a spell that enveloped her rear hooves in a blackened void-light. Vinyl had said it was for hoof-to-hoof combat, but never specified what it was supposed to do. Something about bucking.

She wheeled around, primed her hind legs, and launched back. The door then disintegrated on contact. It was time for the warface. She snapped up to stand tall, outstretched her wings, barred her fangs, and used her magic to make her mane stand and slither like a gorgon’s serpentine hair.

She hissed bitterly, “Everypony get out of here! This place is mine!”

The inhabitants, a deflated, blister-poxed man, his similarly diseased wife, and their son, not twelve years of age stared in a silent, momentary confusion before the man quickly opened a drawer, tossed two knives to his family and launched himself at Twilight.

She immediately dropped her act in terror, got into bucking stance again and struck the man dead square in the chest. He went flying back with the clear sound of several ribs snapping and a thick yellow sludge came oozing from his mouth. He still recovered and charged again, this time with his wife in tow and Twilight fled, managing to move faster than their affiliated bodies.

“What did Vinyl say about these guys? Headshots? Headshots!”

The architecture of the building was covered in spikes, so there was quite the copious number of ways she could do this. Twilight wrestled one back and forth until it snapped out of place and sent it hurtling down the hall, piercing the man straight through the forehead.

Her fight or flight instinct snapped off then and there and she froze. The scene seemed to go in slow motion as the man’s frenzied face became more lazy and limp. His forward leg buckled and the rest of him came crumbling like a house of cards, ending with a heavy thump on the floor.

The next thing she saw was the wife becoming even more wide-eyed and overcoming her illness into a sprint, and tackling her to the floor. The lady’s slavering, snapping jaws accompanied the dull blade she tried the thrust into Twilight’s throat against the resistance of her hooves. The little boy had a clear shot and as he brought his knife down for the kill, a size-seven boot said otherwise, driving into his face and sending him rocketing down the hall and crashing out the far window.

“GOOOOOOOOAAALLLL!” A familiar voice cheered, before grabbing the woman’s head and thrusting her knee up into her jaw with a solid round of snapping teeth.

For the first time, Twilight had been happy to see Cultist as she drove a dagger into the assailant’s skull and yank it back out of the limp cadaver with shreds of greymatter on the barbs. She worked its jaw up and down and performed the worst ventriloquism in the history of the art.

“Cho bee oar nawt too bee? Jat eez teh kwestyon.” She proceeded to throw it down and smash its skull under her bootheel in a splatter of rotten flesh and cranial fluid. “NAWT!”

Twilight staggered to her hooves, gasping and grasping for an understanding of what just happened.

“Luuks, yoo beet off moar tan yoo kan choo!” Cultist giggled, glancing at the eviscerated skull of the gangly man.

Twilight vigorously shook her head. “Whah... how? Where did you come from?”

“Mah parenchs! Hwer elshe?”

“No, I mean just now.”

Cultist pointed back to an open door not twenty feet away. “Herd teh noyze and rekognaized yoor skreeming!”

Twilight looked at the bodies with a wave of nausea bubbling up. It was bad enough that they were already writhing in disease, but now they were decomposing faster than anything she’d ever seen and a strange sight caught her attention.

A pair of dull green lights glowed in their bodies, which rose until two marble-sized orbs came rolling off their chests and onto the floor.

What Vinyl had done to Octavia came back to Twilight as a firm reminder.

“Those are... their souls?”

“Yeah.” Cultist picked one up and rolled it around between her fingers. She didn’t seem too interested in it though.

For a moment, Twilight considered what happened to Vinyl after she consumed one. A heightening of power of some sort.

”Hot damn! You don’t know how good this feels!”

But it was like cannibalizing the dead, a thought that made Twilight shudder and stick her tongue out in disgust. Cultist carelessly flicked the soul out of her hand and it shot straight past Twilight’s tongue, riding it into her mouth.

She choked for a second as it got lodged in her throat and the gag reflex kicked in, forcing her to swallow.

“What was that for?!” she coughed.

“Shorry.”

It was kind of sixty-forty mix in terms of Twilight’s feeling of relief and disappointment that nothing seemed to happen. No sudden sprouting of extra limbs, no feeling that she was on top of the world.

At least until now.

She doubled over as her abdomen rocked form the inside out in an explosion of an indescribable, pure euphoria that boomed outward like a tidal wave until it snapped away in the tips of her tail and ears. Her eye turned to the other soul and she licked her lips.

“You’re not going to have that one too, are you?”

Cultist shook her head and tossed the other to Twilight. As she popped it with great fervor, she thought, ’Is this what Pinkie Pie feels all the time?’

Pinkie sucked up the blue strands of hair like spaghetti and one last gulp brought her snack squeezing down to her belly. With a content, smiling sigh, she let herself fall back in a beanbag chair and rested her hoof and claw on her squirming paunch.

“How is it in there?”

After a couple seconds, her occupant responded, “Kinda nice actually.” Vinyl put her hooved behind her head and laid back against the rippling surface like a waterbed. “It’s warm, soft, and stretches easily so it’s almost roomy. What did I taste like?”

“Blueberry sour tape and lemon ice cream.” Pinkie recalled.

Vinyl pouted. “Hmph. I thought I’d be more of a pina colada. Anyway, you wanted advice with this Whooves you’re after?”

“Yeah. He keeps pushing me away, but I think it’s because he’s just not ready yet.”

“Mhmm. So you want something to speed up the process? There’s a method where you take a part of their soul, and they come to fall in love sooner or later.”

“But isn’t that like mind control? I don’t want to force him to like me.”

“No, no. You tell him you’ll give it back if he just spends a little time with you. The falling in love part, that comes naturally as he learns more about you. It’s kept Tavi and I together since half of me is in the gem in her tie. She says it works like catnip.”

Pinkie’s stomach grumbled as it picked up the taste of its meal and slowly worked itself into motion. To Vinyl it was like a wet full-body massage, until Pinkie started ‘helping’ by kneading her belly very roughly.

“Hey now! I don’t wanna be basted like a turkey and have the juices working faster. You can get me out of here, right?”

“Um... I think so,” said Pinkie with an air of uncertainty.

Vinyl let out a nervous chuckle and sat upright. “Let’s see if you can do that now actually.”

“Aww... Just a few more minutes?”

“No, I’d feel a lot better knowing I can survive this.”

Pinkie reluctantly got up and positioned herself front down to the floor and rear in the air to have gravity help. She started wheezing like a cat with an imminent hairball. Her stomach violently jerked and heaved, forcing Vinyl back up her throat. She used her tongues to pull her up and out like a cat from a sack, covered in spit and stomach acid.

Pinkie’s stomach growled again. “Now you know I can do it, can I have you back inside?”

Before Vinyl could answer, they heard applause from beyond the flaps separating the two rooms. Vinyl recognized the last few lines of the song they clapped to and shook her head.

“No can do it looks like. My shift starts soon.” Pinkie made an annoyed huff and let Vinyl slip from her hooves. “Might wanna take cover for this.”

After Pinkie ducked and curled up behind the beanbag chair, Vinyl shook like a wet dog, her mane and tail whipping the muck all around the back room in a spattering of purple slime. By the end, she was largely dry, only looking a little wet.

“Before I go up, how ‘bout we wait over a mug?”

Pinkie poked her head back up with a wide smile and followed Vinyl through the flaps. The Tome of Corruption was a small pub with rarely more than a dozen patrons at any time. Scattered on elegantly woven ottomans and stands were artistically decorated vases and pitchers which poured wine, blood, or some mixture thereof. The patrons partook in bowls of overripe fruit and dabbled in the arts of their choosing under the chains lazily hanging from the ceiling.

Some wrote stories, painted, or canoodled their lovers. Most have an unnatural grey-pearl tone to their skin and some of their eyes were animalistic, completely blackened with nary an iris or pupil to be seen.

The center of their applause was the cellist on stage. Octavia bowed her head with a half-satisfied smile.

The overseer of the establishment was a delicate creature, a balance of hideousness and enchanting beauty at the same time. She stood on backward-arched, cloven hooves, had silver rings pierced across her body, and four arms. One held a serrated sword, another carried a book on a chain, and the last two sported tremendously long and thin crustaceous claws, almost like Pinkie Pie’s.

She rapidly clacked the pincers in her own form of applause. "Bravo maestro, play on!"

Octavia nervously nodded and picked another song from memory. The woman motioned to a pegasus to dance with her, who graciously accepted.

Vinyl showed Pinkie to the bar area where a magenta pony hung on the racks. It had no legs but at least six long, spider like arms and crawled around, grabbing and pouring bottles and barrels for her customers. It smashed a bottle and shook it at Pinkie and Vinyl.

"There you are, Scratch! I thought you were gonna be late again. Who's your friend here?"

"Something to whet the whistle first,” the unicorn said as she took a seat “The usual."

“Coming up.” The web of limbs took down several bottles, popped their corks with strong thumbs, and tipped them into a special mixing container which she shook like a maraca and made a tall pour into two tankards, ending in a mushrooming foam finish.

Pinkie stared in wonder at this frothy treat as they were slid over and picked up with earnest. She immediately gulped down the whole thing, cup and all while VInyl took herself a long swig and slammed the mug down.

"Now, Berry, this is Pinkie Pie. Pinkie, Berry Punch."

"You passing through, Pinkie?" Berry asked.

She gave an affirming nod. "Mmhm! Me and my friends are staying until this Wadladladl thing blows over.”

“You mean the WAAAGH!!!?” Vinyl corrected.

“Oh yeah. It sounds like something you’d just shout every time you say it.”

“Well it is spelled in all caps if you write it, with no less than three exclamation points.” Vinyl took another chug. “It’s the only consistent thing about the orks.”

"I don’t think we have much to worry about,” Belly said while she ran a cloth inside a glass, “Because I heard the Brass Beast is coming back."

Pinkie giggled at the name, "That sounds funny. The Brass bass grassy nasty beast."

"He's nothing to laugh at.” warned Vinyl. “He and the pony he rides around on have wrecked this place’s shit so many times. He’s put his cult of Khorne flakes together out of the most vicious, bloodthirsty psychopaths in the city."

"Many say he spent a whole day in the Warp." Berry exclaimed.

"Warp time, or our real time?"

"Warp time."

"Poor bastard."

"How long is that in real time?" Pinkie asked.

"At least three years."

"The warp can't be that bad, can it?"

Vinyl raised a brow and glared at Pinkie as if she needed things explained slow and simple."You look at her and tell me a million of those isn't gonna fuck him up," she said and pointed to the daemonette.

At the conclusion of the dance, she had snipped the pegasus' head off. It's face silently laughed as she skinned it and fit as a bra cup for one of her three breasts.

Pinkie retracted her statement.

"Then there are horrors, flamers, and the lords of lhange,” Vinyl went on, “bloodletters and bloodthirsters, plaguebearers and great unclean ones, all fighting this endless, infinitely huge war in a dimension fucked up by the gods."

“Sounds like some party!” Pinkie said.

"Yeah, speaking of a party.” Vinyl wheeled around in her chair as the music stopped. “Yo Octavia, you're putting everypony to sleep!"

"I do grow weary of this style for the time being,” The daemonette tittered. “A change of tempo is needed!"

"And I'd be honored to provide it." Vinyl leaned to Pinkie and nudged her in the side, "These dipshits don't know anything about magic electronics. My stereo riles 'em up every time."

As Vinyl approached the small stage, Octavia’s objections were drowned out in applause for the unicorn and a patron began roughly dragging her away, barely clutching the cello in her side. She reached out with her bowstring, severing the human’s legs and dropping him to the floor.

"I'll get down myself!" she snapped, got up, and waddled off.

Vinyl brought the writhing, legless man to center stage and unsheathed his knife.

"Not before I take what I need." She hissed darkly.

Octavia sighed, took the ruby out of her tie and tossed it to her. Grinning, Vinyl drew out a fragment of her soul and consumed it. Cringing and moaning, her teeth grew long and fused with their counterparts on the opposite row, the notes across her body giving off a faint hum in random pitches. The wall fixture vibrated from the low, blaring sounds of her deep breathing.

"Dark prince of pleasure!" She screamed, "You demand perfection, entertainment, but my friend could not provide!"

Those writing, painting and pleasuring one another found their attention focused on her.

"Take this soul so that you may see that my time is worthy of your attention!"

Her horn crackled and sparked, striking the knife and she plunged it into the man's heart. He laughed with a mad grin as dark clouds began gathering around him, and moments later he was torn asunder as his flesh and blood caved into the blade, then burst into a howling pink abyss in the floor. From it rose a large assembly of turntables and a wall of speakers. She wrapped a cable around her horn, one down to her voicebox and funneled a great amount of energy into them. She drew a very long breath.

"You digging this air!? I think we need more air, and food and drugs and wounds and alcohol and everything else I didn’t think of!"

"I can't take it anymore! I can't live in these conditions!" wailed Rarity as she rolled up her materials in a bedsheet

Applejack amusedly watched, virtually refusing to help. "Ya mean it this time, or ya just gonna get over it agin?"

"No, this is the last straw!" Rarity held up a slab of armor that was quickly rusting over and growing weeping blisters. "You did this on purpose! I’ve been working on this armor all week, and now somehow it’s bleeding!"

"I said it was an accident! Ya keep goi'n on about how ah make everythi'n dirty and stink it up! Even if it was on purpose, I’d say it’s 'bout time ah got ya back for makin’ me feel like garbage!"

Rarity threw the chest plate at Applejack who ducked her head and Rarity stormed out with the sack over her back.

“If Twilight can find her own residence, I can too!”

"Good! I can't wait to see ya outta here!" Applejack scoffed.

The armor had hit Fluttershy, bouncing off the sheet that covered her. She turned to see what hit her but Whooves pulled her back.

"Focus on me, ok?" She nodded. He held out a scrap of brass."Just hold this and try to keep from taking it in."

She looked at the scrap with shaking eyes. "I-I don't think I can."

"Come on, timidity doesn't keep anypony alive."

She slowly held out her hoof and Whooves placed the brass right in the middle of it. The shard stung to the touch and began to sink. It rose back when Fluttershy put more concentration into it. Drops of blood that had replaced the iron mare’s sweat ran down her face.

Whooves tried to keep an honest, confident face, but it was sometimes shaken by how much maintenance Fluttershy was in convincing her she wouldn’t lash out at something as small as a fly.

"Good. Keep it there, just for a little bit."

She shivered, fighting to hold the shard without absorbing it. Small bumps rose around her joints, and down her spine that lengthened into spikes. As the mark carving in her chest cracked, her flaming heart started beating faster and faster.

The painful balancing act ended as she appeared inexplicably aggravated and Whooves snatched the brass back. Fluttershy felt sharp pangs all over when the spikes quickly retracted. She huffed with exhaustion and relief that the exercise was over.

"Still have to work on it," he said with a nervous smile.

Fluttershy nodded and returned to her safe room, the closet while the Doctor dragged a hoof down his face. "Applejack, you and Rarity really have to work out what’s going on between you.”

“Why should I?” she growled. “She practically hates me now, sayin’ all I do is stink up the place and leave piled of maggots where she sleeps.”

“Whatever she feels about you and what you feel about her, It might just be the feelings Nurgle and Tzeentch have for each other. They’re opposites where Nurgle is about stagnation and despair and Tzeentch is hope and change. You’re not drifting apart, they are trying to take you apart.”

Applejack rolled her jaw and pondered it. “Maybe we can sort things out if I tell her that too. I’ll see if I can catch up with her.”

Rarity peered into a crack in a door. The space was free of occupants and full of things that filled her with such eagerness, her horns crackled. Under the archway at the bottom of another apartment complex some ways away from where her friends were, she had a good view of her surroundings with the eyes all over her body.

"You or them... Everything is free game." she repeated, Octavia's words resonating in her head like an angry beehive. "This is going to be easy!"

She contemplated how to get inside; she leaned on the door, and accidentally wiggled one of the scything talons under her arms into the lock. The extra limb had come from nowhere some days ago. It was then Rarity found out Tzeentch was into random, and rapid mutations. Noticing this, she figured she could use it to feel for the tumblers. She closed her eyes in concentration, the rest of them following soon after, found a couple of the metal nubs and clicked them.

A thump hit her shoulder, hard and heavy, and when she opened her eyes, a disfigured light green unicorn had her gnarled hand on her shoulder and shocked her to the ground in a jolt of magic.

"You thought you were just going to break into my home?" the unicorn hissed with her hand clasped around Rarity’s neck. Rarity could barely shake her head. before the unicorn shouted, "Yes, you did!" They stamped on Rarity’s head with the unmistakable sound of her jaw snapping, and picked her up, shaking her madly. "You think it's that easy!? To steal a home? To ruin six years of work?"

The unicorn raised their crooked arm and engulfed it in flames. "Nopony is going to keep me from my destiny. I must become whole!"

The blaze brightly illuminated the archway and as they brought it closer, they hesitated. The fire extinguished and they grasped Rarity's arm, fervently examining its humanoid bone structure. Feeling a severe burn rise in her body, Rarity raised her other arm to the assailant’s face and let her storm unleash. Lightning surged between them and her captor foamed at the mouth, dropping the home invader. The pain forced Rarity to finally blackout.

"Is... that... it?" Lyra sputtered.

She ignored the twinges and stink of her smoking fur and dragged Rarity inside.

"One step closer."

Rainbow Dash took another crack at going outside, taking a far more cautious approach by avoiding contact with the wicked denizens below.

As she broke the clouds, the heat and light of the sun was absent and her jaw dropped at what was there. Howling winds blew from twisted columns connecting to a second layer of clouds far above. She gazed up at a humongous wall of hardened white clouds with countless hatches. Great banners of a partial solar eclipse streamed from the parapets, some of them immaculate, while others were worn and tattered.

The wall appeared to be moving closer, as well as the spikes braced along its base. She walked backward, keeping pace with the wall and scanned around at the array of towers and obstacles.

“Woah...”

The banner nearest had woven on it, Victoria Cloudsdale

“C-cloudsdale...” Rainbow stammered.

From her fillyhood home, gone was much of the ancient Heliopolitan architecture, gone were the open archways, and what struck her most was the missing waterfalls of vibrant rainbows. Where the Rainbow Factory used to be, she saw its smokestacks billowing a pitch black smoke.

This couldn’t be it. Whatever this was, it was a fortress, not a city.

She’d been practicing her transformations and tried for something to get by the hatches. She visualized her target form. ’Just like a changeling. Think like a changeling,’ she thought. Her feathers started folding in, collapsing her body into a smaller and smaller form until a rainbow-colored ladybug flew up to the wall and crawled under the smallest gap in the hatch.

Inside was a soldier in the dark, leaning against the wall to the side of the hatch. All along the interior was a line of cannons, and their crews looked to be combat ready as the powder-ponies ran the precious gunpowder to their guns and the others loaded their weapons.

’What's going on here?’

She buzzed through the battery, following the soldier traffic in the opposite direction until she was on outside the wall, on the inside of the city. It was in much the same state of alertness as the wall. Columns of militiaponies marched in good order to their positions along the defenses. The soldiers themselves were almost hilariously under armed and armored. Most had mere scraps of armor, leftover pauldrons or leg guards, while a noticeable number didn’t have any armor at all. Nothing but thick leather or thick cloth to protect them.

They were led by these mad looking pegasi chanting passages from a book each of them carried. Unfortunately for Rainbow, they seemed to be in another language, but the carvings on the inside of the wall was plain and clear. across the great span were etched countless names and texts. One of the many plaques along the base read:

Those who gave their lives to the defense of the Holy City, beacon of the princesses’ light, shall have their names remembered as long as these walls stand. They are the martyrs against the Terror. They are the defenders of Cloudsdale. They are the Sentinels, and the princesses know the name of all who have fallen in their names.

Rainbow’s antenna twitched in confusion. “What is this? It’s like the princesses are pretending to be gods! And... Are these all the names of everypony who’s died fighting here?”

The words and the thought of how so many could die in one place made her feel strangely queasy. She looked up from the plaque and saw a name engraved slightly larger than the others.

Thunderlane - steed of mercenary captain Voland of Voland's Venators

"Last one to die is a sissy!"

‘Thunder? I knew that stallion!’ the little Rainbug thought.

She hovered along, to find other names. Dumbbell, Score, Hoops, those bullies who harassed her in her filly hood. Less than pleasant memories of them filled her thoughts.

As she hovered along the wall, more personally close names popped up. Blue Skies, Nimbus, Snowcatcher, Rainbow Dash—

She covered her stinging eyes and her ears were suddenly full of wicked laughter. When she opened, a new name was engraved where hers was, now in a leafy halo.

Soarin - 1st Lieutenant to Governor General Spitfire

Her heart sank with several similar etchings listed under Wonderbolts Company. The originals who she idolized were carved at the top. She read the whole list and every original Wonderbolt was there, killed in battle, all save Spitfire.

Rainbow put a tiny leg against the wall and hung her head. "What else are you gonna take from me!?”

"Everything. We will take your name, your identity..." the voices cackled.

Thunder rocked the clouds, sounding more like a roar. The clouds started to lurch and churn more violently. Lightning shot across the sky and through the cloud columns. What few civilians who were still on the streets scrambled for their homes.

The lightning branched into several arms as it struck all over the city, leaving behind creatures similar to the fury or blasting buildings apart. The instant the creatures landed, they began an ungodly, and relentless slaughter on all those they saw, driving tooth and claw into the body of the pegasus closest to them.

Rainbug could only watch her home town’s populace be rendered limb from limb. So many of them dropped their weapons, clutching their heads or clawing at the ground as if trying to escape before the battle even began.

They were going mad, but not with fear; something was entering their minds and rendering them mental.

“But why isn’t it happening to me?” she thought.

“Because we own you, and we wouldn’t want out property to break,” responded the voices.

A streak of light gray smoke launched up from the top of the city, arced down and came streaking toward the battle. Rainbow made them out in blue armor plate and streaked in yellow lightning bolts.

The leader, with a voice that commanded authority, ordered, “The militia wither in the face of the neverborn. Let them wither, for your task is the daemons themselves!”

“Aye!” the hundred pegasi acknowledged.

“For the Wonderbolts!”

“For the Wonderbolts!”

“Break!”

With great precision, they broke into 10-pony squads and dove on the chaos. Extending the retractable hoof blades built into their armor, they tacked and almost instantly took out over a dozen daemons in the first strike.

Being a tiny insect, Rainbow took to making a beeline for the darkness of an alley.

“I can help them!” she thought, watching her favorite group fight for their survival. “I can turn into something strong, right?”

Rainbow tried to visualize again, mentally painting herself in the image of a Wonderbolt, but then she remembered,

“Wait... My friends. I have to be careful, be safe. For them.”

She returned to her original form in a flurry of feathers. “I have to find somepony to hide with.”

She turned around and found a Wonderbolt behind her, reeling on his hind legs. The last thing she saw was his steel-clad hoof driving into her face, and the last she heard was,

“We finally have you, daemon.”

"Never again... So... c-c-cold...."

Twilight sat so close to the fireplace, she might as well be in it. She was moist with sweat, yet shivered as if in an ice bath. Applejack was barely able to tell between one who was sick or well anymore.

“So they don’t got no thermometers,” Applejack said as she came back from the kitchen with a bowl of water and a rag. “But we’ll see if this’ll cool ya down.”

Of course, Applejack couldn’t touch it as she’d contaminate it immediately. So Twilight dipped the cloth in the water by hoff as even her magic seemed impaired.

The water boiled and hissed the instant it touched her, creating a plume of scalding hot steam.

“That ain’t natural,” Applejack gawled.

Nevertheless, Twilight slapped the rag over her forehead, producing the same screaming steam cloud. Even then it still stung like ice cubes.

“There ya go! Lookin’ better already!”

In Applejack’s eyes, Twilight’s cracking and burning fur was a sign of improvement. The unicorn found it slowly getting more and more difficult to breathe, and even the wood boards beneath her smoldered and burned.

“Hey, Twi. Eyes open, okay?” Applejack clopped her hooves in her face, drawing no attention. Twilight became more lazy-eyed and let the rag fall from her forehead. She finally faced Applejack, opening her eyes a little more. “There y'are. Feelin’ any better?”

Chomp

“Hey uh, sugarcube, you kinda bit my neck and...” Applejack pushed a little to get Twilight off, but she didn’t budge, her fangs still firmly locked in place. “If you can just let go, that’d be great.”

Applejack tried to stay calm and pushed a little more forcefully, but Twilight refused to move and completely broke as she heard Twilight start to draw blood.

“GAH! Get off me!” Applejack backed up, but Twilight followed, countering every move she made, throwing her head side to side or just trying to run. Twilight kept her head anchored in place.

“Fluttershy, help!”

The machine mare poked her head from the closet and saw the alicorn and pseudo-zombie in their parasitic tug-of-war.

“She ain’t listenin’ ta nuthin’! Get her off!”

“Just like separating fighting animals,” Fluttershy whispered to herself. “Just like that.”

Fluttershy didn’t have to take two steps closer before Twilight let Applejack go, clutching her stomach like bombshells were going off in it. Applejack was drained to a living bag of bones. All of her coagulated blood, pus, and plasma were sucked away and Twilight was reaping the side effects of Nurgle’s blood.

It would not be pretty.

The spears at her back kept her moving and with her forelegs tied above her head as she struggled to walk upright. Rainbow Dash was tired from her concussion, her head in a throbbing quake.

A priest chanted passages from a large tome, in his unintelligible language that made Rainbow feel even more nauseous. The Wonderbolts led her through the fortress with a rope gagging her mouth.

Traversing from the outer walls to the inner, Rainbow saw how Cloudsdale had changed. It was a dystopia like she’d never seen. Some kind of religion, nothing less than a cult ran the place, throwing an almost blinding amount of their iconography on every surface. The soldiers were everywhere and became better armed and armored toward the center until she was brought into a citadel guarded by the Wonderbolts themselves.

What was once a troupe for airshows was now a militarized order, headquartered at the center of the city. The bastion of towers and capillaries of walkways spoke of an intended maze of architecture.

Rainbow was brought high up in the most fortified tower of the complex, up a great winding stair that ended with a chamber of ten cages, suspended from the ceiling. They surged with warp energy, containing daemons banging at their bars, yowling and screaming curses and unholy litanies as the energy was constantly drawn out of them.

“Welcome to your new home,” a sun-yellow pegasus smirked.

Rainbow squeaked when she saw her. On her navy blue fatigues was pinned striped military honors badge with more colors than any rainbow. The tassels of her gold shoulder cuffs swayed with her fast, purposeful stride. Her mane was as fiery as ever, but there was an obvious sign of harm. In her right wing, some of the feathers and skin was cut away, exposing a gunmetal grey surface where a bone ought to be.

She poked the joint in Rainbow’s kaleidoscopically colored face. When Rainbow had changed back, she was an unrecognizable palette of constantly shifting colors.

“A couple of iron rods can go a long way. Next time, try to cut through the whole wing.” The pegasus started going back to the cages, but paused a moment and looked back with a dark grin. “Oh, that’s right! there won’t be a next time. Wonderbolts! Line up!”

The door was closed behind Rainbow and all the wonderbolts rapidly assembled in formation before the yellow pegasus. Rainbow felt in a void by herself with the burning gaze of the soldiers on her.

“How are the casualties at the Celestial Wall?” the general asked an older soldier.

“We counted six hundred militia and thirty percent of the Wonderbolts detachment, Miss Spitfire.”

“Hmm,” she nodded. “Not as bad as last time we passed over Mordheim.” She turned to the rest of the warriors. “ At ease. Let me introduce the newest member of the family, the scourge that had plagued us for seven years, the Changeling(1).”

Rainbow shook her head and muttered unheard objections through her gag.

“Don’t be shy! Come on over and meet your caretakers.”

Rainbow squeaked again and didn’t move.

“Aw, it’s scared,” Spitfire mockingly cooed. “Here, let me help.”

She kicked Rainbow’s hooves out from under her and she landed, face first on a n unyieldingly hard floor. Spitfire dragged her along by the mane and held her up in front of one of the Wonderbolts.

“This is Thunderstorm. His team will be taking care of you during the day.”

The stallion snorted a hot, misty breath in Rainbow’s face with a sneer.

“This is Silent Night. You can guess when you’ll see him each day.”

This one’s eyes didn’t move, but stared daggers into Rainbow’s eyes. They actually stung.

“Oh, you two will get along great. I can feel it! Last but not least, is Lightning Dust.”

Spitfire dragged Rainbow before a mint green mare whose amber-eyed gaze was most hostile.

“Permission to speak freely,” she said.

“Granted.”

“You remind me a lot of Rainbow Dash.” Lighting moved her face closer. “I hate Rainbow Dash. And guess what.”

“Whaah?” Rainbow sputtered.

“I’m your top overseer.”

“Ah nah.”

Spitfire started bringing Rainbow to the only open cage. “I can’t wait to see what you really look like. I heard you have three arms, but even you don’t remember what you look like.” She threw her in like a duffle bag and slammed the cage shut. “Now let’s find out.”

The priest drew his gem encrusted warhammer and the ringing stung Rainbow Dash's ears. Her insides squirmed slightly. He hit it again and to the prisoner it was head splitting. Her skin tore and bone poked through. The pain was unbearable but her headache prevented her from forming into something normal. One more grunting strike and she lost it.

More flesh and bone seemed to materialize from nowhere. She looked like a growing, endlessly shifting cactus with unnaturally huge thorns. The soldiers fixed their guns on her, anticipating disaster. The energy of the transformation and another slam from the hammer sparked the cage into activation and electrocuted her. She shrank down and developed light blue feathers and fur. Spitfire nervously brought her rainbow-colored ascot to the outside of her suit to compare it to the growing mane of the prisoner.

"This...isn't..." Her head ached, trying to grasp what she was seeing. "K-k-kid...?"Rainbow dash lay convulsing on the floor, wide-eyed and foaming at the mouth. "You... saved my life once. Why?"

With no answer from the seizing prisoner, Spitfire tore off her ascot and sadly looked up at the soldiers. "What are you looking at!? Just... Back to your duties! GO!" They hastily returned to their original posts and Spitfire ran out.

Lightning Dust watched Rainbow with a growing sadistic smile.

“Dreams really do come true.”

It wasn’t that hard, following the smell of Rarity’s burning fur. Not that it was a good thing, because this meant Rarity must be undergoing several uncontrolled self-shocks.

One of the few benefits Applejack saw in her state was that her repulsive stench kept a small bubble of space around her that many other people tried to avoid.

“Make sure Rarity’s alright and it’s right back ta help Twilight.”

She caught herself in mid yawn and her yes slowly closing and forced them open again.

“Nope! Not fallin’ asleep. Not fallin’ asleep.”

She picked up her pace into a weak and hasty trot. After Twilight bit her, it took awhile for her body to fill back out to where she could stand on her own again.

The smell continued to lull her into slowing down and it wasn’t too long before the aroma of burning flesh and meat brought her to a crawl.

“Stay... awake... I’m not... a... a...”

Lyra resecured the straps holding Rarity against the eight-pointed star on the wall. Rarity’s fur was charred to patches of blackening ashed and she was clinging to consciousness.

“Don’t pass out now,” Lyra whispered hastily as she lightly slapped Rarity’s cheek. “I need one more surge and the rift can work!”

She ran back across the lab space and clipped a pair of clamps to her horn and sat behind a smaller star. The room was rigged for this. Wires led back and forth between Rarity, Lyra and the rift circle. As she charged her horn again, Rarity was linked to her and squirmed in futile resistance that ultimately resulted in her releasing another deluge of energy, coursing across her and down the wires to Lyra.

She received it with little grace, stumbling as her muscles spasmed, but managed to keep enough control to redirect it again to the second star. It sparked and cracked with a flaring witchlight and each prong cast a beam into the center of its circle. Lyra grinned as the disturbance grew to take up the whole desktop circle in a murmuring pink and purple abyss.

“Finally...”

She looked at her crude arms. Their backward elbow joints and fat sausages of fingers would be an unmissed sight. She cautiously stuck her arms through the light and the moment she was up to her wrists, it yanked her in up to her shoulders and elicited the grinding pain as if her arms were being rent apart.

"Great Raven." she started painfully, "Dark lord, my god, I beseech thee. Great has been my pain, long my suffering, but I have kept hope in my heart that I would take another step toward humanity. Your designs are magnificent and your plans for the world are grand. I love the part I play, however small, and by thy grace, I seek a gift for my service."

Rarity began coughing a mixture of blood and dust in her cries as the rift howled and groaned, carving away at Lyra’s arms. It's steel arrows bent toward her face but she remained steady, confident in the Changer of Ways. The arrows poked at her face, increasing in pressure until they drew blood. She grunted as the rift suddenly exploded, sending a wave of residual magic across the room. Lyra was thrown back, landing against the far wall as Rarity’s spike faded.

Lyra raised an arm to wipe her cuts and paused at the sight of them. The inside of her arms were still settling, but she didn't notice the squirming of her bones and muscle and marveled at their form. She wiggled her fingers, the popping and aching that came with every movement was gone. For the first time, she could raise her arms over her head and fell backward again, unfamiliar with her range of motion. Rarity couldn't tell if her captor was giggling or crying as she ran the refined appendage down her face.

"If only you could see me now, Bon Bon," Lyra gasped as a tear escaped her eye. “Why didn’t you follow me?”

There was a single, hard thud at the door that Lyra ignored to approach Rarity. "Thank you, so much! I couldn't have done this without you!" She grabbed her by the neck and her elbow ignited.

Another thud.

"I just have to show thanks for this and you get to be the lucky sacrifice to Tzeentch." The fire traveled down her arm and Rarity's chin just started to burn when the third thud rocked the door. But still Lyra tried to focus on her sacrifice.

Low moaning shook her resolve. In a frustrated grunt, she cast flames under the door to scare off whatever was there. The whoosh of air and heat was powerful. Something certainly burning on the other side, the crackling of flames assured her of this, but the moaning and pounding on the door persisted. The center of the door developed bubbles that fizzled and steamed until a hole was being bored in it. The hole enlarged to reveal a snapping mouth with four rows of teeth, its caustic green saliva burning through the door. Lyra tried to ignite it again but, being moist with bodily fluids, it kept going with its only its oily mane burning.

"Darn it, die already, stupid plague zombie!" she shouted.

It rammed the door again, shattering the weakened woodwork with its head and forced its forelegs in.

"No, no, no!"

Lyra kicked it back out and breathed deeply. Her arms blazed, fired through the hole, and engulfed it in a hissing firestorm. Rarity sweated from the heat, even on the other side of the room. Lyra slumped over, panting forcefully, and wiped her nose when it started to feel wet. Her hand was streaked in red.

She slowly walked out to see her handiwork through the smoke. The moaning had stopped but she still heard movement in the smoky arch. She stepped on a scorched skaven's head and as the smoke cleared, the rotting pony was busied in devouring its intestines, itself also severely burned.

"Nurgle isn't taking my sacrifice, you sack of puke," spat Lyra. She kicked its head, but it didn’t react, continuing to eat the rat is if nothing else mattered. Lyra went back in, unhooked Rarity and lugged her over her shoulders.

She lugged her past Applejack, bearing Rarity’s weight on her back, when a splitting headache seized her and froze. She stood motionless for a full two minutes, staring into the sky and then grinned.

"His brilliance truly knows no bounds."

"App...Applejack...h-help." Rarity mumbled.

Applejack remained fixed on her meal, her eyes covered in dust scratches from having not blinked in days. She didn't notice Lyra carry the burnt, multi-horned unicorn back inside and levitate the rat's body far away, making her mindlessly follow.

When she came too, she couldn't tell how long her thoughts wandered and rubbed her eyes, only smearing a bloody sludge into them. She found herself chewing on a soft spongy substance with something in her other hoof. She felt stiff and her vision came back into focus. Her body had been burned black and she stood over a huge rat's skeleton with its skull cracked open. She swallowed the mush in her mouth and found half a brain in her hoof. She stepped back, trying to grasp the situation while a rain of maggots fell from her abdomen. The ground seemed to end and she almost fell off the roof of the building she was on. It was a good thirty foot drop.

“H-h-how did I get up here? How am I gonna get back down?”

There was no sign of how she’d gotten up either. No pile of boxes, stairs, nothing but a few holes in the wall and a trail of her slime leading up the side.

The sight of this brought the first sensory feeling in a while to her foreleg, where something was squirming underneath the skin. A line of lumpy objects balled together in the hoof burst the fleshy cover. Applejack tried to tuck it under her other leg to contain it, but it kept changing with the sickening snap and clatter of bone.

When It stopped, she didn’t know what to expect, but her leg felt heavier and longer. So heavy, it was almost unwieldy in fact. An ossified axe’s head, lined with short but sharp canine and molar teeth, and supported by the twin bones of her foreleg had torn itself into being. For reasons she didn’t understand, there were even the faces of three ponies’ skulls on the flat of it, arranged in a triangular pattern.

Applejack’s first reaction was to calmly and carefully—

She grabbed the axe head and tried to yank it off. She didn’t care for the damage as she wouldn’t even feel it, but it was firmly rooted on her. Even as she rolled around on the roof, frantically prying at it to the point that her other hoof broke off, it refused to budge.

She went rolling over the side of the roof and the instant before she hit the ground in a screaming freefall, she could swear she felt her heart leap.

Splat

After a moment of wondering if the white light would appear, Applejack found that it didn’t. She could still hear the people in the street, and was acutely aware of the melody of bodily destruction she made.

It did feel weird , trying to manipulate the shattered joints and tendons that were torn asunder. As she peeled her face off the concrete, a shredded lump of swollen yellow muscle fell from her mouth and wetly slapped to the cobblestones.

It was her tongue.

Still, the axe was in perfect condition, even after she saw her ribs bursted through her chest, hind legs bent backwards, and a fairly large radius of bodily fluids spread out from ground zero.

She couldn’t stand on her eviscerated limbs, so settled for reaching out, digging the axe’s spike into the ground, and dragging herself on her torn belly.

’I’m alive! Ha! I’m alive! Sweet Celestia, I gotta get outta here!’

Author's Note

(1). There is a Changeling daemon in the Old World, it is a daemon of tzeentch. Its abilities are just like the insectoid changelings, but don't get them confused. One's the mlp bugs, the other is the chaos daemon who's been terrorizing Cloudsdale.

Chapter 12: Hail to the Night

The vendors were out again. Twilight watched from the darkness of an alley as one by one they were swarmed by thieves, their wares stolen in broad daylight. She eyed one with racks of colorful potions, sitting amongst a plethora of flasks and lab equipment for refining and maintaining the concoctions. The man behind the counter, a wiry-looking human with strips of pallid gray skin about his eyes, plied a straight knife to ward off the frequent grasping hands of passersby and customers alike.

She stretched her leathery wings, which had by now grown to a more practical size for flight, and swung them forward experimentally. She eyed the tools her target had arrayed at his stall, weighing just how much of it she could take in one go, and what she would need for her research.

She began focusing her energy to teleport across the square. "Ok... ok. It's fine. Poof, sweep, poof. You've teleported lots of times before, no difference... Except he has a knife!"

She shook her head to dislodge the thought, and positioned her wings for the grab. She noticed that the man would stab his own counter repeatedly when no grasping hands were present, pulling it back out and stabbing again in a perfect rhythm.

bang, slip, bang, slip, bang

Twilight released the spell and in the shroud of a blackened fog shot her wings forward and down, and loosed another spell. The moment before she’d gone, the furious face of the vendor was clear, but he was still pulling his blade up, giving her the instant she needed to vanish.

"Gods damn it!" he howled and pounded both fists on the empty counter, making the entire stand rattle. “I’m doomed... My supplier will be furious!”

He pulled the knife up and noticed a black stripe about mid way up that started to run.

He let out an amused sigh. “I hope it hurt.”

"Oh my gosh, I did it!" Twilight laughed as if she pulled off the biggest heist in Equestria.

She laid everything out across the desk and admired the bounty. A sharp smarting in her wing made her magic falter, dropping and shattering a flask.

"Ah... I teleported on that, didn’t I?" she giggled. The close call was more exhilarating than terrifying. A puncture in her wing dripped onto the floor. She felt a mounting thirst with each drop.

A small cage of rats squeaked fearfully at her approach. The blood of the city rats usually tasted of rotten onion juice, but she wasn't ready to take anything bigger. She floated one out and felt remorseful by its flailing and squeaking. Her special teeth extended and, not to prolong the creature's anxiety, quickly brought it up, impaling it on her teeth. She fought her gag reflex, trying to get down its foul tasting blood, and tipped her head back to avoid it touching her tongue. When the rodent's trickle ceased, she hurriedly spat out out and wiped her teeth of its fur. Only two rats remained in the cage.

"I'll have to leave more bait out."

Twilight had come to make this space something of a temporary home, despite it being only a single room. She’d cleaned out the rot and filth the previous inhabitants, rearranged what sparse possessions they had to her liking, and assembled the books she found most important to her research, those on mutation and warp magic. However, before beginning, she had to dispose of the stinking rat.

The Doctor facehoofed as Applejack snapped and moaned at the severed hand he dangled before her face. She writhed and twisted in her restraints, already beginning to rip her own legs off. Her lower jaw hung down to her neck before shooting back up, splattering acidic saliva. He slid the hand close enough that she chomped on it, not taking the time to chew. Her moaning eased and she began speaking intelligibly.

"Grimes...Golden...Pink... Pearl..." She swayed her head with the listing. "Bottle Greening... Paula Red..."

"Just stop." Whooves muttered.

"Whut happen'd to the hand? Did I beat it? And where'd that rope come from?"

The stallion tucked it behind himself. "It's nothing, and no, listing apple species didn't distract you. You ate it... along with the foot, other hand, and ear from the other tests."

"What!?" She looked at the fingernail that fell out of her mouth. "Get me off 'a this." she said angrily.

He held his breath while releasing the clamps over her legs and she landed with a wet thud.

"Well, the mutations stopped for the time being,” he said bittersweetly. “That's good."

"Nothin’ was wrong with me to begin with."

"Are you serious? What do you think we’ve been doing for the past half hour? Where do you think all the other parts went?"

"I dunno whut you did with 'em, but I didn't eat 'em!" She picked him up and searched his person. "Where'd ya’ll hide it, huh?"

“Applejack, stop!” said Whooves as he was shaken about. “Why would I try to make you think you’re sick?”

Applejack slowed down, her eyelids growing heavy. She started sniffing the air, like an animal catching a scent, and loosened her grip. The Doctor got away in time to avoid the caustic green slime dripping down from her salivating jaw. She looked extremely sleepy, slowly stood up, and limped toward the door.

"Applejack, not again...” he said, slapping her cheek and trying to wake her up. “What in the world up and died outside?"

Applejack’s face hit the door with a solid thud, splatting her acid on it. She reeled back and stood wobbling for a few seconds and staring absentmindedly at it before advancing on it once more, repeating the slam. Again and again she blindly struck the door as Whooves went back for the rope. He paused as he held it, looking between the ends and his digitless hooves.

He shook them in the air and cursed the heavens. "Of course! I can't tie a knot!"

Twilight levitated the lifeless rat beside herself as she navigated the complex, wondering if her idea for getting rid of it would be taken well or not. Her ear curiously turned to the sound of a repeated thumping against one of the doors and Applejack's moaning on the other side.

"Applejack, are you alright?"

"Not really,” the voice of the Doctor said. “Have any meat around you?"

"Uh... a rat. Why?"

"That'll do. Hold it in front of the door and open it."

Twilight dangled the animal out and opened the door, letting Applejack lunge at it and snatch it in her teeth.

’That works, I guess,’

Twilight watched as the rat was messily devoured and Applejack steadily came too again.

"Ah...bet yer...tryin’..ta make me feel bad, 'n... Twi! when did ya get here?"

’To make you do that.’ “Just wanted to make sure you were doing well in seeing if you can control your urges. By the sound you made, it doesn’t look like it went over well.”

An aggravated snarl creased Applejack’s face. "Ah didn't eat anythi'n!" But when she saw the severed rat's tail and bits of meat fall from her mouth, she made a dismissive agitated shout and ran back into the room.

Whooves put a hoof up to stop Twilight when she attempted to follow. “She won’t listen to anything about her affliction. There’s a reason it’s called the Curse of Unbelief. And why did you have a rat with you?”

"I actually brought the rat to see if she'd do that again. I got curious."

The Doctor’s brow furrowed at that. "She's not a guinea pig, you know."

"I know. Just... thinking. We should know how these changes work."

“Just try not to talk about it to her. It’s like salt in an open wound.” Whooves pinched between his eyes. “It’s just one thing after another. Applejack barely remembers seeing Rarity, and you haven’t been able to find Rainbow Dash...”

“Do you think she’s alright?”

“Well... I don’t know how she’s doing now, but she’s too important to the Storm of Chaos. The gods would see her to somewhere relatively safe.”

“But still. We can only imagine what’s happening to her right now.”

Apple Bloom had come to take quite a liking in a particular stallion, with a very familiar accent, who took to her like family. His cutiemark was a worm-infested rotten apple and he traveled as part of a warband, a roaming mob intent on looting and slaughter.

When they asked about his name, he said, “Everypony I know calls me Pox, so why shouldn’t you?”

He was a big one, enough so that Apple Bloom could easily sit on both his back and liquefied, dripping face with absolute disbelief while Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo followed on the ground.

“What do ya mean ‘there’s more’?!”

“I mean, gettin’ yer cutiemark is just tha first step. Gettin’ yer mark gets you ta be a follower.”

“And what comes next?”

“Then warrior, chosen, champion, lord, and if you’re a good filly, spread Nurgle’s rot all over the world, he’ll let ya be one of his favorite children, a daemon prince. That means Immortality, and a place second only to the Everchosen himself!” He heard his passenger give a despondent moan and let herself fall over his neck. “What’s wrong, Apple Bloom?”

“My friends and I spent so long tryin’ ta get our cutiemarks, and no”w that we have ‘em, we find out it’s just the beginning.”

“Well, the real fun isn’t in gettin’ there, it’s the journey. One soul at a time, each kill gets ya closer.””

“What rank’re you?”

“Chosen. Took me nine years ta get this far, and look what grandpa Nurgle gave me for it.” He took off his helmet, which had a large bony spike curving upward from the forehead, only the bone didn’t leave with the helmet. It was fixed on him, like a crooked unicorn’s horn.

“Woah!” Scootaloo gasped, “That’s real?”

“Sure is. I’ve run through more ponies with this than I’m ready ta count.” It was most characterized by its coating of old, blackened blood, indicating he’d never cleaned it. “I noticed ya didn’t get yer cutiemark yet. What do ya think it’s gonna be?

Scootaloo took a glance at her blank flank. “I don’t know, and I hate being last! Sweetie Belle and Apple Bloom got their marks weeks ago!”

“Don’t worry yer head too much. It’ll come when you need it most.”

Despite that, Scootaloo hung her head low. “Who knows how long that’ll be?”

Pox chuckled. “Stick with us, and it won't be too long.”

Rarity’s eyes shot open in a cold sweat. Every facet of her being was aching with a ferocity she’d never known. Something was cupped over her mouth and nose, moving and scraping at her teeth. Rarity tried to lift her arm, but her skin burned. I felt like her whole hide was two sizes too small.

She forced her arm to her face and felt a lumpy, five armed object clasped firmly to her face. One of its arms went up the bridge of her muzzle and to her mane line.

She pulled at the appendage, which ardently refused to release its suction grip on her face. Rolling over to get up, she spotted the damaged rift gate and squealed.

“Hey, you awake yet?”

At hearing the voice, Rarity stumbled off the surface and onto the floor. Her body screamed at every joint. Her captor casually walked in and used her telekinesis to pick Rarity up and sit her down on the desk.

A heavy iron glove weighed down on her hand with glittering warpstone gems in the knuckles.

“That glove will help stop you from using your magic surges. Before I could get it on you, you were frying yourself to a crisp.”

Rarity looked down and found what she was talking about. Her body was almost blackened, caked in oil-moistened ashes that was once her fur, her extra eyes were shriveled to no more than giant blind raisins, and her hide looked like dried leather.

"I really thought you were going to die," Lyra snickered, “Now Bon Bon, get off her face.”

Tickling the underside of the thing stuck on Rarity’s face, it shook and peeled its arms off. Rarity watched a fuzzy blue starfish scamper up Lyra’s arm and perch on her shoulder.

Lyra chuckled while Rarity spat and wiped her face of the residue left by such a repulsive creature. “He practically saved your life. As he ate the plaque off your teeth, he kept your windpipe open by... You really don’t want to know how. Just think of him like an asthma inhaler.”

Rarity’s throat felt numb, but she could feel an unpleasant squeezing sensation in her shoulder. One of her eyes was trying to blink, but with its deformed shape, it was squished out of the socket and dangled by it's optic nerve.

Lyra snapped her fingers, producing a small, intense flame like a blowtorch, and she brought it to the exposed nerve. Rarity snatched her arm and shook her head disapproval.

"It’s going to come off anyway,” Lyra said. “Either it comes off now, or it dries up very painfully and falls off.”

She looked back and forth between the fire and her hanging eye, and tried to put it back in, unsuccessfully. Lyra levitated the eye and swiped her flame at the nerve, quickly severing and cauterizing it with a short yelp of pain from Rarity. The remainder of the nerve slithered back into her body.

“I’m having a cult meeting here in a few days, and I think we just got a new member.”

Rarity didn’t really know what that meant, but Lyra shook her by the shoulder with an ominous laugh.

“I’ll show you that this is the way. That Tzeentch’s plans are worth dying for!”

Under her wings wasn't the best place to carry it as it poked her, but levitating it proved impossible as the book literally breathed the stuff of chaos. Twilight cursed the individual who created such a book as she carried it through the library.

While searching for a safe spot to read it in the labyrinthine corridors, the sound of rustling papers grew louder behind her. She stuck close to one side to avoid the figure who passed by.

They were cascading in what she thought was a ridiculous amount of chains, scrolls, steel spikes and arrows poking through their cloak. Skulls clattered on a necklace, branded with stars on their foreheads. Out of the walls of text that whipped up at Twilight’s face, the name ‘Cheerilee’ stood out.

‘Cheerilee?’ Twilight wondered. ’What did they do to you?’

“Uh, Cheerilee?”

The figure’s ears flicked in Twilight’s direction and they turned a worn hood and black-veiled face to her. Cheerilee's voice was the definition of ghostly, producing hollow, aimless tones before she truly started talking.

“Twilight Sparkle... fancy meeting you here. That’s a very good reading choice you have.”

“Thanks. It’s really uncomfortable to carry though. Do you still teach?”

“Oh yes. I teach the one true faith. Do you need assistance in finding your way to the gods’ grace?”

Twilight nearly shook her head at that. Here was the schoolhouse teacher she used to know for some time, standing with scrolls written in Black Speech nailed into her body and carrying the blasphemous venom of chaos on her tongue.

“To uh, some degree,” Twilight said hesitantly, pawing at the floor. “I think I need a more in-depth look.”

Cheerilee nodded as Twilight hoofed her the vicious book and read the introduction.

The essence of the universe shall be open to you. You will know the light of truth. The greatness of Chaos shall be open to you. The gods await your answer.

“There are very advanced arts in this. I admire your enthusiasm. You can come by my school house in two days, while I prepare the beginning of your curriculum. It might appear small, but it’s suitable. It is between this library and the Betrayer of Pain.”

“Thanks, Cheerilee. It’s mostly how the warp changes creatures I wanted to know about.”

“For this kind of endeavor, you will need an assistant. Somepony to help you in experiments.

Twilight thought over the list of possibilities. Applejack wouldn’t hear a word regarding mutations, Rarity was still missing, as was Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy was a basketcase, Pinkie Pie was out of control, doing heaven knows what with Vinyl Scratch, and The Doctor had his hooves full keeping Applejack and Fluttershy sane.

“I don’t think I have anypony who could help me,” she finally said.

Cheerilee tapped her lip for a moment. “I think I know where you can find somepony.”

The slave market, a river port of human and pony trafficking, and slave handlers hocking their living products to the highest bidder. Mutilated and quaking unfortunates were corralled like farm animals, awaiting to be sold off with empty eyes.

Cheerilee had given Twilight a single fair-sized bit of refined warpstone to purchase one to aid in her studies. The concept of owning another being didn't sink in well.

’But here, the ends have to justify the means’

A streamlined black ship with sails like a dragon’s wings dropped its docking platform with a rattling slam. Tall, slender figures under the black banner of a crimson serpent creature marched out in formation around their quarry. Leading them was a sneering elf wearing a horned headpiece and hair that flowed like an oil spill down his back. He scanned around with repulsive disgust at the mutants and denizens of the city, but there was money to be made nonetheless.

There were pegasi among the soldiers as well, but their wings bore no feathers. Instead, the had the wings of bats, and equally eerie slitted pupils.

’They look just like the Lunar Guard,’ Twilight thought. ’But what are they doing with the Dark Elves?’

Before she took a step toward them, something pulled at Twilight's tail, drawing her attention. A toothy dwarf, wearing a tall cylindrical hat, whistling innocently, shuffled toward a wagon hooked to several ork and goblin slave stock.

"You like what you see, yes?"

Twilight didn't know what to make of it. Orks were supposedly aggressive by nature. Though most of them gave scared passing glances, one very large among them was unafraid and kept its head up with a hateful gaze.

"Come, come! See what we have to offer, yes.” The dwarf slapped each greenskin, but didn’t touch the biggest one. “They come in all sizes: gnoblar; goblin; ork boy; and nob."

Twilight scrutinized one of the boyz, taking in its tusk-like teeth, algae green skin, and beady red eyes. She then had a lightbulb moment.

"A friend of mine said you guys have a funny accent. Go ahead and say something."

The ork’s eyes shot wide and he bared his teeth in anger

"Yoo fink an orkses aksint iz funey?! How bout dis!? WAAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHHH!"

Spit splashed over Twilight’s face and its rank breath blew her mane back. Sparkling green light emanated from the wagon until the ork’s head was suddenly blown off its shoulders.

The dwarf lowered his hissing blunderbuss. “You really didn’t want that one anyway, did you?” Twilight was still a deer in the headlights and shook herself back to reality, wiping off her face and fixing her mane. "Nevermind. Perhaps an ork boy is a little much. How about a gnoblar, yes? Smart enough to get the job done and just dumb enough to accept any job. Goblins on the other hand, chronic backstabbers."

"But dat's da powah uv Gork, brootal kunni'n." said a goblin snarkily.

An ork kicked it. "It'z Mork dat's brootal kunni'n, ya styoopid git."

"Oy, Da runt's roit! Gork's da moast kunni'n." another boy argued.

Their simple-minded debate instantly exploded into kicking and biting in their shackles. The dwarf's attempts to quell the little riot were for naught and the nob laughed at him the whole time.

Twilight quietly tipped away. The orks just weren’t her type.

The dark elves had a good sack of gold from quickly selling their stock to the slave hungry warmongers of the city, and only one slave left; a grey-blue bat-pony, his entire body covered in scars that looked as if they were artistically carved into his flesh; like vines, like burning veins.

“Last item of the day!” the lead elf announced. “Going for three ounces!”

Twilight looked at her wyrdstone coin. It had 1oz carved on it.

“A fine specimen here! One of the few in number, Noctral bat-pony race! Two ounces!”

Twilight held her coin tighter, but the elf put his arm down and tuned to one of the spearmen and muttered, “No one’s going to take this one and it’s not worth carting his stinking hide back. Throw him in the river.”

Twilight stomped a hoof in frustration as the soldiers returned to the ship, but not the slave. One of the elves was moving him toward the edge of the dock, and put his boot at the stallion’s back.

“Wait!” Twilight bolted over, waving her coin and the elf hesitated. “I’ll take him!”

“You have two ounces?”

“No just... one.” Twilight levitated the coin up and the elf took it.

“Profit’s a profit,” he chortled, and kicked the noctral over.

Twilight magically caught him and set him back on land while the elf boarded the black ship laughing. She picked up the end of his chain link leash and looked at him for a minute.

’I own this stallion... I just bought another pony’s life...’

“H-hello.”

He didn’t respond, kept his eyes down to the ground and was shivering slightly. Twilight felt like the monster she looked like.

“Hey, Mister... Stallion.” She put her hoof under his chin and raised him to look at her. She tried to crack a smile, but it inadvertently showed her fangs and wrinkled her face into a half-smiling snarl. “Do you have a name?”

His shaking, catlike eyes spoke of nothing but fear.

“You don’t remember?”

He shook his head.

“How about um...” The name Kislev came to mind. The pronunciation was like a dance of the voice, and just sounded funny. “How about Kivsin? Do you like that name?”

Once again, he didn’t speak but managed to nod painfully.

“That’s great!” beamed Twilight. “So I guess I’m you new... owner. I’m Twilight Sparkle, by the way.” She put her wings around him and lit her horn for a teleportation spell. “I’ll take you back to where I’m staying and we’ll see about getting that collar off.”

Kivsin watched as the world around them was consumed in a black fog, then he found himself in a single room apartment as it dissipated.

“Welcome to your new home!” said Twilight, letting him go. She pointed to a pile of clothing that used to belong to the previous inhabitants. “That’s where you sleep, since these people evidently don’t believe in beds, and is there anything unique about a noctral’s diet?”

Kivsin spotted the cage of rats and tapped it.

“So noctrals are meat eaters? I never knew that. You can have one if you want.”

Kivsin smiled brightly as he bowed his head, took a squealing rat from the cage and bit it clean in half with his carnivorous teeth. He devoured it in two hasty bites like an animal, smacking the blood off his lips.

“Now let’s see about this collar.” Twilight examined the brace around his neck. It fit very tightly and she could hear that his breathing was strained, like it was forever on the verge of choking him. “Now hold still.”

She focused her magic in a thin stripe down the width of the back of the collar and, like a psychic hammer and chisel, applied a sharp thrust of force and cracked it. She started prying it open, which brought his fur and even patches of skin peeling off with it.

“How long have you been wearing this collar?”

Twilight found an even more eye opening sight, four spikes from the inside of the collar slipping out of his neck. She levitated a couple of cloths over and put them in Kivsin’s hooves. “Put these hard against the sides of your neck when I say ‘now’, okay?” He nodded.

“Now!”

Twilight ripped the collar off and Kivsin planted the rags against the bleeding holes with a struggling gasp and choughed the same red droplets. The first sound he made was a shrill squeak as the heavy brace clattered to the floor. He rolled his neck with a succession of pops in the spine and took his first unhindered breath in ages, deep and long.

He silently mouthed a ‘thank you’, which made Twilight feel just a little bit better about her situation.

“You’re welcome. I don’t know how the Dark Elves treated you, but you won’t get any of that from me."

It wasn’t bad being with this Sparkle alicorn. Quite nice actually. He wasn’t whipped and beaten on a near daily basis, where he slept didn’t reek of stale urine, and he wasn’t locked up in a cage with barely enough room to stand up.

For a few days, he’d helped Twilight with her studies, which much of the time consisted of being the test dummy for testing spells. In one instance, he’d been temporarily left with only one eye.

For now, the master was gone, off to someone's house, this Cherry... Happily. He couldn’t remember, and he was alone. He curled up on his makeshift bed and waited for her to come back like a dog. He tried not to think as such an act would only prolong an unpleasant experience by making one focus on it more.

’An empty mind, is a healthy mind...’

He was taken from this lack of contemplation by the door, which had been rebuilt out of folded up metal sheets and scraps, rattling.

‘That didn’t take long at all,’ he thought, picking his head up.

After a second, the jiggling stopped, and a black pincer came piercing the steel like nail into wood. Kivsin jumped up and grabbed the knife on the desk as the claw cut an opening in the door like a can opener. Shaking in his fur, the door came crashing down with a blur of pink streaking in.

It was but a fraction of a second before the blinding speed of this figure had its legs around him in a constricting hold that almost enveloped him in her squishy body. A long tongue forced him to look up into a pink mare’s grinning face.

“Wow! So you’re the pony Twilight was talking about!” she bleated elatedly. “You’re just like the spooky night guards! You even got the wings and the fluffy ears!” Suddenly, she planted a hoof to her forehead. “D’oh, how could I forget! I’m Pinkie Pie, and Twilight told me you were Kivsin. I just couldn’t wait to meet you, so I came straight here.”

The whole time, Kivsin wasn’t listening to a word, trying to get his knife-bearing hoof around, but Pinkie snatched and threw it away as she let out a slightly pained belch.

“Ugh, excuse me. I think it’s just somepony I ate.”

Kivsin whimpered as he felt the pony’s lumpy stomach lurch against his back. ’Somepony she ate?!’

“You know...” Pinkie ran her tongue slowly up and down the side of Kivsin’s face. “I think I’ll have you meet her.”

With a weak voice, Kivsin could only muster a vigorous shaking of the head in opposition as Pinkie brought her mouth down over him. Her widened esophagus grabbed his head and started pulling him in , as well as her hoof and claw pushing his whole thrashing body further down he throat. She tilted her head back with Kivsin's hind legs kicking in the air and his body swelling her neck, and swallowed to bring him down to where only the tips of his hooves were left sticking from Pinkie's lips. She moaned slightly as the texture of his ragged fur tickled her throat and in another contraction, he was gone into her.

Her throat opened ahead of him and in the green-lit sac below, another voice said, “Well who is this? Kivsin I presume?”

“Mhm,” Pinkie affirmed, savoring the taste of her snack as more of Kivsin was piled in and stretched her stomach more. Kivsin landed next to a grey earth pony with only two legs, holding a piece of glowing green stone for light.

“And a bat-pony, how exotic! Oh look, he’s panicking.” Octavia wrapped her tentacles around Kivsin as he was trying to force his way back up. “Calm down, you.” She pulled him back down and he was bewildered as to how she could be so calm. “Listen.”

Their cell was groaning very threateningly and contracting tightly around them. Pinkie strained to stop it and steadily it relaxed back into a slow churn.

“Don’t fight it too much,” she grunted. “Tummy likes it when they fight and it could digest you guys in just a couple of minutes. Look around.”

The pool of gastric acid had a reddish shade to it and there were still bits of meat stuck to the walls that were slowly being dissolved away.

“That’s what’s left of a stallion who didn’t listen. I think he only lasted about ten seconds before tummy broke his neck with how strong it crushed him.” Pinkie rubbed the top of Kivsin’s head. “So just relax. Isn’t it warm and soft in there, my tummy goop smooth and soothing. It’s not often I get to have two ponies, so I wanna enjoy you and make you two last until Twilight comes back. Then I can say we already met. It's like a special feeling, to have somepony inside you, like you're sheltering or protecting them.” She gently massaged the top of Kivsin's head and giggled. "And it's so ticklish! Just the sliding around and soaking up the flavor right out of your fur."

“You see?” said Octavia. “Not much to worry about.”

Pinkie laid down on Kivsin’s bed, shifting her contents onto their sides, and hugging her belly contently as a creeping wave of sleepiness took her. “Mmm... you guys are delicious.”

Octavia and Kivsin heard her start to snore and they got off each other after being tossed around. “I wonder,” she said, slowly tracing her hoof along the patterns of his scars. “where are you from-”

“PINKIE!”

The shriek frightened them both and Pinkie snapped up from her short-lived nap. Twilight ran in, her horn ablaze in both anger and panic.

“Tell me you didn’t eat Kivsin!”

“I didn’t eat Kivsin,” Pinkie said back stoutly.

Twilight wiped her forehead of the gathering sweat and asked, “Then... where is he?”

“In my tummy.”

“But you just said you didn’t eat him!”

“Because you told me to say it!”

Twilight slapped both hooves to her face and shouted, “Spit him out!”

“Okay, okay. Just so you know, We already got acquainted, Octavia too.” Her stomach contracted, sending a pair of pony-shaped bulges up her neck and Octavia was first out, then Kivsin in another heave, splattering onto the floor.

Twilight telekinetically pushed the two mares out the door in a huff, “You both, get out of here!” and slammed the cutout opening back into place.

“I can’t believe this! She just barged in here and decided ‘Hm, I wonder what bat tastes like.’”

Kivsin wasn’t listening much as he was still thinking about that grey pony, that mare Octavia.

“Don’t get sick now. Just one more to go.”

Twilight walked in a slow circle around the square plaza, searching for her last target. Cheerilee had assigned her to take three skulls from as many victims, and two skulls were already balancing on her horns, both human. She spotted one; a pony, small and helpless.

“Perfect.”

Twilight put herself in a grabbing posture with wings curled and mouth open to bite.

Poof

She quickly bit down, her fangs piercing right into her victim’s trachea and choking his scream out. Using her greater size, she held him in a locked position while she drank of his red ichor. His struggles weakened the more blood she drew out until he stopped moving and she couldn’t feel his pulse anymore. Then she got to work on retrieving the last piece of her assignment.

She looked away as her magic peeled the deceased stallion’s face back, took out the eyes, and wiggled the skull until it snapped off the spine. She opted to levitate it at her side instead of putting its still wet bones anywhere on herself. With another spell, she extracted the soul and hastily hid it under her wing with the other two.

Even with such coveted morses hidden, she took no lesiure in getting back to Cheerilee's dilapidated school house where she was fixing a broken window.

The chain-laden mare hammered the last nail in with a hoof before turning to the sound of approaching hooves. "You took quite some time out there. Quickly, what is death to a cultist?"

"That death is a service?" Twilight quickly said back.

"And?"

"And... Their death brings them to a familial bond with Nurgle, pleasure to Slaanesh, blood to Khorne, and it's just the death of another tool for Tzeentch."

Cheerilee nodded and took the skulls inside where Kivsin was finishing decorating a pedestal bearing a large and ornate goblet. "You won't regret this. It was the best decision i ever made."

She arranged them around a dark goblet with a small bit of wyrdstone powder at the bottom and sparked her chains inside, erupting in a riot of colors and flame. It produced a strange coldness, despite its brightness. Cheerilee stuck her hooves into the flame and drew them out, carrying the ether with them.

"Are you ready?"

Twilight nodded, sitting tall but nervous. The robed one pressed her hooves to her chest hard and they passed in, filling her with a biting cold and wracking pain. "Hold still!"

After what felt like an eternity to Twilight, Cheerilee pulled back

The black gem rest in Cheerilee's hooves, and her intrigue was unseen behind her veil. It burned black, consuming the scarce light around it, silently emitting waves of dark tendrils to the floor and ceiling. Souls, though unique from person to person, were supposed to look the same throughout their lives but this black pearl had been burning inside Twilight her whole life. The alicorn sat hunched over with a hellish pain in her chest, feeling like she would implode any second.

Cheerilee raised Twilight's black sun to the chalice and before she could drop it in, a great, flaming gloved hand seized it. A thunderous chuckle emitted from the flame and Twilight began to spontaneously laugh with it. They grew more hyper, to maniacal cackling. The flayed corpses about the room writhed and screamed as if they were still alive. The flame blasted the ceiling in a column of pink and purple warp essence and fizzled out. Cheerilee's hood was singed and Twilight calmed, coughing and the empty feeling was gone.

Kivsin helped her up. "Are you alright, miss?"

"Don't... call me... miss." She gasped. "I think... I'll be ok, I’m just... so thirsty...”

A nightmare. Luna couldn't have imagined the holiday in her name would become a horror. hundreds of people and ponies wearing costumes and masks of daemons and the villains of Chaos were corralled at intersections and hacked apart or shot en masse by cheering, laughing crowds. Those dying seemed willing as they left their homes in evil dress and happily rushed to join the receiving end of a crossbow firing squad. Piles of bodies were burned by Bright Wizards who, at the snap of their fingers, lit the mounds ablaze. Few still played the old games. Pumpkin catapults, bug tosses, and such seemed to only attract the children and foals.

Celestia joined her, despairing the madness.

"We are sorry, Tia. We should not have asked for the celebration."

"You couldn't have known what it would become. Come back from the balcony. This is almost as terrible as the siege." She returned to the palace.

"Sister, we... we weren't... At the siege, the cannons, the bells. It was just so frighten--" Her voice cut off to a strangled gasp, followed by the sound of many wingbeats.

Celestia turned around, and Luna was gone. There was a figure in the sky - no, several, flying away, one screaming and was silenced. She ran to the balcony and noticed several of the statues of bat-winged pegasi were gone.

Luna beat her wings in resistance to the noctrals carrying her off in shackles, dangling her belly up. One of them wiped their face, clearing the ash and chalk paint and showing their greyish blue fur. Another, carrying a unicorn, dropped him on top of her and interfered with her attempts to smite them with magic.

"Hurry! Hurry!" They all shouted at him.

He struggled to balance on Luna's writhing torso and drew a series of needle components. The receptacle contained a swirling, dark, sparkling mist, similar to Nightmare Moon's mane and he began hastily assembling it. Celestia and several guards were closing quickly behind them, increasing his stress and fumbling.

"Your imprisonment ends tonight, milady! By the aid of Manfred von Carstein, most benevolent count of Sylvania, we have recreated thy true power. I return it to you!" He thrust the needle into Luna's neck. "Drink of this energy and awake, O Lady of the Night. Rule your people and purge The Empire of the false princess!"

The black, ephemeral mist rushed from the needle and into Luna’s body. Her eyes became glassy and unfocused and her frantic struggles stalled for a moment as a feeling of dizziness washed over her.

The unicorn sighed, knowing his job was done. He let himself drop off and silently fell, landing on a pile of flaming bodies from the celebration. The bat ponies stopped, released Luna and were quickly surrounded by the gold-clad pegasus guards. They hissed at the sight of Celestia and unsheathed knives. Expecting resistance, the soldiers slowly closed until the targets put the blades to their own necks.

"Hail to the Night!"

The ponies fell, blood streaming above them. Bones shattered as they hit the ground and lay motionless.

Celestia quickly swooped in and embraced her sister. “Luna? Luna?! Did they hurt you?”

Her sharp, yet compassionate tone cut through the fog clouding her mind, and Luna shook her head. “N-no, we don’t think so. They pricked with a needle or something, but we feel fine.”

The sun princess gave a quick nod and a barely perceptible sigh of relief, before turning back to the cadre of guards, her expression set with vicious determination. "We're going back to the palace immediately! I want it locked down and every carving and statue scrutinized thoroughly!"

They started back, and Luna rubbed her temples. A slight headache started, and she assumed it was from being hung upside down. The blood must have rushed to her head.

Chapter 13: Chaos Consumes

"Worst homework ever." Twilight thought. "Miss Cheerlie's trying to torture me!" Performing a Slaaneshi ritual was at the bottom of the list of things she wanted to do. She wanted only Vinyl to do it with her but the musician insisted bringing Pinkie Pie as well.

So, what was needed? Ponies seemed to lack the 'facilities' that humans had for an easy good time but anything really. Pleasure could be in all places and Twilight didn't have much other than books and lab equipment neither guest would be interested in. She moved all the paraphernalia into the closet should something go wrong and Pinkie Pie eating everyone in the room was a worst case scenario. Twilight was ready though. No sickness, no paralysis, no surprises. Pinkie tried anything and she'd be met with a pair of long fangs to the neck. Now she had to wait for them to arrive and read a section in a book of magic on the wyrdstone Vinyl said she'd bring.

Such a substance is vastly prized, more valuable than gold, and has infinitely many uses. They'd be using pure, solidified Chaos. The entire city of Mordheim was rebuilt around the crater of a wyrdstone asteroid.

Twilight occasionally stole a drink from Kivsin who slept like the dead on his little tattered shirt of a bed, slipping her fangs into the holes left by his old, constricting collar. Three years of sleep deprivation made him a rock. She tried to treat him like a roommate instead of a slave but he just couldn't process kindness and didn't even know the meaning of the word 'free' no matter how crystal clearly Twilight explained it to him. The Dark Elves do a bang up job maintaining order and their sense of servitude.

At last there was a knock at the door and the tunes of Vinyl tinkering with her autotuned voice. Twilight started to make her way to the door and Pinkie Pie's tongue poked through the keyhole. She fiddled around in the mechanisms of the lock until, *click*. So that's how she got in last time to devour Kivsin. The door swung open and they sauntered in with a mortar and pestle, the green stone Vinyl filched from Rarity, and three short straws.

"So glad you guys could make it." Twilight said.

"Shh, shut the fuck up for a second..." Vinyl whispered, putting a hoof to her lips. "You hear that?"

Twilight listened intently but could only hear the muffled bustling of the city beyond the building. "Hear what?"

"That's the sound of warp snuff not being made. I'm gonna fix that." She quickly ran over to the desk and threw all the material across its surface and fumbled through her beer-goggles vision to land the wyrdstone in the mortar and relentlessly pound it with the pestle. Its properties were quite fickle. One could easily bite it in half but it took a bombardment with a metal ramrod just to chip it little by little. She hung her mouth open a little and a whole song, voice, instruments, and effects rushed out in another language. "Fear! Pain! Fill my cup with the essence of souls! Fear! Pain! Your suffering will prolong my days!"

"So... Pinkie Pie". Twilight tried to ride the sinisterly playful air of the song. "Maybe we could start while she's doing that?"

Pinkie remained nervously quiet and spread her tongues across Vinyl's back and shoulders, tasting the lime ice cream unicorn. She bounced to the beat and a square bulge in her stomach rattled with a glassy sound.

"Put the booze right up here." Vinyl said through the pleasurable caressing.

"What are you talking about? I don't have anything." Pinkie played.

"Your rubbing it on me." Vinyl clearly wanted to focus on the stone.

Pinkie sucked her tongues back and her stomach squeezed up the six-pack onto the desk, dripping with drool. Twilight moved closer and Pinkie got up and walked away, pretending to explore the apartment. She loomed over Kivsin and smacked her lips in hunger. Twilight didn't really want to get a work over but her grade hung by a thread. Besides, how bad could pleasure be when they're doing it for each other? She quietly moved behind Pinkie and opened her wings to give her an apologetic hug and as she came down, Pinky snapped around and caught her head in her claw.

"I always wondered how strong this is." she mused with a curious smile. "I use it a lot as a bottle opener but is it like a pair of scissors, only good for making confetti out of a pony's skin?" She squeezed her crabby claw tighter while Twilight tried to bite her but was unable to break the hard shell. She pulled her face closer and her breath tingled Twilight's muzzle "Or how about a shark's jaw? To get out all that red paint and jello in their head." Twilight readied her horn to force Pinkie's claw open. "Hmm... but that's to find out another day." She jerked Twilight's mouth against hers and started slithering her tongues into her mouth.

"It's just part of worship. Don't be afraid." Twilight thought frantically. The tentacles moved into every nook and cranny of her mouth, rolling over teeth and wrapping around her tongue. "What do I do?" She put her forelegs around Pinkie Pie and she did the same. The claw ran down her back, like trying to unzip her skin and pinched her flanks. They shared the same air in each others' lungs, stealing it back and forth. Pinkie Pie watched Twilight's eyes close as she became immersed and carried her to the bed. She rolled them both on and soon parted their lips. Twilight gasped for real air.

"Ooh, sour as ever!" Pinkie canted, licking her lips. She left a sugary, bubblegum taste in Twilight's mouth and when she went to speak, accidentally blew a black bubble. Pinkie was so soft and warm, her coat so smooth, like a blanket knitted by Slaanesh as she slid down Twilight's body and started nibbling her bony hoofs.

"You know you have white chocolate right here? Mm!" She said, licking Twilight's hooves. She leaned up to look. "Don't get up."

She slowly dragged her tongue up Twilight's leg, spending a lot of time at the inside of her haunches where she tensed up and blushed brightly at the sensations. Her leg snapped closed on Pinkie's tongue and she groaned from the pressing on it. She slid her tongue back and forth, in and out of the space between Twilight's leg and torso and Twilight couldn't hold back a moan of pleasure of her own.

"Just let it happen. Don't be embarrassed!" Pinkie said to her smorgasbord of flavors. At Twilight's flank, Pinkie swirled around on it, rubbing her muzzle and wetly kissing it, all the actions the Dark Prince would reward.

She climbed onto the bed, onto Twilight and brought her tongues lapping over her torso, painting her with streaks of black and blue, rubbing their coats together. Twilight tried to relax but memories of the past two treatments she got from Pinkie kept her uneasy. The comfort of her fur and soft body was welcomed and Pinkie put her legs around her, sliding up her body, and kept working Twilight's leg. She tickled under her chin and kissed her cheek, drawing out more enjoyment sighs. She took advantage of the open mouth mouth being open and slipped a couple of tongues in, slithering down her windpipe against her protesting whines. Instead of inflicting burning pain, Pinkie tickled the tissue and her laced saliva made the very act of breathing an experience. Twilight had to return the favors and lightly gnashed her teeth on the tongues, delighting Pinkie Pie as she reached the main course, her horn.

Which angle to come from? The side, straight down? Who cares? The result was always guaranteed excellent. It was already vibrating and humming with some energy and she slapped her mouth over it and got to work. She sucked on it like a straw of the greatest soda in the world while her tongues actively massaged it in her mouth. Twilight had never felt such pleasure before and started to roll and squirm, almost shouting her ecstasy cries. Her wings twitched and flapped erratically. This bottomless drink filled Pinkie's system with feelings she wished would never end. Each time she stopped for a short breath, Sparks and glints of magic fell from her lips.

One more long slurp on the straw and Twilight felt a massive spike in pleasure bordering on painful. Her horn erupted, blasting Pinkie Pie to the ceiling in a brilliant beam and pummeled her in powerful pulses of magic. Twilight was pushed back hard into the bed. Even Vinyl was taken from her task to see.

The climax faded and Pinkie fell onto her, her cheeks sore but appetite satisfied. They both panted and Twilight looked at her with 'what the heck was that!?' frozen on her face.

"Now that's what I call a happy ending!" Vinyl Scratch laughed. "Warpstone's done!"

Twilight was disoriented and stayed in bed while Pinkie stumbled off and eyed the three lines of green dust on the desk.

"I think I'm done. That... that's just enough for one day."

"But it ain't the full experience without the best the warp can offer. You wanna fail your assignment?"

Twilight quickly hobbled over and Vinyl passed her a straw. Pinkie took a few more licks of her horn before the energy was completely gone.

"So what you do is..." Vinyl started, "You put the straw at one end of the line, put nostril over it and breath like you just got shot!"

They all put their straws in position and Vinyl started counting. "One...fuck it!" The dust shot up the tube and Pinkie and Twilight followed. Twilight accidentally forced her nose on the straw and choked slightly on the dust. For the slightest moment it seemed like nothing was happening until Vinyl's voice started to buzz loudly like static and her eyes flushed red. She started a vicious mantra in a deep, sinister voice that was clearly not hers, slouched over in a trance.

"Speak praise to Slaanesh and you shall live forever in the glory of Chaos. Speak them not, and every one of you shall dieeeee...." She buzzed again, as if switching radio channels. "It's a long way to Tipperary! It's a long way to go! It's a long way to Tipperary, to the sweetest mare I know!"

Twilight desperately tried to blow her nose to get the dust out of her system but it was far too late. Her head started to burn and the room twisted and broke apart in a vast cosmos beyond the walls. Pinkie Pie grabbed her in a crushing embrace. As the drug took hold, it felt like Twilight was being hugged by her doll Smarty Pants. She wriggled around and worked her forelegs out to hug her back.

"Twilight..." Pinkie Pie groaned, "I'm so hungry, I gotta eat something. Listen!" She shoved Twilight's face against her stomach. The tentacles inside poked and probed at her face but were separated by Pinkie's skin and the stomach walls. Her stomach roared, making her whole torso ripple and she moaned in pain. "Please please please. You won't melt away like the other people I met, promise! You didn't last time!"

Twilight's brain was fried and the floor felt cold and hard. Pinkie's belly promised softness and warmth. "Al-alright."

Pinkie squealed in delight and flipped Twilight upside down. She thrust her hind legs into her mouth and pulled her in by hoof and claw, groaning at the stretching of her body to accommodate the huge meal. She licked deep between Twilight's flanks, making her shudder and shake with pleasure. Pinkie started to swallow, pinching Twilight's lower body and pulling her up from the floor, into her ravenous maw. She could feel her prey's legs enter her stomach and the tentacles in the cavern twist around the food but there was still the whole upper half to gulp down.

She raised her up and the shifting of her center of gravity brought new sensations.Twilight tucked her wings down as gripping muscles took her up to her neck and a dozen tongues slapped onto her head and dragged her into Pinkie's lips. She looked up as the light of her room disappeared by the closing jaw. Pinkie Pie paused at her horn and slurped at it a little bit more. Just feel her expanded throat a little longer. Twilight giggled with her face pressed at Pinkie's throat but the stomach below growled again and the tentacles gripped tighter. She swallowed again and Twilight kept her legs extended to pre-stretch her stomach and make room as she slid in among the clingy tentacles. They coiled around her limbs but she didn't care, it was finally warm.

Pinkie breathed heavily as her windpipe was closed while she ate. Her belly was happy and so was she. She slouched over her big bubble, rubbing it and feeling the tentacles wrap her meal. She could still taste Twilight with them, an added bonus and they pressed out against Pinkie's fur. Her stomach gurgled and rumbled painfully and a huge pressure move up her throat.

"What's happening?" Twilight's muffled voice asked.

*BUUUUUURRRPP* *hic* "Oh, nothing. Tummy really missed you!"

Pinkie watched her stomach shift and flex as Twilight shifted to a more comfortable position and laid her head back against the wall of muscle, pressing Pinkie's liver. The devourer's lungs pushed down on her head with each breath and Twilight listened to the clockwork of her body. Pinkie hunched over herself and poked her belly to find Twilight's features. Twilight pushed back and stretched her legs, ballooning Pinkie's stomach.

"Oh yeah!" Pinkie moaned and hugged Twilight tightly. Her whole body was filled in absolute rapture.

"You like that?" Twilight said. Her face was frozen in an aching grin and she devised a mutually pleasing treatment.

"More. More!"

Vinyl flopped her upper body left and right, swinging her head around like a possessed meat puppet. A small box of muscle and veins hung out her mouth. It emitted a new song, very mystical and sensual. "Castle of pleasures... fields of desire... gardens of lust... I give you heat of eternal FIRE!"

Twilight let the music carry her motions as she danced in her awkward position, squishing and pulling the tentacles and Pinkie Pie was rapt in the vicious pleasurable stinging. Her stomach started to fill with saliva and stomach acid but Twilight kept her jive. Her tight shell grew round with the fluid instead of conforming to Twilight's shape. It was a soft sack before her now, like squeezing a yoga ball. Twilight rubbed her face against the walls and er horn poked up the skin very far. This one point stung of pleasure and Pinkie squished her skin against it, rubbing it like trying to light a fire with friction. On the inside, the rippling, wet walls enthralled Twilight again. She pushed her head harder against the wall. She had to feel it again.

The tickling, tingling intensified and Pinkie felt the crackles of magic she was working out of Twilight. After sufficient stimulation, on the brink, Pinkie grasped what she made out to be Twilight's head, pulled her back and braced herself. Twilight groaned as the sensation climaxed and her cell was flooded with magic, glowing bright purple from the inside out. Pinkie absorbed the energy and the extra energy forced her to climax also. Her stomach contracted so tightly it looked like Twilight was in a mould. The fluids were forced out and spewed out her mouth. Her tentacles, like a mad assault, tied onto Twilight over every inch of her body, constricting like snakes and quickly forced entrance to her mouth, filling Twilight's stomach and proceeded through her intestines and out her plot. The high left her with no way to react but laugh at being infiltrated inside and out.

The pleasure was almost paralyzing for Pinkie, overwhelming her nerves as her belly absorbed the magic discharge. As it dissipated after a while, she had her tongues run backward into her stomach and pull the uncontrollable tentacles out of Twilight's mouth and guts, where they shouldn't be.

"Oh my gosh." she panted. "You're amazing."

Twilight laid back, her horn pounding with residual pleasure energy the tentacles hungrily wrapped around her for. She looked at her legs and torso and saw nothing but squirming snakes. Her insides were on fire and felt like a tumultuous sea. "Thanks. You to."

Pinkie wiped her mouth, hobbled up and her gorged gut was barely off the floor. She struggled with the extra weight and her wobbling muscles and her legs contended with her stomach for the space under her. Twilight was carried on her side, sloshing around and Pinkie lowered herself onto Kivsin who continued to slumber as the rock he was. Twilight totally forgot the assignment and was totally immersed in gently soothing arms.

"I'd take him in too but I'm just so stuffed!" Pinkie grumbled, disappointed with herself.

Vinyl soon came to. Her songs quieted but something still seemed a little off about her. "Hark! What hast thou done with thine friend?" she asked with a crooked, stupid smile. "Thou hast consumed her once again! Pray tell, hast thou enjoyed it my dear Sparkle?"

"It's amazing in here. So soft and warm. Who knew this felt so good?" The bulges of her pushing hooves poked through the pink cavern.

"And what is this!?" Vinyl gasped at the sixpack. "Diane, perhaps thou wisheth to wash down the aftertaste?"

"Yes Please!"

The white unicorn levitated the pack and it jerked around the air randomly. Her horn crackled and popped like a backfiring car. Pinkie grabbed two floating bottles and swallowed one. Twilight shifted again so her head was upright and out of the way of the esophageal hole and let the bottle slip into her hooves. Quickly after, a stream of alcohol poured in through the same entrance. She bit off the cork and tipped her bottle to her mouth. She coughed in rejection of its burning.

"Not the best draught Berry Punch has come up with but adequate." Vinyl canted and wormed her way under Pinkie's hot belly. Moving against Kivsin, she stroked down the side of his face. Like reflex, he slapped her hoof away. "He reminds me so of my dear Octavia. Her grey fur, so sleek, smooth, tis if Slaanesh blessed her with a coat of his making. Oh the songs she composes, it sets my ears ablaze in harmony. The sounds, the melody. Her soft lips to mine, mine, hers..." She slowly nudged Kivsin's head closer. "All we've been through. She is my bliss. My rock. My love."

Twilight felt Vinyl have her way with him but focused more on drinking the dreck in her hooves. Down to the last drop, the endured it's gagging thickness. She heard and felt Pinkie Pie weeping softly with her stomach convulsing with her sobs.

"You ok Pinkie?" she choked.

Pinkie sniffed and suppressed her sniveling. "N-n-nothing. Just... did the Doc ever tell you where he goes all day? I *sniff* I haven't seen him in weeks."

"He just says 'buisiness'. I don't know." Twilight sounded truly unknowing and rubbed the stomach walls to sooth her shelter. It slowly became active, rolling and grinding at her. Twilight chuckled at the normally deadly situation. "I think your trying to digest me."

Pinkie cuddled her belly, thankful for its occupant. "Mhm. It's my favorite part of getting to know new ponies but they always melt away after a few hours. You didn't though. That's why your my second favorite."

"Second? Who's first?"

"Um, Vinyl." she said slightly nervous.

"I'm innocent... I swear!" Kivsin mumbled. "I didn't take them!" His damaged ear reactively twitched and waved, enticing Pinkie Pie to snatch it with a tongue.

"You know, he tastes like a blueberries." she said.

What was likely a bad idea popped into Twilight's head. She swirled her horn around in the soup of tentacles around her until it was writhing with them. She closed her eyes and charged her horn with the only sleep based spell she could remember under the influence and Pinkie Pie hummed, feeling the energy.

She suddenly felt cold and the wet grinding of Pinkie's stomach was absent. The drug induced pleasure was gone. Sounds of suffering wailing and rattling chains prompted her to open er eyes and she nearly had a heart attack, faced by a mutilated, quivering man. She was sitting in a dark space, a huge cage full of similarly battered people and ponies piled atop one another. Dead captives were fought over and devoured by their starving, bone skinny comrades. The cage reeked of feces, bodily filth and rotting flesh. What terror was Kivsin dreaming? She quickly backed away from the feeding frenzy and threw herself against the door to the cage. Rather than slamming into it, she fell through it, and stumbled to stop her charge. She went back to the cage and put her hoof to one of the bars. It passed right through like a ghost unnoticed.

"Twilight!" Pinkie's voice called from above.

She looked up and saw a small hatch in the high ceiling, no more than a square foot and Pinkie Pie looking down. The mare, on a whim, phased through the floor and floated to the level below, peddling her legs to move away from the writhing cage.

"Where are we?" She asked, frightened.

"In Kivsin's dream I think. I wanted to know more about him but he couldn't remember anything."

"I don't like it here."

"I just want to find out what happened to him. We should look around."

They were apparently aboard some kind of ship as the whole environment rolled up and down and they heard water splashing outside. There were entire rooms and workshops full of heinous, cruel weapons and tools. Spears, curved swords, daggers and small, surgical instruments were sorted neatly for easy access. A black suited man, no, elf by his ears and long face, wide eyed, grinning ear to ear, and snickering childishly to himself entered and gathered many of the sharp, precise instruments. They followed him, believing he must have something to do with the dream.

The ship was full of slaves and captives and the omnipresent screams of those cursed to a fate worse than death. What kind of vessel was this? It was larger than any seaborne vessel they'd ever seen. Twilight's stuck her head through the wall and looked up. A huge iron wall, ranked with spikes and blades stretched up for one hundred feet and tall, spired towers shot up into the dark sky. Noctrals perched on the wall and circled the air, flying between towers and dropping bodies overboard, but which one was her assistant? It dawned on Twilight from her studies, it was a Black Ark, a floating fortress of the Dark Elves and they were at the back, near the captain's quarters, or commander considering the number of occupants the ship could carry. Kivsin said he was a river raider before being turned in but such a giant ship couldn't possibly sail a river.

Pinkie quickly got bored of following the elf. "Twilight he's not doing anything." she whined. "How do we...get... out..."

A huge iron wrought door bordered with wyrdstone crystals loomed on the wall and chains lazily swung, somehow in the still air. A large amount of green and red crystal was arranged in the form of two green, piercing eyes with red irises. The touching of warpstone with rubies produced an ominous purple haze. The sadistic elf hauled the door open and revealed a more terrifying scene. The dark unicorn, the curse upon the Crystal Empire sat in a throne of black crystals with his hateful gaze fixed on a noctral strapped to a table, specially placed in the quarters for amusement from its victims. Druchii warriors stood silently at their side.

Twilight and Pinkie Pie couldn't process King Sombra was here. They saw him be destroyed, saw his shattered remains fly off into the arctic wasteland. How?

"Is it time for pain?" the scrawny elf wheezed.

Sombra nodded. "Theft in the Black Guard shall not stand." he growled.

The Black Guard? The most elite of dark elven warriors? Those trained only slightly from infancy and pitted against one another in battles to the death until few remain? They protected the most important assets and figures of their race, formed the final vanguard of Malekith's armies. Noctrals were prized less but those selected at random for the Black Guard were still the best of the best.

"My liege, I have not committed the act! I have only your best interests in mind!" the noctral huffed.

"Then suffer for me."

The mad doctor dipped a scalpel in one of many glasses of toxins and acids and brought it to Kivsin's forehead. Quickly the skin broke and his screams filled the air. The pain bringer reaped almost orgasmic pleasure from the music, carving intricate paths across his face.

Sombra deviated his future torture. "Three days Karond Kar, three weeks Hag Graeth, three years the Witch Elves. He survives, sell him. Wipe him of all memory of his service and incept the position of a lowly corsair raider." A king of few words but they resonated dreadfully in the ears of all present. He levitated a long, thin, wyrdstone crystal and stuck one end in a candle. It fizzled and glowed red at the end and he put the other in his mouth, puffing black smoke and he sat back for the show.

Abruptly, the wyrdsone flame engulfed him and spread across the throne, walls, floor, and guards. Pinkie Pie clutched Twilight tightly like a security blanket as all burned and collapsed in ash and bone. The ashes swirled around them and reformed into an evil city with them on the walls.

Thousands of bodies hung from buildings and towers like sick holiday decorations. They still twitched and squirmed with the spells cast on them, rendering them unable to die on these nooses but still witness hell as long as their necks or the ropes would hold. A body on one of the highest towers finally fell hundreds of feet. It's head hit the ground a full two seconds after the body.

Kivsin was herded across the wall with a noose round his neck. He was covered in many scars but still far fewer than he has now. He fought, struggled and twisted with the knots binding his wings and legs. One soldier lifted him onto the edge of the wall and another securely tied the rope to one of the protrusions.

"Hey! Stop!" Twilight shouted. The soldiers didn't notice. She ran at them but her attempt to wrestle Kivsin away failed. Her limbs still passed through them. They kicked him over and the rope snapped tight. He slammed against the wall and swung left and right. "Kivsin!" Twilight experimented with the dream's physics and she and Pinkie walked down he wall to him. He choked and gagged, robbed of breath but undying, not even passing out.

Through the dark clouds, the sun accelerated it's motion and in seconds it was night, then day again. Kivsin stopped moving. He may as well have been dead but the spells the spells cast on the hanging victims would not grant them that mercy. Three times this cycle repeated and some bodies along the wall fell to their final deaths in spike pits below. Kivsin's neck was permanently elongated three inches. A couple of noctrals swooped by, untied him and carried him off to another ship in the harbor.

Rocks rained from the sky around them, piling up and formed a cave full of slaves, chained together and hammering and picking away at wyrdstone. They were bags of bones, weakly swinging their tools while guards joyfully whipped and beat them. The cavern stretched deep down into pitch blackness. One pony collapsed of starvation, a husk of dry skin. The chaos crystals around him illuminated and the body slowly stood again with a dead look on his face. He slipped his hoof back in the pickaxe holdster and continued working clumsily. Next to him, a man's skeletal body with a mere few ribbons of muscle left raised his pickaxe one last time, froze, shuddered, and fell onto the rocks. His body shattered and bones scattered.

Twilight dreaded that Kivsin was somewhere in the caverns but thank Celestia he was alive. Pinkie sadly failed trying to suck on the crystals she saw as rock candy. Chaos may have been the greatest force of darkness but the Druchii were truly the most wicked. Kivsin's final punishment materialized around them.

A blubbering noctral, covered in his own blood, his guts splayed around him and still connected in his body was surrounded by four bewitching witches. Their seductive, bodies were scantily lined with thin, vine like, metal strips. Their ample breasts cradled in iron braziers. They argued in light, manipulative voices as to who would have at him next. The scene accelerated and slowed at different intervals. Over the course of weeks, dragging him back to the altar day after day, they slowly skinned him. They peeled his hide off whole and took turns using it as a coat, the eye holes as a bra, and the limbs and nose as condoms. Kivsin was left in his tiny cage his bare muscles and entrails left to the elements of the filthy surroundings.

Eventually, one witch hid with the pelt cut the hide's ear in half and the others found it undesirable with this flaw. She had it all to herself for a while but the others found her out and sacrificed her to Khaine by tearing her limb from limb and throwing her parts into great fire pits, billowing thick, black smoke. They brought Kivsin back out, packed his guts back in and stitched the defiled hide back, making sure to cut his real ear in half to match.

Twilight saw enough. She relinquished her energy and found herself in Pinkie's belly again. The warpstone high returned.

"Aw... my little dark trooper." she whispered. "Hey Pinkie." No response. "Peenkay..." she drolled again. SHe poked at Pinkie's spine which resulted in some twitching but no words. Pinkie was fast asleep, her energy redirected to digest her meal. "Catch you when you wake up I guess."

Vinyl rested her head on Kivsin's cheek. "Keep my soul, my sweet Octavia. Take me into your heart. I am yours forevermore."

Were they gone? The skeletons, ghosts, zombies, but not those raised by Nurgle's blights, and the screaming. Oh the screaming that whipped Apple Bloom into a frenzy of terror. She'd seen nurglings make homes among the bloated innards of chosen and champions, and for her there was nowhere else to run to. It was a much tighter fit but she managed to squeeze into a giant corroded hole in Pox's armor where his bloated guts were bulging out. She remained there, even though he now wasn't moving and she saw a number of swords and spears crisscrossing through Pox's torso.

The undead had come up from the ground. She was deep within the warband, too far to see the source of a great purple light and out of the very earth, skeletal arms, swords, and all manner of resurrected warriors sprang up and a chaotic massacre ensued. The Nurglites seemed invincible for a short time as the skeletons' blows caused no true injuries to their already decaying bodies but even this wasn't enough. They could only take so much damage before finally tasting the bitterness of their mortality and succumbing to undead blades.

Apple Bloom's terrified shaking caused hr host's body to rattle as well. She heard the shifting of bodies and bones outside the cavern of entrails, and the weapons, one by one, wiggled until they were loose and slid out.

"Brother.." someone said and kicked Pox. "Get up you lazy slime hound."

Apple Bloom smiled in relief as Pox's moldy lungs swelled and deflated in an annoyed sigh and she slid a little deeper in he as they raised their front.

"Y'all calln' me lazy 'n y'a can't dig me outta there any faster?"

"How long'd it take y'all ta git all a this offa me?"

"Not sure. But we can't leave without you brother." The man cracked a smile full of thick blood and set off to aid his comrades.

The host stood up and his guts shifted heavier than usual. "Apple Bloom, Y'allright?" he asked with great concern. He shoved a hoof into the hole in his abdomen, brown pus oozing out the deeper he pushed. She grabbed it and the sight of her popping out would make the hardest mortal vomit. She dripped with his toxic and contaminated fluids but it was more like taking a bath. His smile was drowned in pus and boils, radiating pestilence and paternal love.

He set her down and she gazed on the foggy field of bodies and bones under high, branchless trees. Nurglite zombies scooped chunks of meat from their Sylvanian counterparts down their throats, even after their stomachs had long since burst and the food fell back out their abdomens. Flies and maggots coated the bodies that were being collected and some got back up after being infested. Bodies were piled so thick, the ground couldn't be seen.

"I almost thought the worst when all those skeletons pinned me down. Looka like all ya got was a spear in the belly." He closed the eyes of a slain warrior who had a look of terror frozen on his face. Their soul was at peace with the Grandfather and Pox ripped his arm off, bit off the biceps and hoofed it to Apple Bloom. "He ain't usin' this no more."

She was almost too disturbed by the myriad dead to eat. Almost. Zombie meat was dry and tough, a lot like jerky. Among the putrid green warriors sifting through the bodies, were cleaner ones, clad in crimson plate. Their helmets bore high steel crests and the mark of Khorne adorned every surface. They had come in aid to the Plague Lord's children.

The most prominent among them rode atop an iron rhinoceros. A skeleton, still futilely clawing at its face was hanging by its horn that had passed harmlessly through it's ribcage. The rider reached down and plucked its skull off. The body it left behind fell apart an clattered to the ground. He studied it for its worthiness to join the many other skulls perched on the spikes of his armor while his mount carried him about, crushing skulls and breaking bones for amusement. She couldn't tell where it was looking due its lack of pupils in its flaming eyes but it suddenly turned toward her and Pox.

He turned her around and put their backs to him. He bowed her head down and remained casually occupied with his meal. Applebloom was scared and scooted a little closer to him. The ground started to shake as the beast drew closer and she heard the rattling of the chains and rings that naturally grew from its body. Its joints produced a powerful machine like grinding that must have been a horror to hear in battle as a juggernaut's charge, while not very fast, was virtually unstoppable because of their weight. What few living nerves she had left picked up a great heat and she shuddered as it breathed heavily against her back, smoke and sparks rushing past. Had she been any more afraid she would have ejected spores in his face, leading to a young demise. It put its muzzle closer to her and whiffed her stench, short and sharp. It did this down her sides and over her head while she desperately tried to ignore him but her sores wept with fear.

It put a claw through the loops in her ribbon, unraveled it and her mane fell over her face in frizzled curtains. How she wanted to get it back but Pox laid his hoof on her shoulder.

"'Skcuse me friend." he said, discontent bubbling up. "Think y'all accident'ly nabbed the ribbon outta this here filly's mane." The pony juggernaut kept walking away. "Ah'd really 'preciate it if you'd give it back." They didn't stop and Pox was driven to show the same devotion to Applebloom as Nurgle does to all his children. He stood up. "Hey!"

The steed and rider paused and turned their heads to him, brimming with anger from being addressed by an inferior.

"Your quarrels aren't worth my time." the rider growled to his mount and dismounted. He landed with the rattle of a hundred years of trophies from his service to Khorne.

"The ribb'n" Pox demanded.

"N'nope." the daemon rumbled. Their voice echoed a fuming anger, also somehow, indifference.

Applebloom knew that sound anywhere and looked on the mechanistic pony, her foalish mind flooded as she recognized his bolted face and short, orange mane. He shifted the front of his torso lower on jacks on the inside of his legs, cocking down one at a time.

Pox stayed up. "Come on now guy. This doesn't have ta git vahlent."

"E'yep!"

They shoved off and rocked the ground with their accelerating stampede. Pox's throat swelled like a toad, gathering a caustic spray to spew on them. They lowered their head to level their bladed horn. Applebloom jumped between them, throwing caution to the wind, and got skewered on their horn. Pox jumped aside as his concoction would burn even a fellow corpse and drank it back. The juggernaut threw their head left and right as the hitchhiker pivoted around and put her face close to his eye.

"Big Mac?" She shouted, trying to sound over his antagonized growling. "Oh please tell me it's you! It's me, Applebloom!"

He became even more enraged and started running into others to get her off, slamming them aside like a freight train, bashing the hitch hiker against flesh and steel. Bones broke, skin tore, but she held onto his head. Eventually he threw his head back and she flew off. She'd accidentally spit in his eye while talking and he shouted obscenities beyond mortal tongues. He took the time to look at the ribbon tangled in his paw. The hope that he'd see any of his family again was crushed a long time ago. He simply took the ribbon because it reminded him of her but he couldn't fathom he'd find her.

"Big bro?" she came closer again, dragging her stumbling, shattered lower body and hugged him at the back, bracing for any more abuse he may give her. He stared at her for a good long time. Her orange eyes, frayed red mane and a distinct yellow hue in her moldy coat. He reached back and picked her up. He couldn't remember the last time his mouth wasn't in a perpetual frown or when he didn't hate everything in existence.

Applebloom brimmed with glee as he started crying and held her close, accidentally snapping more bones. Her sores wept with joy and she put her legs around his neck. The unending storm ravaging his mind seemed to slowly settle and he almost feared the flourishing calmness. The word to describe such a feeling would invoke nightmares in the most violent of the Blood God's warriors. Peace.

"Lil Applebloom." he cried softly.

The reunion hug only lasted until Applebloom's excrement leaked into the cracks of Big Mac's body and burned harshly. He reluctantly let go and she slipped off, leaving her abdominal skin stuck to his chest. Her rotting innards were exposed, making even her sick at the sight. He peeled it off, threw it over the opening and patted it down to make it stick. His claws accidentally sliced more scars across her body. The ribbon was returned to her and he took great joy in helping her tie it back, even with no skill in manestyling and left her mane mostly uncontained.

"Uh... Applebloom." A scaly, feathered filly muttered fearfully with an ecstatic orange pegasus trailing her. "Who's your friend?"

The storm gathered again and Big Mac growled at her like a beast most foul. She stopped moving closer.

"Sweetiebelle! It's Big Mac!"

Seeing Applebloom speak friendly to the mouthy creature settled him. Sweetiebelle glared at the monster before Scootaloo ran forth and shoved her flank in Applebloom's face, squealing in heavenly delight.

"Look! Look! I got it!" her excitement flooded out as she showed off her mark of undivided. "I can't wait for what I het! Maybe sharp teeth, or bull's horns, or-- wah!"

Big mac grabbed her tail and hung her upside down before his burning eyes. Shaking her plot in another's face probably wasn't a good idea. He retracted his claws into his hoof and put the dark slits to Scootaloo's face.

"No, don't!" His sick sister cried, putting her hooves against him.

He let one slowly forward and poked lightly against Scootaloo's cheek, drawing out a small red trickle and a yelp. He grudgingly dropped her head first and Applebloom caught her with her squishy body.

"Whah'd you do that!?" she asked, the brute.

He observed the concern she had for the orange pegasus and the sad looks she gave him. He pulled back all his hoof blades and gave a tiny apologetic gesture.

"Y'all know this guy?" Pox asked and looked at him skeptically. "Think ya can do whut ya want ta these here fillies? Think all that corny hot stuff'll make ya git away with anythi'n? Where's it now huh? You better keep it bottled up cus Nurgle put Applebloom in mah care."

Big Mac abruptly thumped him across the face, dislodging his jaw. It precariously hung by the skin of his left cheek and acidic bile dripped from his open throat.

"Both y'all stop it!"Applebloom scolded him again. "What's gotten inta you Big Mac?"

He couldn't understand what he was doing wrong. Get offended, kill the offender. No big whoop. Tearing his jaw off was just a start. Pox fixed his jaw back up and maggots formed a living chain to loosely hold it.

"Ammah ashk agin. Ya knaw him?" He garbled.

"He's mah big brother!"

Pox was stumped to how a pony juggernaut, a demonically enchanted war machine, was related to a little pus ball. Big Mac put his claw around her to spite him and wore a smug grin.

"Brothers!" A filthy droll jovially bellowed out, grabbing the attention of all. The leader of the warband, a champion of Nurgle, stood with the Khornate leader. He spoke through a completely closed helmet, sprouting elephantine tusks into the air. Several severed hands hung on his belt. "A great blessing of company has been bestowed upon you all!" He took the commander by the wrist and raised it into the air. "The Brass Beast is with us, the scourge of Mordheim!" The nurglite cheers sounded like a horrid hospital, men and ponies gagging and choking on phlegm laughter. "A maggot feast shall be made this evening in celebration of our victory and his arrival. Gather up the carcases and be joyous in your labors! We march for the Empire's black heart!" The marauders expedited their efforts, coordinating zombies to collect bodies, not eat them.

"Ugh. Hayt tha shitty." Pox grumbled. "Rememver mah firsht tahm in tha Shitadel a Jecay. Chew many people, chew crowded."

Big Mac shoved him aside at his master's whistle. Time to go. He didn't hesitate as every second he wasn't there when called, the beast grew angrier. Applebloom tried to follow but he stopped her as bringing her to the murderous figure could end only one way.

"Ya gonna join us tonight?" she asked, seeking some reassurance.

"E'yep" he said back confidently but uncertain in mind.

Pox put his hoof on Applebloom's back and watched her brother walk away. "Come on. We got work ta do." He snapped to Sweetiebelle "Bird Brain, yer start'n the fire tonight."

After garnering a copious number of corpses or the Brass Beast's patience running out, whichever came first, the warband marched again. The tzeentchinas were gone, eradicated by the backfired spell of a sorcerer in the ambush. Sweetiebelle felt isolated, especially with Pox and other Nurglites being harsh to her. As night drew, they used her as a torch, tying her to a rusty, boil bubbling, halberd very tightly despite Applebloom's and Scootaloo's protests, and forcing her to continuously produce flames. She was exceptionally bright, scaring off the nocturnal beasts that lurked in Sylvania's dark forests. This took a toll on her energy and any time she sputtered out, they spat corrosive saliva at her to perk her up again.

When they set up a crudely fortified camp for the evening, as the undead got active at night, they prepared to celebrate the Beast's coming by arranging cadavers in awkward positions and impaling plague zombies on spears to have them flail and squirm in place. Pox took the exhausted light source down and threw her at a large mound of bodies at the center of camp.

"Light em up." he ordered.

She could barely see through the haze of tiredness and used the last of her strength to spit a dull spark onto one of the body's hair. The oils in it quickly caught and she collapsed, fast asleep. Another warrior scooped her up in his huge, filthy claw and tossed her out of the circle like a bar of soap.

"Y'all can't be calli'n it a night already!" Pox said to Applebloom and Scootaloo as they carried Sweetiebelle to the tent they'd share with him.

"No, we're coming back." Scootaloo shouted back against the growing sounds of diseased dancing and revelry.

"Well hurry it up with Bird Brain. We're gonna summun tha plagebearers soon!"

Scootaloo stayed with her extinguished friend and Applebloom went back to join Pox.

"Why you n everypony bei'n so mean ta Sweetiebelle? She didn't no nuthi'n wrong."

"She chose tha wrong god. Reason enough. Tzeentch dun care bout his followers n they dun do nuthi'n for no one but themselves." He scanned his hoof around at the marauders. They came in all shapes and sizes, even women and children were present but all bore the sickly visage of pestilence happily. "We live for each other. We're all, brothers, sisters, family." He ruffled her mane. "Yer tha most important thing to me right now. Ah won't let that bird brain trick ya inta anythi'n."

"She ain't like that. N whut happen'd ta Undivided? We're all spos'd ta be friends."

He thought long and hard. The Everchosen was coming soon and all of Chaos was to unite under the eight pointed star, united in a common cause, to bring the End Times. A nurgling plodded to them and pulled on Applebloom's tail to get her to join the plague dance. It's claws were coated in the most foul substances to curse the air. Its wickedly childish demeanor brought her to trust it and it scratched them both slightly with its claw. She didn't know why Pox was smiling at the burning that quickly intensified in his leg and her back. Soon they could feel every countless disease and disorder Nurgle gave them.

Arthritis, asthma, yellow fever, rabies, scabies, epilepsy, smallpox, diarrhea, necrosis, and a large cancerous growth, pulsating in unison with her plaque encrusted, pus pumping heart. She could feel the maggots wriggling through her body, gorging on what was in her stomach and passing through the many holes and tears in her flesh. She trembled in pain, unable to gain the control to move but Pox got up, shaking and with a wide smile tearing the skin of his face, showing withered bone and inflamed blood vessels.

The tiny daemon clapped and took his hoof, bringing him into the howling ring.

"Be sure ta join in when ya can move!" He let out a howl like a wolf inside a butter churn with a madman at the handle.

The camp became obscured in a fog of flies and the Khornates were in another part, pouring skulls into a massive cauldron of blood for worship. Applebloom lay facing the dance and it was hours before it ended when the zombies fell apart. The people sat round the fire, tossing more on when it started to die down and told stories, and feasted on the dead. All that succulent flesh. She couldn't resist but her affliction rendered her near motionless, just reaching in vain.

She heard sounds that reminded her of when she found Big Mac, the mechanistic grinding of steel and he picked her up by the back of her neck in his teeth. He carried her to the circle and all went quiet save the droning and buzzing of millions of flies, pinging off his body. He shoved Pox over and took a seat as if the spot was reserved for him and leaned Applebloom against him.

"Somethi'n fer mah sis." he growled.

Smiles consumed the staring marauders and the leader ripped out and tossed the intestines from a dead tzeentchian's body. It still had many of its fluids left, blood and natural liquids that made it taste better. It splatted in front of Applebloom but she didn't have the strength to lift it. Instead, Big Mac forked it with his claws and raised it to her.

"Even khornates have a soft spot!" a heretic shouted.

The circle roared with the voices of welcoming and jokes. Even Pox, whose smile died when Big Mac arrived, felt another coming on.

Twilight gently tapped on the closet door, trying her best to be just loud enough to hear but the occupant still squeaked in fear.

"Fluttershy?" She whispered. A short, curious hum whistled out from inside. "Can we come in?"

"We?"

"Yeah. I have a new friend I want you to meet."

There was a long silence. "Ok."

Twilight slowly opened the door and Kivsin and Fluttershy shared terrified looks, each fearing the other's appearance. Twilight nudged him out of his timid trance.

"H-h-hello." he sounded on the edge of panic.

Fluttershy shuffled away. "Hi."

"So..." Twilight mused, "How are your exercises with the Doctor?"

"They're alright." She answered. Through she was trying not to let out any emotion, she was still clearly melancholy.

"Can you maybe control your anger a bit? Any progress there?"

"A little."

"Think you can go out? First time since we got here."

"Not without the Doctor. I just feel safer with him."

"Well Kivsin has a lot of experience with harsh situations. He'll keep you safe."

He had no idea what Twilight was taking about. In Fluttershy's eyes, he was a nightmarish creature. His scars boasted of his worth. She draped her blanket over herself and cautiously walked out with them. Twilight had to reassure her many times as they reached the exit of the complex.

"Wait." Fluttershy said. She lowered the blanket over her eyes. "Ok."

Twilight and Kivsin guided her into the ghoulish urban noise. She felt so many things bump her and shuddered in trying to keep calm. Her hooves sparked as they hit the cobblestone streets. They walked for several blocks and Fluttershy became more and more unnerved by the sounds of screaming, chopping, and daemonic howls. She put her ears down to the sides of her head but the sound echoed like in a seashell.

"Tw-Tw-Twilight, I wanna go back." she whimpered.

"We're almost there. Just hang in there."

The city's clamor faded as they moved into a more closed space. Fluttershy heard Twilight and someone else whispering and her blanket was slowly pulled off.

"You remember Miss Cheerlie, Fluttershy?"

"Mhm." She still held the blanket over her eyes.

"Well don't be afraid, this is still her. Just put down the sheet."

She slowly lowered her woven shield and was met by a hooded, spike laden pony. Faceless and curious, Cheerlie slowly raised her hoof, startling the beast back. She instead brought a skull and held it up to her. Fluttershy became hypnotically fixed on it, like a dog to a ball, following it and eventually snatching it in her hooves. Like a sacred gem, her gaze was inflexibly fixed on it and she petted it, allowing Cheerlie to study her further. She had almost all the makings of the daemonic steeds but lacked the wide, blocky shoulders, bright, flaming eyes, spikes around her joints and spine, and single bladed horn jutting out from her face. Her steel flesh was hot to the touch. Cheerlie ran her hoof through the bleeding mane, and sampled it.

"Not bad." she chirped. "I want a moment alone with her. In the mean time, go into the back room and practice combat techniques with the other student."

"Kivsin, do you know any fighting moves?" Twilight asked.

"No." he answered sheepishly.

"But you were a soldier, weren't you? There's got to be something you remember."

"N-no... I was less. I was just a pirate but where did I go? What did I do? Did I have friends? These scars..." He looked at his artistic mutilations in trepidation. Every action he committed ached greatly. Merely walking to the veil to the other room brought wincing pain with every step. "The witches..." He started scratching himself feverishly and it felt like there were legions of fire ants under his skin.

Twilight squished his cheeks together. "No you weren't. You were so much more. There's a black guardsman in there somewhere and a sparring session ought to bring him out."

He hung his head down in doubt. Twilight pulled aside the curtain of flesh, eager to see the space beyond and a great steel blade came swooping down, nearly cleaving her in half. It stuck solidly in the wood floor and she wheezed in panic at the sweating, light green unicorn with elegant arms and hands, fighting the polearm up.

"Finally!" Lyra breathed with a tone of finally satisfied impatience. She quickly levitated two chalices, pouring with the ether of souls, brought one to herself and gave the other to Twilight. The green glow around it traded for purple and she suspended it away from herself. Lyra thirstily tipped her head back and poured the soul stuff down. "You're not gonna drink?" she said, staring at the unconsumed cup. She reached for it but it floated further away.

"I might." Twilight stood firm. The memory of the intense chills and inability to defend herself from a ravenous Pinkie Pie kept her from indulging.

"Go ahead." Cheerlie approved. "Those are the souls you brought the other day. You said the fever culminated in something, hallucinations, a light. I want you to work until it happens."

Twilight reluctantly threw the drink down her throat, failing to not smile from it's enchanting taste and texture. Lyra grudgingly returned to swinging the halberd around and laughing with her dexterous gifts. The room was full of weapons that looked like they weren't meant for mortal hands and dark armour of giants on one side and a wide open space for practice on the other. Huge swords, axes, spears, and spiked horseshoes were all on display in this demented candy store.

Which tool to try? Which armour to don? Twilight perused the vast collection as far away from Lyra as possible. She spotted an ensemble similar to Dark Elf armour but shaped for a pony.

"Do you remember this?" She asked, hoping for memories to flood back to Kivsin. They didn't.

She slipped the blade-horned helmet over his head and his yellow eyes vanished in the darkness. It took a while for his weakened body to get used to the weight but there was more to come. Bladed leg greaves, bladed wing guards, almost every component had some razor surface and he looked like a swiss army knife. The Druchii followed their god of murder, Khaela Mensha Khaine, very strictly. Killing, murder, is the rule of law and one must be dressed appropriately to be a law abiding citizen.

Twilight took the only helmet that seemed to fit over her extra horns. It had its own horn bolted on, forming a four armed crest with hers. A steel vest and bristling horseshoes gave her the visage of evil.

"How do I look?" The weight of the suit was already getting to her.

"Like...uh...a High Handed Slayer!" He said cautiously.

Content with her protection, she needed a weapon. Tools of maiming and shredding galore enticed and a mace, trailing in barbed chains, she chose. They kept their distance from the axe crazy pony and stood facing one another.

"Ready?" She said, lazily swinging the mace and raising it up.

"Yes." he gulped.

She cocked the mace up another foot and Lyra watched, anticipating a catastrophe. Kivsin assumed a new stance which gave Twilight the impression he was getting more into it. As she brought the mace down, slightly off as not to actually crush her assistant. He stayed put, not doing anything and the mace crashed into the floor.

Nothing? She tapped the side of his helmet with the mace and he flinched.

"You have pretty sucky aim." Lyra said.

Kivsin took off his helmet. "P-perhaps you would like to try again miss."

Twilight put it back on him. "No. Go organize the shields by color or something. I need to think."

Lyra raised her weapon to throw it at him like a javelin. She started to thrust down but the weapon was forcibly lifted from her hands. She turned around to see where it had gone and hit an iron wall. She looked up, confused by the sound of grinding metal and witnessed a giant iron pegasus chewing up the polearm.

Sparks and blood rained down on her and she backed away in terror. Fluttershy wore a painful smile as she tried to absorb several weapons but had reached her limit. She had several bludgeons protrude from her hooves and scanned around at the potential victims. Kivsin hastily built himself a tiny fort out of shields.

"So who wants to spar with me huh!?" she screeched. The culmination of anger management training with the Doctor wasn't enough. No one came forth and her smile slightly faded. "I don't wan to to kill anypony! Just bash your brains in and smear them acrosshh... ffffrrrrr!" She struggled not to just lash out on them and took it slow. "Eenie... meenie... miney DIE!"

The makeshift morningstar came down toward Twilight and she hastily levitated a shield against her. It was easily pierced and taken away. She brought another and it was also ripped apart. She raised a magic shield, a glowing purple dome and watched Fluttershy's wide smile sink.

"Magic? Magic!? No magic! No magic!" She cried agonizingly and repeatedly struck the dome. "Come out here and die the right way!"

With each blow, a shock of pain rang through Twilight's head and the one strike produced a crack. She watched from within her weakening protector, through a growing spiderweb of cracks, at Lyra who was still backing away. She took a spear and the sweat on her arms burst into flames, slowly consuming the shaft of the spear and burning brightest on the tip. She took a number of deep breaths and swirling, tzeentchian tattoo marks on her arms, painting themselves, lowly illuminated. Even she looked on them with surprise and gained greater confidence. She lunged forward and the spear tip flashed, firing a vicious beam of white flame and exploded on the back of Fluttershy's head.

She fell onto the dome and rolled off with molten steel dripping from where the flame struck. Twilight was about to relinquish the shield but took the lull in pounding to repair it and move away as Fluttershy slowly got back up, beyond rage. Countless small bumps elongated to spikes across her body. Her joints swelled, becoming rectangular and sprawling with thorns and a layer of brass closed up around the mark engraved on her chest. Her hooves grew razoring claws. No one could imagine the raging torrent drowning her conscious as she turned to her attacker, frothing red foam.

Lyra threw away the spear and summoned her energy again, unleashing a wide spray of rainbow flame. It consumed Fluttershy as got closer. Agonizing cries spilled from the firestorm and her orange glowing, sagging face broke through. The weapons she'd taken started to fall out by the fires of change and Lyra knew to keep up the hosing. Fluttershy was severely slowed and little by little she lost mass. She was making progress though to strike Lyra and raised her hooves. All the weapons were sprawled behind her and now her body began to melt, slowly dripping onto the floor. The features of her face became indistinguishable. Her feral cries ground to silence and she slowed to a freeze. She looked like a half melted wax statue and Lyra's nose bled heavily. Her arms ached like hell and the searing tattoos took a long time to dissipate. The stifling smoke slowly cleared and Miss Cheerlie sat, clapping at the curtain. "B minus!"

Lyra was dumbfounded and exhausted. "What? What is this thing!?"

"Twilight's friend. B minus. Take it or leave it." she canted.

Lyra snapped to Twilight, pointing a smoking finger. "You brought this? What were you thinking?"

"I... I thought Miss Cheerlie would help." she mumbled and moved closer to the melted pony, their mouth hanging stretched. She looked into her only visible eye, the other being covered. The capillaries were inflamed and it shook, still with rage.

"Well she's in much better condition now!" Lyra said. She wiped her nose and the blood smelled of kerosene. "Frick this. I'm going home."

"Not yet." Cheerlie halted her. "Pop quiz, tutoring room, now."

"How can we have a quiz after this?" Twilight probed, discarding her sweaty armor. "Fluttershy needs help!"

"Like this. Now."

They left the room and Twilight looked back at Fluttershy and Kivsin who was still quivering in his fortress.

The tutor's room was rather small. Eight desks were arranged on the arrows of a star on the floor. Cheerlie sat herself at a desk at the front of the room and her students took the seats with scrolls on them. She lit a slow burning fuse leading to a small amount of warpstone under their desks. They knew this couldn't be good and wasted no time getting to the first question.

Which cult was indirectly responsible for The Sundering of Ulthuan? No multiple choice? Darn. Twilight answered to the best of her ability, The Cult of Slaanesh. Her thoughts swirled with what was in the other room and by the time her slow progress got half way through, Lyra had already finished and the fuse was just reaching both their desks. She hastily wrote down what she could gather from skimming the questions. Magnus the Pious, Engra Deathsword, The Slayer of Kings, Praag.

The last question struck like a ton of bricks. What was the name of The Lord of the End Times' daemonic steed? She glanced at the teacher who was reviewing Lyra's quiz. The word "was" reassured her and she put down Dorghar. She skittishly left her desk as the fuse neared the powder pile.

"It begins." Cheerlie said with interest and felt her forehead. Very warm. In fact, beads of sweat were gathering. Twilight broke through her stress and noticed an intense chill and slight shivers running through her.

"What begin-" Lyra was interrupted by a couple of loud bangs and the desks they were sitting in being lodged in the ceiling, black smoke scars under them.

Miss Cheerlie Spoke as if two explosions hadn't just happened. "Some kind of reaction Twilight has to consuming souls. You're welcome to stay and watch if you change your mind."

"Only to watch her squirm for bringing that monster and missing a slave at point blank range." Lyra chuckled.

"He used to be a great soldier." Twilight struck back.

"Sure, and the pony I'm having to look after isn't a stuck up, high maintenance lightning rod!" A special thought crossed her mind. "Oh! Can I do the thing!?"

"What thing?" Twilight inquired.

"Watch." she said eagerly.

Lyra curled up two fingers, keeping the pointer and middle fingers extended, one on top of the other and thumb extended up. She pointed to a skull trinket on Cheerlie's desk and after adjusting aim for a second, slammed her thumb down and a fire beam shot from her fingers, exploding the skull completely.

"Oooooohhhh!" she blared, mimicking a horn. "Who needs a pistol now! This is why I serve."

"Now..." Mis Cheerlie said annoyed, swiping the ash off her desk, "...go clean up the other room."

"Why?"

"Because there are several damaged weapons, a half melted juggernaut, and a slave who likely wet himself."

"Guuugh!" Lyra moaned.

The task to clean the arms room was great as the weapons were melted to the floor and Fluttershy remained frozen. Twilight slowly approached Kivsin who had a small puddle under him.

Twilight slowly lifted the shields away and, not knowing what to do, resorted to rocking him like a large baby in her wings and showing him Fluttershy was stopped.

"Just get back to sorting ok?"

He nodded and she put him down.

"I don't think I asked your name yet." she said to Lyra.

She snapped her fingers and produced a blowtorch's flame. "Lyra. You?"

"Twilight Sparkle. Is there anything I can do?"

Sparks erupted from a sword she started cutting off the floor. "I don't know. Cut that loose." She pointed to Fluttershy.

"She's not a thing."

"Whatever."

Luna was startled and jumped back from the balcony at the sound of her sister springing awake in cold sweat in the bedchamber.

"Tia, what is the matter?"

"It's... that dream. This is the second time." she yawned, pressing her forehead with a hoof.

"The day we faced Discord?"

"Yes. The figure in the mirror he was talking to. Do you remember? A great black, winged monster. He applauded us after petrifying Discord. I don't want to recall it, please. Trying to make the moon set again?" Celestia asked , trying to lighten the mood.

"Ah yes..." Luna said shyly. "I feel the two monns of this world." Mannslieb and Moorslieb. "The days here, they happen on their own. What makes time go by without magic?"

She spied one of the Emperor's messenger falcons approaching and stepped aside for it to swoop in and open the scroll on the stand, as was its training. Franz requested their presence at noon to welcome a High Elf expeditionary force and war council. The Elves had a reputation for appearing when and where they wanted without prior notice. They think themselves so high and mighty.

"You might want to get some sleep Luna. You will have to be up again soon." Celestia said.

Luna blew a disgruntled sigh and proceeded to her bed. A steady migraine intensified and she paused to address it.

"Do not despair. The Witch Hunters are scouring this palace for anypony or thing that may have something to do with what happened."

The Sun's light started to create a purple, then orange glow that disappeared in the always present clouds. Once in a while there would be a beam of heavenly light that shone down, but only for a moment. They just followed where the greatest amount of light was piercing the clouds to tell the time of day. Celestia performed her duties and desires around the palace, reading and responding to letters from nobles and lords, aiding the witch hunters who had already found five more noctrals disguised as statues and four even further extreme humans in the the Lunar Cult, a state funded religious branch, and bearing the weight of a heavy ensemble of solar based armour. She didn't understand why such overdone decoration was necessary for her and Luna. Although masterfully crafted, all the sunbeams, embroidered suns, and its hot, stifling interior seemed overplayed until the Emperor explained.

Soft, compassionate rule never worked in the Old World. Sigmar Heldenhammer united the tribes of men into the Empire through fire and sword and ruled until his mysterious "departure", after which he was declared a god. In order to make sure future emperors wielded the same authority, the state declared the emperor was directly chosen by Sigmar though the elections of the Elector Counts of the Empire's many provinces. Order and purity against Chaos is maintained by the church of Sigmar and militarized religious orders. So the princesses must take on a godly visage to instil divine fear and reverence and keep subjects faithful and free of heresy. It was also good exercise, wearing all that armor, builds up muscle strength.

As the afternoon approached, Luna lethargically emerged in a similarly highly decorated shell. The obscured light of day stung her eyes and she explored the palace more. There was always a new room or corridor to discover, some special aspect she never noticed. Gothic architecture was indeed unique but by its very nature, also grim and dark. High, arched ceilings boasted a somewhat disturbing and heroic array of art. In one painting, ponies were fleeing the daemons of Chaos aboard ships, carried by the hand of Sigmar under the waves. They came from an unknown world beyond the coasts and the hideous amalgamations slaughtered them as they disembarked and survivors took behind the armies of the Empire that awaited the onslaught. Franz was on his giant griffon, Deathclaw, at the forefront. The princesses were depicted as gods, descending from the sky, through a break in the dark clouds. Celestia was engulfed in the flames of the sun and Luna surrounded by the evening mist. The daemons nearest them, though in reality incapable of fear, fled in panic.

How all this had to be fabricated. Fear and faith were the only things holding the world together.

Upon turning a corner, Luna saw four soldiers were stationed in front of one door and a witch hunter stepping out for a moment. Muffled cries echoed inside and the hunter was spattered with some blood. The witch hunters are a ruthless force of purity. Uncompromising, fanatical to subtle insanity, and have no qualms about killing innocents. They believe there is no such thing as innocence, only degrees of guilt. The guards knelt as Luna got close and the man stopped stroking his pointed beard, trying to figure out what to do concerning the individual in the room, and bowed his upper body.

"Rise all." Luna said firmly. "May I ask as to the nature of your work, faithful templar?"

"Justice for the mare of the moon your highness." The sheer tone of his voice sounded of piousness.

"We are quite curious to see."

"Of course."

He passed his hand into the room and followed Luna inside. A noctral was clamped to something of a surgical table. A large vice kept his mouth forced open and his cheeks had just begun to tear. All his bloody molars were on another counter and two other figures in doctor's clothing, including beaked masks with herbs at the end were readying their cruel tools for another round at him. Luna was severely off put but kept composure.

"This is the only one we have captured alive." her escort said. "All the others bite a tablet hidden in their mouths or slay themselves by other means."

One doctor maneuvered a gripper far in back of the bat pony's mouth and extracted a tiny green disk. The other removed the clamp and his jaw snapped shut. He agonizingly hummed and was elated to see Luna.

"I have seen the face of god..." he crooned.

"Speak only when spoken to heretic." the hunter scolded. "Do you now confess thy sin and seek salvation in death?"

"I shall not confess for I follow the true faith!" he blasted back and turned to Luna. "Your holiness, I implore thee. Unleash upon these nonbelievers!"

The hunter put both hands on the table and loomed over him. "Her darkness will not serve the vampires."

"She will see how she has been oppressed by the false princess. And when she does, the undead will burn the Empire to the ground."

"Heresy!" the holyman roared and gave the prisoner a solid punch with large brass knuckles. His nose steadily ran bloody and he spat out two more fangs. "Repent, monster! Why have your kind come?"

"You... are not worthy... to hear the brilliance of Manfred Von Carstein." the bleeding creature sputtered.

The hunter reached for one of the three flintlock pistols on his person but his hand was trapped in a blue glow. Luna looked sincerely at the victim.

"Would you speak for us?" she asked with compassion.

He was speechless for a moment as god spoke. "I...I- I... we... want to free you from this lowly state. Free you from under the hoof of Celestia. Nightmare Moon is the true you and the night is destined to rule forever."

Luna became cross. "Nightmare Moon is ours to control and I love my sister. I was being selfish the first time. Everypony requires the balance of night and day or all falls out into disarray." He did not question his deity.

"My lady." a servant said outside. "Celestia awaits you at the carriages. It is time to meet the elves."

Luna left the noctral dismissed and the doctors descended on him. She followed the guide through the halls she'd gotten lost in once or twice. The palace was quite smaller than that of the Emperor but still massive, comparable to the palace in Canterlot. Outside, it was a bastion of stone and steel. Gigantic stained glass windows formed the picture of Sigmar's twin tailed comet, streaking across a solar eclipse.

From atop the hill the palace was situated on, much of Altdorf could be looked on. The buildings grew high above the streets and looked more disheveled, stacked atop one another the further from the palace one looked. Closer, were great complexes, banners fluttering from the roofs, housing the wealthy, lords, and the high ranking of the Empire's huge, semi professional military. The College of Magic, in the distance, slowly emitted a wide array of colored smoke from the students working within and the Cathedral of Sigmar stood as a multi-spired block with its gold dome, always surrounded by the teeming masses seeking hope in an always desperate world. Along with the College of Engineering, and the Emperor's palace, these monoliths dominated the skyline.

Celestia awaited Luna at the bottom of the stairs, a good hundred fifty steps down the hill. Their carriages were mostly enclosed and heavily reinforced against the tainted ones who walked the streets. Where the majority lived was prolific with heretics, and murderous cults, aside from the cults to Sigmar and the princesses the government supported. This made the carriages too heavy to fly. The pullers had their eyes removed and lids sewn shut. The reasoning for this could not possibly make sense and they were guided by forcibly trained pegasus foals in angelic skirts. Fifty elite bodyguards surrounded the convoy in full plated gold painted steel and black iron. They sported a large spike that stuck from their helmets to headbutt foes and a spear or halberd fixed to the side of their suits, pointing straight forward.

In battle, the tactic for earth ponies with fixed polearms was to simply run. Run at the enemy and don't stop till your heart gives out which was usually two seconds after impact with orks or chaos beasts.

"What kind of twisted parade is this sister?" Luna asked.

"I do not know." She was equally distraught. "But they do what must be done. The sooner we set off, the sooner we can leave this in the street."

They entered their respective carriages. Celestia's was very bright and the captains of her bodyguard, Swift Sword and Thunder Fire, were in with her to protect. Luna was much better able to see in the dark and was her carriage dark.

"Could we pull back the thicker veil please."

One of the guards pulled away the more dense curtain and the thinner one was of a material where the occupants could see out but those outside couldn't see in. Once both were settled, the lead guard levitated up an ornate whistle.

"By the left...March!"

The beating thunder of heavy armour rattled the carriages ornaments and the pullers lurched forward. As they descended the hill, the cityscape rose around them and they got a true perspective to the scale of the buildings. The living blocks hid the sun and the only sky was directly above the streets, a straight sliver down the mddle. The pony nobles, few though there were, enjoyed the best their money could buy. The best clothes, and guaranteed the ripest fruits and vegetables where the lower class was at the mercy of silver tongued merchants, so manipulative they could sell paintings to the blind. Mares waved handkerchiefs from windows and there was the murmur of reverent prayer at the carriages' passing.

"Buckle up!" the lead sounded off and the ring of guards shrank and tightened. The sprawls awaited.

Further down, the majority was starved of light. Living blocks, little more than plaster filling the open spaces between wooden skeletons, rose so high and hung so far over the streets, those on the streets might believe they were underground. Only at high noon would the sun be overhead, gracing them for only an hour or two through the clouds. Pegasi tended to live on the roofs, bringing earthbound friends to see the remnants of the sun for free and charging massively for strangers. Huge sewers and gutters ran open, full of foul waste that putrefied the air. A small amount of the stink penetrated the reinforced carriage doors. Crowds grew thick and the guards pushed their way through. They shoved aside or downright killed those that couldn't move in time. They came under attack by a shower of flowers, rice, and mad, insane praise. The princesses couldn't see much beyond the troops and didn't want to.

This went on as long as they were in the equine district and finally caught a break where humans became more ubiquitous. Thy didn't receive the same insane praise but were still bombarded with plants as the allies of Sigmar.

"What happened to the subjects?" Luna sighed sorrowfully to captain Nightshade. She stared out the window at the impoverished thousands. "What happened to the noctrals? They used to be so loyal in Equestria."

"Simple madness milady. They are heretics now, so they must die." he said grimly.

"There is not a one that remains sane?" She pressed again. Nightshade fidgeted a bit. He did not want to suggest god was unknowing but Luna saw through him. "Is there?"

He saw she now wanted an answer. "I... I thought you knew princess."

"Knew what?" she pressured him on.

"The Lunar Cult is rife with them. They are loyal to you, not Nightmare Moon."

Her spirit was lifted to heaven at this. 'We must see them immediately!' she thought. The Emperor beckoned though and her fire was smothered. "Tonight. We must meet them."

"I'll make the arrangements at the headquarters as soon as possible milady." Nightshade acknowledged.

The Emperor's palace was within sight, a bulwark of stone, towers, and imperial calligraphy. Several crocked chimneys jutted up and wood struts supported less important outcroppings and platforms. The gates to a walled off military courtyard were opened to the convoy. Many a parade had been staged there as tens of thousands would march and rapturous music would play before the legion was sent off to die on the frontier.

At least a dozen servants of the Emperor received the caravan at the bottom of the palace's stairs and swiftly opened the carriage doors with gloved hands. A few beams of sunlight shone on the palace, signifying to all below that this was a truly holy place. The princesses hesitated before attempting to climb the extensive stairs in heavy armor but they must. The pegasus foals raised the trailing veils behind them as they ascended. Forty men pulled the giant doors open and they entered with Captain Thunder Fire and Nightshade.

"Sister," Lina started. "...what do you suppose an elf looks like?"

"I suppose they'd be taller than men but I'm really not sure."

Another guide led them through the tall, wide corridors, through the empty throne room, up more dreaded stairs, and before a golden door with a carving of Ghal Maraz with the flames of Sigmar's comet raging down its handle. The guide departed as only those of sufficient title could even touch the passage.

"I suppose we open it ourselves." Celestia said, watching them walk off.

They magically pushed on each flap of the door, great effort it took, and came into the palace's war room. A vast collection of war plans, arms designs and maps. Several generals of men and elves circled a table, talking about the countless battles across the Empire and the Land of Chill. Upon seeing the princesses, the generals stood but only the men saluted. The Emperor was enthroned on the grandest seat and an Archmage, the most powerful of elven wizards sat by him. The thin wrinkles of aging, which took some hundreds of years to start to catch him, lined his solemn face. His beautiful crescent staff lay across his lap. The elves were a few inches taller than men on average, donned in flowing, gleaming silver armour with sharp tipped shoulders. Between the plates were silky cloths and gowns. They all had a conceited, almost contemptuous gaze.

"Thank you for joining us princesses." the Emperor welcomed. "Our talks can now begin." He motioned his hand to two regal benches, side by side in an empty place at the table.

Thunder Fire and Nightshade helped them around, over small piles of books and scrolls. The elves stared at them with some dislike. A horse, royalty? Absurd!

Franz took a look at the seven foot solder by the Archmage. He had long, wide arms and hands, inhuman in size and his suit was decorated in the dragon insignias and emblems that were common in elven culture. The fingers of his segmented gloves tapered to sharp points. He wore a blue silk cloth over his nose and mouth, the rest of his face was blackened in his helmet's shadow, and a blue robe hung down to his ankles under the steel.

The Emperor leaned to the mage and said with great curiosity, "I believed they were far larger than this and did not need such protection."

"He is still quite young." the mage said back, turning his head slightly to him. "But very unique."

"How so? What is his name?" Celestia asked with equal inquisitiveness as Franz.

The mage hesitated whether or not to even talk to the animal. "We renamed him. His old name was far to base." He glanced at Celestia. The indignity. "His name is Thrakian."

Down the soldier's back, his armour rippled and he fidgeted but remained facing the door across the table.

"May we see his face?"

"He is one of his kind. With all due respect, I simply wish you not."

Thrakian looked at the Celestia, interested in the request but respected the mage. She was a slight nervous as he was not staring for a long time at her with unseen eyes.

"If we can begin." the wizard insisted. Thrakian returned his gaze to he door.

"Let's." the Emperor said. The generals lowered again and a dozen imperial scribes readied their quills. "For two thousand and five hundred years since the founding of The Empire by the Sigmar the Divine, men and elves have fought side by side against the unholy darkness." If by 'side by side' he means 'show up whenever they feel like it and leave whenever, even in the middle of battle' then yes. "This day we have in our midst, the rulers of a race, previously unknown to this Old World and delivered to safety by the Almighty. Princess Celestia, Princess Luna, we will need your wisdom in these matters as well as the elves."

"We will aid you, holy Emperor, however we can." Celestia nodded.

"It is our first war council in two thousand years but we might still know a thing or two." Luna said heftily.

The mage rolled his eyes skeptically and quickly straightened up again when Karl Franz turned to him.

"The presence of such an esteemed group of the Elves of Ulthuan is an omen of terrible events to transpire. I implore as to your purpose."

He stood and firmly planted his staff on the ground. "The shrine of Asuryan has signaled the Arch Enemy has renewed his bloody march. The second Storm of Chaos is upon us." Instantly, fear could be felt on the air as if Morr, god of death himself entered the room. He released his staff, leaving it standing upright with no support and placed his hand on the map that covered the table in a region far to the northeast, on the very edge of the Old World. "There are few ways south and the Dark Lands are not an option for him due to Orkoid dominance. He will gather the Chaos Dwarfs, ensuring exit from the Northern Wastes and march on Kislev. Khaine knows how long they can hold him. By order of Phoenix King Finubar the Seafarer, we have come to stop him. Our force is forty five thousand strong and encamped fifty miles north of Carroburg. The fate of the Old World hangs by a thread yet again and we are here to save you."

Self importance at its finest. Though the Empire was truly on the verge of defeat in the first storm. The Everchosen had literally backhand slapped Valten, the Exalted of Sigmar across the apocalyptic battlefield and the only thing that saved the world was the ork warboss Grimgor Ironhide, headbutting him in his unholy family jewels. Of course the Empire credits his defeat to their armies and courage.

"Your assistance is indeed appreciated." Franz said somberly.

"It is not all your highness. We have also brought five thousand of the princesses' race as well."

Celestia sprang up. "Is this true? More survived?"

'Unfortunately' the mage thought. "Yes. They call themselves the Crystal Ponies. They were lost in the Warp for some days where the majority perished before reemerging in the province of Lothern. King Finubar provided asylum and in return they would share their skills and magic, especially the crystal heart. It renders their bodies strong as crystal itself and after exposure, when wounded..." He reached under his robe and laid on the table a crystallized pony's lower jaw. "We have done our best to create a prosthetic for their princess Mi Amore Cadenza."

"Princess Cadence is with you?" Celestia's anxiousness was peaking.

"She is. Under escort in the elven district in this city. She did not want to come and I move on."

The Emperor added his input on the WAAAGH!!! and the mage warned the Chaos horde may subjugate them, adding the boyz of the WAAAGH!!! to their already colossal legions. The deliberations consisted of the human marshals from all different provinces, Middenland, Ostermark, and many others, shuffling figures around on the map, forming strategic plans to wither the hordes and the elves scolding them for incompetent strategies. Which was superior though? The engineering and gunpowder technologies of The Empire, their marriage culminating in the Steam Tank, or the skill and experience of the elves who had spent seven thousand years battling Chaos? Thunder Fire and Nightshade tried to make their input but were almost completely dismissed and were only heeded when Luna joined them. Franz advised Celestia to prepare for a campaign across the Empire to rally support and call back Shining Armor from Ostermark to Castle Reikguard. She went further, saying he should be able to see his wife again.

Thrakian suddenly stiffened and grunted in pain as the back of his armor jumped up.

"Breath." the Archmage said sternly.

He slowly inhaled and exhaled. the bulges sank down and thin green smoke streamed out from under his bandana. "I felt it again teacher." His voice was young for his size, almost childish. "Another surge of Chaos energy. Southeast, far away."

"Twilight, Twilight focus!" Miss Cheerlie demanded, slapping her across the face. Drinking the soul was finally bearing results, painful results. Her body was pale as a ghost and radiated burning heat, boiling off her sweat as she shivered and was extremely out of it. "What do you see?"

Every feature of the room started sagging, melting. The corpses laughed and screamed and performed depraved acts, macabre dances, tearing each other limb from limb, and clawing at Twilight's body. The twisted faces grew out of the walls, cackling and howling. She hunched over, coughing violently and sprays of blood splattered onto scrolls and the floor. The thirst was overwhelming and she tried to bite the nonexistent corpses ripping her apart. Her insides felt frozen solid even with her temperature quickly rising.

Memorable heavy footsteps and a blowing wind around the corner drained whatever blood was left in her. The dead retreated as Archaon came around. Twilight backed up until she hit the wall but was too dizzy to notice to obstruction.

"What is it!?" Cheerlie shouted. No response, just more 'No! No! Get away!'

"She explode yet?" Lyra called out from the training room.

"Almost."

Like a show she couldn't miss, Lyra rushed in and was eager to see Twilight lose her mind. Archaon looked far different. A bronze helmet with void black eyes and a piercing eye in the forehead, titanic horns and armour of black and red trim. He drew his sword, the Slayer of Kings. Within it was bound the soul of Khorne's greatest Bloodletter, U'zhul the Skulltaker.

"Stand."

She instinctively stood, feeling like she remembered the blade from somewhere. She had once only been waist height compared to him but now she could look him straight in the eyes. He tapped the sword on her in different areas and she showed him her mutated features. Extra horns that had been receding with her worsening condition, furless hooves, blood red eyes, and the Eternally Burning Mark of Chaos on her face, shifting to her flank and devouring the stars of her cutiemark. His thunderous chuckling sent her reeling again and her suffering peaked.

Her fur and skin smoked and hissed. Soon, it burned off in cinders, cracking piece by piece and her mane rose, waving like flames, then she burst. A brilliant orb of flame erupted from her, vaporizing the aberration and the remnants of her bloody hide were plastered to the walls and floor. Lyra manipulated the flames to avoid Miss Cheerlie and herself and was disappointed there was still a pony sitting there. A huffing, bright yellow pony, blood trickling from her mouth. Twilight's mane and tail were an angry flame, her whole body emitted a campfire's light and warmth. She felt oddly fantastic and outrageously thirsty. The taste of her own black blood was sickening and thirst was absolutely overwhelming. She sprang to Fluttershy and her bleeding mane for sustenance but it was dry, having been boiled clean.

"Yeah about her..." Lyra nervously shrugged.

Twilight pushed Lyra aside, her mind quickly deteriorating. "Blood. Blood! BLOOD!... BLOOD!!" She blew the front door open and gazed upon the buffet of blood and souls, hundreds of denizens with their delusions of grandeur. She threw herself into the crowd and clasped her jaws onto the first body they found, draining them to a husk in a second. This disturbance did not go unnoticed and the crowd immediately fell apart into a frenzied free for all of maiming, killing, rape, and pillage. Even Lyra and Miss Cheerlie joined in the slaughter, one firing her fire pistol hand and the other whipping chains and chanting to the dark gods for many kills.

Five, six, seven, eleven, it was not enough. The blood craving only got worse and Twilight started a spell to finally satiate her hunger. What happened next could only be described as a horrific storm of lightning and thunder, striking all those in a wide area around her, replacing their bodies with a red mist settling on piles of clothes, armour and ashes. Metal fixtures sparked and exploded as the lightning struck them, fried bodies lay strewn about the street and the blood flowed to her through the cracks and fissures. It flooded into her, enough to satisfy a khornate champion for at least eleven minutes. The last drops fed her and she spied, not the barbecued corpses, but the hundreds of souls, sweet, sweet souls. The calmed circle around her closed quickly as more rioters rushed to the fight and she hastily gathered all she could, many dozens and stole back to Cheerlie's hovel.

Animalistically she fed on mouthfuls of the orderves, gulping down several at a time. The screaming of their souls rang like music, bells that produced the finest melody. When all were consumed, she finally relaxed. Her hoofsteps stopped branding the floor as she cooled and spun around, trying to look at the plume of fire where her tail used to be and patted her head to find her mane. She found none, only more flames. What happened? this question played a million times in her thoughts.

"Daemonkind." Miss Cheerlie said fascinated with her transformation. She supported Lyra as she bled and one of her deformed feet was cut wide open. Twilight looked at Cheerlie with a million question look. "I feel it from you, see it in you. No wonder your soul was already dark."

"What are you talking about?"

Miss Cheerlie let go of Lyra, leaving her to stumble and trip into the classroom and scatter scrolls. "This is the true you. The energy of the Gods given form."

"That's not right. It just a side effect." Twilight refused. "I've never done anything to hurt anypony when I was normal. This is all just Chaos trying to drive me crazy!"

"Aren't we all already? Who was it you saw?"

"Archaon."

Cheerlie was distraught as Twilight went on. The capture of her and her friends, being in His presence, how she didn't want to be part of his madness, all piled on stress.

"Now I just want to go home."

The smell of fungus filled the air from an unknown source. Miss Cheerlie recognized the stench and brusquely picked up Twilight. "Can you fly?"

"N-no." She sniveled.

Cheerlie slapped her again. "Get it together. Have the slave teach you. Never thought I would say something like that. Get Fluttershy back to normal and throw weapons at her whether she wants it or not."

"What was with making her angry before?" Twilight rebuked. "You said you would help her."

"I have. It is her duty to Khorne to kill, to spill blood for him. She's better that way and we'll need her that way to fight."

"Fight who?"

"The WAAAGH!!!"

"They're here?" Twilight asked fearfully.

"They will be, soon. Enrage Fluttershy anyway you can."

Is she kidding? Make Fluttershy berserk again. If she was though, it would be a huge advantage in the coming battle.

The half melted shell was still fixed on the wall. Drops of blood fell from her eyes and she moaned through her sealed mouth in utter remorse. Twilight quietly came behind her and looked up the wall of arms and armor. She tilted Fluttershy back with her magic, snapping and ripping up floorboards stuck to the juggernaut's legs. She squeaked in fright and Twilight, to the one who hated being mad, thrust her face into the wall. The crash felled some articles from the and Fluttershy wailed "Why?" Twilight did it again, harder, whispering "sorry" each time. Fluttershy started rumbling and holding back her despair, something that had to be broken. The dent in the wall got deeper and larger and more objects rained down. Fluttershy's body started reforming with her ballooning rage and absorbed the metal gear into her.

The last pound ripped through the wall and her head was stuck inside. The equipment splashed into her like water and the final daemonic features came in. A massive blade grew, replacing her nose and she cut her head free. Twice her original size, she faced Twilight who thought "Now what?"

"Now who are you?" Fluttershy thundered. She extended chains from her claw and snapped them at Twilight, ensnaring and pulling her up before her smoking, smile torn face. She dropped Twilight into her lap and held her there with the other claw, grinding the palm back and forth on her head and pulling her skin. Bashing her face in didn't just break her in the prefered way but it was better than having Twilight's skin peeled off and body chopped up. Fluttershy's pupils were shrunk to pinpricks and her teeth were spiky and spinning, a meat grinder. The warmth of Twilight's fire brought her into a nurturing embrace and Fluttershy petted her like she would Angel but her hard paw made it oh so painful. Dare Twilight speak and risk angering the beast with herself in its grasp? No. "No monsters here. I've never felt SO RELAXED!" she screamed. Her eye twitched.

Miss Cheerlie came in and facehoofed at them. "Fluttershy, could you put her down please?" Her smile died and she dropped her flaming pet on the floor. "Twilight, take the slave onto the roof and give him this." Twilight caught a soul and held Kivsin who was cowering again. A black cloud engulfed them and they imploded. Cheerlie looked back to Fluttershy. "What am I going to do with you?"

"Take me back to the apartment?" 'Please oh please oh please.'

"No. Do you have anything that makes you angry, a pet peeve?"

"Not Peeve but I had a bunny, Angel. The only thing wrong he ever did was when I tried to get him to eat lunch but he wanted this big salad. I did my best but I was missing just one piece." Growling snuck into her voice. "A single cherry. This little, insignificant part and he wouldn't eat it." She put on a deep frown and her eye spasmed, looking off in all different directions. Angrier and angrier she became. "Does it really make a difference? Just because this one little red dot isn't there, you get to just throw the whole thing away and make me do it over? 'Oh look at me. I'm Angel. I rule this house and own Fluttershy, the only thing keeping me protected from the monsters in the Everfree Forest. I always get what I want and if I don't, I can just bitch slap her to do it again!' Who cares if there isn't a cherry!? It's still a huge salad you fickle fucking RAT!"

Hearing Vinyl lambast Octavia many times taught her some "anger release" words.

"At a girl'" Miss Cheerlie thought. "Remember everything."

Author's Note

Build ramps of the bodies of your comrades to reach the ramparts. Fill the moat with our corpses. Bring down the walls with the weight of the dead. - Arbaal the Undefeated

Chapter 14: Match Made in Hell

"Wh-wh- who are you!?" Kivsin gasped. The hold of the burning unicorn was only very warm despite their whipping, orange and yellow mane and tail. He pushed himself away and ran for the edge of the roof and readied to jump but couldn't open his wings. He never could.

"Kivsin, it's me, Twilight!" She caught him as he jumped, wings or not, and fought him to stop panicking. She enveloped him in her wings, bit down on the preexisting holes in his neck and he froze in fear. Her glaring, bright red eyes pierced him as her muzzle brushed against his chin. She steadily let go when he appeared to calm down.

“Master… I-I’m sorry!” He cowardly backed away.

“Don’t be. I can’t quite stomach this either.”

“You… you look, impressive.”

His docile nature didn’t make her feel any better. “Thanks. So uh, flying. Do you think you can teach me?”

He sweat bullets but could not refuse his owner. “I suppose I could.”

Kivsin tried to open his wings again but the bones locked up. Every joint was bent backward and the skin was stretched where it shouldn't be. She took a wing and, judging by her knowledge of wing anatomy, resolved to simply pull hard, snapping and popping, and all the bones shifted back into place like an intricate lock. He screamed shortly and held it back, biting his lip just short of making it bleed. He beat his wing like it was on fire. Before he could protest, Twilight yanked on the other, playing another melody of crackling bones and he stretched them to wear out the pain. The rolling of those joints that had for years been still and unused felt strange and uncomfortable. The sliding of his once removed flesh against his muscles felt disgusting.

"Now up!" Twilight threw him in the air and like instinct, his wings snapped open and he caught himself in a hover.

“Thank you, master!” He was so enthralled by his returned ability, he threw his forelegs around her and suddenly felt sick when he realized what he did. She returned the gesture before he could lose it.

“You’re welcome! Now how many times do I have to tell you, it’s okay? An accidental bump, if you’re hurt, you don’t have to act like I’m going to kill you if you need me. You’re more than just some slave. You’re my friend and I’m there for you.” She set him down and pretended to be formal. “Now if you please, my mentor.”

The residual toxins in Kivsin’s head burned as he was thought hard about what she said.

Flying? How do I describe it? It just happens. It’s natural. Kivsin thought. “Well, uh, what do we have to work with? Could I see your wings?”

They whooshed wide open and she displayed them proudly, at least until they burst into flames to match the rest of her. Any interest she had in her form went up in smoke. These warp flames proved not actually hot. Chaos would say ‘Physics? What’s that?’ He had to start showing her the mechanics somewhere and cautiously rolled her wing in a circle.

“You must feel the pattern of up, forward, and diagonally down and back. Can you feel it?”

Twilight giggled the whole time. “Oh I feel something.” She repeated the motions. “Alright, up, forward, and back.” She accidentally slapped Kivsin back, helped him up and found his skin like a wrongly worn jacket. The impact pushed his loose fitting hide up, the mouth hole over his eyes, and the red, sinew of his ears stuck out the eye holes.

“Do not sully your hooves on the likes of me.” He muffled through his coat. Agonizingly packing his ears back and drawing his face down, he corrected his pelt like a hoodie. There was still some red under his eyes and his mouth was slightly askew.

“Sorry.” Twilight apologized.

“It is not your fault, master. I-I should not have been in your path.”

“I’ll just get back to practice.”

“Of course.”

__________________________________________________________________________________

The sun’s rays peered through the clouds as the regal sisters climbed the long stairs to the palace. The talks with the elves disintegrated into arguing over the most trivial of military concepts. Such was normal of his generals as Franz explained. Luna was inexplicably wrought with sleepiness. Overall, nothing gained but dialogue opened between the races of men, elves, and ponies.

"Thank you for accepting me as a guest your majesties." Thrakian said. His silver armor faintly reflected the sky and environment. A Hoeth swordmaster, was sent from the elven district of the city to make sure he doesn't 'decay' culturally from interacting with ponies, these lesser creatures.

"We are honored to have such an esteemed warrior like you." Celestia canted. "Your clothes speak volumes of your experience with dragons. Tell me, what are they like in Ulthuan?"

The precisely forged silver insignias on his suit represented 'sun dragon', the youngest classification. Dragon riders had to be especially careful with the hot temper of their creatures, else they be burned in the saddle.

"I can assure you they are far more powerful than the kind you described in Equestria. Rare as Morrslieb turning red, they're large enough to shatter fortress gates. They have claws that can slice through stone…” He flexed his large, sharp hand. “and they can breathe so much more than just fire. Ice, lightning, acid, poison gas. They are much thinner though, like stick bugs with big mouths."

"Are you raising a young dragon at home?" Celestia asked.

He looked to the sky wishfully, "No your majesty.” He wrung his hands. “Are the Elements of Harmony among your retinue?"

“How do you know about the Elements of Harmony?” Luna yawned. She barely had the strength to raise her head.

He got a bit tense. Even the swordmaster gave him a questioning look. “Yes, how do you know?”

Thrakian paused on a step and requested with wavering firmness. “Your highness, permission to remove my helmet.”

The Swordmaster scowled and gently held a strange gold whistle, shaped like a fierce dragon. “You understand you are to wear it at all times when out of doors and around those of importance?”

Stupid rules. He ignored him. “It was your previous request earlier, your highness. I would be more than happy to oblige. It would certainly answer your question.”

Curiosity be damned, the elf raised the whistle to his lips and threatened to blow it.

“Oh just take it off!” the brain-dead Luna said.

“While he is here, our will is supreme.” Celestia ruled. “Off with it.” The elf put away the whistle. “What was that whistle supposed to do?”

“Discipline.”

Thrakian proceeded to unhook the base of his helmet. “Every day, all day, I have to wear this and it is suffocating.”

Celestia was surprised to see overlapping, purple scales covering his skin and green scale bands across the front of his neck and large jaw. Flaps of green hide flexed up from the center of his neck in an animalistic display as his helmet was lifted off and crested atop the center of his head. Green almond shaped eyes looked on Celestia as a gentleman with a small child, waiting behind them to burst forth if the elf were gone.

“Your holiness, do you recognize me?”

The sun goddess’ mind was clogged but managed, “Y-yes. Spike. My goodness, how old are you now?”

“Nineteen, but you haven’t aged a day.” He responded cheerfully.

“You were three, last I saw you. How are you…”

“Thrakian, you know them?” the confused swordmaster said.

Spike’s smile fell slightly. “I always hated that name. What’s so wrong with Spike?”

Luna impatiently nudged her sister. “Could we please take this inside?”

“You might collapse any moment.” Spike joked.

Forty more steps and nearly as many questions asked. A team of unicorns heaved the great passage open and Luna was first in, barely able to keep her eyes open.

“We are honestly happy to meet you, Spike, but we must rest.” she said and trotted off.

He bowed his head in understanding. He, Celestia, and his aide took down the other way.

Luna slumped through the passages, almost sleepwalking from this debilitating exhaustion. Each turn mocked her with the absence of the bedchamber doors and forced her to lug her suit about. At last, salvation! The ornate doors beckoned and she was enchanted as the guards opened them. The familiar room was like a wonderland but the open windows let cursed light flood in. She snapped the blinds shut and rang for the appropriate group to perform the rites of her retirement. Always a ritual for everything.

In a few eternal minutes, they entered. The most piously decorated of them slowly swung a smoking censer and levitated a holy text. Luna took her place in the center of the room and held her forelegs out to her sides. The attendants adeptly disrobed her, choreographed to the priest’s reading of some passages from the text. Luna didn’t bother to listen, just wish the process would go faster. They rested each component of her armor on a mannequin and finished with her crown.

“Amen.” The priest concluded and quietly shut the book. They all bowed subserviently and departed in good order.

At last.

She hastily climbed into bed, yanked the sheets over her head and was out like a light.

The shadows on the darkened room quaked, bent and rippled independent of their objects, and stretched their two dimensional fingers toward the sleeping princess. She tossed and turned under the sheets as she was consumed in the essence of darkness. The shadows broke from their source items and completely filled her. She sat up and Nightmare Moon threw off the covers.

“Oh how long has it been?”

She rolled her neck and it crackled like a glockenspiel. The mirror showed her a mare that seemed strange. She hardly recognized herself without the usual blue armor ensemble and got a feel for how dull and monotone her features were. She was as back as the corner of Luna’s mind she was entombed in. That void where the infinite silence was deafening. She looked to the mannequin.

“Fortify me.” Her horn glowed its ominous dark blue and, one piece at a time, the suit encased her. Her mind raced with all she could do but knew as well as Celestia the hell that was bursting out from the north. She was in no position to revolt against the solar goddess and knew not of the incident on Nightmare Night. Her energy warped the armor, twisting it into something truly nightmarish. The tiny, marble moons and crescents formed into green emerald eyes and her edges became tapering and sharp. She could sense something was amiss.

The window blinds parted at her motion and she looked out over the city. “Somepony didn’t leave sacrifices.” she said, licking her lips. She dissolved into a dark mist and flowed through the tiny cracks in the window to the outside, sticking to the shadows.

As nimble as the wind, she passed low to the ground, between blades of grass even, and into the wealthy sprawls around the palace. Her sight identified who did and didn't leave offerings on the holiday dedicated to her. A small procession of cultists, lauding in their grim monotone, were clean as they radiated nothing in her eyes. In one of the spacious complexes, she saw through the walls, the black silhouette of a mare. The first to be punished. She rose against the wall and in through the window. Nothing but contempt, she felt for the blasphemous pony. Or was it hunger for the taste of the unfaithful?

"I'll wait for you in the carriage dear." A stallion at the door of the bedroom said. He fixed the last creases in his classy clothing, straightened his collar, and stood at the door.

"Yes, yes. I'll be there soon." the target answered. She stood before a dresser, covered in countless makeups, powders, and pads. She blew a kiss to the stallion and he snatched the invisible gem from the air. He shut the door and she returned to her preparations.

Nightmare Moon reformed and, silent as a shadow, she approached from behind, intending to toy a little with her victim. She let herself be seen in the mirror, her wings open, teeth bristling, and narrow, hungry eyes glaring into her being. The powdered pony dropped her makeup pad and as she snapped her head around, Nightmare Moon quickly poofed into her vaporous form again, so thin, she was unseen. The orange pony timidly scanned around, her breath heavied from the surprise. She checked the mirror again and only her reflection looked back.

"I'll leave double next year." she said to herself. "That should make up for it."

There won't be a next year for you.

Nightmare Moon lingered closer and slowly re-condensed, just enough to be seen again and expand when the mare jerked around once more. She was definitely afraid now, fearing divine punishment. Before a religious icon at the bedside, she bowed and prayed for forgiveness.

Let this be my que.

The moon deity fully materialized silently behind her. "You unfaithful, miserable wretch." she murmured with scorn. The mare's heart skipped a beat, or two. She backed against the nightstand as Nightmare Moon stood over her. "You ask for forgiveness? There can be no forgiveness."

The horrified pony sputtered, "Please, your holiness! I have been so dedicated my whole life! I pray every morning and night, go to the abbey every sunday and monday. My faith was stained by but a single night. I offer thee a million times a million apologies. Have mercy upon me!" Tears started to pool in her eyes.

"Mercy." Nightmare Moon smirked. She raised the mare with her magic and forced her legs to curl against her body. She speared her penitent eyes with her gaze. "No mercy for heretics."

The skin of her cheeks parted, exposing the red muscles underneath. Her jaw stretched down and she floated the pony to it. She fruitlessly screamed and struggled against the blue magic that enveloped her and her face pressed against the hot, humid back of Nightmare Moon's throat. The esophagus widened and she looked down into her moist, pulsating doom. Sharp teeth scraped and cut her body as she was moved into the vertical tunnel. A playful tongue stroked along her underside as Nightmare Moon enjoyed the taste of her.

Nightmare Moon raised her head to align the passages and let gravity sink her victim a little further. She released her magic hold and let them flail their hind legs about while she swallowed, pulling them deeper into her bowels. Their round flanks required extra effort to get down and their body formed a massive, writhing girth in her throat. Their screaming was muffled by the wet insides. A few crushing gulps later, their hind hoofs slipped into her throat. Her snack squeezed through her, round the bend between her neck and torso and she loved it as they were stuffed into the pit of her stomach, clothes and all. Nightmare moon felt her squirm and licked the bits of torn skin and blood on her teeth. As her esophagus settled, it pushed up a girdle that fell wetly out her mouth.

"Ah, the taste of flesh. Just as tender and succulent as I remember." she canted. She brought her head around and raised the side of her armor. Her skin was stretched with the blasphemer inside. Her stomach rolled and jerked, the digestive juices burned in the mare's bleeding cuts. "I'm going to keep giving you air, so you're awake to feel me burn you." she said sinisterly. Under the black fur, they screamed, beat the soft walls and jostled. "Try all you like, little orderve. It amuses me."

She vaporized and streamed back out the room.

So sister, what say I join you?

__________________________________________________________________________________

Celestia placed the quill back into its holster and flashed her letter to its destination. The Pegasus holding up the writing block departed.

“Shining Armor should receive that soon. Tell me, how did you find him?” Celestia asked. Her sword and shield clinked against her legs as she walked to the practice room.

“I would not know that your majesty.” The swordmaster said. “I have been on missions for the Tower of Hoeth longer than ponies have been in Ulthuan.

“I can answer, Princess.” Spike took a deep breath to ease the pain of remembering.

He slept soundly in his little basket and having done his daily duties and some of Twilight's as she was still out, rest was well deserved. The smell of smoke, not his, but something more wooden, startled him awake. The air was thick with the stench of burning wood but the fire was not in the tree, yet.

"Twilight! Twilight!" He scrambled out of bed and shook the unconscious librarian. She didn’t move.

A fire near a large tree house full of dry paper books and scrolls brought him to instinctively try to drag Twilight with his infantile strength out. Soul wrenching howling and tortured screaming outside filled him with rampant fear and he hastily got Twilight down the stairs, across the lower floor and he put her down to open the door. He immediately regretted it as the denizens of ponyville were running about like chickens with their heads cut off from nightmarish monsters and steel giants.

These horrors brutishly swiped up the ponies by twos and threes, caging and binding them. Every home was ablaze and ash and cinders rained from the raging heavens. The dirt roads quickly became mud of blood as the creatures slaughtered many mercilessly. One chaos warrior, one of these steel giants, was carrying Spike's beloved Rarity, screeching like a banshee for her freedom. His young facilities couldn't process all that was happening and he slammed the door shut. His back to it, he scanned around at Twilight, then the upstairs window. Just as he was going to act, a large crash and splinters of wood fell on his ears and head. He looked up and a large fist had rammed through the door, feeling around for him.

He grabbed Twilight and dragged her back up the stairs as the door was smashed apart. A chaos warrior stormed in and stomped up after them, pulling Twilight away and grabbing Spike by the face. He analyzed him for a few seconds through dark eye holes and toted him under his arm, kicking and screaming. Back outside, the leader of the hundred man warband, a sorcerer, was going over a map with his second in command.

"Follow the railway tracks. Burn everything between Manehattan, Applooza, and the arctic regions. There is a great darkness near the Crystal Empire, shattered and scattered. Bring it to me. Slay all who fight, capture the rest."

The triangular path between those places covered at least half of Equestria.

As Spike was carried from the tree-house, a Flamer, a twisted, viney creature of many mouths and limbs, belched plumes of fire onto the tree-house. Further in the distance, the white and blue city of Cloudsdale was slowly swallowed by a massive dark fog and disappeared from the night sky. Wrestling for freedom, he screamed and beat the armor of his captor and was thrown into an iron cage. His face bashed against the bars and the rest of his body tingled for little reason. He looked at his claw and his fingers started growing, twisting and bending with no rhyme or reason, as shapeless as the fiery wind that devoured Ponyville.

The caravan carried everyone out of town and over the hills on a forced march. Spike's condition quickly worsened and he cried as his body became more distorted and contorted. His fingers grew long and rending, his tail, bulbous and coiled. His teeth stabbed through the gums of the opposite row and his mouth was constantly bleeding.

In the camp, he was kept isolated as he was degrading into a chaos spawn. A mindless monster so warped by chaos, they are nothing but masses of raging flesh and vague limbs and mouths that will lash out and kill anything that moves. The night dragged on. He dreaded what was happening to him and feared everything in sight. A stealthy elven agent, a shadow warrior, quietly slithered into the room his cage was in.

"Ssh." He whispered silently and took him in the cage.

Spike tried his best to stay quiet but his changing nature would not allow him. He moaned and howled almost constantly until the elf was being pursued by chaos marauders. With super-athletic speed, the elf ran. Forget stealth, he was found. A portal, hidden in a small recess of the central tent of the camp was his way out and he dove through. So mocking was the Warp that they were inadvertently taken back in time, some years before the coming of ponies to the world.

In Ulthuan, more specifically the province of Caledor where dragons are considered sacred creatures, the elves performed daily rituals and spells on him to cleanse him of the taint of Chaos. He'd been raised among other young dragons but they were not necessarily sentient. They could not speak, hold a conversation, or reason like dragons in Equestria. As he grew up, his sentience made him very special among his more primal brethren. Diets of raw meat were standard and the elves pounded into his head, 'jewels are for magic and decoration, not eating'.

At thirteen years old, his dragon lord sent him to the woods alone, where the daemons of Chaos lurk. For a whole month he was so live there, feeding on woodland creatures, and when daemons bounded toward him, he was consumed by the tumultuous trauma of the night chaos came. He unleashed all his hatred, pain, and sadness on them. Even after their bodies disintegrated back to the warp, he still clawed at the ground, still seeing them there until he'd dug a fairly deep hole that he'd then spend the night in.

After the trial, and righting some injuries cross his body, the ponies of the Crystal Empire came, escaping chaos. Horribly depopulated and Princess Cadence on the verge of death, they became second-class citizens. He witnessed Cadence receive a prosthetic jaw as her severed one no longer fit her head. Her speech was still understandable but had a powerful lisp.

She at one point plummeted into a bout of insanity at the news that King Sombra was in Naggaroth, resurrected by chaos magic. Her people would never be safe. He was gifted to Malekith, the Witch King by Archaon, sent on a wooden raft across the sea and wound up in Naggaroth. Sombra once disobeyed Malekith who treated him like a pet, leading an assault on Ulthuan and failing miserably to the power of the Crystal Heart. His punishment on returning to the Druchii capital, Naggarond is unknown.

Years after, the shrine of Asuryan signaled the new Storm of Chaos had begun. Spike, Cadence, and the High Elven host set off to the Old World.

“You and she have been through so much.” Celestia said sincerely.

Spike treaded glumly with the hateful knowledge that Twilight or the others weren’t in the city. “We can’t dwell on the past too much. The fate of the world is out most urgent concern now.” He tried to perk himself up. “How often do you train?”

“Every afternoon I can with the most skilled warriors in Reikland.”

“Humans move in slow motion compared to elves.” Spike snickered. The swordmaster put on a superior grin as well.

Spike held the entrance to the combat practice room. A high roof provided room for flying combatants. Though he didn’t have wings, he was still maneuverable. He took off his gloves and ran his large claw along the wall.

“Could I get a feel for the room, princess?”

“Absolutely.”

The small child burst forth. He sank his claw into the stone and hoisted himself up, gripping and swinging on fixtures and structural supports, as agile as a squirrel and blindingly fast. Celestia couldn’t remember the last time she saw such childish joy. He let himself fall and slammed to the ground, scattering the hay cover with the force.

“Right. Let’s go.” He put his helmet back on and unsheathed a greatsword. Elves had to use two hands to wield them but his size allowed him to swing it with one. His shield was tall and wide, studded with red rubies and embossed with the silver icon of a blazing phoenix.

Celestia drew her own sword, channeling her magic threw it to make it roar with solar flames. Her shield was a proud sun. Its sharp points would easily pierce any armor.

“Mares first.” Spike said, bobbing back and forth.

“My, my. Such a gentledragon.” Nightmare Moon sounded from the entrance.

“Luna.” Celestia said perplexed. “I thought you were resting.”

Nightmare Moon forced herself to smile but in her mind, was spitting venom. “In this form I have some time longer before exhaustion strikes again and I must behold what prowess Spike has.” If there weren't a seven and a half food dragon in the room, her words would have been less friendly.

Spike's helmet suddenly jerked up and he unbuttoned the metal folds at the back. His frills stood on end, responding to the evil presence in the room, and he held back the urge to bestially growl at her.

“I’m sorry princess." he grunted. "You radiate a dark energy.” He caught a peculiar scent. “Is… there blood in here? Princess, are you hurt?”

Nightmare Moon sucked in her gut and buried her tenseness. “Not in the slightest, worrisome dragon.” She lept into the air and seated herself in a lookout booth. “Come now! We are all well. I implore thee, proceed.”

Spike gave her one more glance before returning to Celestia. “When you’re ready.”

Nightmare Moon felt uncomfortable in her seat, on her stuffed stomach, well obscured by her suit. She felt her prisoner twitch and breathe faintly in their churning, gooey cell.

“Still not perished I see." She shifted on her gut, feeling they weren't anywhere near melted. "Time may not be on my side. Digest now.” Her horn lit dimly and her stomach quickly kicked into overdrive, filling with acid. It pounded and pummeled the victim, audibly squelching and gurgling as it crushed and dissolved them into a soft, chunky fluid mush. Her stomach shrank as it flushed the slush into her intestines. She let out a small, dainty belch. “Pardon me.” she chortled. There was a crash of metal and she looked up to see Celestia on her side with Spike’s engraved sword lightly touching her neck. He helped her up and Nightmare Moon clapped at her defeat. “You will fell him next bout sister!”

__________________________________________________________________________________

"Woe O world! The age of mortals is coming to an end! Time passes into oblivion and the stars lapse in the sky!" The pessimistic, raspy preacher lauded in the streets outside the castle walls.

"Somepony shut him up." Shining Armor ordered, his last nerve crushed.

A handgunner aimed through one of the view ports in the wall and his weapon flashed. There was a short clamor of screaming and a minute later, the tune of the town returned to normal. Shining Armor returned to his brooding and staring at his mutated banner of command. The star speckled shield of the tapestry became warped and evil since his last battle. The central star glared an organic eye at him. The points had become bloody arrow heads and instead of six, there were eight. This image burrowed itself deep within him. This sign meant something, but what?

The chamber door rattled and creaked open and an messenger entered nervously. "My lord.”

“Go ahead.”

“Th-the generals are concerned as to your recent h-h-h-habits.”

Shining Armor’s ears twitched, frightening the messenger. “Go on.”

“They believe you are too d-d-distracted by this banner.”

A pair of furious sapphire eyes that haven’t known sleep for three days set his soul on fire. “Go on…”

“The generals believe, for your health and purity of soul, the tainted banner should be... burned.”

With his gaze no longer fixed on the banner, Shining Armor finally felt the weight of his deprivation. It wasn’t the worst exhaustiveness he’d felt but still mired his coordination.

“Very well. Take it to the temple.” He yawned. “Dispose of it in the sacred fire.” He rubbed his burning eyes. “Did the dwarf concede?”

“N-n-no my lord. His human associate has but won’t go without him.”

“Double the offer. I don’t care what it takes. If they’re half what their books say they’ve accomplished, they’re my only option. What was the man’s name? Felix something?”

“Felix Jaeger sir. Your presence is also requested at the top of the citadel. The White City is within sight and will be here for resupplying for two days.”

Burned out or not, Shining Armor was excited to see it. “Then let us be on our way.” Military attendants rolled up the standard and carried it out with the sisterless field-marshal.

He was in his ceremonial wear, a wide, gold and midnight blue hat, an armored vest embossed with a lunar eclipse, and a red and deep blue cape, the colors of Altdorf. His sleeves were specially colored to signify he was the highest commander of imperial forces short of the Princesses and Emperor. He shared the same authority with Reikmarshall Kurt. Ascending the stairs, Shining Armor regretfully reminisced his recent decision, attempting to attack the ork WAAAGH!!! and getting twenty thousand men and ponies killed. The roar of artillery and screams of those injured men haunted him.

As a soldier opened the door to the roof, Shining Armor and all who were with him were blinded by a flood of white light into the fire lit stairwell. He paused at the top of the stairs, covering his eyes, and when they adjusted, he beheld the unblinking eye of day, burning his retinas as he stared directly into it. Many haven’t seen the sun in years. His eyes were pulled away when an officer called his small group of Reiksguard stallions to attention. He took a look around the fortified roof and the grassy plains beyond the wall and the city of Bechafen behind him. His sun starved skin tingled as the warmth of heavenly light blessed the earth.

The sky was almost completely clear; a placid sea of noble blue. Tens of thousands of city residents were gathered around the citadel, radiating a pall of prayer and the stink of tight packed plebs and their burning incense would be smelled for miles around. In the distance, over the plains, was a titanic, thick column of clouds, slowly floating in Bechafen’s direction. Mists of many colors, rainbows, poured from its walls and high places. They shimmered immaculately in the sunlight. Shining Armor stepped up to one of the elevated platforms on the roof and awaited the coming of Cloudsdale.

Pegasi kept the skies clear of clouds and the floating, battle damaged metropolis began to pass by. Its battered walls were lined with pegasi who swooped down and began tying ropes down to different parts of the castle and walls. Miles of rope, hundreds of hooks and knots were fastened. The airy city slowed its movement as the ropes strained and squeaked, and soon halted. Its great gate was right before the platform Shining Armor stood upon.

The Reiksguard officer stepped forward with a banner bearer. The flag was raised straight up and slowly angled toward the city. Long trumpets blared a short set of tones, loud and grandly.

“Will the Governor-General of Cloudsdale come forth and welcome, most pious servant of the celestial gods, Reikmarshall Shining Armor!” the officer shouted.

The denizens below silenced, awaiting a response. The great poufy gate jerked forward slightly and slowly lowered to the platform and a trio of regal pegasi proceeded down. One bore the banner of Cloudsdale, a twin headed alicorn, looking in opposite directions over its large wings. Another was shaven bald around his head with an iron halo down around his eyebrows. The banner bearer pointed the pole straight up and touched the tip of the Ostermark flag.

“Hail and well met Reikmarshall.” The third, yellow and orange mare greeted.

“And to you.” Shining Armor responded. He looked up the mountainous city. Behind his professional façade, he was beyond words. “Your city is beautiful.” he said earnestly.

“It radiates its purity. I would be honored if you would view our facilities and attend the exodus of the souls of our fallen.”

“I would like to witness the processes. Thank you.”

A priest carried a shallow bowl of water before Shining Armor, dipped his hoof in it and dabbed the reikmarshall’s forehead.

“Oh immortal majesties, have mercy upon us, though weak and miserable that we are. Oh masters of heaven, protect your flock from the taint. Oh keepers of the light and night, guide or uncertain path with your wisdom. We are your subjects and we are servants to thee. We stand free from blindness of heart. Free from hypocrisies, feign glories, and deceits but captive to hatred, malice, and anger, to the filth, the beast, the heretic. By thy grace and will, by thy sacrifice and glory, by thy ascension as the gods of ponykind, keep and strengthen us, we who fight for thee.”

“Amen.” All said.

“The clouds are safe, reikmarshall. The Rig makes it so.” The governor assured him.

Shining Armor nervously placed his hoof onto the white surface and put pressure on it. It felt strange but, as the pegasus said, it held up his weight. The flags separated as he stepped up and the Reiksguard stallions followed them up the gate.

“Might I know the name of my host?” Shining Armor asked.

“Spitfire." She shook his hoof. "I don't think I caught your name. The officer didn't yell loud enough.” she joked.

“Spitfire…” he wondered. “One of the original Wonderbolts! This is an honor indeed.”

“Yeah. Being the last of the first generation alive has its perks.” She sighed.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be.”

A carriage awaited them both just inside the walls. Shining Armor ignored the lamenting sounds around them and entered.

“Mind if we break the formal act here?” Spitfire asked

“I suppose.”

“Thanks. I would have preferred to fly but you being earthbound and all, heh.”

“Not that much of a disadvantage when you have magic.” Shining Armor jabbed back.

Through tinted windows, he looked out. The inside of the walls was absolutely shanty, poor pegasi desperately tried to recover their destroyed homes and one flew around, calling out, “Muffin!? Muffin!?” She soon found her little lavender daughter, crying with one leg bent at odd angles.

One pushing a wheelbarrow full of bodies rolled down the street. “Bring out yer dead! Bring our yer dead!” Another four dismembered pegasi were loaded up. It wasn’t Shining Armor’s job to care for them.

“What was the attack like?” he asked.

Spitfire sniffed. “I don’t… I don’t want to talk about it. Here, I got this for the ride.” She opened a compartment with a couple of glasses and a bottle of deep red wine. “Like extra hooves.” she boasted as she held the glasses in her wings and poured with her hooves.

“No hooves.” Shining Armor adeptly levitated the cup away and tipped it over her head. The drink spilled out and he caught it just before her face and streamed it back into the cup. He took a short sip, bitter and teeming with more alcohol than it should.

“Yeah, not known for its taste.” She gulped down her glass in one go, poured another, and corked the bottle. She was already showing signs of intoxication. “You know, a lot of ponies tell me I can’t hold my drink. I don’t believe them.”

She almost straightaway fell drunk. Most of their talk was just Spitfire rambling about how she had to take a leadership role in Cloudsdale and keep everyone together as the city emerged from the Warp, over Nuln. The Imperials didn’t take kindly to this but eventually, the Princesses got their conference with the Emperor and the massive batteries of artillery pointed at Cloudsdale were lifted. The city was tethered in place in the sky and they learned from the gunnery college in Nuln. In time, Cloudsdale became specialized with black powder weaponry; guns, cannons, rockets and everything in between. They were set adrift, carried by the warp guided winds and became a beacon of faith and a holy city for ponies everywhere.

She fell apart as she described the attack over Mordheim. A terrible daemon of Tzeentch, the Changeling, had been terrorizing Cloudsdale for years, sabotaging their works and playing lethal practical jokes on the unwary. It was responsible for the opening of a warp portal that sucked in Soarin and he was never seen again. The daemon was apparently captured in the attack and turned out to be Rainbow Dash when she was locked away in The Rig. The Rig took her daemonic energy, along with other daemons, to make the clouds of the city safe for non-pegasi to walk on. After Soarin, Rainbow Dash was the last important pony Spitfire knew who she could look to. She wore a rainbow ascot for luck every waking minute and was completely destroyed after finding out she was her worst enemy.

Spitfire picked up the bottle to pour her third glass while Shining Armor was only half done with his first. He forced her to put it down.

“This isn’t the way to solve your problems. I understand what you’re going through.”

“What do you know?” she grumbled. “What do you know about losing everypony you ever held near and dear?”

He leaned back and donned his serious face that quickly silenced her. “I lost my wife and little sister. I don’t know if they’re alive or dead or worse.”

A golden flash in the carriage disoriented them both for a moment and Shining Armor picked up the letter, stamped with the Celestia’s seal. Before he could read it, the carriage seemed to sink into the clouds a few inches but held after. The sound of alarm bells penetrated the space, sounding at every pitch a pony could hear.

“What is that?” Shining Armor said.

They climbed out of the carriage and one of the guards of The Rig hovered over them. He wore lightning bolts all over his gleaming armor and was obviously distraught.

“Governor, the Changeling has escaped!”

Spitfire looked ready to explode. She slammed her hoofs on the ground and let out a scream, so enraged, it would shatter the Immaterium.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Half a moldy potato and a cup of spit from the security guards every other day, not an ideal diet to be on for three weeks and now trying to run for her life. A hooded creature, no legs, three arms on one side and carrying a bloody, scroll wrapped scythe in the other, pulled Rainbow Dash along. The contact of these two shapeshifters caused them to revert to their original forms but neither could take the time to look at themselves. It used the sickle well, reaping a harvest of souls as he cut through the guards and brought his precious cargo to a window overlooking the city.

“Bird!” it screeched and jumped, pulling Rainbow Dash along with him.

She’d become nearly deaf from listening to the daemons in The Rig screaming and howling and couldn’t understand what the figure said. It let go of her hoof and shifted into a mutated raven. She emulated him, wracked with pain as her body ripped itself apart to become a similar, creature. Bullets whizzed by from the inaccurate gunners and they dove to the lower levels. Though it wasn’t extremely long in the Rig, Rainbow Dash was rapt with the same happiness she felt the first time she took flight as a filly, the wind in her face, the weightlessness. She strained to keep up with the guide and her malnourished body hampered her further. She marveled at the literally bird’s eye view of Cloudsdale and Bechafen below. They both settled in a space between two buildings and were well concealed in the darkness. Rainbow Dash nearly crashed with her dulled dexterity and they huddled silent as soldiers swooped by over the alley. They were safe for the moment.

“Wonderful! Wonderful!” the daemon squawked and assumed the form of a noblecolt, keeping his scythe out. “Fix yourself up. You must return to where you belong.” He tapped her with his scythe, forcing her back to normal.

Outside of The Rig, the ruinous powers wreaked havoc on her mind again and Rainbow Dash’s forgetfulness streak came back with a terrible vengeance.

“Who are you? Who… am I?” she murmured weakly, trying to catch her breath.

“Very good question!” he said maliciously. “But my name is not what is urgent here. My lord Soarin, you took a nasty spill through the Warp.”

“Warp? Soarin?” Rainbow Dash garbled.

“Your amnesia is terrible! That daemonette really hit you in the head hard.” he lied further.

The Changeling passed the flat side of his scythe over Rainbow Dash and formed her in the image of Soarin, a light blue coat, dark blue mane, and a winged star on her, or his, flanks. The daemon studied the scrawny, woozy work before him.

“Not quite there yet.”

He smashed Rainbow Dash across the face with the dull side of his staff, instantly fracturing her skull. He then quickly cut and tore her body, opening gaping wounds, breaking bones and spreading her blood.

“Let us put some of this here, this gets ripped. Just enough exposed skull and let that hang off by a thread.”

He wound up the flat end of his scythe like a golf club. “And one broken rib! *crack* Two! *crack* Three!” So intricate was the masterpiece he crafted and soon, he had a mutilated wreck before him. This fake Soarin drooled blood.

“Convincing!” he congratulated himself and compacted his sickle into a necklace. He knelt down and lifted Rainbow Dash’s sliced ear. “There’s only room for one shape shifter in this town and I’ll enjoy the extra challenge.” He punted her head with the small sickle before returning it to his pocket. “What did I just say?” She just looked at him with inflamed, confused eyes. She didn’t know the colt standing over her. “Good. Now let’s see you back to your girlfriend.” He picked up the confused and destroyed Soarin and helped him out of the alley. “Help! Help! This colt is horribly injured!” the disguised daemon wailed.

A soldier swooped down and inspected the victim. His jaw hit the pavement. “Praise the sisters, he found his way back! What happened?”

“I d- I don’t know!” the changeling acted. “I found him like this and a black cloud was vanishing around him. He can’t remember anything.”

“Apothecary! Somepony find a Luna damned medicine maker!” the soldier shouted.

Jurisdiction was soon handed over to the group of troops that came to aid their ruined lieutenant, beaten to an inch of his life. The Changeling daemon trotted away solemnly, and then happily the further from the medical mash pit he got. The gears of his plan were in motion.

“Just as planned.” He whistled. “Just as planned.”

__________________________________________________________________________________

Rainbow Dash awoke, feeling warm and wet all over. A pool of water surrounded her and her cut forehead stung as a nurse wiped a disinfectant cloth over it. A dozen medical ponies surrounded her.

“Spitfire, he’s awake.” Shining Armor said.

Soarin painfully turned his head at the yellow pegasus that knelt by him, her face full of happiness and tears.

“Soarin, do you recognize me? She asked. He shook his head. “I’m Spitfire.” She choked. “You and I were together. We’re going to help you get back into things, okay? Help you remember.”

He weakly nodded and started to cough blood into the water.

Shining Armor whispered to Spitfire, “I have to leave immediately. I’m needed at Altdorf. I’m happy for you two, and good luck.”

“Thank you.” she said.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Rarity passed the needle through the loop, one last time. Her bony arm, devoid of flesh, muscle, and blood, creaked and bent into a pair of scissors and clipped the thread. These limbs were nothing but endlessly shifting, thick tree branches of white marrow. She tugged on the thread and tightened up where it connected to a pair of pants. Elegantly sewn with all her hatred and thankfulness toward Lyra, it would nicely cover up her gnarled legs.

She checked herself one more time. She had times when she'd ask herself, 'Is this what I've become? This hideousness.' She was riddled with cold, barren craters where large eyeballs used to be. Three horns occupied her forehead and temples, curving upward and were always aglow to relieve a constant buildup of magic. Her shoulders brimmed with bony spines. Her leathery skin successfully grew back her white fur that covered up her withered hide and she shifted her fingers into a plethora of shapes for amusement. Animals, faces, weapons. One large talon, shaped like a scythe at her side twitched and curled without command, seeming to do whatever it so pleased. The Skaven's blade pierced deep and she thanked Tzeentch she hadn't perished and the claw grew from the wound in time.

She had her fingers come together to form something of a handheld mirror and funneled her energy into it, crackling and sparking with lightning.

"Show me Applejack." she muttered to it. The beams came together and formed a hazy, glassy surface.

The dead mare was ridden down the street by Cultist-Chan who held a slab of raw meat on a stick before her face. The toothy mouthed girl had come by a few times, a friend of Lyra's. The poor dear had to wait over 38,000 years before she would be used for whatever the Dark Gods were saving her for. In her zombified state, Applejack mindlessly followed the bait and would come to again soon and wonder how she got where she was. Then skulk off to her hole and pretend to be well.

It was clear she'd gone bonkers as she had a set of dead ponies that she painted one red with blood, another yellow with puss, and the last a putrid green and stretched its skin to make it look old. She filled them with maggots and flies under her control and conducted them like puppets to mimic her family. The Plague Lord does love family. She lived with a fake little sister, big brother, and grandma and convinced herself they were real, at least until she would suddenly break down, tear the meat puppets apart and go to see the Doctor to regain some sanity.

"Not faring so well are we?" Rarity snickered.

She separated her fingers and thought about going to find her friends. She'd contemplated leaving the domicile as she was no longer at the mercy of the living inhaler that used to couple to her face but the armour she was forging didn’t quite feel done yet. The price of chaos warrior armour was steep and she'd like to keep her soul, so she settled for making her own. She poured the insanity of her mad visions into it. Every crease, horn, lightning heated weld, and thorn on it was part of some nightmare or hallucination she gave form. Her horns would display beautifully through the ghoulish helmet. Monstrous, beaked faces with glass eyes glared out from the chestplate and shoulders. Bronze was shaped as smoke and in thin stripes across its dark blue bulk. Any hopes Lyra had of trying it on were dashed as Rarity made it to be big enough for herself. She stood one and a half feet taller, without the armor.

She walked around the home, looking for something to do. Lyra had many trinkets, books, and this pet starfish she called BonBon, after her lost friend. The spiny creature disgusted her but it was the only company she had when Lyra went out and ashamedly talked to it once in a while.

“Come on out you vile little beast.” Rarity chimed to the starfish in its cage. She held out her palm and opened the hatch. The creature scampered into her hand and she elongated her fingers into the shape of a tree. She watched it swing and play and purr in its little feral language.

Her entertainment was interrupted by the impact of another painful vision. They were all vague. A giant metal beast was at the door, smashing at it and looking for her. At that moment, the ground did seem to vibrate. The wall fixtures shook slightly and it stopped on the other side of the wall. Rarity got as far from the door as possible and charged her hands with lightning, forcing the starfish to abandon its jungle gym.

Her heart raced as she waited with her hand to the door. The door rattled and jostled a little and in fearful stress, Rarity fired.

“Woah!” Lyra gasped as the shot missed and scorched the wall. “Swiss, what the frick!?”

Rarity’s cratered exterior merited the nickname. “T-terribly sorry dear. I thought you were something else.” She sat in her chair in relief.

“Well find something to put on, we’re going out. But first.” She picked up a hammer and chisel from a disorganized pile of things.

Rarity instinctively covered her flanks where the gems of her cutiemarks had turned green and actually materialized warpstone on them once in a while. There was at least 20 bits worth on her rump now.

“Oh, no” Rarity got up.

“Yes.” Lyra grinned.

“No!”

"Yeees." Lyra psyched her out.

Miss Cheerlie’s patience ran out. “Lyra, would you hurry up in there!”

“Just a… hold still! Minute!” The sound of snapping stone was accompanied by a painful yelp. “Done, you baby.” Rarity massaged her aching flanks as Lyra put her cruel mining tools away. “Awesome! You finished my pants?” She swiped it off the work desk and immediately tried it on, poking her tail through a hole just below the back of the waistline. They were striped blue and black with marks of Tzeentch on the knees. “Oh this is so cool, thanks!”

“Must I put on my suit now? It just doesn’t feel complete.” Rarity griped.

“It’s fine. Here.” Lyra shoved the helmet into her bony hands.

She tapped her hard fingers on it. “Oh, what the heck.” She slipped it over her head and went for the rest of the ensemble.

It felt natural. With Lyra providing the flame when she was crafting it, Rarity made it to conform to her shape on the inside. She specially made the side with her talon to support her so she didn’t need use her arms like a cane but it rendered her back a little stiff. The bones shooting from her shoulders fit into their sockets in the pauldrons and lit the glass eyes a brilliant bright blue. They channeled her excess magic into the eyes and it dissipated as a mystical smoke on the air. She was finally at ease, not having to constantly monitor her own levels and worry about a backfire. She didn't bother with arm braces or greaves as she could use her whole arms for defense, forming them into clubs or tasers. From the mouths of the shoulder pads though, flowed long cloth sleeves that ran to her wrists.

"What do you think? Inspiring or does it need..." She shuddered at the thought of the bloody business of collecting, "...skulls?" Turn once, then once more on sharply pointed shoes, Lyra got a good look and clapped snootily.

“What do I have to say to get us out of here faster?”

“I am waiting on you now. So exited! I haven’t been outside in weeks!”

“How many times did I tell you, BonBon doesn’t like being outside.”

“Suffocating me is a strange way to say it.”

“Come on, go!” Lyra pushed Rarity to the door and magically opened it.

Rarity had to step sideways to get out and nearly ran back inside at the sight of what was to the side of the door.

The iron monster leaned fearfully against the building, twice Rarity’s height and a cloaked pony with a large necklace of skulls talked to it.

“Fluttershy, There’s somepony that wants to meet you.” Miss Cheerlie said softly.

Her mane of chains rattled as Fluttershy turned her head to Rarity. Her eyes widened and she turned back, afraid of the armor she wore and didn’t recognize her.

“Hello!” the chaos teacher greeted Rarity. “I’m Miss Cheerlie of Mordheim’s School for Heresy. Lyra told me a bit about you. She calls you Swiss but your actual name may be better.”

Rarity managed to pull her attention from Fluttershy to Cheerlie. “R-Rarity. This… Fluttershy?”

The giant looked back again, focusing on her familiar face. She picked Rarity up and squeezed her between her forelegs, swinging back and forth.

"Oh Rarity! I can't believe you’re okay!" She bawled, breathing burning hot air from the furnace of her insides. Rarity’s magic armor burned Fluttershy’s chest and she quickly let her go. She wobbled to balance with the weight of her armor.

“How did… giant.” Rarity stammered.

“Ah yes, unfortunately something like this happens to many ponies that become juggernauts.” Miss Cheerlie expounded. “Their bodies haven’t accepted this form yet so they have different kinds of allergic reactions to metal. In her case, absorbing it.”

“That doesn’t make any sense!” Rarity scolded.

Miss Cheerlie laughed, “You expect chaos to make sense? I remember when Vanga’s mount became a juggernaut. He had him locked in magic chains for two years for exploding every time he touched metal. He nearly blew up the entire Keep of Skulls. Guess who provided the chains.” She jingled the barbed links that trailed from her body.

“Years?” Fluttershy squeaked.

“Yes. Enjoy it while you can.”

“Quite the piece of work, isn’t she?” Lyra slapped Rarity square on the back.

"Where did you find her?"

"Just this morning. Some crazy pony brought her to the school, she lost it, and I almost melted her. You know her?"

"She’s one of my best friends.” Rarity tapped Flutterhsy’s hoof. “I can’t imagine the pain you must be feeling.”

Fluttershy was shivering like a boiling kettle. “I’m glad this is my limit though. I can’t take anymore.”

“What is that horrid smell?” Rarity covered her offended nose.

“Kerosene.” Lyra said with a smile, tightening the reddened cast around her foot. She took a dab of it and felt its oily texture between her fingers. “That’s what I get for messing with pyromancy.” She burned it off and shoved her foot in Rarity’s face. “Here, get a better whiff!”

“Ew ew ew! Stop!”

Fluttershy futilely tried to talk them to peace in her tiny voice. “Um L-lyra… please don’t do that.”

The mint green mare couldn’t hear her over her own laughter.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Vanga looked on from the tree line at the forming circle of orkz around the great walls of Mordheim. It was a thin line; a few hundred maybe. The greenskins just began to set up their arcane, ramshackle siege engines. The Chaotic warband was on the far side of the city from the WAAAGH!!! as it slowly started to surround the place. Arrows and gunfire were exchanged in growing intensity between the walls and outside ground.

“Little piglets, ripe for the slaughter.” Vanga echoed.

“E’yep.” His mound said back.

Vanga raised his axe. “Knights on me!”

Khornate chaos warrior knights and riderless chaos warrior ponies formed an organized rank and file in the woods, right behind their leader. The steeds snorted smoke and angry warp flames. Khornates on foot and the Nurglites readied behind.

“Y’all keep close.” Pox told the three fillies that were to take cover under him like a bloated meat shield.

“Mhm.” They nervously murmured back.

Vanga rode Big Mac to one side of the cavalry line and trotted past them. Their armour was battered and worn from their campaigns away from the city but they all still boasted the Blood God’s fury. Big Mac had a visible layer of rust on him from the celebration to Nurgle a couple nights before.

“Charge for the gate. Slay all in your path!” Vanga roared. He raised his axe to the sky. “Blood for the Blood God!”

“SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!” the cavalry screamed back.

The warband lurched forward and burst from the trees.

“Maim kill burn. Maim kill burn.” Vanga slowly chanted. “Maim kill burn! Maim Kill burn!” The rest of Khorne’s legion joined in. “MAIM KILL BURN! MAIM KILL BURN!”

They got the orkz’ attention as arrows started to land far out in front of them. They never bother to really aim. As the band entered the steel shower, the shots panged and deflected off their armour and got harmlessly stuck in the nurglites’ bodies. The immaterial howls of the force reverberated to the heavens and the cutiemark crusaders kept huddled under their undead umbrella. The orkz’ battlecry broke through Chaos’ noise.

“WAAAAAAAGH!!!”

They turned a spear chukka around and it thunked a large bolt into the horde. It skewered a long line through the heretics.

The first ork came charging at the Brass Beast, beady red eyes and a dull choppa in hand. Big Mac lowered his head and jerked it to the side, impaling the ork on his horn and Vanga brutally cut it off for the next. He swiped down, cutting off an arm from the spear chukka and decapitating a goblin. Time and time again, they cut down the greenskins, forging a stream of blood behind them. The cavalry plowed through and steadily put the thin line to rout. A big ‘un, bigga 'n tuffa than normal orkz, rallied its fleeing subordinates, shouting at them to ‘git bak in da fight!’. He positioned itself right in Big Mac’s way and pounded his shield, patronizing him. It couldn’t wait to give a good crompi’n. The bait worked and the juggernaut steamed toward him.

“Git stuck in kay-oss boyz! WAAAAAAGH!”

With a crash, Big Mac’s horn penetrated straight through the ork’s shield but its size managed to slow him massively, ripping up soil as it was pushed back. Vanga used his mount’s sudden stop to lunge forward, pull the shield down and cleave through the ork’s helmet, burrowing his axe deep in its head.

“Open the gate!” Vanga thundered at the ramparts. “I am Vanga! Chosen of the Blood God! Warlord of the Crimson Hand!” He hacked and slashed at the orkz as they came. “I COMMAND YOU!”

His boast truly carried weight and moments later, the gate creaked and squealed open. Vanga waved his mighty axe to the gate and his warriors made a break for it. Big Mac ripped his horn out of the fallen big ‘un’s shield and battled his way around, looking for Pox who he’d tear apart later, once he could get him and Applebloom out of sight of each other. The bloated carrier plodded as quickly as one could with dead muscles and bones eaten away to sponges. A sorcerer surrounded himself and them in a roaring, blinding fog of flies, devouring orkz to bones as they tried to enter the miasma. His passengers were deathly afraid at the bogged down brawl.

Mig Mac ran over, pushed Pox aside, and lowered his shoulder to the fillies.

“Get on.”

The crusaders hastily got on his back and he charged for the open gate, avoiding as best he could the orkz that tried to work out their choppi’n arms on the little ones. On the other side, he dropped them off to the side of the gateway and charged back out to help clear the way for the rest of the troops.

“Everypony aright?” Pox checked the three fillies, unable to ignore his sense of paternal duty. They dripped with blood and fungus spores and Applebloom had a choppa in her back.

“Ah think so.” she said, yanking it out

Scootaloo checked to see if her cutiemark was still there. The eight pointed star remained.

A small number of orkz tried to enter the city but were massacred by the defenders. The skirmish raged outside for a while and a steady flow of heretics came through, limping, crawling, or parading in with overflowing bravado. The racket of battle progressively quieted down and the four grew apprehensive as Big Mac and Vanga seemed not to have entered yet.

The gate eventually let itself go with gravity and crashed down. Dust blew and chains rattled with the bang. Applebloom ran to the sound of a repeating clang to find her brother. He limped along, his left hind leg mechanically groaned and squeaked as he walked and wobbled at the joint. Vanga held him by the handle on his neck, both of them covered in nicks and deeply cut plates.

“To the Keep of Skulls!” Vanga barked.

The khornates formed a ragged, battle damaged column and headed into the city. Vanga pulled his limping steed forward. Once at the keep, they’d be refitted, redressed, and rejoin the battle. Big Mac would get a painful re-fabrication of his hide.

“Brother!” one rotting heretic called to Pox. “Are you not coming with us?” The nurgle worshipers were headed in another direction.

“Jus gonna make sure these here fillies get with their friend safe.”

Applebloom watched her brother struggle and walked by him, keeping to his right side. “You aright Big Mac?”

“E’yep” he lied, listing heavily to the left.

Applebloom was dizzied by the sights of a city, its tall buildings, flowing rivers of people, and so many stores, shops, and the smells of raw meat everywhere. The noise of people walking and howls of daemons and death was ubiquitous.

“This really where ya live?”

“N’nope.” He pointed his head to the sky spearing towers at the center of the sprawls.

“Woah-“

A giant metal hoof slammed into Big Mac from around the street corner, kicking him up and he seemed stuck to it. Vanga and Applebloom were thrown back.

“Wh-wh-what did I just hit?” Fluttershy sputtered. “Eek!”

“Hey, let go a him!” Applebloom punched Fluttershy’s hoof to no effect. Vanga stood silent. Words were not necessary to express his rage.

Big Mac’s iron body forcibly crumpled and crushed toward her hoof.

“No, no, no!” Fluttershy cried, her head starting to pound. She tried to scrape him off with her other hoof but it stuck also to his face. She tried to separate them. He wailed as she pulled apart more strongly and the sections between his torso and hind legs popped and cracked.

She ripped him in half. Liquid fire poured from pipes in his separated waist and torso and he seemed to perish. His fiery eyes extinguished. Fluttershy took a moment to mentally process the strange arrangement of bodyparts on her hoofs.

“Big Mac!” Applebloom cried. Caustic tears trickled from her dry, amber eyes.

Fluttershy screeched in terror at the work on her hoofs and smashed them together to try to put him back together. They rang against one another and there was no sign of him between them. She separated her legs and there was nothing but a crushed face, dissolving into her hoof. Her accelerating heartbeat sent shockwaves of pain through her whole body and her daemonic features manifested themselves again. She would consciously witness her transformation, swelling joints, shortening neck, and elongating claws.

“No, please. I don’t wanna be mad. I don’t wanna…” She growled and whimpered.

“Grapples!” Vanga bellowed to his troops. “Grapples! Tie it down!”

Everyone on the block scrambled. Anything and everything they could find, torture hooks, grappling hooks, fishing hooks, anything to catch and restrain her. Rarity held her hoof, knowing what she'd have to do.

Fluttershy snatched her hoof from Rarity's hold and clutched her head as hers and Big Mac's minds crashed. Everyone around her was a target and ropes flew around her like streamers, clasping her legs and fusing to her body. She was half laughing, half crying at their attempt and glared at Big Mac's little sis with a soul rending grin and bloody tears running down her cheeks.

"Applebloom, run."

__________________________________________________________________________________

Twilight teleported herself and into her apartment and rummaged through her things. She had to know. Miss Cheerlie’s words buzzed in her brain like a furious beehive. Remaining black stains on the floor reminded her of the night before. She shuddered and wished to forget.

“Daemonancy, daemonancy, come on!”

She raged as it wasn’t placed in alphabetical order with the other books and teleported back to find her answer. The dark cloud around her scattered and her ears were assaulted by the blaring music outside a room full of Slaanesh iconography. Octavia was preparing Kivsin for the ritual and pretended nothing happened while Twilight was gone.

“That was quick.” Octavia said.

“I would have found the book faster is somepony organized them better.” Twilight glared at Kivsin. “Is he ready?”

“As best I could prepare him. Consuming souls really did this to you? Just so you know, I’ve never done this before.”

“I need to know if I’ve fallen that far. If I’m really a daemon.”

With the potential daemon already present, Octavia skipped to the environmental preparations in the book. Twilight lit the incense in her flaming, tail and mane and Kivsin lay lengthwise, along a large mark of Slaanesh on the floor. The air was soon filled with the unholy smoke and Octavia painted a chaos star on Kivsin’s face and chest with the blood of a sacrifice. One of the dancers that enjoyed Vinyl’s deafening noise in the other room served well.

"We are gathered here today to join these two being in unholy union." the dark sermon began. "In our midst, is a servant of the great gods, here to be incepted into a worthy vessel and infest it with the plague of darkness. Do you seek a vehicle to carry out the gods' intents?"

"Yes." Twilight answered edgily.

"Kivsin, will you accept a child of chaos into your being, and share flesh and blood until separation or death?"

"Y-yes." he gulped, quaking on the mark.

"Then let the seed of his demise be planted for the greater glory of Chaos."

Twilight picked up the headless body of the sacrifice and sank her fangs into its shoulder. She drank it to a tight husk and rested her hooves on Kivsin’s face and chest. Her horn illuminated brightly and Kivsin whimpered in fear.

Twilight felt but a mere tingle as her fur evaporated into lingering flames. She only opened her eyes when she started to loose feeling in her hoofs as they choked Kivsin in a burning mask. Her entire body dissolved into fire and even she was frightened. Her jaw, face, then the rest of her head disintegrated. Kivsin gasped and writhed with the flames. He tried to breathe, inadvertently inhaling his master, choking breath by breath. He sat up when he met real air again, his lungs on fire and fur singed.

"Master?" He clutched his aching chest. His body didn't respond. "Master!?" he yelled at himself more distressed. He immediately felt lost, the small room felt too open and foreign.

Octavia put her hoof on his shoulder. “Give her time. Now where were we?” She released her cello onto a beanbag chair, balancing on her one hind leg. She hopped to Kivsin and carefully sat in his lap. “When she isn’t here, you are mine, understand?” She poked his heaving chest. “Friend of your owner.”

Her maw opened slightly, brushing its teeth against him and a set of tentacles wrapped around his leg that supported her. One gently pulled his head down to her.

“Take your time, Twilight.” she whispered.

Kivsin didn’t much object to this feeling of his person. While Twilight was searching for the book, Octavia had her way with him and he enjoyed it a little also. She took one of his hooves and stuffed it in her maw. He took his lips away as he didn't know what she was doing.

"Easy." she said softly. The teeth gently stroked his leg. "Just find my sweet spot and beat it like an egg." she said hotly.

He felt around in her torso. A thick membrane separated her organs from the outside. He felt the ripples of her ribcage and found a small bump just below her left lung.

She grunted in pleasure, "Right there. Oh yes."

She returned to her business with him as he worked the area with his hoof. More tendrils slowly emerged from the membranes inside her and filled her great mouth. Kivsin took his hoof away as he grew nervous but her tentacles grabbed it and forced it back to her pleasure center. Her eyes dilated and she gritted her teeth as the sensation grew and she could barely hold back the swirling mass in her body. At completion, her maw jerked open and the tentacles washed over him, grabbing every feature of his body and yanked him into Octavia's open side. She wailed as he was packed in, pushing against her membrane and pushing her organs aside, and the great mouth snapped shut. Some tentacles retracted back into the walls of her body but a large number stayed to embrace their guest.

"My goodness." Octavia huffed. She stroked down her side, shoulder to haunches. The teeth locked her side shut tight. "So sorry. I'll be able to let you out in a while." She watched the imprints his hooves made against her coat as he pushed against the crease of the mouth. "Oh bliss. You remind me of when I locked Vinyl in there. That taught her not to borrow my cello without my permission." She laid on her back with him in her side. "So, tell me how you got those scars."

__________________________________________________________________________________

Pools of molten steel boiled around her. The stifling heat made Rarity feel sticky in her armour but the snarling monster before her was far more important.

“Fluttershy, p-please stop.”

The horned beast crawled to balance between the glowing, rectangular vats of the giant dwarven forges. The huge facility was evacuated as the chaos dwarfs didn’t dare fire their lead and metallic shot at Fluttershy. Rarity looked around through the glass eyes of her armor. Applebloom was hiding securely in a pile of chains to the right. To the far left, a dwarf slaver was coordinating a mob of goblin slaves to manipulate chains that controlled a hellcannon riding on railings on the ceiling, catching up to Fluttershy.

“Dear, please stop this. I can see what is going to happen and I can’t stand to see you in this much pain.”

“I’ll never stop.” Fluttershy grimaced. “Not while there’s still one living soul left in the world. Everything must die and I’ll start with you and Applebloom. I want to fell Big Mac lose it when I grind her up…” her jagged teeth spun and whirled, “and burn what’s left. Then, I’m gonna drown the world in blood, endless killing, for the blood god.” She twinged and was suddenly struck by a fireball of warp energy.

“Got her!” Scootaloo jeered. “Great shot Sweetiebelle!”

The mouthy filly released the lever of a smoking hellcannon. “Thanks!”

The artillery piece wailed and moaned with the tortured souls bound within. The great mouth of a bore flexed and screamed. Fluttershy readjusted herself and felt where the shot hit. A good chunk of her chest was melted away but she was too frenzied to care.

“Drop it!” the slaver commanded.

The gobbos released the chains and the other cannon plummeted onto Fluttershy with a hellish crash. She was stuck on her belly and Rarity carefully got closer, her vision beginning to come to fruition.

“I’m sorry, I can’t let it come true.” Rarity said as she placed her hand on the beast’s cheek and electrocuted her severely. Fluttershy’s metal form amplified the effect.

“YOU CAN’T HURT ME!” she screamed, truly suffering. Her claw tried to lunge forward and impale Rarity but the frame of the artillery had her. Rarity took another breath and pumped another massive jolt into her friend, hoping to make her pass out. Again and again, Fluttershy slowly faded, her body smoking. “You…call this pain?” she drooled. A simple plan came to mind and Rarity was frightened to see her grin. She let out most of the metal she’d taken in. Arms, armor, and metal sheets, budded out and fell into the vats around her. She then took the hellcannon instead.

“Don’t you dare do it!” Rarity ordered. She slapped her other hand on Fluttershy’s snapping muzzle and put in everything she had. The artillery bellowed through Fluttershy and her mouth dribbled the raw soul energy that was its ammunition. “No! Stop!” Rarity gave her a punch that boomed with a shockwave and deeply dented her cheek.

The monster stood with the weapon fully assimilated and built up a shot to unleash on Rarity. The outsized unicorn ran as Fluttershy’s mouth filled and she felt a sudden surge. Not a buildup of anger but more of a flush of it, away. She looked at her paws, the bloody claws from killing so many while chasing Applebloom. The taste of the shot was repulsive and she spat the shot behind her. It exploded in a hissing mushroom cloud. She felt her horn, this gigantic blade shooting up from her nose, still bearing many bodies and metal plates form smashing through buildings. Her heart melted as she looked around to the little fillies coming out of hiding and Rarity, who still had a deathly frightened look.

“Don’t run.” Rarity said. Fluttershy couldn’t bear what she’d almost done, what she said and did, and backed up.

“There it is!” Vanga barked from outside the forge. “It has my steed! Seize it!”

Rarity ran up to Fluttershy and wrapped her arm around her neck, holding her own wrist. “Okay, now we run.”

“Wait!” Applebloom cried. “She’s still got mah big bro and ah ain’t gonna leave ‘im!”

Rarity held Applebloom in a roll cage she made out of her other arm and looked up to Fluttershy’s miserable face. “Go Fluttershy! This is where my vision stopped! We have to get out of here!” The iron giant picked herself up and faced the charging heretics. “Just go and don’t stop for anything!” Rarity fired a great bolt of lightning and fried a couple small hostiles.

Fluttershy acted on instinct, bowed her head, and charged. She tried to ignore the shouting and striking of axes against her hard legs. Rarity looked back at the little white filly with the horned orange pegasus as they the forge became more distant. Fluttershy thundered through the streets, making sure her commuters were safe. Rarity gave her directions to anywhere but there. Even she didn’t know where they could hide.

__________________________________________________________________________________

Octavia practiced her cello as it was firmly secured in her side maw. The smoke of the incense in the room trailed toward Kivsin as his muscles and bones bubbled and expanded.

One of his eyes turned red and swiveled and blinked independently of his natural yellow eye. His skin swelled and strained as his insides redeveloped and split along his scars. His blood soaked him and his hooves budded bumps that grew into long, sharp claws. His jaw became large and powerful, armed with warp tempered steel teeth. To accommodate his weight, his wings grew to be giant. Black fluids oozed form his muscles and hardened into a shell to protect the soft flesh between the remains of his fur. His face looked more like a mask he could rip of at any moment and reveal a more hideous visage.

“Ubvit… Ubvit…” he growled.

It was one of the few words in Black Speech Octavia could understand. Kill, kill. She hastily got up and waddled to the entrance flaps, using the cello as a second leg. Kivsin grabbed her leg and rumbled furiously.

“Kill! Kill!”

“Oh Kivsin, What did I do?” Twilight said at the monster. His ears perked up and he looked back. Hazy and her ears drooped down, she held his soul in her hoof but he didn’t see it.

“Master!” He sprang up and quickly fell again with his unfamiliar weight, hitting his head on a counter.

“Ow!” Twilight grunted. She held the side of her head. “I felt that.”

“You see her don’t you?” Octavia looked to where Kivsin did, but saw and heard nothing. “Welcome back.” She waved.

Twilight knew she wouldn’t be noticed and focused on Kivsin’s soul. She examined it, dull blue and smoldering. It rattled as she shook it to find anything inside and started a strip soul spell and it flurried with memories and information. The possibilities. Cells of his true history were locked up in mystic chains, the life he never knew he had. She took the ones of his training and combat knowledge, of King Sombra and all the business he heard from him but kept away his independent will and the fact he was once part of the Black Guard. He was hers.

“Let’s see what we can do here.” She brought one close. “Here’s your name! Rampage.” She giggled, “You definitely look the part now.”

Her horn glowed brightly and the Druchii spell shattered. She looked to him and he was scratching his head like a rash. Without provocation, he grabbed his face and started squeezing hard. She could feel this assault on his person. “Wh-what are you doing?”

“I d…I don’t know.” He feared. “What’s happening?”

Twilight quickly took another cell against his tightening grip and broke its bonds also. His other claw grabbed his neck and began crushing it. The nails dug into his skin.

“Master!?” he garbled.

Twilight’s air was already cut and she faintly took the memory of King Sombra. The image laughed insidiously as if he knew what she was doing. Those vicious green eyes seemed to accelerate her dwindling and blood ran from Kivsin’s face and throat. With the last of her breath, she broke the seal and it exploded in raucous laughter. Twilight gasped as Kivsin threw his arms down. The memories funneled back into his soul and it burned bright blue and a little hot in her hooves.

“That was different.” Octavia amusedly approached him and leaned her hoof on the possessed pony’s shoulder. She couldn’t resist the blood on him and brought her tongue close to him.

“Let her Kivsin. You need a cleanup.” Twilight said before he could push the thirsty grey mare away. She folded her legs under her body and got comfortable. “Tell me everything you remember.”

Octavia seated herself in his lap and pulled his head down so she could drink of his blood there. She tickled both their chins and her saliva stung his cuts. Twilight bent her neck to the sides she was working on and giggled.

“What I remember?” Memories flooded his mind. Their multitude filled him with nostalgia and remorse.

“Hold still!” Octavia ordered as Kivsin shuffled closer to Twilight.

“I-I remember so much! Master, thank you!”

He unloaded his information to her while Octavia drank her fill. Eventually, Twilight was struck with the realization.

“Wait a minute. How do we separate?”

Author's Note

There was a publishing mishap with this chapter a while back. I felt so stupid with how it looked and hopefully this is much better.

Chapter 15: Darkness Within

Octavia’s winding tunes vibrated into the room from outside. Every note was crisp, clear, and would entrance the wildest beast.

“How long has she been freaking out?” Vinyl asked, watching the possessed noctral turn his head, round and round, bored of whatever invisible show he was watching.

“Twenty minutes.” he moaned.

He followed Twilight as she skittishly trotted around him.

“Think, think, think. How do we get apart again? I don’t believe this!”

It just didn't process that it had happened. Through daemonic magic, she'd possessed her assistant, mutating him into a hideous, horned monster. He couldn't touch her but she could touch him and felt him up, trying to figure out his mutated features. His red eye was just like hers.

“I c- I can’t stay in your head!”

Vinyl leaned on Kivsin’s back and felt his swollen muscles. She purred at his texture, his warm, rolling hills and ripples, and her Slaaneshi nature quickly took hold.

“I can get us a cocktail. Get us in the mood.” She said archly.

“This is no time to get high!” Twilight screeched, unheard by the white unicorn.

Kivsin spoke for her. “No.”

Let down, Vinyl brought her muzzle to his ear. “Yo Twinkle Hooves, you wanna say it yourself?”

Her cycle of panic was broken. She glared at her with fervent inquiry.

“I think the master is interested,” Kivsin said.

“Alright then.” Vinyl grinned. “His body’s yours, too. You can take control. He’s like a jacket. Just slip it on.”

Kivsin wrung his claws timidly as Twilight looked over her vehicle.

“How does this even work?” Twilight wondered. She sat in Kivsin’s lap, her back to his chest and peered back at his almost canine face. He grinned, a hundred daggers in his smile. “Sleeves, right.”

He spasmed and convulsed as hell itself entered his system. As his seizure slowed, Vinyl asked, “So, who am I talking to right now?”

Kivsin gazed in wonder at his claws, bent his fingers, and started gasping, unable to breathe.

“Twinkle Hooves, you in there? Breathe, you son of a bitch!"

He panged and contorted again and inhaled more steadily.

“Master, I’m sorry!” he said to himself. “The elves’ torture was thorough. Nothing works as it should...”

“Everything about you, it’s so painful...”

Her voice echoed in his mind like she was recovering from having every bone in her body shattered. “Oh Celestia, what am I?” His red eye looked at his claws on all his legs. “What did I turn you into?”

“Offer for a swig still stands.” Vinyl said offhandedly, then started back through the flaps of the room.

“Wait!”

Kivsin grabbed her tail and she let out an aroused ’ooh!’ then turned around with a falsely romantic look. “You wanna play that game?”

“The master would partake in a drink,” he said, sternly sticking to the first proposal.

“Then get your flank up!”

It felt so awkward, trying to manipulate these twenty rending fingers on his legs, and Twilight piecing everything she knew about herself back together.

“Just follow your orders.” he thought to himself.

The air was foul with the stench of concentrated perfumes, choking smoke, and sweat. The Tome of Corruption was a small place - about two dozen people were in at any one time. Some wrote stories, others smoked anything that could burn, and more drew incredible works of art on notepads and canvases. A woman of tight, light purple skin slowly and sensually danced around a small fire pit. Countless piercings hung on her body, passing under and through the smooth exterior. Her large crab-like claws snapped and clicked in a perpetual mating ritual. A masterfully woven banner, bearing the mark of Slaanesh hung behind a grey mare, a bow replacing her right foreleg, playing her warped cello that the daemonette danced to.

The bar was tended by a magenta pony hanging from the bottle and barrel racks. Thirteen arms sprouted from her back. A few shook a container and she poured an orange, foamy fluid into a glass and slid it to a customer. One man sat with his face on the counter, either in a coma or dead. A pink mare sat gloomy and when she received her hissing, black beverage, ingested the whole cup. A moment later, she spat it up empty.

“Woah Vinyl, who’s your friend?” Berry Punch mused.

“This 8.5 on the scale…” Vinyl said, leaning on Kivsin as she walked, “is Kivsin. Got his flank possessed by the most pussy ass daemon I ever saw.”

“The master is very upset,” he said.

“Nothing Berry’s juices can’t fix!”

In the seat, Twilight felt him keep glancing at the limp body in the chair over.

“Oh my gosh, I forgot to feed you for six days!” Twilight rebuked herself. “I’ve just been so caught up. I’m sorry.”

It felt strange to the bat, an attraction he couldn’t resist. “I’m not sure why, but the smell of flesh, it just…”

With a mind of its own, his claw grabbed the man by the arm.

“I think he’s been dead for about half an hour. You can get rid of him, if you want.” Berry said nonchalantly.

Kivsin put his claws to use, ripping the arm off and munching on it like a meat stick. Twilight couldn’t remember the time she experienced solid food, just blood. She ignored the reviled taste and feeling of the raw meat and tried to focus on the taste of the blood, from which she drew her sustenance. Vinyl already ordered - her usual, and the most alcohol-spiked blood available for Kivsin. The process sickened the possessed couple. Berry Punch chugged a couple of bottles, quickly got sick and vomited into a tankard. Vinyl happily took it. The second was sealed in a pressurized bottle because of the volatility of the alcohol. The draught fumed thick, grey fog from Warp knows what else was in it.

He finished off the hand, half-heartedly took it from Berry’s stringy arm and stared into the swirling red and black… black?

“Master, this might affect you too. We-“

“Drink it.” The troubled daemon in his head ordered.

Orders were orders. He quickly brought it up, but a blue aura around the tankard stopped him.

“Don’t take it all at once, big guy,” Vinyl warned, her horn aglow. “Anything I know about the shit Berry puts out, you can’t drink too fast.”

Berry chuckled maliciously and glanced at the dead man, missing an arm. The pink mare across the bar extended a slimy tongue and ran it over the span of his back. He swiped at it but they snatched it back.

“I knew it!” Pinkie Pie exclaimed.

She eagerly came around his back and hopped up against him, hanging her forelegs over his shoulders and sliding her soft, wiggling underbelly against his back.

“Look at you, grown up big and strong. Where’s Twilight, servy-colt?”

“Somewhere within me, twisting my body in ways I-caah!”

Pinkie forced his mouth open wide and shoved her face in.

“Twilight! Yoohoo!?” she shouted down his throat. “Sorry about last night but you had to get out somehow!”

He shoved her back and massaged his aching jaw. “She does not want to speak with you!” he railed her.

He grabbed one of her tongues and wrapped it around her muzzle, tying a tight knot before her eyes. Pinkie sulked back to her place and attempted to free herself. Twilight giggled in his mind, a bit tipsy from the spiked blood. Kivsin was already chock full of pollutants and wasn’t affected much. The air suddenly felt stale and everyone felt a bit empty as Octavia finished her last song. The daemonette clicked her claws in applause with the rest of the patrons. The performer bowed her head in thanks and stood from her stool. As she crossed the floor, her sleek grey fur and one voluptuous flank were caressed and squeezed by the sexually wanting hands and hooves of the small audience.

“Here she comes,” Vinyl cooed.

Octavia teasingly kept her distance, going around her lover in a bubble and leaning back against the counter to watch a unicorn with a living, snake-like clarinet take the tiny stage. The game was over and she indulged in her partner when Vinyl jumped at her and lovingly forced their bodies together.

“I don’t think I will ever understand Chaos, master.”

“You’re lucky you didn’t see me and Pinkie Pie last night. Cannot unsee.”

_______________________________________________________________________

“Think, think…” Nightmare Moon pondered in the bedchamber.

She poked her forehead to force her mind to work faster, to no effect. How to convince Celestia she had to stay and Luna had to go? The twin moons were rising together, first time they've seen. Luna, not her, was needed for the night duties. It bothered her so much that the moons moved on their own, independent of her whims. She stepped onto the hanging balcony, watching the sun set in one direction and Mannslieb and Morrslieb rising in the other. The serene purple and orange sky faded as the astral ball sank.

She raised her hooves to the bright grey and small teal orbs and felt her energy touch them. Like psychic fingers she gripped them, but they did not move at her pull, especially Morrslieb which she felt almost fight back. Harder and harder, she forced her power into it until her face reddened but, in line with the clockwork of the universe, the moons still rose at their own pace.

“My will shall not be denied!” she growled.

Her eyes glowed white and she raised her hooves again. Her horn hummed and strained with the power it had to channel. Finally, Mannslieb budged. It rose a little bit faster and Nightmare Moon lifted her hold on Morrslieb to focus on it. A great effort made it move little faster as she brought it to a twelve ‘o clock position in the sky.

She felt weak on her legs and admired her act. Morrslieb was left alone in its little corner of heaven with nothing but the pinprick stars to give it company. She returned to the bedchamber and assumed the position when Luna fell asleep, legs sprawled about the mattress and sheets over her head. She prepared to relinquish the shadows that gave her form over Luna’s body… but they didn’t leave at her command.

Briefly, she felt pensive. What was she to do if the little sister was not present but this monster of darkness? But then, she quickly came up with a legitimate excuse; the moons up at once forced Luna into this form. Now Nightmare Moon would have to pretend she didn’t hate Celestia with the passion of a thousand cursed suns a little longer.

The door began to creak and the corners of her mouth curled upward slightly in a malicious smile.

“Act two.” she whispered.

______________________________________________________________________________

Octavia observed the beast climb the wall of the bar, digging his claws into the wood and quivering with the daemonic influence twisting his conscience. The already destroyed walls of his sanity were eroded yet further.

“Perhaps you could take me up, sometime.” she said wistfully.

Kivsin ignored her and continued his ascent. “Our souls are from the wild, and wings to reach the sky. Let the sun fall into the ocean, let the earth erupt in flame.” he extolled.

“Kivsin, snap out of it!”

He stopped abruptly, shaking his head as if to clear it. One of his claws nearly slipped from the wall before he realized what was happening and righted himself. “Master, may I ask why we’re up here?”

“I want you to fly us back to the school. I’m not going to get it any time soon.” she hiccupped.

She realized this when she nearly spiraled into a spear cache some time ago. He spread his wings, tattered with rips and holes at the bottom. Peering over the edge of the roof, it wasn’t a long drop but he still felt major vertigo.

“Waiting for liftoff, pilot.”

Kivsin clawed up the thick chimney as his senses caved again, Twilight’s daemonic influence coursing through his veins in a myriad of conflicting sensations.

“We leave in sleep, those who don’t know the final day is here. The very last and we leave at dawn.” Perching on the top, he scanned around for which direction to go in. “We raise our hooves and bodies to the peak, into the universe. Toward the stars we go.”

He beat his great wings once, and was launched into the air. Twilight laughed at the rush of flight, yet soon felt growing anxiety as they slowed in the air and started to fall in a falcon-like nosedive.

“You know what you’re doing, right?”

She felt his face curl into an evil smile. The ground flew up at them and his Twilight-controlled red eye shut tight, awaiting impact. She snapped his wings wide open and it felt like catching on railings, the force of stopping his descent. Twilight felt like she hit a rock floor as they rose above the buildings where daemons and pegasi flew freely. Kivsin rode on the air and didn’t have to flap much with his huge wingspan.

Twilight stared down on the city, a million torchlights and a light fog rolling through the streets. She felt the strength of his body pushing through the air and how close they came to becoming a pancake.

“You’ve gone crazy, you know that?”

“Crazy? Who’s crazy? I’m not crazy! Why are there cobwebs on my face!?” he babbled. “Blood! I ache for the taste of blood!”

He picked a lean pegasus out of the surroundings and flew straight up, high over them like a bird of prey. His face contorted into an expression of bestial, uninhibited hunger.

“Go get him.”

Kivsin curled his wings in and dove on his target, expertly positioning his claws to specifically clasp their neck and hind legs. By the time they looked up at the shadow that covered them, Kivsin smashed into him, crushing his throat to a fraction of its original thickness and driving them down to the floor of the roofs below. With his spine snapped at the neck, the pegasus was already dead. Kivsin flipped the body on its back and thrust his claws into its chest. He pried open the ribcage, stuck his claw between the lungs, and ripped out the heart, tearing it open and letting the hot red liquid pour into his mouth. The open vessels in its chest created a puddle of blood that he plunged his mouth into, sucking up the sweet ichor until the well ran dry.

“To the school, now.”

He scarfed down the heart eagerly, savoring the rich, chewy muscle, and took off again in a leap.

“Always hungry, just like the gods,” Twilight’s voice chuckled, looking at his bloody claws. “Can you make the trip more interesting? A few air tricks, maybe.”

“Former Black Guard are always full of surprises.”

“I broke that one, too!?”

“Broke what?”

“Nothing. Nothing. You still don’t know what ‘free’ means?”

“...Is it another language?”

“Nevermind. Show me what you got.”

_____________________________________________________________________________________

“Calm down, calm down…” Rarity wheezed as she pieced the door to Lyra’s apartment back together. “Okay, what’s your situation? Your friend is an unstable giant metal beast that just absorbed a piece of super-heavy artillery and another juggernaut, you have to look after her and a zombified filly, and every bloodthirsty Khornate in the city is after us. Uhohohoho, I’m doomed!”

“You let ‘im out! Gimme my big brother back!” Apple Bloom demanded.

She pounded the quivering iron pony with all the fury her tiny body could muster, but Rarity yanked her away from a falling glob of hellcannon ammunition. Fluttershy swallowed back the foul tasting-energy as it dribbled from her lips.

“Apple Bloom, please be patient! Fluttershy, please, just release whatever you have in you.”

Apple Bloom glared fiercely at the steel giant as Fluttershy put her emotional sessions with the Doctor to use. She haphazardly sat, her head brushing the ceiling of the room.

“Happy thoughts, happy thoughts...” she whispered.

Rarity finally caught her breath. “See, Apple Bloom? She’ll get him back-“

“I can’t!” Fluttershy cried, her eyes wide and terrified.

Apple Bloom renewed her useless bombardment of the monster that had devoured her brother.

“What... what do you mean?” Rarity said, anxiety returning.

“Wh-when I try… th-th-the monsters appear.” She pressed the sides of her head. Her body rang from the impact of her sharp paws. “I can feel his steel… mixed with mine. It’s so cold...”

She shook like a washing machine, vibrating the whole room.

Apple Bloom climbed up and looked into the burned-out hole in Fluttershy’s chest. Red-hot pipes crisscrossed her body and a pair of bellows for lungs obscured a throbbing lava rock that was her heart.

“Get down from there, you’ll fall in!” Rarity said and pulled Apple Bloom to the floor. “Let’s see if I can cover that up.”

She winnowed through a pile of metal scraps, waste from the forging of her armor. A reasonable slab presented itself and she laid it over the hole. Fluttershy was at her maximum for metal intake so Rarity had to weld it on herself. She ran a charged finger along the crease, producing a brilliant shower of sparks and ticklish giggling from the iron giant.

“You… k-killed Big Mac…” Apple Bloom wept as the reality sunk in.

Fluttershy swiveled her eyes to the sobbing filly, but stayed still for the patch-up.

“N-no, he’s not. I mean, I don’t think so. I feel something, like maybe he’s alive. I’m so sorry. So sorry…”

Rarity bit her lip, preparing herself to break Fluttershy’s heart even further. “F-Fluttershy, listen... What you did out there, when you acted… different... we’re actually going to need... more of that.”

She jumped back against the wall, horrified and the metal plate only half-welded.

“W-w-w-” She couldn’t even start.

“Everything out there would do the same thing to you without a second thought,” Rarity quickly tried to explain. “Everypony is cruel, hateful, and murderous. You have to do it first before they do it to you.”

“No!” Fluttershy huffed, her voice choked with fear and disbelief. “Please, no! It hurts to be mad! I don’t want to hurt anypony!”

“It hurts worse to be dead! None of us will be mad at you, we won’t think badly of you and we’ll still be best friends. You need to kill things for survival, and know who not to!”

Just as the iron giant was about to retort, the door slammed open and Lyra and Cheerilee rushed in, shutting and locking it behind them.

“Phew, I think we lost them… Well, this is getting crowded,” The unicorn remarked, glancing around with distaste. “Pus ball, off the bed!”

Her hands began glowing with ominous, sickly green fire, and she fixed her baleful glare on Apple Bloom. The rotting filly scampered off, leaving a pool of bodily slimes on the linens.

Cheerilee stormed up to Fluttershy furiously, murmuring dark curses under her breath.

“Class was not dismissed, you truant…” She snapped her chains at her. Their pure chaotic energy stung like a real whip, sparking and scarring her body. “Rowdy, disobedient, rabble-rouser! You came to me to harness your anger, correct?”

Fluttershy painfully nodded, holding her legs as they dripped liquid fire from the gashes. “Ye... yes.”

“Then we’ll resume where we left off.”

Rarity stepped back, and let the display of cruelty go on.

______________________________________________________________________________

“Brown colt, hourglass cutiemark. Brown colt, hourglass mark.” Kivsin repeated as his eyes scanned in different directions over the market square from a roof. He had counted at least two scraps down in the streets already between the seemingly-suicidal vendors and polyglot populace, but—

“There he is!” Twilight exclaimed, spying Whooves and Applejack taking part in a shop raid. “Go in after them, but don’t scare them.”

“Scare them?” Kivsin blurted madly.

“No!”

“Scare them!?”

“I said don’t scare them!”

“Yes master, SCARE THEM!”

Twilight lost control of the beast. He jumped down as Applejack threw herself through the window of the shop and shambled at the owner, her mindless instinct taking hold. He thrust a knife into her neck but, being already dead, she bore down on him and took a huge bite out of his skull. Whooves took what they needed for when they eventually left the city.

“That’s all we need.” he said, checking the shelves one more time. “Applejack, let’s go before the other people-“

A creature that immediately made Whooves think of a fury daemon screamed in through the window, scattering papers and small items in its wake. The possessed noctral spotted the Doctor and sounded a mind-shattering howl.

“Applejack, help!” Whooves shouted, but the pony had already entered her zombified trance and just kept feasting on the unfortunate shopkeeper.

Kivsin blasted forward at the doctor, who in his fear had backed himself into a corner, and with a crash they both went down to the floor. The noctral fixed his blood-encrusted claw around Whooves’ throat, his lips parting to reveal rows of jagged teeth festooned with bits of heart muscle. His breath burned the Doctor’s face and it looked as if he’d just bite his head off on the spot.

“Stop right there!”

The anger in Twilight’s voice made Kivsin shrink back in fear.

“Say what I say.”

Whooves coughed as the monster took its claw away.

“Doctor Whooves,” Kivsin repeated unsteadily as Twilight spoke, “Don’t be frightened. He won’t hurt you.”

The Doctor tried to maneuver around him, his gaze flicking wildly between the bat-pony and the door.

“Wait, please! Twilight is in here.” Kivsin tapped his head.

Whooves stopped and stared in confusion. “W...what?”

“I don’t know how it happened so quickly or how long I could do this, but... I-I’ve become a daemon, or at least gotten the powers, and possessed this noctral. I want you to meet Kivsin.” He shook his hoof and put on a bloody smile. “I wanted you to meet him before, but I just never got around to it. He’s actually a lot smaller than this and used to be part of the Black Guard in Naggaroth. Isn’t that incredible?”

Whooves couldn’t quite process it. “Twilight, you did this?” he probed, his voice hovering between curiosity and firm rebuke. “Are you in control?”

“No - Kivsin’s body’s been so destroyed from torture, everything he does is a nightmare. Can you separate us?” The fused couple were discouraged as he shook his head. “But the daemonancy book didn’t have anything on separation.”

“What have you been doing with daemon magic?” Whooves asked, a bit angrily.

“I’ve been experimenting, going to school and learning about it. Is something wrong?”

“You need to stop this.” he said slowly.

“Why? Chaos has the answer to every question, for every problem. Kill it!”

“Look at yourself!” Whooves exclaimed, squeezing Kivsin’s face. “You’re a daemon in a pony-bat! Rgh, you’re going too far. Have you asked him what he feels with you turning his brain inside out?”

Kivsin stood back and allowed the Doctor to rise shakily to all fours. Several moments passed in silence, before Twilight’s voice sounded in his mind once more.

“What does this feel like?”

He felt small, microscopic, as the pressure of the attention of two ponies came bearing down on him. The great black holes of their eyes drained his soul and stole his breath. An axe of dull molars and muscle to the skull cleared his thoughts.

“Doc, run! Ah got ‘em pinned!” Applejack grunted.

Kivsin kept her axe from clocking him again and held her by the lower jaw as she tried to sink her cavity-riddled teeth into his face. He positioned his hind legs just right and bucked her off with a crack of her ribcage. The caustic ooze her skin excreted burned his claws. Yellow pustules and inflamed veins set his claws on fire.

“He’s not dangerous, Applejack!” Whooves said, putting himself between them. “Twilight’s trapped in this body!”

Kivsin slapped his claws together, popping the blisters and waving his hands to get the fluid off. Applejack rallied her posture and scrutinized the creature, as the bat-pony kept an eye on that organic axe of a leg she hobbled on. The teeth moved like a segmented insect back up her leg and her skin stretched back down to rebuild her hoof.

“Whut ‘n tarnation are ya talki’n bout?” she said. This thing doesn’t resemble Twilight at all, save the wings and fangs. “What are ya tryi’n ta pull?”

“Just keep repeating after me.”

“In the wayfarer place, you had a heart attack and died. Your heart still isn’t beating.” Kivsin said slowly, his expression still wary.

Applejack held her chest that hadn’t made a beat in a month. “How’d it happen?”

“I tried to scare you and you said, ‘t’aint scary, sugarcube’. Then bam!”

It slowly sank in, ever so slowly. “Then… who’s this colt, here?”

“Introduce yourself. All formal, and such.”

“Ex-Black Guardspony Kivsin, ma’am.”

“Now don’t be talki’n like that. Y’all maki’n me feel old. How’d y’all git smushed together?”

“The master wanted to know if she was a daemon, so she attempted a possession spell and it worked. She is very troubled now, and it may be taking a toll on me.”

“Well, shoot! Twi, What’s it look like in there?”

“I can’t see on the inside; I look through his left eye.” Kivsin spoke for her. His red eye spun and swiveled randomly. It felt so icky in the socket, like someone stuck a fork in the back and was getting ready to just pop it out.

“How did you get mixed up with a Guard?” Whooves came in, wary of the nature of such individuals.

“I bought him at the slave market to help me with my research and homework. He’s so broken, he can barely think for himself. It’s almost like keeping a pet.”

Whooves got sorely cross. “Who’s been giving you homework!?”

“...Miss Cheerilee. She runs the schoolhouse we go to.” Kivsin said cautiously.

“Let me see your apartment.” Whooves demanded, sounding very disappointed and apprehensive.

“Take us there.”

Whooves was brusquely swept up under Kivsin’s foreleg and lugged out of the store.

“What are you doing? Let me go!” Whooves berated him.

“Taking you to the master’s apartment.” Kivsin responded flatly.

With a sweep of his large wings, they rocketed into the air.

“Ah guess a’ll have to find mah own way!?” Applejack shouted after the shrinking pair. She summoned the cloud of flies around her. “Go follow ‘em.” And they did, buzzing off after the three.

___________________________________________________________________________________

A quivering, clawed paw paced itself on Cheerilee’s hoof.

“How do you feel, Fluttershy?” she gently asked.

The iron mare barely resisted the impulse to create bloody ribbons out of the teacher and tie them around her nails.

“Pretty good.” she rumbled.

Cheerilee looked into the big blue saucers in her head and the red railroad tracks that crossed them.

“I’m so thirsty.” she said dryly. Wisps of black smoke poured up from her mouth.

“Rarity,” Cheerilee called around her.

“One moment.”

Rarity wiped a bloody cloth across Fluttershy’s bleeding mane and wrung it into a large bucket.

“Here you are, dear.”

She raised it to her and she swiped it out of her hands. The blood hissed and boiled as it ran down Fluttershy’s tongue. She threw it down and reached behind her for Rarity, who hastily jumped back.

“Where are you? Where are you!?” she snarled.

Cheerilee slowly ran her hoof along the mark of Khorne on the iron palm.

“Stay focused, dear. You’re very ill right now, I can tell. There are some nasty things flowing through you, your hide and mind. Such a hateful, volatile mixture. Absolute chaos that can be unleashed. Let’s calm down, now.”

The sound of air rushing into Fluttershy’s billowous lungs created a wind everyone could feel. A steam-like hissing rang inside her. Her painful smile steadily sank and she started to whimper. Rarity reached up and put her hand on her cooling shoulder.

“Can we be done? Please?” Fluttershy stuttered.

Cheerilee’s only response was, “Rarity, again.”

Her bony hand still on Fluttershy’s shoulder, Rarity sent another jolt of electricity through her.

“Sorry, dear. This is for your own good.”

Fluttershy sputtered and writhed and her rage mounted again. She thrust her claws at Rarity and barely caught her between two of them, sinking into the wall. She pulled one to and held her in place with the other.

“Back to me.” Cheerilee said coolly.

Fluttershy pondered her options for a moment and yanked her claws out. Rarity fled for her life to the other room where Lyra was messing with Apple Bloom, lighting her on fire and letting her panic for a second or two and quickly snuffing her out. Rarity shocked her assailant, like touching a doorknob after walking on a carpet.

“Ow! What?” Lyra jerked around.

“Stop torturing the poor thing.” Rarity stated, staring firmly into the unicorn’s golden eyes.

Lyra pouted, clearly wanting to go back to play with her helpless toy. “Why should I? It’s funny.”

“Because her big brother is part of that.” Rarity pointed to the calmly raging juggernaut in the other room.

Lyra’s eyes widened, then she gulped. “Apple Bloom! Hey, Sorry about that, heh. You know I was just joking, right? I’d never let you burn to a crisp.”

Rarity solidly punched her on the shoulder and hesitated in petting Apple Bloom’s smoldering hide.

“Try not to mess with anything, and just shout if she tries anything.”

“But ah was shouti’n every time!”

“Oh…” Rarity mentally berated herself.

___________________________________________________________________________

“My own church. This is more like it.”

Nightmare Moon was only slightly impressed at the large chapel seated low among the residential buildings. Its windows glowed with torchlight against the nighttime darkness, reflecting on the lunar decor.

Her carriage was surrounded by a throng that wished to see their god enter the house of faith. The wicked Celestia and weakling Luna were reluctant to be worshiped like a deity, but the nightmare loved, indeed craved such attention. The carriage creaked to a halt before the majestic doors and a guard, riding in with her, opened the door of the wagon.

Nightmare Moon stepped into the evening air. Its natural scents brought fond memories of screaming villagers and invading dreams. She paid no mind to the on-looking ponies. They were ants to her. No, less. They were the dirt and cobblestones her steel-clad hooves walked on. The entrance was opened from the inside and all were relieved to see her grin fractionally.

A multitudinous thousand candles burned in anticipation of her arrival. Wide archways gave the illusion the building was larger on the inside than outside. A small choir chanted a doleful prayer upon the central stage.

All this light, it offended her senses. She swiped a wing through the air, blowing a chilling wind that extinguished half the candles. All fell silent and there were a couple short screams from the plebs, god-fearing and tense.

“Better.”

“Quaint.” Nightmare smirked.

The greeters parted to her desire to go down the columns of seats where many gazed on her. She was in her own self-absorbed bubble where no one else existed but her and who she talked to. Each one her eyes fell upon frightfully looked away and she came across a stallion, trying to bottle his misery, poorly though. His head spun as she stopped at his row and lowered her head to him. So close, his face burned.

“You miss her, don’t you?”

The grey stallion turned to her. The familiar scent of his fiancé’s favorite perfume permeated Nightmare Moon’s breath, a citrusy aroma mixed with the smell of blood. She spoke in a way as to expel as much air as possible in his face.

“If it makes you feel any better, she was quite delicious.”

She rose again and left him with his face to the backrest of the row ahead and moved on to the platform where the preacher would deliver his fiery sermons to the wanting. Her ears turned to the sound of light bells. A nobly adorned individual, rattling a chain of skeletal fingers and holding an equine skull under its wing proceeded to the podium at the center of the platform.

“Princess, if you could follow me.” Nightshade almost pleaded, trying to maintain a composed facade. Half the evening he planned was already ruined.

He hovered by a hallowed box seat high behind the stage. Its bulk was marble, chiseled with craters and studded with pure black onyx stones. Nightmare Moon took her place, resting on an array of embroidered pillows and got an excellent view of the church and the hundreds of eyes between her and the stage.

The vicar positioned the skull on the podium accordingly, seeming to ignore the presence of the goddess of the church. A race once loyal but now split in between Sylvania, the Witch King, and the Lunar Cult, the noctral preacher opened his text and cleared his throat.

“In dedicatione deae Lunae in morte.”

As the oration played, Nightmare Moon sat with her ego soaking up the words, the praise. She only half listened though, the rest of her facilities concentrated on what to do with Celestia. Earn her trust to let the evil half rule during the Storm, or try to lock Luna away in this living prison of jealousy and hatred, giving the solar diarch no choice.

She juggled and processed the possibilities, before catching sight of a small black silhouette coming around the front corner of the main room. A little blue colt, marked with scars of those condemned to a terrible fate, was led in chains.

“On all other nights, sacrifices to Her had their bodies purged in flame.” The preacher echoed, “But tonight, She may take it directly.”

Nightshade breathed a sigh of relief to see Nightmare Moon smile and stand in her box.

The speaker looked up to her and pointed a righteous hoof. “She hungers to punish and devour the unfaithful!”

She lightly jumped from the box and her sweeping wings blew everyone’s mane wildly. The colt stumbled over himself as he was enveloped in the shimmering mist of Nightmare Moon’s mane. They both were concealed under the magic aura.

“Little foal, tell me why you were unfaithful on Nightmare Night?” she whispered, faking concern in her voice. "Why did you leave no offering to me?"

“I-I was going to,” The blue colt stammered. “I was on my way even with my offering, but I was beat up and it was stolen.”

“Stolen!” she said with mock surprise - Nightmare Moon honestly believed him, but she didn’t care much and wouldn’t be kept from her snack. She undid his chains. “It is still a crime, unfortunately, child.”

He sobbed to the floor.

“What is your name?”

“S-Silent Spring,” he choked.

“Do you have any family? Friends? Where are they?”

“3846 Heldenplatz. My dad is... is...”

She nodded. “I’ll let them know that you weren’t taken in anger. That you’re part of the moon, now.”

She pulled him close and let him hug her leg. She rubbed her muzzle to the crown of his head and let the sweet lies set him at ease.

He felt an intense, humid heat encase his head and suddenly something wet run down his face. Before he could react, he was surrounded in darkness and felt something clasp around his hind legs followed by being beset all around by soft, moist walls, squishing him.

Nightmare Moon raised her head and lunged down, snapping her teeth over the foal’s hind legs and pulling him into her esophagus. In one gulp the bulge in her throat slid down. Her powerful muscles carried him through her ribcage and a small wave of pleasure buzzed through her torso as he squeezed into her belly. She felt him gasp in the acid fumes and quickly perish.

“Oh, it’s good to be back…” she sighed, rubbing the lump in her abdomen.

She swiftly sprang back into the air, leaving the misty cover to vanish where she left, and returned to her sacrosanct box.

“Retribution delivered!” the preacher bellowed. “Let this be an example of the fate that awaits you if you betray your faith!”

Nightmare Moon returned her thoughts to scheming. She was able to think more clearly on a full stomach.

______________________________________________________________________________

Kivsin pressed the pump of a syringe, borrowed from Vinyl’s arsenal of drug injection equipment, into a test tube.

“Careful.”

“I understand.”

His darkened blood filled the tube halfway, and he placed it in its holster. Over a steady flame, it rested and they waited for it to boil.

His foreleg tingled, signaling Twilight was attempting to use them again. She grunted and hissed as she burned with the toxins in his system. Her energy slipped into his leg like a sleeve and the index finger twitched and flexed up and down.

“Pointer finger, ow. Middle, ring, thumb.”

Trying to raise the arm, Twilight was on the brink of screaming.

“Log.”

Kivsin used his other claw to open a drawer and lay out a notebook, quill, and ink.

“Day two. Motor control is slightly better. Fingers, manageable. Arm, intense pain persists.”

Kivsin’s claw-writing was worse than a foal. Twilight told him to just use his mouth and he jotted it down, bird feathers tickling the roof.

She lowered his arm. “Ah! Hah…hah…How do you put up with this all the time?!”

“Years of living under it and experiencing worse every single day.”

“I swear I’ll never drink your blood again.”

“What do we do about the Doctor’s warning?”

Whooves had made her return most of her books to the library, and told her quite stringently not to go to the schoolhouse until further notice.

“We keep experimenting and looking for a way to get me out. Oh Celestia, what if it never wears off?”

“I could always dispose of myself. Daemons can’t inhabit the dead.”

“Don’t say that! We’ll find a way.”

She used his claw to scratch his head. She went at the one spot that filled him with a dog-like bliss. Even his leg started thumping rapidly.

“The Doctor was right. What have I done?” She relinquished control of his leg, despairing her condition. “Where is he, anyway?”

“He is still working with miss Applejack around this time.”

The blood-filled vial began to boil and in a flash, exploded. Shooting glass pattered off Kivsin’s hardened hide and he shielded his face with hands that were pierced by many shards.

“What the hoof is running through you!?”

____________________________________________________________________________

“Doctor? Miss Applejack?” Kivsin called through the door.

There was only the sound of starved zombie-like moaning. Applejack was definitely there.

“Perhaps their situation is delicate--“

A pressuring thud and smoke blowing through the door dislodged it and it creaked open on its own. Kivsin poked his head into the acrid fumes. Applejack was lunging herself at a hunk of meat, herself tied to a bedpost so she just kept falling over. The smoke streamed from Vinyl’s room along with tired murmuring.

“Hurry!”

Kivsin blew the smoke clear with his wings and found Vinyl’s door blasted off its hinges. Vinyl lay haphazardly, her horn fading with leftover magic from a backfired spell. Pinkie Pie was on the opposite end of hell’s music room, unconscious, with a struggling Whooves tied up in her tongues and in her lap. A shrinking magic light hovered over Whooves’ heart before flickering out.

“Help him! Now!” Twilight ordered.

Kivsin quickly closed the distance and began unraveling the slimy tongues from his limbs and mouth. He dripped with Pinkie’s drool and pressed his throbbing chest.

“Thank you!” he gasped. “Oh god, I can’t take her anymore!”

“What do you mean?”

“You two have to keep her away from me. Chaos is making her think she loves me!”

He hopped out from between Pinkie’s legs and she immediately felt his absence. She sleepily hugged the empty air in front of her, like a dog having a nightmare for it’s lost bone.

Vinyl slowly stirred, rubbing her burning horn. “Shit… how long have- Tavi! ”

She sprang to life. Prying Pinkie’s mouth wide open, she stuck her head in.

“Tavi, you okay?”

“I would be, if you didn’t let her ingest me!” a miffed accent bubbled up.

“You walk too slow. Don’t’ worry, I’m commin’ for you! Just stick your hoof up her throat.”

Pinkie’s belly jostled and soon Vinyl saw a sticky grey hoof poke out of the depths.

“Kippy, led me a hoof?”

Left to use his own damaged brain, he grasped Vinyl’s hind legs and shoved her into Pinkie’s waiting maw.

“Why?!” Twilight yelled in shock and disbelief.

“She said, ‘I’m coming for you.’ So…”

Pinkie couldn’t breathe with the mass in her throat and instinctively swallowed. She smiled as Vinyl slid down and joined her friend.

“What the fuck was that!? Get us out of here!” The white unicorn’s scream was muffled by the soft walls of Pinkie’s stomach.

“Just one minute!” Whooves interrupted. “What were you trying to do to me?”

“Nothing…”

“Vinyl, tell him!” Octavia nudged her.

“I promised Pinkie I wouldn’t.”

“Then I guess we’ll leave you in there.” Whooves said. “She could be up in a few minutes, or hours. ”

Her stomach groaned and started to roll around them.

“Fine! Jeez. She wanted your soul, Doc. If Slaanesh tries to hook you two up, it’s got to be! You can’t deny him…her. Hell, is Slaanesh a boy or a girl?”

“We’ll talk about it later! Whooves, get us out!” Octavia shook and pushed out against the tight skin.

Pinkie rested her claw on the two ponies, murmuring in what was now more of a digestive nap than a coma.

“Yummy pony goo for tummy...”

“Kivsin, reach down there before that happens.”

He pulled her jaw down some with one finger and maneuvered his claw, then his leg down her throat until he was shoulder-deep. Pinkie’s muzzle rubbed against his neck and her tongues tasted him in her warm, wet chambers.

He felt some mane, and gripped Vinyl’s head. She in turn held his wrist. Placing his other claw against Pinkie’s chest, he pulled Vinyl up. The stomach tentacles around her mandated extra force. Her face soon popped up and Kivsin grabbed her with the other claw and she slid out with an audible pop as her hind hooves exited Pinkie’s mouth. He reached back in for Octavia, finding her hoof and pulling up.

“Talk to the Doctor for me.” Twilight said nervously.

“Doctor, the master would like a word.”

He was still shaking off the black spittle from his coat.

“It’s so confusing which one of you is talking or who I’m talking to.” he snickered.

“What if I… sold my…”

He trailed off as Twilight lost her nerve.

“Sold what?” Whooves asked.

“Sold my… rrrrgh my soul! ”

His face paled. A fear crossed his face that would make Twilight apologize a billion times if he could hear her.

“You didn’t."

Kivsin managed to get Octavia out of Pinkie’s gullet and she hugged him with her one foreleg.

“I’m sorry, Doctor.”

Twilight was screaming penitence but Kivsin only transferred her words, not trying to convey her emotion. The Doctor paced back and forth. His second worst nightmare scenario had come weeks ago.

“Oh god, this is bad... Okay... But all is not lost. Alright, you haven’t turned evil, that’s good. Curious, what did it look like?”

“Black. Like an evil sun.” Kivsin said.

Whooves felt a bit lighter but still trotted about, pensively thinking. “Black sun, black sun... It wasn’t your soul, it was a beacon! Archaon could know exactly where we are now! Tzeentch, you clever bugger, tricking him into thinking it was Twilight’s soul. He’s probably waiting for you to come running to him, but eventually he’ll find out what it really is and start tracking us. Why, Twilight? Why did you think selling your soul was a good idea!?”

“Chaos promised--“

“You fell for it. Promises, promises! Never believe anything Chaos says, or else you’re just a puppet to them.”

Vinyl threw a foreleg around the Doctor. “Hey, you’ve been able to trust us this far.”

She licked his cheek with a forked tongue and tried to mount him. Whooves adeptly pushed her on her back.

“I never trusted you, but now I know to really keep away.” he rebuked.

“If Applejack can’t stop herself from going zombie-brained, you can stay with us, Doctor.” Twilight said through her slave. “If we get separated, Kivsin can protect you. Oh, you should see him when he goes after somepony to eat their heart and through him, their blood tastes sooo much better.”

Even Kivsin’s eyes fluttered as he recalled the fond taste of flesh and blood.

“Vinyl, Octavia, do not tell Pinkie Pie you told Twilight or she will go ballistic.”

“You’re gonna have to give me some incentive, Doc.” Vinyl said lewdly. Her electronic voice played a saucy song as she helped Octavia balance and levitated her cello into place where she gripped it.

The grey paraplegic could read Vinyl’s plan in her eyes and both glared on Whooves lustfully.

“No. Oh no, no, no.” he blared. He wouldn’t have any of that.

“Why not?” Vinyl moaned. “You don't know the good times the Prince of Pleasure brings.”

The two Slaaneshis circled him, looking for areas on his body they’d want to ravage and he skittishly trotted out.

“So I’ll move our supplies to your apartment?” he breathed to Twilight. He moved a little closer and whispered, “And uh, look out for these two?”

Kivsin’s red eye looked to them, drying each other of the saliva and the way they touched each other, wrapping the cloths and bed sheets around themselves looked like the beginning of some bizarre ritual.

“I put a new lock on my door. Not even Pinkie Pie can crack it now.”

Whooves sighed with relief. “Now I have to get Applejack back into the right mind.”

The door closed behind them as a small, spontaneous orgy began.

The bloated zombie in the other stolen room thrashed against its restraints. The slab of meat just a foot beyond her snapping mouth mocked her. She moaned with the infinite hunger of Nurgle’s undead. Her eyes were rolled back, diseased yellow balls running with red capillaries. Her mind was gone, replaced by only two thoughts in this state - eat, and infect.

Twilight felt much the same insatiable thirst for meat in Kivsin. Her daemonic influence, warping his mind depended on her emotions. Too happy, sad, angry, and he’d slip.

“Take it, quick. It’s still wet with blood.”

“What I do to bring her back is just get it far away enough that she- what are you doing?”

Whooves was off put by Kivsin snatching up the meat and stuffing it in his own face.

“We are sorry, Doctor,” he said between bloody bites, “but we hunger.”

“Don’t indulge yourselves. The addiction will get worse. The key is moderation.”

Whooves poked Applejack with a stick, waiting for the absence of the meat to register to her. Soon, her eyes rolled back down and noticed the rope around her neck. She sighed.

“Happen’d agin, didn’t it?”

Whooves nodded sadly. Applejack clenched her body and secreted acids onto the rope. It snapped quickly.

“Whut put me under this time?”

“Just something that fell out of our bags.” The doctor fabricated.

Kivsin spoke with confusion, “Wasn’t it Vinyl and-“

“No,” he said over her with a small, twitching smile. “It was hanging out the bag.”

He glanced to their tiny supply cache. Some jars of food, bottles of blood, and bound bundles of hay, all tied in burlap bags.

“Right, secret.”

“Oh yeah, right.”

“I wonder, Why d’yall call ‘im ‘Kivsin’? Whut kinda name is that?”

“The master enjoys the sound of the name of the country, Kislev.”

Whooves amusedly shook his head. “Named after a country full of axe-toting gun nuts, brilliant. It’s amazing how you’re all taking this.”

“Taki’n whut?

“All that’s happened. A month ago you were reading in a library or bucking appletrees, not a care in the world. Now one of you is a zombie, another is a daemonic vampire and steed of the apocalypse, one’s a giant metal killing machine, one’s a really tight hugger, and two we have no idea where they are. It’s Chaos. It softens your minds, renders your emotions numb to gruesome killing and tragedy. Twilight, you said it yourself; ‘you should see him when he eats ponies’ hearts.’ They must taste great to you two.”

Applejack ran her hoof across her bald head. “Ah do miss mah mane. Where do ya suppose Rarity ‘n Rainbow Dash are?”

“Wherever she is, Chaos is wrecking havoc on her memories. They already made her forget what she looks like, maybe they can make her forget who she is.” Whooves pondered it a bit more. “They wouldn’t let her go down. They’d make sure she’s somewhere safe and, forcing shapeshifting on her, she could be anypony, anywhere.”

He noticed a strange silence - no, not silence, but absence of a familiar sound. Fluttershy’s incoherent murmuring.

“Did anypony check on Fluttershy?” he said, walking to the closet.

“Oh, no,” Twilight gasped.

“Um, Applejack, due to certain changes in The Doctor’s state of living in this space, he will be moving into the master’s domicile.” Kivsin hastily forced out and gathered a couple of bags of supplies.

“Oh, uh. Alright. It’s gonna git a little lonely.” Applejack sighed.

The closet door’s creaking made Twilight squeak and hell was unleashed from round the corner.

“Where. Is. Fluttershy?”

____________________________________________________________________________

“You love me, don’t you?” Fluttershy rumbled. Her paw ground around on Apple Bloom’s head and the filly almost lost herself in fear of the angry blue eyes boring holes in her skull.

“Mhm.” she murmured fearfully.

The edges of Fluttershy’s mouth curled up a bit. “That’s fantastic! We just couldn’t be friends if you didn’t, now could we?”

The rotting filly shook her head.

“There are many who don’t love you.” Cheerilee said.

Apple Boom squeaked as Fluttershy held her pet tighter. A few of her decayed bones snapped.

“Who? Why? I’ll… I’ll kill them!”

“Orkz don’t like you when they don’t like Chaos. The Empire hates you. Elves and dwarfs despise you. They want nothing more than to see you dead.”

“No... nooo... noooo...” She muttered darkly, a dangerous edge to her voice.

“There is a way, though. Kill them, and they will love you for setting their souls at peace.”

Fluttershy smiled. “I’ll make them. They’re going to LOVE ME!!”

She jumped up to all fours amidst a cacophony of noise, but Cheerilee raised a hoof to stop her.

“In time; in time.”

____________________________________________________________________________

“Is he still mad?” Twilight couldn’t see the Doctor as he was on Kivsin’s right.

The entranced noctral carried some sacks on his back, balanced by his wings. He glanced at the fuming Doctor with the neck of a bag in his teeth. Both walked in silence, penetrated by him thinking out loud once in a while, rearranging his plans.

‘Yes.’ Kivsin thought back.

He kept his attention down the dark, sharply protruding hallways and came upon their apartment door. He bit his own claw, enough to draw a drop or two of blood and stuck his slightly reddened finger into the lock. It growled, clicked and the door creaked open.

Whooves plopped his bag beside the desk and pulled at his face, a million problems running through his brain.

“I just… I can’t believe you.” he started. “You lost her, left her in the care of a Chaos missionary. Do you have any idea what will happen to her!?”

“We’re sorry--“

“She could be turned on us! She could be taken away! Rainbow Dash might have a better chance than her, and she may not even know who she is anymore!” He paused his assault to think again. “The warp eating her memories could make her think she’s anypony! But who… who would they disguise her as?”

____________________________________________________________________________

“Lift.”

The pegasus nurses slowly raised the corners of a large blanket, holding Soarin, still covered in open wounds that had finally stopped bleeding. The medicinal water soaked through the cloth and he grunted as his limbs were stingingly pushed to new positions.

“Careful!” Spitfire said. She hadn’t left his side for days. Her mane was a matted mess, and black bags framed her eyes in rings.

They lowered him onto a stretcher and let the wet blanket fall around him. The carriers started with their load into the halls while a couple of nurses patted Soarin with towels, soaking up the moisture. Spitfire anxiously walked by him, watching his every aching breath.

The hospital was working tirelessly with all the casualties of battle. Wounded soldiers screamed and jerked on the tables and beds. All smelled of blood and tears and madly babbled the horrors of witnessing the fury of the Warp. All but one room was occupied which was reserved for the “returned” lieutenant. Medical technology had gone backward. What were once IV’s and heart monitors, bone saws, biting gags, and religious trinkets now waited for a poor victim.

“Just a few stitches, a night to finish drying off, and he’s yours, general.” said the surgeon with a rehearsed smile, something to calm the friends of the injured. “I’d recommend a week for the stitches to settle and an hour of prayer every day to speed up the healing. Alright, everypony I don’t need, out!”

The room steadily emptied to surgeon Cauterize, two nurses, Spitfire, and a sweatingly nervous Soarin. A nurse placed a rubber biting block in his mouth and he looked back at her with ‘what is this for?’ written all over his face. Her chuckling told him learning would be painful. Both nurses put their weight on his hooves as the doctor poked a string through the eye of a needle and tied it securely.

An axe cleaved through his leg as the doctor stuck the needle through one of the canyons of torn skin on the afflicted limb. His attempts to twist and pull away were easily thwarted by the cruel surgeon’s subordinates.

“All that time in the warp made you soft?” Cauterize said. “You used to not even flinch.”

Back and forth between the edges, the thin metal splinter wove and the unicorn surgeon tugged on its trailing string to bring the flaps together. A pair of scissors levitated to the string, surrounded in his own green aura and snipped it near the skin. Cauterize tied a large knot in the ends so they wouldn’t slip through the holes the needle had punched.

“One down, six to go.”

Soarin’s teeth squeaked against the block, his eyes watering in pain.

A few firm knocks sounded at the door and Cauterize almost missed his mark as he winced.

“Requesting permission to enter, General Spitfire.”

“Granted.”

A light green pegasus entered, wearing a sharp blue uniform, buttoned down with gold beads, patterned with vicious lightning bolts.

“What do you want, Lightning Dust?” Spitfire said, a bit uncomfortable with another pony in the room, especially her.

“I just wanted to see if it was true, that Soarin came back. Looks like the troops were right.” She read the contempt streaming from Spitfire. “Ma’am, I fully intend to serve my probation, but how could I have known? When I’m back in action, I will divert every resource of my squadron to find her and return her to the Rig, or bring her down.”

“You got to see him. Get out of here.”

Lightning saluted somewhat angrily and trotted out.

Spitfire’s longing hoof touched Soarin’s and it comforted him a bit as Cauterize worked at sealing the gaping cuts.

____________________________________________________________________________

“Twilight?” Celestia stood up.

Somehow she was in the palace of Canterlot, untouched by the siege chaos had laid against it. The halls were free of the severed heads and organs that the unholy legion threw through the windows. The stained glass was intact, and an eerie orange-red light reflected in. She ran over to the unicorn on the balcony, looking out on the world below.

The world was on fire. All was consumed in its ravenous grip, sending a reverse rain of cinders into the sky. The waterfalls and rivers ran red, carrying mutilated heads and bodies in their current. A fog of mold and pestilence blew across the land, rotting and eating away at all it touched. Geysers of magma erupted from cracks in the planet and raw ley energy poured out with it. The ponies of the burning kingdom shambled about in chains, blinded or broken, with the invisible fingers f the warp spearing their minds, they danced in dark worship and the streets of Canterlot flowed with the blood of evil sacrifices.

Celestia witnessed hell itself.

“Did I do a good job, Princess?” Twilight asked, beaming with anticipation for her teacher’s response.

“Twilight… what is this-“

She bumped into an invisible barrier, holding her back from the lavender magician.

“Princess?” Twilight said again.

Celestia looked on with horror as a second solar goddess walked past, smiling warmly at the unicorn. Twilight looked up, her expression mirroring that of the milk-white alicorn beside her.

“Who are you!? Stop! ” the confused Celestia barked. The imposter ignored her and draped her feathered wing over her faithful student.

“It’s wonderful. Perfect.”

“Twilight, get away from her!”

She didn’t hear or see her banging at the shield, trying to break it with the fullest might of her magic that would have felled a Chaos mammoth.

“This is why I chose you,” The imposter canted. “The moment I saw you when you were a filly, I saw the future of the world.” She scanned her hoof at the apocalypse-ravaged Equestria. “This couldn’t have happened without you.”

Twilight rested her head on fake Celestia’s shoulder as the real diarch relinquished her assault on the barrier in exhaustion. The imposter held Twilight like a daughter and, adding insult to injury, glanced back at her.

“Wake up, Celestia.”

Its face shifted, slowly twisted and burned.

“Wake up, Tia…”

Its necklace buckled and creaked into a golden mark of Tzeentch, burned into its chest. A wicked raven glared at Celestia. Its black eyes sucked out her soul.

“It’s your turn.”

Dancing flames engulfed her body, instantly killing her nerves and she fought in vain to put herself out, rolling, slapping her legs. She dove into the bloody waterfall, bringing a hissing end to the flames and it carried her to the streets below. The current swept her around, her charred flesh banged against buildings, dragged on the ground, it tore her skin apart.

The last thing she saw, for a split second, was an axe blade whistling to her neck.

______________________________________________________________________________

“Tia, wake up!” Nightmare Moon shouted.

The sleep-sweating alicorn jumped up, panting like death itself had stabbed her heart. She skittishly looked around. Nothing was on fire, and her fur was still a divine white. The subtle rays of sunlight began to pierce the blinds. Nightmare and an entourage of religious officials to commemorate the changing of shifts looked on her nervously.

“What a nightmare you must have had,” she said with false concern.

“It was worse this time… so much worse.” Celestia buried her face in her hooves.

“Perhaps you should tell Shining Armor, and Cadence.” Nightmare Moon stood at the center of the room, the place for their dressing and undressing of their ceremonial armor.

“We must.” She lethargically joined beside her sister’s alternate state and the parishioners started their task.

As one piece of Nightmare Moon’s suit was removed, a respective part of Celestia’s armor was put on in precise unison. The Emperor’s words that wearing heavy armor all day was exercise in and of itself held true - both princesses had put on a bit more muscle mass after six years lugging and carrying their ensemble’s weight. It became easier in time, and they felt naked without it.

“I miss the real you, Luna. This shell of darkness almost looks like it’s taken over.”

‘Take a step closer, and I’ll really take over.’ Nightmare Moon hatefully thought, before giving a sigh in agreement. “Hopefully, I will be normal again as the moons separate their orbits.”

“We mustn’t speak of hope here. It strengthens the ruinous powers.”

Celestia tilted her head back slightly as the chestplate was put on. It’s high collar brushed her chin before it was latched in place and fell lower. She tilted forward to let a golden sun be fixed behind her head and Nightmare Moon’s similar lunar ornament was taken off. As the last pieces of the Mare of the Moon’s protection were removed, her dark energy left it, reverting back to their nobler shapes.

“We should wait for Shining Armor to get here. I cannot bear to tell them more than once.” Celestia sighed.

“Where you must pause, I will carry on, sis-“ Nightmare Moon forced herself, “sister…”

“Thank you. What if, in the end, we must face her?”

Nightmare Moon put away her hatred of Celestia. Serious matters beckoned. “If we cannot hope for the best, we must simply want it; want that she doesn’t turn to the darkness.”

“You weren’t there, Luna. I watched her grow up, surrounded by friends and family. All the letters about friendship and love she sent. It may all be meaningless now.”

“It may seem cold, but I don’t share your care for her. If you cannot, I will.”

____________________________________________________________________________

The wind whipped at the Doctor’s mane as he hung upside down by the tail, high above the streets of Mordheim. The tugging feeling was more ticklish than painful.

“Do you see her, Doctor?” Kivsin yelled over the wind in their ears as they flew, Whooves’ tail firmly in his hind claws’ grip.

“My eyes aren’t even open!” he shouted back, afraid to see the far off ground.

‘Take us down.’ Twilight ordered.

The mutant bat-pegasus raised Whooves and held him by the middle in his claws.

“You couldn’t just carry me like this?”

“We need eyes in all directions.”

Kivsin’s claws dug holes in the flat roof he landed on and Twilight couldn’t help but wonder as he put Whooves down.

“Doctor, is it possible to become a daemon this quickly? All the daemon princes take centuries to get their rank.”

Whooves settled himself from all his blood rushing to his head while being upside worn. “Hm… I think it’s because the gods have a schedule to keep. Archaon needs his horse, and time won’t let him wait a hundred years.”

A green glow beyond the roof caught their attention and, nearing the edge, they gazed on a massive crater, smack dab on the surface of the city, hundreds of yards in diameter. Dozens of entranceways, emitting the alien green light that reflected off the black sky dotted the impression. It was usually bustling with thousands of people, mining and toiling to extract the massive wyrdstone deposits down below, but now it was walled off around the rim.

Skaven ratmen scurried about, improving fortifications to the hastily-built compound. The teeming masses of chaos cultists battered at the walls to reap the stone from the mines, but the Skaven held them back. Jezzails with their warplock muskets blasted into the crowd and giant rat ogres were used like attack dogs on leashes, roaring madly at the rioters to scare them back.

“The siege has begun.” The Doctor muttered.

“What?”

“They’re fortifying the compound in case the Orkz get past the walls. We have to find Fluttershy. She can’t get caught up in this.” Kivsin hovered over him and picked him up. “How hard can it be to find a giant in a place like this?”

As Kivsin rose to go around the crater and avoid gunfire, the surprise of a chorus of shattering wood and iron threw him off balance.

Flame and fury descended upon the compound.

____________________________________________________________________________

“I’ll make you love me! After you’re dead, we’ll all be best friends IN HELL!!”

Fluttershy shook off the rubble from the gate and slashed her claws at the Skaven below her, cleaving clean through them like swatting ants. Jezzail bullets pinged and ricochet off her. Their tracers lasted long, advertising where they were among the fortifications.

The rioters poured in after her, along with a maliciously grinning Cheerilee, Rarity, so sorry for what had to be done, and a rotting Apple Bloom, who wouldn’t leave her brother’s side. They used the chaotic crowd as a meat buffer to watch their friend wreak havoc.

She got to work with the hellcannon, its daemonic mouth forming at the end of her hoof, and fired a flaming shot into the walls of the compound, blasting it apart and sending rats flying into nearby buildings. A rat ogre charged her, slamming her off her hooves and both were wrapped in a rolling melee.

“Baby steps,” Cheerilee canted. “Then to the front.”

A large bat pony swooped down, dropped the Doctor among the onlooking trio and darted for the two grappling giants.

Rarity gasped, “Doctor!”

The brown earth pony staggered to his hooves from the abrupt drop. He was suddenly entangled in vines of bone from the armored unicorn, brushing him off and helping his balance. Rarity took off her helmet and knelt slightly to eye level.

“Rarity, where have you been all this time?”

She chuckled. “Oh, being kidnapped for a while, used as a money farm. For the longest time I couldn’t even go outside because of this disgusting little starfish I needed to help me breathe-”

“Ah! … What are these?” he yelped at her bony fingers as they retracted to “normal” length.

“Many things happened to me in those weeks, including the making of…” She posed, showing off her bird-like suit, “This. It felt almost like home to work at my talent again.”

The decaying filly interrupted her catwalk. “Hey, I remember you!” she beamed. “Ah tried ta sell you apples that one time!”

The uncomfortable memory returned to Whooves. Her persistence to get him to buy those red and green baubles was something to be admired. Now, she stood before him, a bloated, fungus-caked…thing.

“Oh, yeah…” he backed away. The fuchsia-colored mare, just as Twilight described her, was his focus. He skirted around Apple Bloom, bounding ungainly over the scar-covered body of a dead Skaven in the process. “Miss Cheerilee, I presume?”

A welcoming, lingering voice bounced out from under her dark hood. “Hello! You know Rarity?”

“Friend of hers,” he said, getting straight to the point. “Fluttershy is also with me, and I’m taking her home.”

Like the teacher she was, Cheerilee flipped through the rolls of parchment nailed to her body and ripped out one in particular, along with a quill.

“Like a parent, finally come for their child. Just sign the late release form and she’s yours.”

‘Never trust a Chaotic.’ Whooves sighed, then glanced at Rarity’s bony fingers. “Rarity, could you sign? I’m not very dexterous with my mouth.”

“Of course, dear.”

She took the quill and it instantly screeched to life. The feather’s follicles hardened to hundreds of teeth that poked and tried to bite her hard fingers. She immediately dropped it.

“It’s a bloodletter quill!” Whooves exclaimed.

Cheerilee snatched it from the ground, shrugging. “Sorry, I thought you would be more formal. It is customary to sign in blood.” She put it away and brought out another quill.

Whooves took it between his teeth and scribbled down his name. Hopefully, his non-human identity wouldn’t be recognized. The feather tasted foul of bodily filth and he spat it into her hoof.

“Thank you very much.” she said, shaking off the pen of spittle.

Kivsin touched down by the Doctor. A few of his organic black carapace plates were cracked. The only thing that stopped Rarity from losing it was that the creature had dropped Whooves with them.

Cheerilee looked into his red eye with casual interest. “Twilight. Enjoying daemonhood?”

Kivsin shook his head. “It hurts us both.”

Fluttershy stomped up behind him as the skirmish quieted, a wicked grin devouring her face as she plucked out heavier weapons that cut deeply into her skin. She was painted in Skaven blood and yanked up the possessed couple, cradling them like a big bunny.

“You helped me… So you love me, right?”

Kivsin took one second too long to answer.

“Right?”

He frantically nodded. “With all our heart!”

She released her grip, and the bat-pony dropped to the cobblestones, gasping.

“What did you do to her?” the Doctor angrily asked Cheerilee.

“I made her better,” she lauded eerily, “But she’s not done yet.”

“Yes, she is.”

A trickle of blood rained on him. He looked up at Fluttershy, looming over him like a steel umbrella. The heat radiating from her felt like a steel mill.

“Done? What do you mean ‘done’, Doctor?”

“Let’s calm down now, Fluttershy, okay?” Cheerilee said happily. “The fight’s over.”

The juggernaut snappishly looked around, seeing no living rats. There must have been more to fight, more to kill, blood to drink, but all the rodents had been slain by the rioters.

She shivered like a washing machine. Her smile sank down and down. She looked at the blood on her hooves, the Skaven bodies shish-kebabed on her horn. Finally, Fluttershy collapsed, wailing with pitiful remorse. “P-p-please, g-g-get them off.”

Kivsin picked up the charge, slipping the bodies off the bladed protrusion between her eyes. Fluttershy was forced to listen to and feel the sliding of their blood wetted corpses as one by one, they were removed. Rarity couldn’t bring herself to help at the thought of her touching these giant rats. She gawked at Kivsin, how Cheerilee called him Twilight. She wrapped her hand into a looking glass again.

“Show me Twilight.”

Lightning arcs popped and crystallized, showing a different angle of Kivsin, working. She viewed a flowing form of equine-shaped flames rushing through him. They both moved in perfect unison, like the fires were sharing his body. The pain of his insides being brushed by the light showed in how he twitched and gritted his teeth.

She stepped nearer. “Twilight?” Another glance at her hand to verify. “Are you in there, dear?”

The daemon was getting tired of explaining. Kivsin turned his head completely around, and Rarity nervously drew back a step as his right eye fixed upon her.

“The master will be with you in a moment.”

Apple Bloom tugged on Rarity’s chainmail skirt. “Can we see mah sis, now?” She pouted impatiently.

Rarity jumped away. “Please don’t touch me!” The filly’s touch rusted a few chain links to a flaky orange dust in seconds. “Applejack? No, no. Not until you find Sweetie Belle.”

“What?” Apple Bloom’s sunken eyes puffed up a bit.

“I won’t be left alone while that bloated, rotting meat puppet you call a sister is happy again.”

The marble eyes of her shoulder pads glowed bright and almost seemed to stare at Apple Bloom with Rarity’s eyes. The filly backed away from her cruelty, bumping into Cheerilee.

“A teacher is always there to help a filly.” she said and patted Apple Bloom on the head. “You can locate us, Rarity?”

She shook her looking-glass. “I will be at Lyra’s, when you have her.” And with that, she departed, stepping gingerly around the blood-soaked charnel house of a street.

Cheerilee gently tugged Apple Bloom’s moldy tail, urging her to follow through the gates of the compound that widened as it was ripped apart by the crowd. Its makeshift towers were toppled, crashing in plumes of ash and dust.

“So, where are your friends?” Cheerilee asked.

“They’re with Pox, a pony we met a week ago. Ah’m not sure where he brought ‘em.”

“Pox? Well, they’re in good hooves. He’s great with the young ones. His name used to be Braeburn, but the warriors of his clan kept calling him Pox, so it just stuck.”

Apple Bloom’s sagging, deflated heart almost literally melted.

___________________________________________________________________________

The world did not exist. He didn’t even thank the ground for being the only thing in existence his hooves acknowledged. The Reiksguard stallions barely kept up with Shining Armor as he bounded through the streets of Altdorf, ignoring all around him save his destination.

His legs sent shockwaves of pain up his body every step, his lungs were on fire but he didn’t care. He was almost there. The crowds parted to the reiksmarshall’s one-stallion stampede.

Across a large open street corner, Shining got his bearings for where he was. His guards caught their breath as well. The Princesses’ and Emperor’s palaces were visible atop their hills on opposite sides of the city. Shining spotted a thin, cloud-white, almost crystalline tower, just barely managing to peak its very top over the buildings around him. The guards didn’t notice for a few seconds that he’d taken off again.

The Elven district. Their inhabitants tried to make it as much like Ulthuan as possible. White brick was laid tall and tapered thinly to their roofs. The layout of the district was such that the center could be seen from any major street and there towered their representative headquarters. A citadel of immaculate white, blue, and gold, Shining Armor bolted for it and stopped before the guard elves at the sides of the door. The blue-eyed unblinking pelts of white lions bit their shoulders and paws wrapped around their waists.

They glanced at the panting, sweaty stallion and his equally exhausted guard, then at each other, not knowing what to make of him.

“I am…Reiksmarshall Shining… Armor.” he huffed. “Most pious servant of… Celestia and Luna, the saviors of… Ponykind.”

One promptly opened the door and both stood aside. He careened in, the stench of his perspiration offending the elves. A few knocked-over elven officials later, came stairs and more stairs, winding up the central tower. He persevered up, his passion holding back the fatigue just enough to move briskly. A pair of guardponies were statues at a regal door. They saluted at the imperial warlord. Their armor bore much resemblance to the soldiers of the old Crystal Empire but was more streamlined and clearly influenced by elven uniform fashion. The reiksguard finally caught up and drew alongside him.

“I demand to see her.”

“Yes, Prince.”

Prince... haven’t heard that title in a while. Shining thought nostalgically.

The reiksguard saluted their Crystal Empire counterparts and took post beside them. One opened the door with a wing and Shining Armor jumped in.

All across the elegant room were glaring white and rainbow reflections of the light that poured in through the windows. It was as if there was a giant glass prism on the plush sofa where the light bounced from.

“Cadence?” ‘She has to be here, she has to be!’

The lights shifted and he heard the faint scraping of crystals.

Author's Note

Sorry it took so long but things have been butts with proofreading. This is actually the first professionally proofread chapter in the story.

Chapter 16: Family Issues (revised)

A crystal mare stared back at Shining Armor from the other side of the sofa. Their eyes fixed for a good minute before she left the couch and they came running to one another with magnetic attraction. She hit Shining with such momentum it swept him off his front legs, a windpipe-crushing hug ensnaring his neck. Tiny crystal tears bounced off her cheeks and pattered on the floor like pebbles.

“Shiny!” Cadence embraced him tightly, only loosening her embrace when she heard her husband start to choke.

He instinctively returned the hug, but his mind was reeling with everything from joy to denial at the sight of his wife. Her body was hard but warm from the sunlight, a living, transparent statue. Her lower jaw looked awkward, like it was painted a slightly off shade of pink and her horn glowed dimly as she talked.

“Cadence, I… Oh gosh, it’s been too long.” Shining looked over his shimmering wife curiously. He hadn't seen her like this since the crystal heart was reactivated in the Crystal Empire. Even he, his sister, and friends were crystallized for at least a short time. “What, happened to you?” She released him sullenly, her heavy hooves stamping the floor. “Is the crystal heart near here? Did you bring it with you?”

“No. It’s still in Ulthuan.” She clinked her hooves together, sounding a ping like fine wine glasses touched in toast. “Phoenix King Finubar insisted we try to unlock its full potential, and…” she sighed. “I was the only one in its chamber while the mages went for more scrolls. The heart made a huge discharge while they were gone, and... this happened.”

“This can’t be undone?”

She shook her head sadly. “No... I can’t even feel anything I touch...”

Shining Armor’s first thought was disbelief. He stepped forward and put his lips firmly to her angled cheek, losing the heat that left her for the air.

“Nothing.” she sighed, pushing him back. “Let’s not ruin this.” She pulled him further into the room with a smile, hiding her sorrow. “We have so much to catch up on!”

Retaking her perch on the sofa, the sunlight gleamed off her crystalline form. Rainbows of light reflected across the formal furniture and rug at the center. The furniture itself was arranged in a circle beside a fireplace, a sofa, two seats designed for humanoids and two for ponies. Cadence drew the blinds further closed to stop the light from reaching her and returned her book, The Adventures of Gotrek and Felix, to the middle table.

“No way! You read that, too?” Shining exclaimed with a grin, trying not to look too much at his wife’s affliction.

“It was just something I pulled from the library downstairs.” Cadence was almost embarrassed of the selection, action adventure. “Do you believe any of this? A dwarf surviving falling of a three-hundred foot cliff, getting hit with a catapult stone, and both of them gaining immortality through magic weapons; it’s nonsense!” Shining Armor hesitated, enough time for Cadence to draw her own idea. “You believe this?” she giggled.

“Well I’ve met them.” he explained, trying to provide some justification for his foolish naivete. “Felix writes down everything they do, and-”

“And what were you talking to them about?”

Even worse, but who was he to lie? “I… wanted to contract them… for a job.” Cadence looked at him with more disapproval on the verge of laughter. “But they wouldn’t do it unless I got Richter Krueger and the Cursed Company as well. I’m not hiring a skeleton army to find Twiley! That and they don’t do ‘capture’ or ‘take them alive’.”

Shining could immediately see something go off subtly in Cadence, literally. A tiny fracture suddenly came to existence in the middle of where her brain ought to be, a miniscule black spider web.

“Oh, I miss her so much! My goodness, do you remember Celestia making us have to send her reports on Twilight’s behavior? It was like she thought she was a monster disguised as a precious little bundle of joy!”

Shining rolled his eyes at the annoying memory. There was nothing wrong with his little sister in all their years, but the princess acted like one missed behavioral report and Twilight would turn into a daemon or something.

“Sunshine, sunshine! Ladybugs awake…” Cadence began to sing. Her movements were uncoordinated and haphazard.

“Uh, Cadence, what’s that going on with your head?”

She paused to glance at Shining and the crack quickly mended itself. He placed a hoof to her crystal skull and moaned slightly. “I’m sorry. It’s just something that happens from time to time. Tell me as soon as it happens.”

Shining nodded. “And your jaw.”

Cadence hesitated for a moment and hoped he was ready. Her horn lit with a prismatic glow and the fur around her jaw suddenly peeled back, revealing a glass mouth underneath. Her false jaw clicked out of place, levitating away. Her tongue flopped down in her open throat, a crystal muscle hanging way down. Shining’s experience bearing witness to worse deformities kept him from looking away but he was nevertheless struck with horror. Her breaths were squeaky, and her vibrating soft palate made it sound like she was snoring. His wife seemed even more inequine now. She hooked it back into place, her horn’s magic still moving it up and down so she could talk.

“It’s a prosthetic. It all happened when we were still in Equestria and you were visiting Canterlot. In the Crystal Empire, got news of those marauders further south and did everything we could to prepare for them. From the reports, we figured we would had to draft every stallion just to stand a chance. When they arrived, somehow, I don’t know, they brought him back.”

“Who?” Shining asked.

“Sombra. It doesn't make sense! We saw him be shattered and thrown into the tundra! How could they have put him back together? He didn’t lead them though. They had him in chains, beaten and bloody. They used his magic by force, even as it caused him great suffering. You should have seen him. He escaped from them one night and came banging away at the barrier to the city with his bare hooves, begging and pleading to be let in. We just couldn't, and they caught him again. The crystal heart kept everypony safe from him, from them - but then there came somepony who became corrupted. He’d fallen to the whispers of chaos and dislodged the heart. The rest was a massacre.

“Sombra was forced to fight, and I think he actually tried to save us! I didn’t know what to think when he said ‘This kingdom is mine and mine alone.’ Then he cast the same spell he did a thousand years ago to hide the empire. I just didn’t know he hid it in the Warp the first time.”

Shimmering, rocky tears collected as she related the town enduring hell itself. Endless daemonic hordes, often repulsed by the crystal heart, surrounded the city at all times. Once in a while, a greater daemon, most of the time a Lord of Change, would be able to overwhelm the barrier with its magic power and the daemon host would pour through the cracks and holes.

“That was when I was hit by a bloodletter’s hellblade, across my mouth. It cut my jaw clean off. The crystal ponies had to fashion a new one for me because my real one was so badly damaged they couldn’t put it back. Years passed, but thank Asuryan we made it out to Ulthuan and Phoenix King Finubar let us stay. Even then, we didn't find peace.

“Sombra was in this world too, in Naggaroth, a pet and slave of Malekith. He tried to talk to me, in the middle of leading an attack on Ulthuan. In battle, he got the two of us alone, just for a minute, maybe two. I know now why he lost. He never meant to win the battle.”

“The Witch King is watching me. I don’t have much time.” He gazed on her glassy shape, the perfect crystal. “Never have I laid eyes on such a gem.”

“He asked you to marry him!?” Shining Armor exclaimed. The image of him smashing the dark stallion to bits played happily in his mind.

Cadence well understood his rage and tried to calm Shining down. “At least just be saved from his imprisonment. But he knows I’ll never go with him.”

Shining was already thinking of over a hundred ways to do that bastard in, changed heart or not. “Does he have anything to do with what goes on with that crack in your head?”

"A side effect from when he ruled the Crystal Empire. He did something to the crystal heart in that time and now that I share a connection with the heart, it affects me too. He talks to me, asking me to come to Naggaroth. There’s little I can do to stop him from getting in my head.”

Shining grimaced, gnashing his teeth. “He’s dead if I see him.”

“We don’t know what good he could do if we can get him out of Malekith’s control. If he’s freed, he’ll work with us.”

He wasn’t buying it. A sadistic tyrant like him? Never. “One wrong look at you and I’ll smash his head in with a warhammer!”

“Can we not talk about things that make you mad? I did find Spike.”

Shining cooled down enough to pry his mind away from his lucid fantasy. “So how is scaly-butt?”

“A big boy, now.” she said. “As he got older, in his rite of passage, he lived for a month in daemon-infested woods. He came out different, more adult. Before that, he was an emotional wreck. The damage to his mind when he was a baby, being exposed to so much chaos... he never seemed to recover until then.”

“Did he come with you?”

“Yes. He’s in the barracks this time of day, always practicing his swordsmanship with other elven warriors. What have you been doing? Are you still captain of the guard?”

“Try tied for second in command of the armies of the Empire!” Shining puffed his chest out in a show-offy fashion. The markings and insignias of his vest made themselves evident.

“How did you get that high?”

Shining’s accomplished feeling faded, replaced by the memories of a nightmarish scene. “In the attack on Canterlot, everypony above me in the military was killed. I’ve had some big shoes to fill.”

Cadence immediately became crestfallen. “Oh…”

“No, it’s okay. You deserve to know.”

The crystal princess opened her mouth to speak again, but was interrupted as a bright flash popped up between them, dropping a wrapped scroll on top of the book. Celestia’s gold seal shimmered on the ribbon.

Rarity paced back and forth, on edge; her little sister, poor Sweetie Belle, was in the hands of filthy nurglites, heathens of disease and rot. Across the room, Lyra was obsessively reading a book on human anatomy and transfiguration spells. Since she acquired feminine arms, she had gained new hope for becoming “whole”.

’Was I too hard on Apple Bloom? Rarity thought. Her hand firmly clasped over her mouth, feeling as if her words to the filly signed her sister’s death warrant. Oh, what if she’s so angry they’ll eat her instead!? No, no, they’re best friends. They’re always off on some Cutie Mark Crusader nonsense-’

The door thumped angrily, startling Rarity out of her pacing.

“Sweetie Belle!” She swiftly swung the front door wide open and a white filly with many wide, toothy mouths spanning her body was shoved at her chest. Before she could look down, a hideous, half-melted face came within inches of hers. Its moldy, necrotic flesh was almost liquefied and its searing pink eyes were completely lined with sickly yellow crust.

Accompanied by maggots and molasses-thick spit flying in Rarity’s face, he bellowed, “Now where’s mah cous’n!?”

Lyra tilted back in her chair. “Who is it?”

Rarity shivered in disgust and slowly turned around with her injured sister in her bony arms. “A friend. I’m just going out for a minute.”

“Try not to get killed.”

“Will do.”

The atrophied stallion pulled Rarity out and slammed the door. “Then y’all better get walki’n.”

And she did, mostly to get away from the combined smell of him and Apple Bloom. Both and Scootaloo walked after her, a heavy train that dragged on her mind.

Only half her armor covered her, which had gotten hot and smelly from anxiety. Rarity only had one pauldron to balance her erratic magic, building like a volcano within her to burst into a fantastic and lethal lightning storm, and a few plates, secured by exposed straps and buckles. She kept watch for khornates, likely serving Vanga and bloodthirsty for the one who had helped his steed escape. Hopefully, being in less than half her suit, she wouldn’t be recognized.

Sweetie Belle whimpered almost silently in Rarity’s arms, covered in discolored acid burns, her mouths missing teeth, and areas where her feathers, mostly around her neck, had been plucked out. Rarity wondered at how her sister had been changed by Chaos. A dozen gashing tears, liked with dagger-teeth spanned her body, each producing a very warm, faint smog.

“Sweetie Belle,” Rarity whispered.

The filly jerked like a frightened dog, fearing another beating. “Rarity...? Rarity!” She jumped up, slipping from the hold that kept her up and Rarity caught her in a magic blue glow. Holding her again, she felt surprisingly light, from whatever strength her marrow arms gave her. Nuzzling at her neck, Sweetie Belle let it all out.

“What did they do to you?” Rarity asked.

Her sister didn’t speak.

“Tried ta stop ‘er from gett’n nabbed by mah boys.” Braeburn said. “They got to ‘er a couple times. Ahm almost regrett’n holdi’n em back.”

Rarity stopped. Her horns arced an angrily buzzing lightning, snapping and tangling among each other, that culminated in a single loud pop and dissipated.

“Thank you... for protecting her.” she said in a low, even voice.

“Keep goin’.” He shoved her on.

“You… you have arms!” Sweetie Belle chimed and rocked playfully in the white tree branches sprouting from Rarity’s shoulders. Her stinging burns halted the simmering curiosity as the toxins burned more harshly in her blood and she rested her head against Rarity’s shoulder. They proceeded in silence.

Twilight had a first person view of her slave cleave his way into chaos warriors with his bare claws. Inhabiting him, body and mind, she saw Kivsin tear men apart with savage fury and hungrily devour their hearts. All the while, she pondered her state, its meaning.

Daemonkind... Neverborn...

Got him now. Twilight said.

The last Khornate of the Crimson Hand that saw them, Fluttershy and the Doctor trying to get away. He, among others that fell to Kivsin’s claws, fled to alert Vanga of where they were going. Now this one remained, backed into a corner and poised, unafraid to let his skull be part of Khorne’s throne for it was the highest honor, to die fighting.

Halberd in hand, he charged, screaming a primal warcry on his way to the blood god’s throne. He promptly proceeded to die with a good chunk of his neck missing. Kivsin wiped the blood off his lips and caught the body before it fell with his other claw. He ripped the warrior’s chest open, yanked out the silenced heart, and scarfed it down.

“Master, I desire more! I beseech you. We are unstoppable together! We can kill anypony we please!”

Kivsin... I’m sorry, the daemon within him said. I’ve made you a monster.

“You haven’t done anything that hasn’t made us stronger!”

No. That’s got to be the last one, Twilight murmured woozily. Take us… take us back to the apartment. I don’t feel so good.

Her vehicle shared this sickness with bodily pains, even greater than usual. He took to the sky like a drunken bat and was barely able to stand when they reached the apartment. His eyes and gums started to bleed and his mind flooded with the cries and lamentations, the laughter and the cacophony of the Immaterium and his master. There came a point where Whooves had to get help.

“I’m not sure what’s happening. The soul energy must be wearing off.” Whooves said hastily, running alongside a decomposing Applejack who was struggling to keep up with her intestines dragging on the floor.

They came upon Twilight’s apartment, Chaos’ song being played in her screaming. Kivsin’s body was split down the middle, hanging in swaying halves and his veins and skin were slowly separating from a flaming daemon mare writhing inside him. Twilight looked back to them in burning agony and ripped a foreleg free, snapping blood vessels and tendons off, and held her hoof out to them.

“Help us!”

While the Doctor hung back, deterred by the daemon’s intense heat, Applejack sprung to the fore. The excrement of her decaying skin boiled as she took Twilight’s hoof and helped her steady as she shook off her assistant’s flayed body. The further the energy wore off, the more Kivsin’s body released her, tendons and red veins breaking off her like vines once climbing up a wall. One leg at a time, Applejack helped her out of the flayed mass. Twilight’s flames slowly died, darkening to near black, surrendering to gravity, and her bright yellow glow was buried under growing follicles of purple fur across her body. In the last couple seconds of pain, she heard the shifting of a suit of armor, turned her head, and her eyes grew wide.

He sat on the dresser, staring pensively, furiously through pale brass lenses of his bronze helmet. Twilight's eyes burned at his visage while the Eye of Sheerian in his forehead sent a museum's worth of horrors into her mind and every nerve in her body was set ablaze in throbbing anguish.

Before she finally reverted to normal, before the apparition faded away, she couldn't help but scream.

“Jeez, Twi!” Whut were y’all doin?”

Twilight was in no condition to answer, gasping for dear life as Applejack set her down. Kivsin’s bisected body steadily reconnected, blood vessels and bones fusing and snapping back into position. They pulled him back together and his skin sealed, letting him gasp and vomit the flesh and blood he’d eaten over the day. His claws shrank, fingers reabsorbing into his hooves, and his formerly possessed form receded to the skinny, artistically scarred bat-pony.

The Doctor stood over Twilight, looking firmly into her tired eyes. “Are you going to try anything like this again?” he asked in frustration. As expected, Twilight shook her head, eager to put the ordeal behind her. She groggily sat up and came to Kivsin’s aid.

“Twi, whut was that?” said Applejack confusedly. “Why were you on fire?”

Twilight’s throat was on fire with blood thirst. She levitated over a rat from the cage of the vermin she kept, and bit into it. It’s foul tasting blood sent her into a coughing fit.

“She was messing with daemonancy,” said Whooves angrily. “Extremely dangerous magic.”

He turned Twilight around and got up close. “We’re not doing sightseeing! I am just about fed up with your reckless diving into Chaos! You’re going to get us killed! The only thing I want you to work on is your abilities, no more fumbling around, understand?”

Twilight drooped with remorse and nodded.

“Jeez, Doc,” said Applejack. “Be a bit easier on ’er.”

“I’m sorry,” Whooves continued with a remorseful sigh. “It’s just that Chaos is a slippery slope. Go one step too far and you’re just another cog in the gods’ doomsday machine. We have to stay focused. Promise me you’ll do that, Twilight.”

“Okay…”

“Thank you. I don’t want to have to treat you like a filly who can’t control herself.“ He checked the clock on the desk, another trinket Twilight had raided from the market. “Applejack, it’s time to work on your condition again,” he sighed. “Hopefully Fluttershy could be a deterrent to Pinkie Pie and those other two.” At the door, he found one more caution to give. “If you go out again, Twilight, keep away from the city walls. It’s a bloodbath there.”

The closing door bid him adieu and Twilight bit her lip. She grabbed Kivsin and quickly cast a teleportation spell. After a brief flash, they were surrounded by the smell of smoke, blood, and the raucous roar of soldiers and the beat of marching columns.

”Crush, kill, destroy, burn! Crush, kill, destroy, burn!”

“I swear this is as close as we get.” Twilight said on a rooftop.

A heaving forest of spears and polearms below, tens of thousands of heretics gathered before and on the walls. At least a dozen cults and cabals made up the throng. The Purple Hand, Iron Fangs, and Vanga’s Crimson Hand were just a few. Artillery of all sizes, from stolen imperial cannons to Chaos dwarf-forged hellcannons thundered and roared, lighting up the sky in a riot of color with their deadly discharge. Flaming arrows leapt up and down across the battlements, coming in and going out. Musket fire crackled and sparked from traitor gunners and Skaven jezzails alike.

Chaos giants and trolls were herded like beasts of war to the walls to move the unholy war engines of cannons and catapults. Beyond hell’s gates were the Ork, in their millions. Who knew what machines they were building, what horrific amalgamations of iron and orkoid ingenuity?

Twilight spotted something coming over the walls, too big to be a catapult stone or arrow. As it continued moving, she saw it was an ork itself, hurdling through the air! Did they actually use one of their own as ammunition? It caught sight of her and poised its choppas to cleave deep into her head.

“WAAAAAAGH!!!” it bellowed brazenly, wide-eyed and keen for a bloody kill.

Twilight took a single step to the left, Kivsin to the right, and the ork’s thrill disappeared. It flapped its arms like a bird frantically, but to no avail. It slammed onto the roof between them with a wet *SMACK*. It didn’t move afterward. Twilight couldn’t help but giggle at its stupidity and saw many other greenskins meet the same fate across the lines of battle. They smacked into buildings, were caught and devoured by daemons in midair, or swatted out of the air by giants.

The daemon’s acts sparked a slight curiosity. I wonder what they taste like? she thought.

She rolled the ork over, its whole front ripped up and flattened. It reeked of fungus and, holding her breath, she sank her fangs deep into its neck. The liquid taste of moldy hay filled her mouth and she immediately threw the body over the side of the roof, spitting and wiping her tongue like acid had been poured on it. Her interest in them grew greater and she picked a launched ork out of the sky in a telekinetic grasp. It kicked and shouted wild obscenities as it’s fun descent was interrupted.

“Wot yoo doi’n yoo styoopid kay-oss pony git!? Lemme go so I’z can cromp ya!”

With a flick of magic, Twilight snapped its neck. She needed a fresh body for her research.

“Here we are.” Rarity fiddled with her hand, trying to remember the shape of the key to get into the apartment. The memory thankfully returned and Braeburn and Apple Bloom pushed past her to the inside, nearly making Rarity drop Sweetie Belle.

“Applejack!” the bloated stallion shouted.

Sitting in her practicing chair, Octavia hastily put her cello back into place and jumped up as the intruders rushed in. “Vinyl! Help!”

Braeburn noticed the gaping hole in the wall, barely covered with sheets and blew through it. There, he found only a brown stallion tying ropes to a bedpost.

“Uh... hello?” the doctor said.

Braeburn payed him no heed and passed back out the flaps “Where is she?” he growled at Rarity.

“I th-thought Applejack would be here! This is where we stayed before I left.” She ran down the hall to the room Octavia had fled to and found Applejack, Vinyl and Pinkie Pie bobbing their heads with sets of headphones over their ears and Octavia fruitlessly trying to shout over them. The deformed cellist ripped the devices off.

“Woah, Tavi! What’s got your plot on fire?” the DJ berated. She cast her sight on Rarity, holding a beaten filly. “I was wondering if you survived out there or not. You get pregnant in the last couple weeks or what?”

Rarity blushed. “No! This is my sister!”

“Why did you let those maggot sacks in here?” Octavia protested.

Rarity started to explain when Apple Bloom rushed by and tackled her big sister in a tight grip. Most everyone spared their eyes from the sight of them, squeezing contagious gunk from one another as they hugged. Their gurgling laughter sickened them. Rarity magically slid them out the door so they could continue their reunion outside.

“Aw, look at her.” Pinkie Pie cooed, eyeing Sweetie Belle. Her stomach grumbled quietly. “What do all these mouths do?” She slipped her tongue into one and Rarity pulled away as it snapped and let out a small plume of azure fire. “Ooh, she’s like a little firecracker!”

“Do you think you can stand?” Rarity asked.

Sweetie Belle shifted around. “I think so.” Rarity set her down. She was a bit wobbly but stayed upright.

“I need to get my things from Lyra’s. Keep her safe until I get back, okay?”

Vinyl grinned schemingly. “Sure. There’s lots of music for her to listen to, warm bed in case she has to lie down. She’s A-okay with us.”

“Oh, you’re a darling, Vinyl. I won’t be a moment.” With that, Rarity departed.

Vinyl glanced at the filly a moment before slapping back on her headphones and passing Octavia a pair. “She’s all yours, Pinkie.”

“All her’s what?” Sweetie asked groggily.

No further invitation needed, the hungry, decadent mare swept up Sweetie Belle and examined her in a way that set off every dreadful thought of pedofillya she learned to recognize in stranger danger lessons in Ponyville. But this was worse. Pinkie wrapped her tongues around the filly’s mouth and worked out her features. The black appendages searched every nook and cranny of her body, making her feel every kind of sick sensation. Pinkie interpreted her muffled disapproving shouts as consent.

Pinkie squeezed Sweetie’s soft flanks together, licking deep between them. It sent a horrifying chill up the filly’s spine and she let out a terrified scream that was barely heard.

Pinkie quickly hid her behind herself as she heard the door opened again with Scootaloo entering. “Hey, I just wanted to know if Rainbow Dash was with you guys—”

Another tongue cut the pegasus off, whipping around her neck and rapidly pulling her head into Pinkie’s widening mouth. Scootaloo choked as her neck was crushed but didn’t have to suffer that long as she was pulled deeper down Pinkie’s throat. Shoulders, hips, and hind legs were sucked down and in one powerful gulp, she was pushed down and dropped into the mutant mare’s slimy nest of tentacles.

“Mmm, oranges, and… ooh, raspberries!” Pinkie bleated as she patted her enlarged stomach with a crabby claw. She brought Sweetie Belle back to the front, smacking her lips. “I’m gonna need something to wash her down with. Think you can help me Sweetie Belle?” Pinkie forced Sweetie’s head to nod. “Thanks!”

Sweetie couldn’t look up far enough with her head held down and felt a warm wetness around her horn and several appendages firmly massaging it up and down and along the spiral grooves. Unable to scream, run, or even resist, Sweetie was helpless as the much bigger earth mare suckled on her horn, drinking her very magic. Pinkie giggled, feeling Scootaloo thrash about in the tight confines of her stomach. The indentations of her hooves pushed out against Pinkie’s torso and her shouts were almost totally obscured. The teal light of Sweetie’s energy illuminated Pinkie’s throat and torso, in which she saw her friend’s fighting silhouette, trying to rip Pinkie’s feelers off.

The forced pleasure Sweetie felt made her feel so much worse. Her salty tears touching Pinkie’s tongues were only adding to the flavor of the drink the mare enjoyed. Sweetie’s involuntary moans of ecstasy climbed higher and higher until she screamed as her horn burned superbly and Pinkie’s cheeks filled with her essence, just short of it leaking out her lips. Pinkie departed her drink’s forehead and gulped down the delicious energy. Her stomach roared as it took it in, demanding more.

“Time for a second course!” Pinkie sat back, opened her mouth and throat impossibly wide and dropped Sweetie Belle in. It was like a short waterslide, ending in a squishy, occupied pocket.

“Sweetie Belle?” Scootaloo gasped. They were both painfully cramped against each other and the feathery unicorn held her desperately.

“Scoots, she… she…”

Black snakes earnestly entwined around their bodies and Pinkie massaged her gut. “You taste like a vanilla cupcake and creamy icing! You’re a good one, Sweetie Belle!” The voice came from all around the captives, being basted and tasted in black gastric juices.

“Let us out of here! You can’t eat us!” The Scootaloo screamed.

“But I just did!” the omnipresent voice vibrated. “I did this to a lot of ponies and almost everyone ends up the same way.”

Scootaloo could guess. “...How?”

“Turned them into goo and tummy soaks them up! If they fight me...” Pinkie massaged her paunch firmly, rubbing the walls of muscle against her meal’s faces. “tummy gets really mad and works so fast they’re gone in a few minutes.”

Fear quickly took them. “Y-You’re not gonna do that to us, are you?”

“Well, you’re kinda my best friend’s sister and her friend and I don’t think Rarity would be happy if she found her sister turned into a white and orange puddle inside me. Just don’t punch or kick too much and you should be fit as a fiddle!” Pinkie jumped up and swung her hanging belly side to side. “You two feel so good!”

“Just let us out!” Sweetie pleaded. “Please! We’ll suffocate in here!”

“No you won’t, silly filly! Look!” Pinkie inhaled deeply and her esophagus opened at her stomach. A breeze blew in and the air inside started to smell a little less stale and acidic. The hole closed soon after. “I’ll let you out when Rarity gets back. Until then…” She trotted to join the musicians behind the mix table and strapped a headset over her belly, then another over her own ears. “enjoy the music.”

“No! Pinkie! Pinkie!!”

They were drowned out by the blaring noise of some garbled mess with too much drum filler.

“Sweetie Belle, can’t you make a fire in here with those mouths?” Scootaloo asked.

“I... I can’t. She sucked out everything I had!”

“I think I have an idea.”

They waited for Pinkie to funnel more air in. As the esophagus widened, Sweetie helped push the pegasus up the hole. When it started to close, Pinkie noticed the disturbance, but felt playful and let Scootaloo continue to climb up.

Scootaloo wiggled up the sticky, dark tube until she felt her hooves reach the top of the throat and just as her face caught a glimpse of outside light, a powerful contraction of Pinkie’s throat sucked her back down.

“No, no, nooo!!”

She was squeezed right back in with the unicorn and Pinkie’s belly groaned with displeasure at her escape attempt.

“It’s not gonna be that easy!” their captor giggled.

“You spit her out right now!!” Rarity screeched, her hands violently crushing down on Pinkie Pie’s throat and fury fueling her strength. The pink pony’s face turned a hotter pink, then blue.

“Can’t… choking…” she shrilly coughed.

Rarity threw her head to the side. Pinkie’s stomach roiled and rumbled as it contracted and two large bulges lurched up her neck, one after the other. Her cheeks swelled and she let out a copious amount of stomach acid, then a slime-covered pony. Rarity picked it up, ignoring the stink and muck, wiped the filly’s face , finding an orange face and purple mane underneath, gasping for breath. Another heave and another filly splashed from Pinkie’s lips.

Knowing that one had to be Sweetie Belle, Rarity clutched Pinkie Pie again and glared into her eyes, mad as hell. “You like to eat? Hmm?” She wrapped her viney fingers around a sizable stereo speaker and forced Pinkie’s mouth open. “Then try this!” She crammed it in, painfully stretching Pinkie’s mouth and half way down her throat, she couldn’t breathe but didn’t want to take it. “Swallow it!” Rarity fumingly screamed.

*Ulp*

The pleasurable feeling of her stomach wrapping around the object wasn’t enough to ease Pinkie as a bony hand pressed to her belly and Rarity electrocuted her. Her stomach attacked the speaker, churning and rubbing around it. The tentacles that inhabited the fleshy walls tore at it, ripping the speaker apart and the rectangular protrusion from Pinkie’s torso took on a more round shape as it was hastily digested. The ultimate stomach ache ensued and the taste of blood trickled across Pinkie’s tongues. Her stomach revolted, sending a blob of sharp half-digested stereo parts and several severed and cut up, bleeding tentacles back up and out.

Rarity stood back from her whimpering work, staring with cruel glee. A loud idle buzzing clicked near her. Vinyl held a large tube in her hooves, a toothy grille at the bore of the cannon. Rarity could feel the vibrations of the pure bass effect as Vinyl breathed with a wire down her throat and hooked to the tube. The chaos-DJ’s electric voice bellowed through the device.

“That’s enough,” she blared sternly. ”Get out of my room or I scream.

It was already enough to set Rarity’s ears ringing. She picked up the crying Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo and stomped out.

Vinyl disconnected the wire from her voicebox and lowered the weapon, pouting. “Damn. I wanted to use this.” Casting her attention to Pinkie Pie, she laughed. “Got you good, didn’t I?”

Pinkie Pie felt her stomach doing somersaults and spat out another flailing, dying tentacle segment. “You knew Rarity would be mad?”. The unicorn’s continued snickering spoke for her. To Vinyl’s surprise, Pinkie started to laugh too, multicolored blood trickling from the corners of the mutant’s mouth. At the same time, Pinkie felt slicing pain and tremendous pleasure. Each jolting convulsion of her shredded belly was a simultaneous heaven and hell of sensations.

“You see! It’s a win-win.” Vinyl stepped a little closer, big mistake.

In an instant, Pinkie lunged up at Vinyl, swallowing up her whole head and made quick work of the rest of her until there was but a pair of frantically kicking legs sticking from her lips. In a few gulps, they were gone too. Pinkie’s belly grew as fresh meat was plopped in.

“Now, you owe me something.” Pinkie leaned back and reclined in a fleshy beanbag chair, letting Vinyl find herself in the dark, stinking pit. “Rub my tummy to make it feel better.”

“From the inside... really?” Vinyl sighed.

Nevertheless, a pair of outward pressing hooves slid along the contour of Pinkie’s belly. She let out a little belch and squeezed her paunch. “Mmm… Maybe I should ask next time instead of just eating ponies.”

“Ya think?” Vinyl chided.

A lot of Pinkie’s toxified blood had left her and the cloud of stimulant-induced haze lifted for but a moment on her mind. She finally actually thought about what she did to the little fillies, that there was a mare inside her. She couldn’t ponder it long as the door burst open again. Rarity’s horns were an electric light show of rage and her very eyes burned with white lightning, sparking like flames of vengeance.

“What did you do to Sweetie Belle’s horn!?”

Braeburn had a trial to put his cousins through. It was a curse that almost every child of the Plague Father Nurgle had to endure that would decide them as either a warrior, or a zombie. Applejack was firmly tied to a bedpost and a piece of meat placed before her. It wasn’t long until the hex made her lapse and she viciously snapped and moaned for the flesh like the filthy undead.

“So you know something about this, then?” The Doctor asked pointedly.

“Tha’ Curse ‘a Unbelief, yeah ah remember that.” Braeburn thoughtfully reminisced. “Guys almost gave up on me. Thought ah’d be no better‘n a plague zombie. It’s like gett’n over alcohol or drugs. It’s hell.” He and Whooves saw this in Applejack as she thrashed and moaned in her restraints, snapping wildly at the cube of meat before her. “Just make sure she doesn’t eat any and she’ll beat this. Takes time.”

“We... haven’t exactly had the best luck with that lately,” Whooves admitted. “It’s not that easy to keep her under control once she gets like this. She always breaks out and gets it somehow. It’s got to be all the acids she secretes.”

“Ah never said it was gonna be easy,” Braeburn shrugged in response. “Well... it’ll be a mite more bearable if you can git somepony with magic to help ya out. Hold ‘em down with that... telly-ken-eesis, maybe. Still, though...”

The former apple farmer had been tied along the whole of her legs and head and already the ropes hissed and smoked as the acids did their work. If she had too much freedom, she’d inadvertently rip her own limbs off to get free. Beside her, Apple Bloom underwent the same suffering.

“I’ll see if Rarity can enchant the ropes; that should help some, at least.” said Whooves, departing.

Braeburn brooded over his family as he recalled what went through his mind in his trial, the pain that had ravaged him. The curse that threatened to unmake him into a mindless creature.

EAT...FEED...KILL...

But it was a labour of love from Nurgle. Pain is pleasure. Death is life.

“Like sisters.” he muttered. He looked up solemnly, hoping his words would reach the Aether. “Y’alls children are sick, grandpapa Nurgle. Ah’ll take good care of em.”

The throne room of the equine imperial palace was much like the one in Canterlot. A long, red silk rug ran from the door, up to a pair of regal thrones atop a short gold platform with tiny crystal clear waterfalls running down the sides. The long space was a dark contrast to Canterlot castle. The stained glass mosaics were very similar, but depicted the heinous foes of the Elements of Harmony in a much grimmer light. Discord, Queen Chrysalis, and King Sombra were vilely crafted in the still images, shown as hideous monsters and the bearers of the Elements as heavenly saviors.

Celestia and Luna waited in their opulent seats, the solar diarch trying to hold her sadness back, a cloud of depression over her heart. Their misty manes idly waved and glistened in the still, stale air.

Celestia felt reassured though, that Luna was back into her true appearance and not stuck in the image of the Nightmare. True, Luna could don and relinquish the look at almost any time, but Mannslieb and Morrslieb being up together, forcing The sun diarch’s sister into the image of evil, was a toll on her nerves. Luna’s abdomen was killing her, like she had eaten something massive. One of the priests said she devoured a young colt as Nightmare Moon the night before in a sacrifice, but she had no memory of this. A messenger came trotting in and bowed before the diarchs.

“Reiksmarshall Shining Armor and the Ulthuan dignitaries have arrived.”

“Let them in.” Celestia said.

“Yes, your Holiness.”

He cantered back out and Luna spied a tear run down her sister’s otherwise stoic face.

“How close were you to your student, sister?”

Celestia noticed the tear and attacked it with a hoof, wiping until her cheek ached. “I... I sometimes thought of her as my own... tried to pretend she wasn’t a monster in disguise. If her darker form has been revealed or she does not fall to the darkness, who is to say she can’t be?”

“It is risky, sister. If Emperor Franz finds out…”

“He won’t,” Celestia said firmly.

The gate opened again and the three desired individuals entered. Judging from the lively conversation, Spike and Shining Armor sounded like the best of friends. If one never knew them before, they could be mistaken for brothers. Cadence was somewhat annoyed by their boyish immaturity but it was probably her exposure to elven self-superiority making her feel this way.

“Guards, please leave us.” Celestia ordered. Their armor rattled as they saluted and trotted out the back. “Please, sit.” She said before Shining Armor could kneel. He and Cadence reclined to their haunches and Spike rested on his knees before the platform.

Celestia took a deep breath to steady her nerves. “Everypony, we have called you here concerning Twilight Sparkle.” There was a curious shifting among them. “If you recall, Cadence and Shining Armor, I had you write reports to me about her behavior, if you noticed anything strange.”

“Yes… what were those for, exactly?” Shining asked.

“It all started long before any of you, before Cadence, or even the incident of Nightmare Moon...”

Celestia and Luna could finally rest easy, as the Elements of Harmony’s energy faded just after their use. The world slowly stabilized. Furniture got reacquainted with gravity and cotton candy clouds disappeared into nothingness. The floor and walls smoldered with lightning burns and boiling magma puddles that were once metal fixtures. A stone draconequus, arms outstretched to resist some terrible power, fell to the ground, unmoving and bearing horror on its face.

“Peace, at last.” Luna huffed.

The older sister combed about the half destroyed hall. “What was he talking to before we entered?”

Both sisters heard the sound of clapping among the banging of falling items and among the wreckages, found a large mirror, with the image of a being the likes of which they had never seen before looking back at them.

“That would be me,” The winged, bronze-clad creature murmured. “Congratulations, ladies. You have successfully accomplished what Khorne and Nurgle have been trying to do for the past seven thousand years.”

“Who are you?” Celestia gaped.

“Little princess, I am Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, Architect of Destiny, and you two…” He scanned a long, clawed finger at them, “are the puppets that will dance to my tunes.”

“Excuse me?” Luna harrumphed, “We are not some pawns! Why was Discord talking to you?”

Tzeentch chuckled, “Oh, poor Discord. Why did you have to turn my chat partner to stone? We would concoct brilliant schemes over the centuries, but he never took his position seriously. He was always wasting his power on dancing buffalo and whoopee cushions. Now look at him, a husk of former god-hood.”

Celestia’s eyes grew a bit wider. “There are more like him? Like you?”

“Why yes, a few. I am in the middle of what may be my greatest plot yet and I need you both to help me.”

“We don’t believe we are in an accepting mood after you referred to us as puppets!” Luna refused sternly.

Tzeentch’s grin held. “You don’t know who you are talking to, whelp.” He took his end of the looking-glass and turned it around. The princesses beheld a nightmarish realm. Dark castle-islands flew across space, joined to others by winding land bridges where millions of nightmarish monsters marched across and into a frenzied bloodbath with others. Lightning and fire engulfed all things and greater daemons towered over the smaller minions, killing hundreds in a single sweep of their weapons. “You wouldn’t want me to open a rift to Equestria in the middle of all that, now would you?” He turned it back, looking with satisfaction at the princesses’ horrified faces. He cupped his hands together. “Let me show her.”

The palms parted, showing a tiny thing. A bright yellow unicorn floated, sleeping, in a ball of crackling warp energy. Tzeentch tapped the ball and it dissipated, dropping the mare into his palm. It stirred, sleepily opening its blood-red eyes and great angry flames flickered to life as its mane, tail, and wings. It wiggled up, shaking like a newborn foal but, judging by its proportions, was taller than any ordinary pony.

“Say hello to your mentors.” Tzeentch whispered.

It looked through the glass at the princesses and instinctively started screaming and snarling at them. It charged and smashed its face on its side of the glass, falling back in a daze. Tzeentch put his hand back over it. Revealing it again, it was sleeping again in an incubation ball, purple fur, black mane, and vampiric wings and fangs.

“Impressive?”

Luna was almost furious by this point. “What monster is that?”

“Now, now. That’s no way to speak of your sister’s prized pupil.”

“I will not teach that thing anything!” Celestia bellowed. “I won’t let you unleash that abomination on Equestria!”

“Oh no, not Equestria - but a different world.” The raven god sat back easily among his vast library, a two-headed lord of change blabbering madly at his side.

“And the mare of fire shall be Her most prized possession, one to love-LOVE! as her own, but it will despise her in THE end.” it sputtered.

“Kairos, leave me.” Tzeentch ordered. The vulture exited, followed by eighty one smaller lords to record his every single word. Tzeentch spoke, rubbing his palms together to the sound of crunching and breaking bones between them. “Fate is a funny thing. You’re so sure you can control it, that your decisions today affect tomorrow and that destiny is what you make of it. But I have seen your futures already transpire, and they are according to my design.”

He balled up one hand and held up the other, forming a shimmering image, dominated by the sterile white of a hospital room, and occupied by a panting, screaming mare in the bed with a dark blue colt at her side, trying to comfort her as best he could. Tzeentch held out his fist, displaying a crying lavender foal where the brutish daemon had been before.

“Push!” the doctor shouted and the quivering mare clenched. Tzeentch formed a fist over the foal, opened it again, and the baby was gone. Simultaneously, the doctor drew the same little creature from between the mare’s legs, wet from the womb. “Congratulations Mr. and Mrs. Sparkle, it’s a girl!”

“Can you not feel me now?” Tzeentch cawed. “Tugging at your strings, leading her and you to my will. Her parents will live in Canterlot and apply her to your most prestigious university, Celestia. You will personally admit her.”

“I will do no such thing!” Celestia snapped.

“But you will.” Tzeentch said calmly, controlled. “You will surround her with love and affection, friends and family. You will even get the goddess of love, Princess Mi Amore Cadenza to be her foal-sitter. You’ll delude yourself into loving her like family. It will become more than an act. You will make sure her heart never knows darkness unless you send her to fight against it, Discord, Sombra, even your own sister after she becomes Nightmare Moon.”

Luna was baffled. “Nightmare Moon?”

The raven laughed at her ignorance. “Enjoy your thousand years on the Moon!” He looked to an hourglass, twisting and winding in random ways. “It would appear I am late for a meeting with my counterparts.” He teleported up from his chair. “And, before I forget, Celestia, in the future, slow down with the bananas, Slaanesh doesn’t like fat mares.”

“I’m so sorry!” Cadence said quickly, her and Shining Armor both straining to hold Spike back with their magic. “He’s been a whole three years without an incident!”

“Liars! Liars! She’s not a monster! She’ll never betray us!” the adolescent dragon howled, twisting and trying to throw himself at Celestia. A torrent of verdant flame shot from his mouth and flowed around the princess’ sun-shaped shield.

Celestia knew he couldn’t take the truth, this couldn't wait for when he would be older, more emotionally prepared. Her horn flared briefly, a gold-white field of energy appearing around Spike’s head and shoulders. Cadence raised a golden necklace whistle to her lips and blew, producing an almost silent note. Spike wiggled harder, his eyes bulged and Shining Armor had to stay clear of his sweeping tail. Cadence’s lungs soon emptied and she and Spike relaxed from their torture.

“Why?...” he whimpered softly. “Why her...? Why us...?”

“Princess...” Shining said, disbelief and anger on his face. “Is this true? Twiley... My sister is a neverborn?”

“I am sorry, Shining Armor—”

“Were we just tools for you!? Damage control to keep her happy so she wouldn't blow up!? Now, the Everchosen's going to come riding down here to bring the End Times, on her back!”

He was overwhelmed with warring emotions. Daemons were literally the stuff of nightmares, given physical form by the lords of Chaos. They were diabolical, unrelenting, and immortal. Their only desire was to kill and burn everything in existence, and must be repeatedly destroyed and sent back to the Warp for the survival of the world.

But Twilight was his little sister. Her whole life, she’d been nothing but an angel. A compulsive, crazy perfectionist, but not a destroyer. He remembered when they first met, when she looked up from that book and smiled. A monster had looked up at him that day, and he had had absolutely no idea.

Was it merely affection she saw when she looked into his eyes, or were her eyes on his soul, like some kind of candied treat?

Spike was released from his magic bonds when he settled down, but still fumed with anger. “And what was I supposed to be? A pet, a plaything?”

“Her warden.” Celestia replied. “To keep her secured and locked away if she ever fell to chaos. I had hoped it would never happen, but if it came to it, you would have been grown up by then and been more than a match for her.”

Spike’s rage was already spent. He hung his head low, sinking and sinking into an abyssal misery.

Celestia was relentless in her truth; if not now, then never. “You weren’t just born from your egg. We had to make use of our deepest knowledge and magic to make sure there was somepony who would live for an eternity with her, to keep track of her.”

“An experiment?” Spike raised his head, his face twisted in anguish. “An artificial creation of magic?”

“No, no. Your egg was laid naturally and a great price was paid to obtain you from the dragon lords, but Equestria’s scholars augmented you in the egg, made you more powerful. I don’t know how far Twilight’s inner potential goes, but it rivals even my own power and I needed somepony equal or greater to look after her, should the necessity arise.”

“Princess Luna,” Cadence cut in, entreating the lunar diarch. “You were there, weren’t you? You could have been the voice of reason!”

“No, Cadence. All occurred after our internment,” Luna said. “As far as we knew, it was... Tia’s responsibility.”

All eyes were on the sullen solar princess. She took a deep breath and composed herself with a shaking confidence in her words. “I did everything I had to to prevent a horror from being unleashed on Equestria, and created contingency plans if others failed. Coming to this world has changed everything.”

“I think you’ve said everything you needed to,” Shining said despondently.

Before Celestia could reply, a drop of brown liquid landed in Spike’s eye, stinging shortly. Another drop, on Luna’s nose. It bore a sweet aroma, almost familiar. She looked up and her mouth hung open in amazement. They found the ceiling covered in fluffy pink clouds which decided to release a hard rain of the brown liquid, soaking everyone. A few drops trickled into Spike’s mouth, and his face went blank with confusion at the taste.

“Ch...chocolate?”

“Impossible.” Celestia mumbled with a thin smile.

“Oh, quite so.”

The Princess of the Sun turned her head to the source of the familiar voice; and froze, her gaze locked onto one of the stained-glass mosaics depicting the great enemies of Equestria. Everything seemed in order, except for the conspicuous absence of one misshapen creature.

“Actually, come to think of it, perhaps the universal perception of the concept of ‘impossible’ is a little off,” Celestia snapped her gaze to the other side of the room, and spotted a strange yet familiar form moving within the windows, carefully examining the artistic reliefs. “After all, it presumes that in a given situation, there are absolutely no alternative explanations, no other possible conclusions, no further paths nor ways to proceed forward.

“Indeed, nearly all mortals are in love with the idea that the universe is governed by some unshakeable laws set in stone by some equally obscure higher power,” The voice was all around them now, a low droll blending in smoothly with the pitter-patter of the thick rain.

“Or maybe...” The voice gasped dramatically. “Maybe you just believe all of these ridiculous things because you are afraid... afraid of what might be if you cannot live knowing there are some constants, universal absolutes... And if so, what would happen if everything you ever knew... everything you had grown to believe about yourselves, about the world, about existence itself...”

The words trailed off, leaving everyone in the room soaked and peering around wildly, trying to pinpoint the source.

“...Was a lie?”

Celestia felt a breath on her neck, and she wheeled about—and jumped at a wild pair of mismatched yellow and red eyes. The creature disappeared and came into existence on her back with a dainty teacup out to the rain.

“Ha ha! How long has it been, ladies? Feels like a hundred years! Would that be in Warp time or real time?” A shattered watch, cogs and springs erupting in a mess from the interior appeared on his wrist. “I really have to get this fixed. All I know is it’s probably not the best time to butt in on your little ‘intervention’, but it’s pretty important.”

“Discord, how are you still alive?” Celestia laughed, happy that at least something was going right.

“What? You thought I was dead?” he replied in a somewhat hurt tone. He vanished with a pop and they found him swimming in the chocolate milk around them. “It’s gonna take more than smashing my statue to destroy one of the gods of Chaos! Archaon actually thought he killed me! Ha! He just sent me homeward bound! Ugh, my realm is in ruins. But I guess I should expect that since I escaped from Big Red and Nurgle. You would not believe how those bloodletters can fight, cutting down my little neglected daemons.”

“Could you please turn off the shower?” Luna grumbled, severely annoyed.

Discord reluctantly snapped his claw and everything instantly evaporated dry. He flew up to the last remaining cloud, pulled it down and stuck his hand into it, searching for something. Spike growled like a feral animal. His green frills were high, tight-drawn and perceiving the massive warp presence.

“What’s got him all grumpy?” Discord asked.

Cadence gingerly petted Spike to calm him, to little avail. “He’s spent a long time being conditioned to detect chaotic energy and, different draconequus or not, he isn’t going to like you.”

“Well, no wonder he’s going nuts. I’m just too much to handle!” Discord flexed his free arm and it drooped down in the middle. “Well, anyway… Where is she?” He stuck his head into the cloud.

“No! I don’ wanna go!” A petulant little voice protested.

Discord pulled out a green and yellow propeller beanie.

“Oh, no...” Luna murmured.

“Oh, come on!” Stretching it wide, Discord put it over his whole head. “You come out here right now, young lady!”

“Nu’uh! Dere’s all th’ Inkwiziters out dere!” the little voice cried.

“What’s the hat for?” Shining Armor asked.

Celestia rubbed her forehead with the flood of sanity-blasting memories. “After Discord was reformed, he brought his… daughter to Canterlot.”

“Auntie Celly and Lulu are here,” Discord cooed.

The hat shrieked with joy and he ripped it off, gritting his teeth. A pink mass wiggled in the hat, bulging out the bottom. It fought and squirmed, getting out one leg, then another, and fell to just where the hat was stuck to the top of her head. Playful, swirling purple eyes spun round and round that would immediately invoke dizziness in anyone that looked into them. She had a white and purple mane, poofy and frizzy as cotton candy. Discord released the hat and the propeller sputtered and whirled, keeping her aloft.

“Auntie Celleshtia, Woona!” She vaporized into a pink cloud and quickly blew over to the princesses, recondensing with both front hooves around them in a tight hug. She was much stronger than she looked.

“Eh, hello, Screwball.” Celestia mumbled through a forced smile.

“You got daddy outta the stachoo?”

“Not us, but we’re glad he was freed again after the accident.”

“Yeah, don’t let me near the Elements of Harmony again, would ya? Being exposed to them too long isn’t good for my complexion. Now, you see,” Discord said, idly scratching his daughter behind the ear with a claw. “Being tied to the Warp again means I need followers in the mortal plane to supply me with astral energy. That’s where my little girl comes in!”

“I’m gonna get daddy lotsa peeple! He’s gonna be strong and beat de badder keyoss bad guys!” Screwball beamed happily.

Discord embraced his chaotic bundle of joy and spun around. “Yes, you are! Now go get daddy some cultists!” The filly squealed with delight as she was launched flying to crash through a stained-glass window, leaving a pony-shaped shatter and she buzzed off over Altdorf.

“Hey, you can’t do that! She’ll spread heresy in the capital!” Shining snapped angrily, holding a foreleg to the window.

“It’s hardly a good time to be talking about candy but, if you insist.” The draconeqqus snapped his claw and a chocolate bar materialized in Shining’s outstretched hoof, causing him to fumble in confusion. Printed across the front, in big beige print, was Hershey’s.

“Anyway, keep your head on. Remember, I’m ‘responsible’ now?” Discord assured, flinching at the word as if it were anathema to him.

Another finger flick and the glass window was restored. “On a more serious note…” he continued, now playing a teeny violin, “You guys know Sigmar, right? Founder of the empire, went for a walk one day and never came back, was declared ascended to godhood and blah blah blah. Well, they weren’t wrong.”

He vanished in a plume of smoke and reappeared, weightlessly balancing atop the princesses’ heads. “Doesn’t that remind you two of anypony? Somepony that said they’re just going for a bit and never… came… back…”

Celestia’s horn flared with white fury as she took him in a telekinetic field and slammed him to the floor, cracking a few tiles in the process. Hers and Luna’s gleaming swords pressed hard just under his chin.

“Why do you speak of our mother and father?” The white alicorn said in a low, dangerous tone.

“Easy! That’s why I’m here!”

He grabbed their hooves and Shining, Cadence and Spike were blinded in a brilliant flash followed by the absence of two alicorns and a draconequus.

Luna and Celestia rubbed their stinging eyes. The smoky smell of the throne room was replaced by a more crisp, clean air. A cool wind blew and they suddenly felt lighter as their armor faded away.

“Here they are, everypony,” Discord canted. “I can’t stay long. This whole dimension gives me the heebie-jeebies.” There was the sound of him teleporting again.

“How much they’ve grown,” A feminine voice said with barely-contained sobbing.

The tone of the voice froze their hearts with unbelief. Their eyes soon adjusted, opening wide to the sight of two alicorns and a fairly familiar man standing before them. The stallion was a perfect midnight blue, his coat dotted by the countless shimmering stars of night. The tearing mare glowed warmly with the light of day. The bright yellow of her core and face faded to orange and nighttime blue at her hooves and down her tail. The man was tall and strongly-built, but bore a grim face, hardly masked by a thin, yet honest smile. On his hip hung a hammer; both princesses knew immediately that it was none other than the iconic Ghal Maraz.

“So these are your offspring,” he said heartily to the greater alicorns. “You must be proud.”

Celestia and Luna suddenly felt young and small in the presence of the trio as the identity of the two alicorns before them became stunningly clear.

“Mother?” Celestia thought aloud.

“Father?” Luna breathed, her voice cracking.

The two figures’ smiles widened.

Author's Note

The scene where the princesses talk to Tzeentch had to be moved here, it fits to well.
I kinda want to do a bit with Screwball...

Chapter 17: The Hunt Begins

This is for later in the chapter. Hopefully, you'll know where.

Let all unholy followers...

The mimicking sun hung high in the Ley’s sky. The whole shimmered with aethereal clouds and was calm, the pure mirror face to the self destructive Immaterium. In the far distance, through the mists of magic, was the realm of the elven pantheon, gleaming spires of marble grey and white.

A few millennia younger than the Warp itself, the Ley had been engaged in a forever-war against the daemonic Immaterium since its inception, two immortal, indestructible realms battling for the mortal plane. One desired no more than to consume the lower world in fire and blood, to endlessly feast on the doom of mortals. The other sought to see the mortal world safe, and free of the daemons feeding on their every thought.

Celestia and her mother, Solianna walked through the courtyard of the palace of the equine realm. A grand ceremony had been held the other day—or however time passed in this dimension—for the arrival of the sibling princesses and they had four thousand years of catching up to do. All things in the yard were divine in nature, the sweet scents of the flowers and vegetation were soothing, and Celestia saw many faces she hadn’t seen for hundreds of years. The last couple of days was all so much, and a walk in the gardens was a good way to slow things down.

“The Ley?” Celestia said ponderously. “I thought it was merely the magic energy in the air.” The flow of magic was far different than in Equestria. In their old home, ley was the source of a unicorn’s power, a shapeless energy they focus through their horns to manipulate objects. By contrast, ley in this new domain was like blood in an animal; it felt natural, smooth, and life-giving.

“Much like the Immaterium, the Ley is its opposite dimension. Just as warp permeates the very soil and air of Sigmar’s world, Ley flows through Equestria and we have made a little headway into the Old World as well. That is why Discord could not stay here long, even after he was reformed. He is bound to the Warp.” Solianna’s head hung down slightly. “We did all we could to stop the Dark Lords from letting the Everchosen reach Equestria, but it just wasn’t enough.”

Her daughter nuzzled at her neck, desiring to bury that sadness. “You did all you could, mother. We are alive, that is all that matters right now.” It did seem a miracle. “Just how many of our old friends are here?” Celestia pursed her lips pensively, carefully choosing a name as if she could only ask once.

“Starswirl?”

“Yes.”

“Tyr?”

“Yes; and Woden, Freya, and Maiesta.” Solianna went ahead. “Those who are valued most to us are granted the gift of immortality. Their deeds are invalueble to resisting the dark lords. If they perish in the mortal realm, they don’t necessarily die. They are sent back to the Warp or in the case of our friends, here. For those abominations in the aether, it could take years, centuries to find a way back to reality. Have you ever heard a daemon prince die?” Her daughter shook her head. “Just as his body disintegrates, he laughs with a power to drive mortals mad, because he will return eventually.”

The concept didn’t sit well with Celestia, as she thought of the monster... her student, that she had raised in Equestria. Even if Twilight was slain and the End Times averted, the daemonic mare would still wander the hellish plains of the Warp, looking for a way back to real space, seeking revenge.

“Your father and I understand what you had to do.” Solianna said, causing Celestia’s ears to droop low. “The Changer is a liar, the likes of which few could fathom.”

“He promised that she would be sent to another world. And he pulled us in with her.” Celestia frowned.

A few things became clear, that she set herself up for an ultimate trap and likely provided the springboard from which the daemon would inadvertently launch itself into the dark gods’ hands. She felt her decisions were selfish, helping raise a prized student, just to keep it calm, and then ship it off to another world for other figures’ purposes.

“That is part of the reason why we had Discord bring you and Luna to us. The creature is truly more powerful than you and your sister are now, but here…” Solianna went on, grinning. “We will prepare you to face down oblivion itself and show you your true nature, as our children.”

Having listened to her father talk for heaven knows how long to someone else brought out a long-extinguished, childish urge in Luna, the desire to explore. She walked off and explored the palace alone for a while. The architecture was certainly similar to that in Equestria, each turn and hallway, and great windows offered a view of the realm below. Her father eventually caught up to her.

"Lulu, there you are! Don't run off like that," he said crossly.

"Our apologies, father, we-"

"Luna, you're not in Equestria. You don't have to do the royal 'we'"

Luna blushed. "I was wondering as to what we would do in our time here."

"Mostly we will be readying you and your sister." He draped his wing over Luna's back and they started walking again. "You were very brave against the Skaven, but they are not the worst of it. You will have to face down the force of the Immaterium in due time."

Luna knew this. And what had become of her sister's 'pupil'? She was probably with Archaon now, fitting her for armor and teaching her to kill mercilessly. It would be a war of the undying.

Immortality. One hundred years, a thousand years; time will tick on and so would they, but, “...Are we ever going to see home again?” The thought buzzed at the mention of their rule in the Empire.

Her starry-coated father tried to give an assuring smile, but uncertainty infiltrated it. “The future will yield great technology that will allow mortals to walk among the stars. Perhaps you will find Equestria then.

“That is many millennia away.” Luna sulked.

“And the planet is not going anywhere soon.” He draped a wing over her back. “Come. We must begin your teaching.”

“The Empire cannot be without us for decades,” Luna said. “Who will rule in our absence? What do we do about Karl Franz?”

“This is the Ley!” Tenebris chortled. “Completely separate from time and space. Years here may be only hours or seconds in the physical plain. Speaking of, there was a period when your mother and I couldn’t see you in the Materium.”

“It must have been during the time Mannslieb and Morrslieb were up together. The whole period is cloudy to me, like I’m remembering something somepony else did... Tia said I was forced into the visage of Nightmare Moon, and acted more selfishly.” While Luna could don the outward appearance of her dark self at any time, the twin moons being so close together in the sky must have forced a change, made some of that monster come out.

“Well, we don’t have a sun or moon here. Solianna and I created the projections in the sky just to simulate the passing of time. The little things count, you understand.”

They walked in contemplation, both still not fully believing that father and daughter were together again. Was this a cruel dream they would both wake up from and find the other was never there, or was it finally real? Either way, they walked close together.

“Father, if Tia and I assume some greater power, would this not mean all the cults, churches, the rabidity of these religions and fear-mongering... would actually be legitimate?”

Tenebris sighed. “It’s something Starswirl and I had been talking about. Ignorance is incurable among the mortals, and they will always need to believe in something. Chaos tempts them with its promises of power, skill, or eternal pleasure, but it’s all lies. That’s why the Imperial churches are so powerful, to provide an alternative to Chaos. If man and ponies must believe in something, let it be you.”

“What do you mean, they got bored!?” Twilight shrieked. Everything she knew of psychology, mental processes, logic itself, was under attack.

“They didn’t get bored,” The Doctor said, tightening the absent-minded Applejack’s restraints. “They got word of a better fight and packed up to go to it.”

“But it doesn’t make any sense! You don’t just stop a siege for something like that! The resources, the energy the Orks spent attacking this place for two weeks, all down the drain! This is beyond stupid, this is... is... baahh!”

Whooves plucked at the taut ropes to inspect them. “But they don’t care. You know why?”

There could be no logical explanation, but Twilight had to ask. “Why?”

“Cuz dey iz da orkz, and orkz iz mayd fer fight’n an’ winnin!” he chuckled. “All we need to do is get everything and pony together and we are out of here. I think Applejack is finally coming around. She might actually beat this.”

The foetid mare had stopped snapping her jaw at the meat and was just moaning weakly through dusty eyes. Apple Bloom had been silent for a day and her eyes were beginning to look more lively.

She was in great pain, feeling like absolute garbage; which may actually be an improvement. “Uuuugh… Weh… Why am I tied up?” She looked up to her zombified sister, her voice gurgling through pus and phlegm. “Apple...jack? Wha- whut’s goin’ on?”

Whooves undid her ropes before she panicked. “It's okay. it was to break your condition.”

“Applejack, whut happen’d?” Apple Bloom pushed her sister, still fearful of her more dead than usual expression.

“Ahh… puuuhh…” she moaned. She grunted and twisted, snapping her four sets of teeth at Apple Bloom who jumped back in fright.

“Wha!... Sis?”

The potential meal out of reach, the entranced zombie returned her dead gaze to the small piece of meat just a few feet away.

Twilight put her leathery wing over Apple Bloom. “She can’t eat anything until her mind comes back. Until then, she has to go through this, okay?”

“And we’ll carry her out of here bound up if she doesn’t recover soon, just ASAP!” Whooves happily pressed on. “Twilight, you and our quiet friend there get everypony together and we are off!”

“Can we bring cous’n Braeburn?” asked Apple Bloom with a hopeful smile.

Whooves sighed and inclined his head in a negative. “Sorry, but we can’t have everypony and their grandmother with us.”

“Huh? Pleaaase!” the foetid filly pleaded.

“I’m sorry, Apple Bloom, but no means no.”

Apple Bloom hung her head sadly and sat a safe distance from her sister. At least she still had her.

Twilight put her hoof around Kivsin and they both vanished in a cloud of warp smoke. On the rooftop, she sheepishly peered over the edge to the river of mutants and cultists below, then the air above. “Do you think I can do it this time?”

Kivsin recalled their time practicing together, mostly bad times. “We have practiced much, and you are improving.”

“Mind if I get some help?”

“Of course, Master.”

“What did I say about that?” Twilight said crossly.

“Oh, uh… Twilight.”

“That’s better.” she smiled brightly.

They had practiced with their little system before; holding each other chest-to-chest, Kivsin would act as a counterweight, flapping in unison to help Twilight not flip over or commit some other aerial folly. Kivsin was always skittish, having been at the mercy of whips and chains for accidentally touching the slave handlers. Small acid injections, molten silver in the mouth, a day with the wyches, just a few examples of the Druchii’s many tortures. Twilight felt him quivering and muttering feverishly to himself.

“It’s okay; nopony’s here to hurt you.” she said.

He steadied a little and nodded. Twilight had always been good to him, even if he never knew it. She let him take some of her rations instead of taking it herself, letting him sleep at day instead of running him ragged with her enhanced wakefulness, never needing to sleep.

He helped Twilight to a moderate flying pace and let go. She was on her own and flew with all the grace of a falling refrigerator. Wonder flowed at the sight of the world whooshing by, the wind in her face and mane. Kivsin wasn’t enjoying it so much as each flap was followed by a wincing jolt of pain throughout his mutilated body. Hopefully, she could take his mind off of it.

“So, what did your old armor look like?” she asked.

“...Come again?” he replied curiously.

“You know, the Black Guard.”

“Oh, um…” The cogs in his mind slowly turned as he recollected. “Much like normal dark elf armor but more bronze trim, some red crystals, and a large gold crest in the forehead. Actually quite something to see.”

“Maybe Rarity could make you a suit.” Twilight wondered. “She’s going to work on something for everypony else. Did you have any weapons?”

A few fond memories trickled back, a pitter-patter of the thrill of battle and the cries of newly captured slaves. “Lightning claws, powered by warpstone. They could cut through anything!“

Twilight gave a thoughtful grin at the description. “Hmm... If we scavenge the battlefield, we can probably find some good metal. You’re going to look great!”

The streets of Mordheim flowed with the Blood God's wine after the siege, that of cultists, greenskins and even a few fallen giants and ogres. The great walls were battered but still stood, the green host gone to more thrilling battles. Gaggles of looters scavenged piles of bodies for goodies.

Twilight resisted the powerrful thirst and temptation to drink the ichor in the roads and dove into a pile of corpses to find some trinkets. After some digging around, she found something of interest.

“Kivsin, look what I found!” she called. She sank her fangs into the body of a dead Druchii noctral, all blood leaving it for her and making it easier for Twilight to pry off it’s black armor. “Will this fit?”

Her assistant threw away a pair of severed arms he was clapping together and let Twilight slip the components on. A perfect fit. It was thin and form-fitting, flexible and made him look like a walking swiss army knife. Between plates shimmered chainmail and two-fingered claw blades stuck from the hoof plates. He looked intimidating indeed, but both knew this was only a preview for what Black Guard armor may look like.

Twilight had found a good suit from a fallen chaos warrior stallion, though she had to skin him to get it off as the metal was fused to his flesh. The ensemble was covered in deep cuts and split plates, in complete disrepair, but it was so appealing to Twilight for its spiky aesthetics. She couldn’t keep the helmet since it didn’t have a hole for her horn, or the other two at her temples. She hid a collection of souls among the armor, such a sweet delicacy the Doctor forbade her from. There had to be a way to consume them without causing her transformation.

“So, how does it feel?”

“Familiar, and… heavier than I remember,” Kivsin said, wriggling to get a feel for the suit.

“You need to rebuild your strength. Let’s go get Pinkie Pie.”

Pinkie gnawed at her hooves in anticipation of the decadent champion’s thumb, whether it would go up or down at the grey cellist on stage. It hung out horizontally, still like a statue’s arm; a single twitch down could end Octavia’s life. The performer herself was blubbering under a composed facade. Her lips quivered and a bead of sweat rolled down her temple.

It rotated up. He enjoyed her song.

The mutant musician bowed, letting out an exasperated breath, and waddled off the stage. She and Vinyl exchanged a good luck kiss and the unicorn took the gem from her tie. The champion reclined in his plush throne and was approached by many gift-givers, offering pleasant distractions while the full-body-tattooed DJ materialized her equipment from the Warp.

Twilight and Kivsin approached the Tome of Corruption, a hulking slaaneshi chaos warrior standing watch at the entrance for only the champion’s followers to be let in. However, being friends of a couple of the only employees of the place, Twilight and Kivsin were let in, giving nervous smiles to the dark pink and purple monolith who glared back through six glassy eyes.

They weaved throught he patrons quietly so as not to disturb the flow of the room and draw attention. The floors and walls were flesh-like, perspiring. The air was rank with sweat and perfume.

A firm nudging broke Pinkie from the entrancing beauty of the champion. “Hey, Twilight! Ooh, cool, where’d you get that armor?”

“We went looting the battlefield and I found it,” the daemonic alicorn said. “We have to get back to the apartment and get out of the city. The orks are gone, and it’s safe now.”

“Oh, I can’t go yet!”

“Why not?”

“I’m doing some work on that hunk o’ man right there.” Pinkie glanced lustfully at the champion. His grey-pink skin tightly wrapped around bulging veins and his perfume stink made all who weren’t loyal to the Dark Prince dizzy.

Vinyl sharply inhaled the dust of the soul gem she’d crushed up and transfigured into her much louder self. She levitated the main cord for the speaker display down her throat and clipped it to her larynx. The wall of subwoofers buzzed idly, each a living, wide-mouthed face fervent to scream. Cables and wires, like metal tentacles, stabbed like syringes into her body through the music notes tattooed all across her. The distinction between mare and machine grew less and less until she looked like a flesh and steel plant, sprouting with warp-iron vines.

“Why!? We’re not supposed to be this close to these kinds of people!” Twilight whispered loudly.

“If Vinyl, Octavia and I do a good job, he’ll lift the debt they owe to the daemon lady for letting Octavia be a cello-pony-hybrid... thing. They’ll be free!”

Setting the incompetence of her friend aside for now, Twilight probed deeper. “So, what are you doing with him?”

“I’m replacing his stitches.” Pinkie rolled out a tongue around a bony needle and thread, looped through the hole, leading into her mouth. “He’s got his mouth pulled up in a smile and the threads are starting to get old, so he wants me to replace it!”

Berry Punch put away the last of her glass bottles so they wouldn’t shatter and Vinyl adjusted her mix table, feeling the warp-powered console talk to her to find an optimal setting. Her friend, Neon Lights was limbering up for a dance as dozens of multicolored bioluminescent pustules across his body shimmered. Twilight’s next protest was crushed under a whine of deafeningly loud voice.

”WAAAAAAAAAOOOOO! Lord Segestes of the Satin Skulls, welcome to the Tome of Corruption,” the DJ bellowed deeply. Her loudness drew blood from a couple of ears in the audience but they enjoyed the pain. She sounded hyper, confident, but the shadow of fear was present. ”Got myself a couple numbers that’s gonna rape your eardrums oh so good. Let all unholy followers of the Prince, come and hear the song of Slaanesh!”

The room shuddered as the first song roared out, crashing over the assembled patrons like a tidal wave. Twilight had to put her muzzle up to Pinkie’s ear just so she could hear her. “Just get to the apartment when you’re done!”

Pinkie nodded and a grey mare motioned for Twilight’s attention. Octavia pointed into her ears and made a sick face, signaling she couldn’t take the noise and could tell Twilight couldn’t either and gestured to follow. She wore a skimpy, sexy armor suit, hideously garish but common slaaneshi fashion. Twilight gave Pinkie one more glance and she waved her black, crustaceous claw.

Go on! I got it! she signaled.

It was an impromptu ballet, trying to navigate back out without bothering any of the dancing patrons. Twilight accidentally bumped into a sickly-looking cultist who, oddly enough, wasn't enjoying the noise. His face ignited in green flame at the agitation, flickering back and forth between that of a man and chitinous black insect. He barely managed to keep a human face. Outside was much quieter, but Vinyl’s living stereo could still be heard loud and clear through the walls.

“So glad to be out of there,” Octavia sighed. “Vinyl always thinks she can drown out her flaws with volume.” She sat on a pile of powder sacks, kicking up a fine dust, and let her tense body loosen up. “If she messes this up, I’ll kill her. I have to get out of this city!”

“Hey, I’ve always wondered,” Twilight said, looking up towards the dark architecture of the surrounding buildings. “What is Mordheim, exactly? Why is there a Chaos city in the middle of the Empire?”

Octavia looked around at the howling, mewling heretics and mutants going about business like all was right with the world. She winnowed through her memories of books she’d read that Vinyl had called her a big nerd for.

“Hmm... well, it used to be an Imperial city; home of the Sovereigns of Sigmar, even, cursed be his name. A comet was going to pass over the city at one point, rumored to herald the second coming of the Imperial god. Hundreds of thousands flocked here, choking the streets and starving the place of food and sanitation. Their suffering and desperation made many start worshiping the Dark Gods for relief. Soon daemons walked the streets as free as men.

“The comet didn’t just fly over, it hit the city, killing thousands and the Imperial Inquisition burned the rest to the ground to purge it of Chaos. The rock left a wealth of wyrdstone, and treasure seekers came after to strike it rich. Mordheim was reborn in greed and the concentration of wyrdstone energy drove everypony insane, worshiping Chaos. The Empire was going through a civil war at that time, so they didn’t have the power to destroy it again. Ever since, heretics and mutants come here. It’s home to us, now.”

A sure smile crossed her face. “If Segestes likes our songs, we can leave! We can go anywhere, maybe even the Wastes!”

“What’s in the Wastes?” Twilight asked.

“The Northmen, people born and raised under the shadow of the dark lords. Their followers of Slaanesh must be so handsome.” Her hoof absentmindedly drifted to between her legs and she lost herself, imagining such men. “So handsome…”

Twilight was off put by Octavia’s sudden self-pleasuring and got up. “So uh, you have fun with that and I have to go get Rarity.” Octavia didn’t even notice her words, grunting and panting in her blasphemous act.

Inside the bar, Pinkie Pie leaned herself against Segestes’ throne and readied her needle while a blue and white-maned pony babbled ‘Perfect teeth, HA! Perfect teeth!’ on the other side who held his mouth open. The greasy, frayed threads were removed, slipping out of a dozen holes in his lips. Minuette pulled the cheek back into its smiling position and Pinkie, moist with cold sweat, maneuvered the needle to the rim of the first hole.

This has to be perfect. she thought.

The stitch passed through the first dry hole with ease and the tug of the string on his lip made him tense marginally and ease back; the pain was a great pleasure. Pinkie needed something to steady the nerves. Vinyl had long since passed out drunk at the bar and the eyes of the champion’s followers were on her.

“Cause I love to make you smile, smile, smile. Yes I do. It fills my heart with sunshine all the while. Yes it does. Cause all I really need's a smile, smile, smile, from these happy friends of mine…”

Segestes chuckled amusedly. His gauntlet passed down her mane, body, and ended at her flank, squeezing it tenderly. The mare huffed a bit and her long tongue twitched at his cheek. She looked into his eye and grinned seductively.

’I like where this is going.’

“What do you mean, you’re coming with us?” Twilight said, bewildered.

The Tzeentch cultist collected the essentials from her room, transfiguration books, food, bits and bobs, and her mutant starfish in its tiny cage.

“It’s destiny.” Lyra monologued. “He spoke to me, told me that this was the path I’m to serve. He didn’t specify, but that’s His genius! We aren’t meant to know what His plan is for us because we’re his pawns.” She stepped aside to allow Rarity and her little sister to pass. She mimicked a puppet, hanging dead on its strings. It looked so, as her arms twitched as if they weren’t her own. “We’re all cogs in the machine of His plans, and I love it!”

Rarity had a smaller but agreeing grin. Her things were packed. The only thing she really had was her fashionably horrifying armor and a mouthy sister. Everyone but Twilight and Kivsin, now separated, had to drape themselves in sheets or cloaks to avoid detection by the Crimson Hand’s sentinels. Twilight was definitely suspicious of Lyra, someone so willing to be a tool for an uncaring god like Tzeentch, but all cultists were crazy in this way. It would be nice to bring along another old Ponyville resident. As everyone left, Lyra summoned her magic and lit the apartment on fire. It burned beautifully as she stared into the firestorm, mezmorized.

“Every step brings us closer.”

A brown earth pony stared annoyed at a daemon alicorn under the shadow of a giant metal pony with a bladed horn between her eyes, blanketed in curtains. To Twilight, it all seemed so surreal, but there they were, with the Doctor sorely glaring at her. A tall, dark archway loomed over them. Above were the floors of the living blocks with flimsy wooden stilts that looked more like a million chopsticks supporting the structures off the lower levels.

“What do you have to say?” he said.

Whooves impatiently waited for Twilight to say it. Fluttershy didn’t feel right, being apologized to, and being outside the safety of the closet where she couldn’t hurt anyone. Her nerves had grown numb to the pain of the evil entities her unstable body absorbed, but her fear of how she acted could be read on her like an open book.

Twilight relented. “I’m sorry for leaving you with a chaos apostle, Fluttershy.”

The daemon engine smiled a little, her first in weeks, and it hurt. “It’s okay. Y-you were only t-t-trying to help.”

“‘N look where that got you ‘n Big Mac.” Braeburn growled. “Stuck together like some Flankenstein with you in charge.” He spat to the ground in disgust, the acidic wad burning into the soil.

Fluttershy was still so destroyed over what she’d done to Applejack's brother. A simple mistake, a bump together in the road, and her fluctuating form had devoured that juggernaut like a cell.

“I’m sorry…” Fluttershy sniffled for the thousandth time.

He was unfazed and turned to the motley group of misfits. He’d made his position on going with the group clear. Nurgle wouldn’t have his children separated. The Doctor was losing control. All these subtle voices, Braeburn, Lyra, Vinyl and Octavia, pulling the girls in the wrong direction.

Three cursed zombies, three celebrating Slaaneshis, three Tzeentchians, two of Undivided, an earth pony, and a giant metal rhino would leave the City of the Damned. Chaos had put together quite the mismatched mob.

“Right! Everypony, get yerselves together!” Nurgle’s stallion commanded. His distasteful gaze cast on the Tzeentchians. “Hey, Birdbrains!” he barked, catching Lyra, Sweetie Belle, and Rarity’s attention. “Y’all know a way outta here without goi’n through the gates?”

“Now why can’t we just go right out the front door?” Lyra asked sarcastically.

Braeburn wasn’t amused. “Cus without somepony important backin’ us, we gotta pay in lives ‘ta be let through. You wanna pick up the tab?”

Lyra picked up her halberd and sighed that he was no fun. “Follow me. There’s a tunnel that leads out under the walls. It’s pretty well-traveled, actually.”

Vinyl ecstatically climbed onto Pinkie’s back. “Then what are we waiting for? Tavi and I are sick of this place!”

The little band emerged onto the street. Fluttershy bore a weakly-entranced Applejack on her back. A large monster like Fluttershy wouldn’t be widely noticed in a place full of ogres, trolls and giants twice her own height and twisted by chaos in similar fashions.

The corrupted Cutiemark Crusaders trotted together, Apple Bloom and Sweetie Belle trying to cheer up the sad orange pegasus whose adoptive sister was still missing.

The pennants of Cloudsdale fluttered sharply in the nimble wind. The warriors of the holy city stood in battle positions atop its mighty white walls. Cannon crews poised their wicks, ready to ignite them to send deadly shot into the enemy ranks. Governor-General Spitfire scanned through a looking-glass down onto a writhing horde of black-armored devils.

The Dark Elves.

Their black armada dotted the slimy sea like a pox, stretching beyond the horizon. The flagship, a fortress-city ship, a Black Ark was like a tick, fanged mooring hooks biting to the coast, letting out its toxin of Druchii warriors and lizard-riding Cold One Knights in dense columns. Noctral bat ponies flew like vultures over the host, keeping their distance from Cloudsdale’s guns. At least a dozen reaper bolt throwers were aimed up at the city, but held their fire.

“Why don’t they shoot?” Spitfire muttered.

“Why don’t we?” Soarin leaned on the parapet, looking down without a glass.

“You look down there and tell me we should go against that.” Spitfire handed him the telescope and he got a better look. His curious demeanor was crushed.

He looked to the open maw of the Ark where a royal palanquin was being carried down the platform. Soarin focused the telescope, picking up a brooding grey unicorn with a red horn on the throne. His ink-black mane flowed over a crimson cape and from emerald green eyes, a dark purple haze blew out like steam in the wind.

“Spitfire, who’s that?” Soarin passed her back the telescope and Spitfire gazed on the dark unicorn. She gritted her teeth.

“Sombra.”

A carrier pegasus was always on hand in combat situations, carrying her favorite weapon; a Nuln long rifle. It had several thick braces around the woodwork and along the lengthy barrel. Spitfire propped it up on a rest stock, peered through a well-crafted scope rested atop the back of the weapon and put the crosshairs over Sombra’s head to account for bullet drop. He was at least half a mile away, but the eight-foot long weapon was made for such a distance. She synced her breath, aiming specifically for the eye. The tip of her wing caressed the trigger and she made final adjustments.

“This is for Fire Streak.”

A sharp crack pierced the air, the scope suddenly became fogged up and the butt of the gun punched spitefully at her shoulder. She kept staring through the scope, waiting for the result to appear. She saw some red, that of his cape, then his mane, then his horn aglow. A crackling telekinetic aura held a tiny piece of hissing-hot lead inches from his eye. He looked unphased, unimpressed or even surprised.

He didn’t even glance back at the shooter as he turned the bullet around. The shot shook briefly and disappeared from view. A second later, the front section of the musket scope exploded, showering glass onto the ground and Spitfire dropped it reflexively. She rubbed her eye; it hurt greatly from the scope jumping back at her face and would likely gain a nasty bruise, but thankfully no glass had shredded it.

“General, are you hurt?” A captain came to her side, speaking worriedly.

“I’m fine, I’m fine. Pack up my musket and keep on alert. I want a hundred messengers sent to Altdorf and all across the Empire. King Sombra is on the southern edge of Norsca with a massive Dark Elf army.” She turned to her lieutenant. He was in no condition to be here, covered in stitches from recent surgery, but insisted to show he was committed to rebuild himself and his relationship with her. “If he’s not going to attack, we should go back to the inner walls. We need to spend every day retraining you.”

Soarin gave a salute. “Yes, my general.”

As he turned to follow her into the air, a thunderous headache gripped him. Images of a cyan pegasus with a rainbow mane getting the life beat out of her scarred his vision. The perpetrator cast a transfiguration spell on the bloody, half-dead mare, giving her Soarin’s appearance.

Spitfire came back to steady him as a wave of nausea crashed up his throat. “Are you okay?” she said.

“I th- I think so...” he muttered as the hallucination faded. He felt like upchucking, but the feeling mockingly lingered at the top of his throat.

“Work through it, Soarin. Let’s go.”

“Everything’s going to hell.”

Shining Armor laid his head on his cluttered desk, the events of the past few weeks bearing down on him all at once. His sister was a hellspawn destined to bring about the end of the world, his wife was a permanent living crystal, Discord’s daughter was running around the capital doing gods know what, and the princesses were missing. Word of their absence was being contained by the Imperial Inquisition, but If they didn’t return soon, Shining would surely have to endure Emperor Franz’s wrath.

“Get up, honey.” Cadence cooed. She put a heavy hoof on his back, shimmering in the torchlight.

Shining’s spirit was nearly at its end. Her hard, cold touch didn’t help any. “What’s going to happen next? Am I some kind of unholy thing? Will I get a debilitating curse?”

What could Cadence say? ‘Finding out the filly you grew up with for most of your life is a creation of the Chaos Gods is part of growing up’, or ‘Maybe if you’re lucky, Twilight will only eat your soul and not torture it for all eternity.’

A saving grace came to break their miserable silence. A shouting that sounded frantic, panicking, got closer and closer until pink slime started pouring in through the cracks in the door. It flowed in, enough to reform into a hysterical four-legged pink blob with a propeller beanie.

“Make him stahp! Meik him stahp!” it cried, stumbling towards the reiksmarshall.

An inquisitor burst in after her, dressed in holy garb, shaking an ornate whittled Ghal Maraz in his hand. “Gaze upon the icon of Sigmar’s power, monster and wither under His light! Wither! The power of Sigmar compels you!” Screwball screamed in agony as her melting body started to boil and further lose form. Her eyes couldn’t leave the hammer, the icon of Chaos’ destroyer, like a moth plunging itself into the flame.

“Inquisitor, that’s enough,” Shining commanded firmly. “You’ve served Sigmar well this hour; now return to your normal duties.”

The inquisitor stopped his litany with gasping breath after pursuing Screwball. “But- Reiksmarshall, the daemon must be destroyed!”

“I will take care of it. Go. Now.”

The inquisitor hesitated before slowly bowing his head, and departed.

“Tank you! Tank yuu!” The solidifying blob hugged Shining Armor but he pushed her off when she was firm enough. She acted as if she wasn’t just dying a minute ago, and bounded back out the door, giving the inquisitor an atomic wedgie before flying over his head.

Reformed or not, how good was Discord’s word that he and his little ball of sunshine were here to help? Not much. Shining Armor had to refocus. He read over his schedule for the day.

3:00 p.m. Mercenary review: Captain Babs Seed of the Cutiemark Crusaders

Something, anything to clear his mind and his plate.

“Another mercenary to find Twilight?” Cadence sighed. Shining had reviewed a hundred mercenary groups; Voland’s Venators, The Bandoleros Gringos, Braganza’s Besiegers, and Ricco’s Republican Guard. It wasn’t that they were incompetent, or bad at what they did, but that they just didn’t give a damn about the job they were paid for. “I’d love to see one of these kinds of people, but... are they really as dangerous as the elves say?”

Shining smirked. “Whatever the elves say about the Empire, it’s only half that bad at the least. It’s actually about time to go to the mercenary camp to see them.”

“And I’m sure the elven administration can wait on the Crystal Princess and the Prince.”

They ran to the wood, Rarity helping a bleeding Lyra to stay upright, Fluttershy barely able to hold Applejack in her teeth. The dense mists of Sylvania’s dark forests shrouded them from the Crimson Hand’s eyes, but Vanga himself would pursue them to the ends of the Empire to get his juggernaut back. Melting Fluttershy down wasn’t out of the question and sift through her molten ramins for Big Mac, his mount. The trees loomed tall and branchless, reaching up into the fog like ancient monoliths of a long lost age. Their bases perpetually smoldered, coursing in veins of glowing cinders, but never burned.

Fluttershy had managed not to weep at her pain for a while but after being chased all over by bloodthirsty men, hell-bent on taking her life, she couldn’t help but bawl. Two bat-winged ponies swooped down, guided by the sad beacon. Applejack kept making the motions like she was moaning, but a rope was tightly fixed around her neck, closing off her windpipe so she’d stay quiet. It wasn’t like the already-dead mare needed to breathe, anyway.

Few by few, the rest found their way together. Pinkie Pie coughed up Octavia, who was too slow for survival’s taste and Vinyl was happy as ever to be out of that gods-damned city. Her experimental magic hoof-cannon swung over her back. Braeburn and three fillies trotted through the mist. He removed a spear that had pinned Apple Bloom to his chest.

“Everypony still in one piece?” he said, receiving several nods and other affirmatives in return. “Then whut’s the plan? Y’all keep goi’n ta this Whooves character, here.” Braeburn cast a suspicious look at him. “He doesn’t look like a follower.”

The fact that Whooves wasn’t rotting away, covered in blood, or mutated beyond recognition wasn’t a good camouflage. He was sweating bullets but his psychotic soulmate drove between Braeburn and him.

“He doesn’t need to answer to you.” Pinkie shook her head. “He’s still trying to find himself, is all. He's, uh, still choosing.”

“Really? Well how ‘bout the Plague Lord?” Braeburn entreated.

Whooves had no such plans for any mark. “Uh, I’m thinking Undivided. All the benefits and nothing gets left out.”

“Ah can give you the mark ‘a Nurgle right now.” Braeburn spat on his hoof, covering it in a fuming sludge. “Just three stamps on the flank and yer part ‘a tha’ family.”

Whooves backed away as Braeburn took a step closer. Pinkie Pie quickly stepped between them, clacking her claw threateningly at the pestilent stallion.

“He doesn’t want it.” she said firmly.

Braeburn put his hoof down, instantly rotting the grass under him. “Suit yerself. Where y’all headed?”

“West.” Whooves said curtly. “Just west. Rarity, do you have the maps?”

The three-horned unicorn levitated several pieces of parchment to him from her burlap bag and helped Lyra to wipe her face; erecting an intense firewall to hold the khornates back devastated her and she bled from her eyes, nose, and mouth.

“Back in the dirt and mud for less than an hour, and we already have wounded,” Rarity grunted.

“Alright,” Whooves started. “We must be just north of the city, so...uh...” Braeburn’s lethal stench filled the Doctor’s nose as he came alongside to study the map as well. “Do you mind if, uh...”

“Ah’ve had mah share a trips round tha countryside. Ah know mah way round here.” he replied. “We follow tha’ River Stir till we hit tha’ road, then stick to tha’ woods ‘n follow tha’ road west.” Whooves just handed him the map, and moved to get away from his gagging fug. He was on the precipice of puking.

“Ah’m flattered, Doc. Let’s move out, everypony! We move at night, rest at day. This is vampire territory!”

“Wahooo!!” Vinyl hurrah’d. She, Pinkie, and Octavia dashed ahead, playing with each other like puppies, nearly vanishing in the fog.

“Maybe I should have waited.” Cadence griped. She looked out the carriage window into the camp of the Dogs of War. Mercenaries of all colors and creeds, their dignitaries and spokesmen all around. Here, the burgomeisters of the Empire bought such warriors to defend their lands, usually sending them straight into harms way since dead mercenaries don’t require compensation. A thousand eyes looked on the carriage, knowing big money was rolling by.

Cadence was pleasantly relieved to see they weren’t all savage barbarians, just most of them. The representatives of Ricco’s Republican Guard were clad in gleaming gold armor, and blood-stained bandannas around every forehead. Even the fat ogres and conniving goblins were a few among the soldiers of fortune. On a sign for the Atalcani Fellowship it read, ’Cutprice cutthroats you can afford!’ The Fighting Cocks, Leopard Company, The Marksmen of Miragliano, and the Grudgebringers, all were a sight to behold.

“You work with these people all the time?” Cadence asked her husband.

“Yeah. You need to know how to speak their language, and everypony here talks money.” Shining said.

“Which of them are the Crusaders?”

Shining shrugged. “I don’t really know. It’s the first I’ve heard of them. We’ll know when the carriage stops.”

Surely enough, it did. The Reiksguard allowed the royal couple to step out and Cadence was quite offended by the dirty smells of the camp. They were before what appeared to be a tiny, mobile cathedral tent. Before the ornately-woven entrance flaps, a very piously-dressed orange-brown mare bowed her head to the Reiksmarshall and Crystal princess.

Babs was older, stronger, wiser, and never let the Crusaders die out after being swept from home. The Cutiemark Crusaders had grown to draw thousands of members from across the Empire, Kislev and Bretonnia where ponies had nestled into as well. Their holy crusades brought the end of many Chaos cults within the Empire, earning them recognition as purifiers and heretic seekers. Members had their flanks branded with the scar of the Celestial Church so no other cutiemark would ever grow. Thus their ultimate crusade, serving the gods Celestia and Luna, would never end.

The Empire’s many tongues didn’t penetrate Bab’s thick Manehattan accent.

“Reiksmarshall, Princess Cadenza.” she greeted.

Shining shook her hoof with an illegitimate smile. “Captain Babs, I assume?”

“The one and only.” she exclaimed pridefully.

A couple of Cadence’s crystal guard halted a stallion from the Venators mercenaries. He grinned slyly with yellowed teeth.

“Hey, beautiful!” He called to Cadence. She ignored him with a deepening grimace. “How about we go to the market and get you some polish? Really make you shine—” An angry magic blast from the princess threw him on his back.

Babs blew her bangs out of her eyes. “We might wanna get inside, before they try to figure out how much you’re worth in gold.”

“Yes, please.” she replied gratefully, glancing around the camp with distaste.

The interior truly spoke of ‘God’s house on earth’, kept at a level of light to mimic the dawn, just when the sun and moons were at opposite ends of the world. The church’s iconography was everywhere, mirroring its mad, murderous devotion to its pantheon. The banner of the Cutiemark Crusaders hung at the back most wall, a yellow pony, sized up from the original filly, with a flaming sword in one hoof and a ram’s horn in the other and at its lips. Along the bottom edge was a phrase in gold yellow thread.

For the Founders.

“You’ll never find a more holy place in this camp ‘a knuckleheads.” Babs started. “You ever heard of the Wings of Hayte, chaos cult?”

“No.” Shining answered.

“Thank us you haven’t. The Crusaders put them down before they got big enough to spread their heretical garbage. The Sons of Odovakar, the Raven Host, and a dozen others, all laid to waste by my troops.” Babs saw that she had caught Shining’s interest as the corners of his mouth creaked up.

Babs darted to three members of the Crusaders, an earth pony, pegasus, and unicorn to show off their equipment. “Our gear is top of the line. While the other merc groups are all infantry or cavalry, we’re more like a private army. Earth ponies provide the muscle, pegasi are our eyes, ears, and light troops, and we have some of the best battle mages outside the College of Magic.” Each soldier displayed his weapons and armor as directed. Hoof and wing blades, a mace at the earth pony’s tail, each was a versatile armory in his own right. The demonstration of their tools and prowess went well, and come the end, Shining was most satisfied. “Do they not cease to impress you?”

“No, they don’t.” Shining chortled. “Do you do search and capture?”

“Sure! So we got the job?”

“If your cost doesn’t bankrupt the military.”

“To serve is its own reward. Who’s the target?”

“Her name’s Twilight Sparkle. Purple coat, black mane, bat wings, and probably bigger than any stallion you’ve got. She’s probably travelling with her friends, six in all. I want them and anypony else with them here with minimal injuries. This is immensely important. They are critical parts in the Storm of Chaos. Twilight, she... it’s important to me that she’s brought to me. Alive.”

The Crusaders were not dissuaded, Babs herself giving a shrug as if talking shop. “Any idea where she might be?”

Shining drew a blank. “She could be anywhere, really. Empire or Wastes.”

Babs blew her mane out of her eyes with a look of disbelief. “You’re kidding... You have no idea where she is?”

“I just need eyes out there. If there’s the slightest chance she can be found, I have to take it.” Shining was in no mood to have his capacity questioned.

“So we’re doing this raw. Gonna have to get Spotlight and Lantern Light in the field. Get all the pegasi scouts active...” Babs formulated her to-do list. Shining Armor and Cadence smirked, pleased at her professional, flowing train of thought.

“Shining...” Cadence whispered. “Are you sure this will work?

“Not in the slightest, but they’re a start.” he murmured in reply, giving a firm nod to reassure her. “Besides, I trust them better than anyone else here with finding Twiley... and that’s saying something.”

Cadence inclined her head knowingly, the play of prismatic light on her frame almost masking her thoughtful expression. “Yes... I trust them, too, though mostly because they’re... our best chance, now.”

Shining didn’t miss her brief pause, knowing she would have liked to say ‘hope’ but keeping in mind such a concept was more dangerous than comforting. Instead, he set his expression into one of resolve and replied simply:

“Our best chance.”

The Ley’s artificial sun gazed down on the dimension. The grand circular arena was largely empty save for two gods of night, two of day, and a draconequus with tin foil hat, shaped like a duck perched atop his head. Discord looked down from the royal mother’s and father’s box on the two princesses below, eager for some playful revenge.

“Aww cmon, Tenebie, it’s fine! I’ll go easy on em.” he said.

“It’s just that—”

“It’s fine!”

“But—”

“It’s fine-It’s fine-It’s fine-It’s fine-It’s fine-It’s fine-It’s fine!” Discord drowned him out while he teleported down to the sands, leaving the immortal night king sighing into his hoof.

“Fifty years, Tia.” Luna took a moment to reflect their time in the Ley. Fifty years of study, training, time with friends thought lost a thousand years ago. And of course, their parents, supervising warily on their next exercise. Luna sifted her hoof in the sand. “And how long do you think it has been in the mortal realm?”

Celestia was lost in her own thoughts and inspecting her sword but managed to respond. “A few days, perhaps?”

Tenebris and Solianna held hooves, channeling a universe’s energy into the arena and formed a grand illusion around their daughters. A cold wind blew from somber grey clouds. The smell of a million burning torches filled their senses as Celestia and Luna observed tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of imperial soldiers and knights marching in vast columns across the grassy field under a forest of spears and halberds.The illusion of Shining Armor came to their side and before Discord flashed out of sight...

“Psst. I’ll be the bloodthirster when you get there.” the draconequus whispered. And *pop*.

“The troops are in high spirits.” Shining said confidently. High above them, a giant gryphon circled. “Looks like Franz is wondering why we stopped.”

“Nothing, nothing.” Celestia said. “Let’s keep moving.”

“Who here’s still got ‘tha need ‘ta sleep?” Braeburn asked.

Most raised their hooves; Twilight and Fluttershy kept theirs down. Not needing to sleep, to fervent followers of chaos, was a blessing. Eternal activity to perform acts of worship and killing. It was what made chaos warriors so dependable; they never tired.

“I haven’t slept in weeks... But I’m never tired,” Fluttershy stammered. “I miss dreaming.”

Twilight was a little more happy about it. “It’s let me get a lot more study time, and I can spend the nights with Kivsin since he’s nocturnal.”

The zombified Applejack moaned lazily in Fluttershy’s paws, gurgling up internal waste.

That evening, it was a forced march, Rarity whining and complaining all the way of exhaustion and hunger.

The forest was alive with the sounds of Sylvania, land of the vampires. There was the occasional undead scream in the distance, or half-destroyed, wiggling zombie corpse that Pinkie would swallow like a snake and digest in just a few minutes. Braeburn saw these as an abomination, a sham of the beauty of Nurgle’s zombies.

Whooves made the mistake of falling behind slightly, and Pinkie Pie loomed over him.

“You didn’t tell anypony about what happened with you, Vinyl and me, right?”

’Oh, bullocks.’

“N-No, of course not!” He trotted ahead, back to the shielding eyes of everyone else.

The light of day at length glowed through the opaque air. The large saddlebags Fluttershy carried were emptied and a tiny camp was erected quickly with the magic of the four unicorns. Applejack was securely staked to the ground and Fluttershy, Twilight, and Braeburn would keep watch for whatever might wander to them.

Pinkie Pie peeked around through the flaps of her tent. The sleepless wardens were nowhere to be seen. She crept with the utmost stealth, avoiding the forest litter of crunchy leaves and noisy earth.

To her dismay, Kivsin was standing guard before the Doctor’s tent. She had to see the Doctor again. It had been so long since they were together privately. Ever so silently, she slipped in the rear side. She snuggled up at the brown stallion’s back, letting her warmth and soft body keep him asleep until she wanted him awake.

She licked his cheek. “Doc... Dooooc...”

He stirred, smiling from the warm embrace that enveloped him. He opened his eyes and found a lumpy black claw around his chest. Pinkie felt him suck in a breath to call for the noctral just outside, but like any other time, she kept his mouth shut with her tongues.

“Please don’t ruin it.” she cooed, pulling him powerfully against her coat. She looked into his frightened eyes and sighed. “You still don’t know how to say it?”

’But I don’t love you and you don’t love me!’ he screamed in his mind.

“When was the last time we were alone together?” She rolled him onto his back, stomped all over his torso like a cat kneading a pillow and curled up on him. “Mind if I keep you company?”

'Yes, I do!!'

“Sweet dreams, Doc.” Pinkie yawned. Still holding his mouth shut, and heavy body weighing him down, Pinkie drifted off, laying her head on his.

The Doctor sighed with aching lungs. Kivsin was just on the other side of the tent flaps, not fifteen feet away. So close, but so far...

’Well,’ he mentally shrugged, ’I survived the last time.’

Author's Note

I understand I totally lost my shit from like chapters 10-14. I'm trying to keep on track.

Chapter 18: A Frail Heart

Five times they’d done this simulation, this mockup of the final battle. It all felt so real to Celestia and Luna; the blood, fire, the roar of the four corners of the world in arms come to one spot. Three of five times, the princesses succeeded. The other two, not so much. It was worse than hell the first time, but necessary. Even though it would be mixed up each time, whatever the storm of chaos was actually breeding was beyond anyone's knowledge.

There were some things their parents couldn’t replicate, however; Archaon’s image could not be forged in the Ley, nor could Tenebris and Solianna recreate his strength, cruelty, and unholy power. He was the will of the Dark Gods, put into a single man.

Recreating Twilight was another matter. Celestia couldn’t bear to see the monster, the daemon she had deluded herself into feeling for as if it were her own. Discord’s impersonation of a bloodthirster was the next best thing.

The High-Handed Slayer swung it’s axe and whip with blurring speed at the alicorns, only to strike the makeshift army below, taking twenty or thirty warriors in a single swing. The demigods circled around it, searching for a weak spot, a chink in its armor, whilst trying to avoid its unholy wrath. They kept it busy, taking turns firing magic blasts while the other fervently scanned it in an attempt to gain any sort of advantage. Its armor was ravaged, in shambles; but it never tired, never slowed down, and kept fighting with an anger and bloodthirst beyond mortal comprehension. The sisters were beaten, their suits half-dismantled and scarred barely within recognition. However, their speed kept the foe’s weapons from striking home.

Luna saw an opening. Just a split second; nay, nanosecond opening as the bloodthirster swung at her sister. Luna’s horn flared brightly before discharging a brilliant azure beam at the chain binding the axe to its arm. The junction exploded and, as the weapon whizzed by Celestia, she too fired at the greater daemon’s hand, forcing it to release its weapon without the chain to guarantee it was within reach. She threw it across the battlefield, and the monster roared with indignant fury. It beat its leathery, tattered wings with such force it launched into the sky and took after its weapon, snapping its whip to fend off the pursuing diarchs.

The iron tendrils cracked and popped thunderously and spun as if alive. Luna heard the high-pitched scream of helstorm rockets and saw their white contrails in the distance. She took them in a blue aura and steered one into the bloodthirster. It went down in a thunderous crash, throwing up dust and killing dozens of marauders. Despite the massive bleeding cavity in its armor, it still managed to rise to its feet; only to find eight more rockets screaming toward it.

Bang! Bang! Bang!

As the smoke cleared, Discord stood where the bloodthirster was now absent, wiping off soot and dirt from his fur. He looked uncomfortable, but still smiled wanly as if he’d enjoyed himself.

“That definitely would have brought down a Bloodthirster.” he grunted, rolling his neck. “But I swear your dad sent those rockets!”

The legions of chaos disintegrated. The grass blew into sand and dust and the visage of the Ley’s mighty arena rose around them.

“And what are you doing? You broke character!” the night king shouted from the balcony. “And I did not!”

“Helstorm rockets aren’t that reliable! They have a better chance of flying backward than forward!”

The king couldn’t help but shrink back a bit in guilt. “Tenebris!” Solianna scolded him, disappointed.

In a flash, Discord appeared between the two. “Ya know, a half-century with their mom and dad must have been fun for you all; but maybe, just maybe, it’s time they go back to real space. They’ve tried this a plenty times already, and I think that some ponies in the materium might be getting nervous as to where they are by now. Time might pass differently between here and there, but it still moves.”

Almost simultaneously, a white and a black flash erupted nearby, and the two siblings emerged from their teleportation with expressions of denial and objection. “Father, not yet—”

Tenebris raised a hoof, his horn glowing a nightly purple. “Shining Armor is responding to a letter from Emperor Franz. They’re both wondering where you are. There is also something else... I can’t tell what they are through this droning, buzzing...” He frustratedly relinquished the spell. He sighed, and Celestia’s and Luna’s faces mirrored his growing sorrow.

“It is time.”

“No, please; just one more day...” Celestia pleaded, though even a thousand years wouldn’t be enough.

“Girls... listen to me, both of you,” he said fondly, laying a hoof on Celestia’s shoulder. “This isn’t easy... for any of us, I know. Being reunited after so long brought joy beyond measure to your mother and I... We’ve watched your progress for countless eons, as you’ve grown so strong and independent, triumphed over countless threats and obstacles, and forged a strong kingdom through sheer force of will and strength of heart. You’ve made us so proud...”

“Oh, my babies...” Solianna choked, and finally the four of them closed the distance and wrapped each other in a tender hug. “We’ll always be here, looking out for you. Remember that.”

“But will we ever see you again?” Luna said with glassy, reddened eyes; then her ears shot up at an idea. “Would Discord be able to convey us back?”

“I could, but I’m not some taxi driver!” He pointed a firm finger at her, suddenly wearing a blue chauffeur's suit. “Alright, kiddies, time to get back to reality. There’s another time shift rolling right now, and Franz is about to blow it.”

“Just a minute,” Tenebris said. “Girls, there is a spell you can learn that will let you return here; not in body, but spirit.” They were still encouraged by the chance to see their parents in the future. He teleported a book before them. “It is called ‘Cast Soul’. I couldn’t teach you because you were already here. It will take some time to learn, but—”

A lion’s paw snatched it from the air. “Yeah, yeah. They’ll figure it out.” Discord put his arms around the princesses. “Arrivederci, Tenebie!”

“We’ll learn it as quick as we can.” Celestia added.

And in a blinding flare of light, the three were gone.

It was the crystal princess’s hour for unwind, for some time to herself from the multitudinous tasks she performed in the Ulthuan immigrant district. Cadence took a sip of tea, made with leaves from a special plant native to Ulthuan, to calm the mind and release some good hormones and she really needed it after the last few days. The birthdays, the school tutoring, the times spent in the park. Did being her foalsitter all amount to nothing? The next time she would see her, she might have a rack of skulls down her back and wondering what her blood tastes like.

No, no. She’s strong, she thought to reassure herself. Maybe not physically, but a tough nut to crack.

Cadence’s lips puckered at the bitter aftertaste of the tea. I’ll have to remind the brewer how much sugar is supposed to be in this. She set the cup down and took up her book again. Before she could begin reading, she heard quick scuttling just outside her door and some very discomforting words flying between her guards. One voice was raspy, gasping.

“We have to get inside. We’ll have the element of surprise that way! We don’t have much time!”

“Soldier, calm down,” a more stern, controlled voice replied. “What happened to you?”

“I-I cannot describe it. A shadow, perhaps. It ended the lives of all downstairs so silently. I managed to strike it, but it only got angrier.”

Cadence warily left her seat as the door flew open and her two crystal guards rushed in, one supporting a battered imperial soldier stallion. Blood stained his coat and armor plates, and he bore the look of one who’d been tortured.

“Princess Cadenza, we apologize for the intrusion,” Idris Flare said. “but we have reason to believe there may be something hostile in the building. We must prepare to face the intruder here.”

The broken appearance of the imperial unicorn brought no protest from the princess. The door was locked, the guards braced themselves off to the sides, and Cadence covered just behind the sofa, her horn charged to strike.

She’d spent many a day with the Phoenix King. Not only did a monarch have to know how to rule, but also how to fight. The battered unicorn was brave. Despite his injuries and fear, he still held a half-broken sword in his telekinetic grip. They waited for the moment to come, waited for the door to be bashed down and they would unleash hell on the intruder.

Cadence heard the window curtains flutter. She turned to the panes but found they were unchanged. The glass was still closed, and the curtains were still open. Behind her, she heard a couple of startled shouts, a wet splash, and felt a biting cold and green glow. She found her guards pinned to the floor, covered in a green net-like slime, and the injured unicorn burning in the verdant flames.

His skin charred off, exposing a hard black surface underneath and his horn grew long and bent at awkward angles. His body grew, shakily rising to stand on two legs and sprouted a second pair of what were now claw-brandishing arms. When the firewall vanished, Cadence was confronted with a towering, bipedal monster, three meters tall. The same green ooze dripped from its sectioned mandibles and its ribcage visibly protruded in its chest. An iron-black chitin carapace plated its form, and organic smokestacks down its back released dark green fumes into the confined air. In awe, her spell cut out.

Its claw clamped over Cadence’s muzzle and forcibly lifted her head back, opening wide the flaps of its mouth. The princess started to feel lightheaded as a pink aether trailed from her glassy body and into the beast's maw, bringing the feeling of an uncontrollable tightening of all her muscles. After it appeared to consume its fill, its jagged horn glowed a sickly green and thrust it straight into her chest.

Hissing and crackling arcs of magic coursed between them and a titanic pressure crushed Cadence as the horn burned into her heart. It thudded frantically, fighting the insect’s influence, but the monster was winning out. A light blue glow started to overtake the green light, trailing back into the monster’s malevolently grinning face.

The process took some time; it appeared to make progress, but suddenly the creature shouted in pain, releasing Cadence and recoiling back. The princess found that the magic spell didn’t seem to harm her physically, but she was still in a cyclone of dizziness and her heart sounded like pulsing thunder in her ears.

An elven spearman who had heard the commotion yanked his polearm out of a crack in the monster’s carapace. In retaliation, it’s forearms opened, dispensing toothy bone-swords into its four hands. In an instant, all the blades cleaved through the elf’s raised shield, and shredded him into a quartered corpse.

In control of herself once more, Cadence brought forth all the power she could muster into her horn and sent a sizzling blue-hued beam toward the giant insect. The blast sent them both flying to opposite ends of the room. Cadence anticipated the shockwave and used her wings to slow herself while the surprised beast crashed through the windows and vanished with an increasingly distant shriek, followed by a cracking boom.

Clutching her pounding chest and her vision coming in and out of focus, Cadence tried to stay on this side of consciousness. With the broken tip of the slain elf’s spear, Idris took it in his teeth and cut enough of the goop to get a hoof free, then proceeded to free himself and Cambrai.

“Princess, are you alright?” he said crisply.

“I think so,” Cadence gasped, her eyes tightly shut so she didn’t have to see the world tumble. She was still trying to grasp what had happened.“Cambrai, Idris, see what happened to the creature.”

“Aye, milady.” The gem-skinned stallions acknowledged and made for the stairs.

Alone, Cadence took some steadying breaths and, when the world stopped spinning, she flew down to see what the creature was.

It lay still on its back, in a ring of wood splinters, shattered glass, and a congregation of frightened residents. They were surprised to see that all the snaps and cracks were from the beast breaking the cobblestone road under it. Not a single chitin plate on its body was broken, but the area Cadence’s knockback spell hit was clearly evident with a small pool of green goo welling up in the speedily healing crater in its chest. It was still alive, breathing, but unconscious.

Elven soldiers quickly arrived through the crowd and surrounded the beast. ‘What in the name of the gods is this thing?’ was on every lip.

Cadence saw four silky wings splayed under it. It must have tried to fly as it was in a whirling freefall. She came up to the giant insect’s feminine face, finding a tiny antennae-crown atop its head and on close inspection identified the knocked-out bug with extreme doubt as to what she first thought.

“Chrysalis...?”

“What I wouldn’t give for wings...” Spike grumbled.

The dragon climbed up the side of an apartment complex, his powerful claws and flexible-toed boots sinking into the wall. His wings were still coming in, at the moment they were just bumps at his shoulder blades, but taking to higher ground seemed logical as his target could fly. At length, he reached the top and took a look out on the cityscape. He’d always wondered what the city looked like, not the fantasy-like Canterlot or Crystal Empire, but like Manehattan or Las Pegasus. Altdorf was the closest thing, this depressing pile of slums and a few affluent areas trying to look royal throughout.

He drew a deep breath to pick up Screwball’s chaotic scent and detected an unmistakable cotton candy aroma that made his green frills tingle.

“Bingo.”

As he strode across the tightly packed roofs, he thought of what Celestia had said. Nurtured, enhanced, made stronger. It made him feel manufactured. Rare, yes; but unnatural. He fostered a growing dislike for her. Living with Twilight, she expected him to grow up with her and keep her locked up if she ever fell to the Great Enemy. Did the princess never once think of how he would feel, having his entire, supposedly immortal, life pre-planned? Did she think he would just be her little soldier and turn against the mare that raised him like a son at her command? He took off his glove and inspected his hand. Though he couldn’t clearly see it, each and every scale was imbued with the stuff of magic. He wondered what he would have been without this, and what his limits were now.

Replacing his glove, he felt he had to take his frustration out on something, and sending Discord’s little hellspawn to oblivion seemed to be the best outlet. His sense of smell took him to eye a store, sunk among the buildings with a sign above the door bearing a picture of a writing quill and sofa side by side. A certain memory popped into his head.

”But the store is called Quills and Sofas! You only sell two things!”

“Sorry junior, all outta quills till monday... Need a sofa?”

“Ngaaah!”

“Davenport...” he growled.

Spike jumped down, landing with pounding force on the street below and frightening the citizens out of their skins at a dragon falling from out of nowhere, but he paid them no heed. He heard crying from inside the store, drew both sword and shield, and forced entry.

A sobbing mare was in the embrace of that very Davenport, sitting on the largest piece of furniture in the store. They both stopped their episode on seeing the very tall dragon. The chaotic cotton candy smell came strongly from the disheveled, tan mare. Her mane, tied in a poor excuse for a bun, was in total disarray and her eyes were manic and hopeful. She seemed to be happy Spike was there.

“You! I saw you through her eyes. You can end it for me!” She came lunging at Spike, apparently trying to throw herself onto his sword. He pulled back, not sure of what was going on. “Please! Before she comes back!”

Davenport clutched the mare, holding her back. “No, Button!” He held her lovingly as she sniffled into his shoulder. “No... we can find another way. And even if we can’t find anything, I’ll never abandon you.”

Spike put his shield away, believing he came in on something he shouldn’t have. “What do you mean, ‘before she comes back?’”

“Davenport... I don’t think I can stand to see you following her. She’s a little monster.” A pink hoof came between them from out of the blue. The mare looked to where it came from, her own shoulder. “No, no! I want more time!” she cried.

The rogue hoof quickly shoved itself into her mouth, choking her and started pulling up what looked like a pink pony’s coat from her throat. Before her lover or Spike could intervene, in a comedic snap, she yanked herself inside out, into a pink filly with poofy mane and swirling whirlpools of madness for eyes who twisted her forelegs bashfully.

“Daaaawww, I wuv yuu too, Davy-poo!”

She planted a fat wet smooch all over his face, and a split second later, a massive sword came slicing through her torso. She fell with a heavy thud to the floor, cleanly bisected in two. Davenport’s face sizzled like boiling water was thrown in his face and he stumbled screaming into the back room.

Spike looked victoriously on the slain spawn; at least until she leaned up on the remainder of her torso and regarded him with mild annoyance. “Ow! That hurt!”

His brain stopped. The sliced area bubbled and quickly popped out new legs. Her disembodied legs appropriately grew a new upper body. Two fillies, each half the size of the original, playfully spun around each other, examining their clone. With a giggle and headbutt they melted into one another.

“Bad dragon!” she shouted, zipping up to spike. She slapped him across the face, her hoof popping into a cloud of pink feathers on impact.

In turn, Spike grabbed her head to the sound of a squeaky toy, tightly squeezing it like a ball of putty with her eyes bulging between his fingers. He slammed her to the stony floor, smashing a few wood boards and roared a waterfall of emerald flame. As quickly as it came down, the filly pulled a water gun from her hat, hosing into Spike’s mouth and sending him gagging and stumbling back.

Her water gun morphed into several ramshackle, poorly built black powder guns, four attached to each of her hooves. She looked as giddy as an ork with a new choppa.

She screamed in an orkish accent, “Dance, draggin! Dance!”

The guns rattled and sparked, popped and clattered like mad. Spike was engulfed in a thundering storm of lead. His silver lamellar armor was shredded in seconds, but, against his thick scaly hide, he just felt like a pinata. Screwball was too enwrapped in the orgy of smoke and sparks to notice it wasn’t working.

“DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA DAKKA!”

’Is this what Celestia meant by ‘enhanced’?’ Spike thought, shielding his face with his arm. He powered up to his feet and staggered forward through the wall of lead, then suddenly,

click click click!

Screwball shook her guns in confusion. “Dakka? Why’d you stop?” She looked up to the furious dragon, covered in nicked scales and lead dust marks, cracking his knuckles with an expression of cruel eagerness.

“Oh, zog me...”

“How many y’all think there are?” Braeburn said quietly.

The group hid low along the treeline, observing a tiny village of at most twenty buildings. The shanty hamlet was almost barren. A few impoverished inhabitants could be seen working, tending to small vegetable gardens, but their constant movement made them difficult to count.

Twilight’s mind wasn’t concerned with that. Her thirst grew more intense as she pieced together what was among the structures. Sylvania was ruled by vampires, which meant that their subjects had to pay tribute to their rulers, which meant...

’Blood...’ She unconsciously extended her fangs.

Braeburn noticed Rarity sitting in a meditative posture, her eyes half closed in a ‘Nopony’s home’ stare and with her horns faintly glowing. “Whut’s she doi’n?”

“Shh...” said Lyra with a finger to her lips. “Projection. She’s counting them.”

Among the villagers, invisible to their eyes, a light blue ghost weightlessly strolled, gingerly making small pointing gestures to each inhabitant. “Twenty-three, twenty-four...”

She spotted in a window, an elderly mare operating a cloth spinning wheel and a filly bringing another roll of black thread to the woodwork machine. The mare gave the little one a pat on the head and they sat with foalish intrigue as to the workings of the spinner.

Rarity pried her eyes away. “Twenty-six...”

She continued her search and came across a dashing suit of armor in the town’s meeting hall. Blood red and screaming of medieval Romanean style, Rarity found she could actually pick it up, even as a spectre away from her body. Enviously she wanted to just take it, at the very least study it further before a man came down the stairs and froze in befuddlement at a floating suit of armor.

“Oops...”

The man blinked a few times to confirm what he saw. “Ugh. The Spirit Hosts must be at it again.”

Before she caused another little incident, Rarity cut off the projection spell, letting the suit heap to the ground. The alabaster mare soon came back to reality, holding her head and fighting back a wave of nausea. “I think there are thirty, thirty-four at most. They have some swords and bows, but no armor or undead warriors.”

“Music ta mah ears.” Braeburn said with a cold smirk.

The Doctor flinched at his malicious tone. He had to keep the girls from falling too far into Chaos, and that included indiscriminate killing. “Maybe we could just bunch them up. Keep them restrained and take what we need, because somepony ate most of our supplies.”

“A mare’s gotta eat.” Pinkie Pie smacked her lips lewdly.

“Doc, lemme tell ya somethin’. The gods want souls, and mortals have souls in ‘em, so we kill ‘em to get ‘em out.” Braeburn nudged his chest, leaving a pus stain. “They’re in you, in me, in them.”

’You’re not even supposed to be with us!’ Whooves thought with exasperation, wiping his coat. “Just hear me out. We might draw the attention of the vampire counts if they find their subjects dead, and I’d rather not have to deal with a tireless horde of undead all calling for our blood. We can’t fight them.”

It was a bitter truth to swallow, but he was right. They could easily overcome zombies and skeleton warriors, but then would come the cairn wraiths, spirit hosts, grave guard, perhaps an actual vampire lord come to deal with them himself.

“Keepin’ it clean, then. You three,” Braeburn pointed to the three hedonists, “Go ‘round the village ‘n cut off any other exit. Birdbrains, round the west side. Fluttershy, go in from tha east.” He saw her eyes widen and shake in fear. “Ya don’t have ta kill nopony, just give em a good scare.”

“Annnnd break!” Vinyl squawked, and she, Pinkie, and Octavia took off along the trees.

“Doctor, could you... please stay with me?” Fluttershy entreated.

He blinked and looked at her for a moment, before nodding. “Of course. Don’t worry, Fluttershy; we’ll make sure this gets finished right smart, and we’ll be on our way.”

“Thank you.” she replied with a shaky, yet grateful smile.

Braeburn kept Apple Bloom and Scootaloo close and waited for the others to get into position. Twilight was starting to slip, her head throbbing with thirst. Her mouth felt like it was full of dust and she started to growl.

The signal came when Lyra cast a series of small fireballs at the village, igniting bales of hay that burst into furious pyres. Everyone burst from the woods, the slaaneshis eating up distance faster by their nature, performing almost acrobatic, dancing maneuvers to avoid projectiles. They hooted and jeered and called out wildly, sending villagers running screaming for cover.

Many people panicked and fled from one edge of the town only to find more chaotic spawns on the other end. Some harder men fired arrows at the assailants but were easily countered by magic shields, a skin of iron, or Braeburn and Apple Bloom just letting the shots stick deep into their unfeeling, rotten bodies. The stallion merely laughed at the shots and yanked them out of himself.

“Ya can’t kill what’s already dead!”

When she was close enough, Vinyl screamed into her sound cannon, blasting two men ten feet backward. Of course, on Fluttershy’s end, hardly anyone gave any resistance. A giant spiked metal monster isn’t very easy to stare down, and when arrows simply ping off, the little voice in the back of your head starts whimpering, “oh shit, oh shit...”

Twilight worked fast, teleporting through the different structures, looking for the stash among the frenzied villagers.

*poof* “Bedroom...” *poof* “Latrine...” *poof* “Food storage...”

Her throat was on fire, and her lungs burned. The thirst resorted to devouring her sanity and forced her more wildly to her search.

*poof* “Meeting hall...” *poof* “Water well...”

An unsettling thought came into her head. ’Just bite the villagers! Slake yourself more easily!’

’No!’

She was on the verge. The last twists of the valve that would release a flood of bestial bloodthirst were being made. Then she heard, from two men outside:

“Secure the barn! The sacrifices’ blood must be kept safe!”

“Jackpot.” she grinned.

The noose tightened around the village until everyone was corralled in the center. To the people’s confusion, the mutants weren’t ripping them apart or trying to sacrifice them to their wicked gods, but merely penned them in like cattle. Braeburn wanted to kill them, spill their entrails across the ground and splay the corpses along the pathways, to hang intestines like streamers for Nurgle’s carnival of death, and snack on one or two of them. But it would have to wait. He slurped back a fat worm that was about to fall out of a hole in his cheek and chewed up that instead.

While he and a few others rummaged the hovels for supplies, Fluttershy, Vinyl, and Kivsin kept watch over the captives.

“Always wanted a captive audience.” the mutant DJ chimed. She looked over the scared faces of the people, a couple ponies in the mix, and turned her magic hoof cannon to its lowest setting; 10. A sharp pain shot through her hoof then she touched the dial and found a bloody arrow, half way impaled through her leg. "Would you lookey here," she said curiously. With a magic yank, the arrow was puled out with a grunt of masochistic pleasure. She licked at the trickling wound. "So which one of you shot me earlier?" All the villagers were silent, but one was fidgeting more than others. "Looks like I got a fan!"

Fluttershy kept her head hanging down, unable to bear the terrified glares from the people on her machine like visage. She wanted someone, anyone more to not think she was a monster.

She held her bladed paw to one of the young boys who scuttled back in fright.

“Please don't be afraid’,” she whispered. “I’m nice. Really, I— hmph!...”

She felt something bubbling up her throat and her chest burned. Suddenly a flaming, glowing goop started trickling from her mouth. The daemonic artillery she’d absorbed was accumulating too much power to contain, and it showed it through her. Its taste was unfathomable and the iron pegasus frantically looked around for something to let the building shot go on. Putting blind faith in luck, she just pointed herself away from the people as her cheeks puffed up to blocking her eyes.

Blah!

A bolt of tortured soul energy streaked straight into a house, detonating with a massive, screaming force that lit up the night in a brilliant, fiery flash. Many parts of the structure vaporized, others liquefied, and the remains burned brightly. Debris and wood planks drizzled down while Fluttershy stared dejectedly at the destruction. Her molten heart felt ill, and she heard the corralled people gasp and mutter. It certainly wasn’t good.

“Good one, Flutters!” Vinyl beat her chest and let out an obnoxious belch. “I win!”

A young boy, sounding six or seven, wept into his mother’s ragged dress. That must have been his home. The juggernaut lifted her head to speak, but found a metal object painlessly panging against her head; a shield with a fang-bearing bat’s face on it. It was Fluttershy’s last chance to show the people she didn’t mean it.

She wiped her mouth, slipped a blade of her other paw through the arm straps and dropped it before the weeping boy, forcing herself to smile. He wiped his eyes and snatched up the shield. Fluttershy was tired of apologizing, knowing there would be more follies ahead, but at least the boy stopped crying and clutched to all he had left of his home.

Lyra stopped her rummaging and stared into the flames. The pyromancer entrancedly watched with a sick, widening grin. “Ohh...Sweet destruction,” she said wickedly. Her arms burst into flames and it didn’t take long before she laughed madly. “Let it burn! Waste everything!” She aided the flames, spreading them over every surface of any structure that wasn’t yet ablaze.

“YEEEAAAHHHH!!” Vinyl screeched, cranking her weapon high. She put the bore to the wall of a house and shouted, “WOW!” The amplified shockwave crushed the wall inward and shattered many windows. Her friend, the paraplegic cellist formulated, composed a symphony of chaos based on what she saw and Vinyl was coming up with her own song too.

“Burn it down! Burn it down baby, burn it burn it down. Yeah, burn it down!”

In a matter of minutes, the whole village was ablaze and reverberating with chaotic laughter. Lyra telekinetically picked up Sweetie Belle and brought her over. “Hey, you remember the ‘living grenade’ trick we talked about?”

The filly nodded sheepishly, closing her extra mouths. “Y-yeah, but I don’t think I can control--waaaaah!”

Lyra hurled Sweetie through a broken window. A second later, flames exploded through every opening of the upper floor. The filly soon opened the ground floor door, pouting angrily. “Some warning next time, please!”

“If it’s not one thing it’s another,” the Doctor groaned, dragging his hoof down his face. He had hoped to avoid any unnecessary trouble, but his companions always seemed to have other plans. He sighed with resignation, reasoning that they shouldn’t be in too much trouble as long as...

’Oh, no...’

“Twilight!” he called out. His voice bounced between the buildings but elicited no response. “Twilight!”

He came across the barn, where a terrific racket of hysterical screams from cows, horses, chickens and pigs was sounding from inside. One by one the animals’ voices died out, until a bull came crashing through one of the weaker points in the wall. Before it could right itself and flee, it was wrapped in a purple glow and yanked back into the darkness. Its last frantic moo tapered off to a gurgling fluid sound.

The Doctor peeked his head in slightly, just enough to see the interior. Strewn about were at least twenty shriveled, contorted animal bodies, every drop of liquid drained from them. They stared out into oblivion with dusty raisins for eyes and identical pairs of holes punched in their necks.

Illuminated by her horn’s glow, Whooves saw the purple pony with her mouth tightly clamped just below the bull’s head. Her black mane fell matted, ragged over her face and each clenching of her lips on her victim’s neck made it more and more withered and skeletal. She took one final, long draw until it appeared as if the bull would pop into a cloud of dust, and finally dropped it’s gangly corpse with a hollow thud. She panted and licked her lips tentatively, looking angry, tired, but still so thirsty, scanning around for anything else to feed on. There was nothing save the brown stallion staring at her frightfully.

The daemonic former unicorn took a step forward, her horn charged to pull in the Doctor so she could sink her teeth into him.

“W-wait; Twilight, it’s me! Remember?”

Twilight stopped, regarding him with a mix of curiosity and feral bloodlust. Finally, she lowered her head slightly, the baleful glow of her horn fading out.

‘Well, at least she still recognizes m--’

Whooves’ sigh of relief was cut short as Twilight’s eyes flung open as if recalling something, then she abruptly turned around and dove straight for a nearby stack of barrels.

“Twilight, what are you doing!?” he exclaimed, treading carefully between the broken bodies. “We’re supposed to leave as little a trace here as possible!” ’And we’re already doing a pretty bad job of it...’

She didn’t even acknowledge his presence as she levitated one of the many twenty-gallon barrels down, ripped off the lid and plunged her head into the thick red fluid. Whooves didn’t know where to grab her to pull her away, as her armor was covered in spikes and bladed protrusions. The liquid quickly sank in the vessel and when it went below Twilight’s mouth, she raised the barrel up like a giant mug. The doctor held her by the neck and tried to wrestle her back but she was stronger and kept her ground, telekinetically crushing the empty barrel into a golf ball-sized wad and bringing up a new one.

“Twilight, if you don’t stop, the vampires will be after us! Think of everypony else here, your friends!”

She paused for a second; and then continued chugging the barrel. Whooves ran to the hole in the wall, but was halted by a magic force on his back. It held him with crushing force, throwing and pinning him down on the ground in a dark corner of the barn. There, under Twilight’s telekinetic hold, he was forced to watch as she proceeded to drink every last barrel.

Even as the last one dripped its final morsels of ichor, she was not satisfied and looked like she would go mad. She feverishly shook the barrel over her dripping, blood-soaked face. ’It can’t be gone! I need more! MORE!’ And then she remembered.

’Souls...’

She took off the front of her armor, and the souls from Mordheim she’d hidden rolled around in the bowl-shaped metal sheet.

’Twilight, no!’ The Doctor was unable to speak with the weight of her magic on his head and helplessly lay still. As the mare took the first chomp, he saw the makings of a monster, a beastial, snarling face and tongue as long as a bloodletter’s. The image of a beast of Chaos.

’Twilight, what are you doing...’

“Etsi nihil occultans, tamen aliquid timeretis. Lex de imperio absolute, et applicabitur ad retributionem mali justo...”

A massive cart rolled along as the litany was chanted, into the largest holding cell of the Imperial Martial Court. Atop the wooden carriage was borne the changeling queen, bound in wrought iron chains and a magic suppressor on her horn. She stared out into nothing with a vacant, bored expression, though signs of pain and hunger could be easily seen. Everyone helping move the cart wore cloths or crude, alien-looking gas masks over their faces to hold back the noxious smog she emitted.

Shining Armor and Cadence came in after. “Let’s get her off this thing,” the reiksmarshall commanded. “Lift!” The guards heaved one end of the cart up far enough for Chrysalis to slide off to the hay below. She sneered in disgust at all these lowly, soft meat things touching her, rolling her onto her back and leaning her against the wall.

The queen looked to Cadence dolefully, waiting for an assault of scorn and disgust; however, Chrysalis barely seemed to acknowledge her. “If one of you could just kill me, it would make my journey back to the hive much faster.”

Cadence ignored the request. “Why are you here?” she asked flatly.

The queen suddenly snapped her eyes to the princess, hunger and misery swilling her voice. “Cadence... my children starve.”

“Why. Are. You. Here?”

The taste of her anger was painful on her tongue. “For your soul.” Now came the flavor of confusion. “My children have lived on nothing but hatred, anger, and love from those serving the Dark Prince. We are not made to live on it forever. Look at me,” she said, shifting her spiky, mutated exoskeleton, “This is the product of it. That, and these... mood swings.” Her lips almost twitched into a smile before sinking again.

Cadence moved closer, on the fence between rage and despair. “What do you mean, my soul? What were you doing to me!?”

“You’re the goddess of love, Cadence,” Chrysalis said, leaning forward hungrily in her chains. “You’re unlimited. With your being, I could feed my subjects forever and end our madness, but clearly, you’ve evaded me.” she gave a rueful chuckle.

“Your madness?” said Shining.

Chrysalis rolled her weary head, wanting to drop into the arms of unconsciousness, or death, no matter how distant the latter was. “In my attempt to strike in your wedding...” She immediately regretted bringing it up as the couple gave off a pang of anger. “We were overcome in starvation, our hivemind was decaying, as well as our collective psyche. Imprisoning Cadence and brainwashing you...” She rolled her eyes in hesitation. “That was part of the plan, but taking over all of Equestria, I’ll admit, was beyond our means.”

“How did you come here?”

Chrysalis raised a brow and stared at him in amusement. “You figure it out.”

The reiksmarshall mentally facehoofed. ’Right. Changeling.’

“Your essence, Cadence, it brings smiles to my dying changelings,” the queen said wantonly. “I can hear them now... they cry for more. Please, come closer.”

“I don’t think so.” Shining’s brows furrowed under his mask. “You and your kind are too dangerous. Maybe we should just let her starve, see what else happens and maybe even put an end to their whole nightmarish, pony-napping race for... Cadence, what are you doing?”

Shining started, looking back and forth between them with disbelief on his face. His wife was actually moving closer to the vermin! Chrysalis and Cadence knew more about emotions than anyone else in the room, and Cadence saw true pain and emerging joy in the insect’s bioluminescent eyes as she sat just close enough.

“And she shows mercy. Well within your nature, isn’t it?” Chrysalis said. Cadence didn’t answer, but glared with cautious contempt.

The queen parted her sectioned maw, and like an aethereal vacuum drew out the feast of energy from the princess’s smooth, gemstone frame. The love was telepathically sent straight to the changeling race’s crumbling hivemind where the last few hundred flickers of changeling consciousness noticed this, and began to feed.

Cadence tensed tightly. It wasn’t necessarily painful, but the contractions of her muscles were involuntary, and it felt like a great pressure was bearing down on every part of her like being deep in an ocean. After a minute, she mustered up the coordination to step away, which brought a flash of anger to Chrysalis’ face. “That’s all you’ll get for now.” she said. “We’ll find out what to do with you later.”

“Maybe even get the Inquisition involved.” Shining threatened.

The queen sneered. “Ah, the Emperor’s personal army of raving, lunatic mad men. I look forward to what your pretty little head comes up with. What are they going to do, read scripture at me to death?”

“You have no idea what they can do. They turned Mordheim inside out, then purged it because of heresy.”

“Ooh, so scared,” the queen mocked. “You have no idea of the pain I’ve felt. What I feel even now is a thousand fold more than what they can do to me. I can feel it. Cadenza is getting sick just looking at me. Now go away before you make me sick.”

Chrysalis looked tired, her antennae drooping and glowing dully. The royal couple knew she wasn’t going anywhere and Cadence was first to leave. Shining looked over Chrysalis’ bonds once again, satisfied that she could barely flex a wrist in those chains. A pair of mercenary ogres, fat ten foot giants, stood guard as the cart crew and reiksmarshall left. As he turned away, he tensed up for but a second and looked back to Chrysalis finding her inhaling a blue mist with a wry grin.

“You’re still my favorite, Shining Armor.” He didn’t respond, but trotted away a little quicker. She drifted, seemingly into a sleepy daze. “I remember the dance we shared, the nights in bed together...” anger crept onto her face. “Until those little Elements of Harmony showed up. They took you from me.” In an instant, she burst into rage, barking and thrashing like a mad dog. “THEY TOOK YOU FROM ME! MY SUBJECTS ARE GOING MAD AND BECOMING MONSTERS BECAUSE OF THEM! THIS IS THEIR FAULT! RAAAGGHH!”

Shining caught up to his wife at a window overlooking the court’s execution square, and street beyond. A hundred torture and execution devices lay waiting for victims. Chrysalis’ screams still echoed faintly through the stone walls.

“Cadence, Why did you give in to her? Without even a word!”

“She really looked penitent, Shining,” she mumbled pensively. “Besides, I let her take very little.”

“I still don’t trust her. At least she didn’t manage to do too much damage to you.” Shining reclined beside her. “Well... We can’t just let her die, because she’ll likely just be reborn in whatever hive she was talking about, and we don’t know where that is.” Shining grunted, “If only the princesses were still here, I could have just sent Chrysalis to them. If the changelings are still in any decent number, we can’t hold her forever. They’ll find a way in here.”

“I wonder if we can get her to help us.” Cadence mused.

“After what she did earlier, what she did at our wedding?” Shining hissed. “Not a chance. I wouldn’t let her even if she really wanted to. She’s just here to feed on love and doesn’t care about anypony but herself and those carbon-copy drones.”

Her attempt at what seemed like assassination weighed heavily on Cadence’s opinion, but the anguish she saw, it had to mean something. And Chrysalis came personally. She didn't send any drones or infiltrators. She wanted to be here for something. Cadence was distracted from her thoughts when she noticed the clouds shifting oddly, and curiously pointed to the disturbance. “Shining, do you see that?”

He squinted in focus, and indeed he did see. “Yeah. What are the weather pegasi doing?”

But he couldn’t see any pegasi, nor could they make the clouds swirl and rumble so quickly to begin with. The darkening blooms arched up into the unseen heavens, rumbling with thunder, forming a great cone into the sky. Shining and Cadence covered their eyes as a column of bright yellow, like a pillar of fire came streaking down to the platform roof of the palace. the yellow tornado was soon accompanied by one of dark blue. Both whirled and raged, arcing lightning between them. Countless denizens leaned out their windows or prayed at this divine event. As the columns dispersed and the clouds slowed, the streetful of citizens began streaming toward the palace.

“What was that?” Cadence asked in awe.

Shining didn’t have a clue. They hastened to reach the exit of the courthouse and, right behind Cadence, Shining told the ogres to keep their eyes on Chrysalis and they’d get an ox each to devour at the end of the day. They nodded eagerly, and the royal couple sped off.

Like flipping a light switch, Chrysalis’ fit had ceased when she saw and heard the show from the tiny window high on the wall. The tiny aperture was specifically placed so prisoners could barely see the outside world. ’Yellow and blue...’ she thought. Rapid-firing ideas went off in her head that made her lips curl into a devilish grin. ’Hm, I need a look at this.’

Chrysalis leaned her head forward and quietly spat onto her chains. The green slime hissed and boiled away at the links. She covered it with her hand to mask the sound, keeping an eye on the guards. The bought-off leadbelcher was leaning on his cannon, picking his ear. She slowly untied herself when the chain link snapped, lifting and lowering the chains to make as little noise as possible. She stood and tiptoed behind the guards, letting her bone sabres slip into her hands from her forearms, and thrust them into the ogres’ heads. With little more than a confused grunt, they fell almost silently, leaving chunks of meat and brain-matter on the barbs of her blades.

She reached between the bars and stopped the leadbelcher’s cannon from falling over and lowered it slowly against his back and then pried the suppressor off her horn. After a burst of green fiery magic, a scribe pony started licking the iron bars of the cell, leaving more acid spittle to quickly eat away at the metal. Once a sizable hole was melted away, the disguised changeling queen strolled out, through the building and into the rushing river of people and ponies, melting seamlessly into the crowd.

Chapter 20: Faith, Steel, and Friendship

“The nobles of our great Empire may claim to rule this land, but their reach stops at the shadow cast by the forests. For within, the Beastmen rule.” ~ Ulren the Tracker

“Three things that make the Empire great - faith, steel, and gunpowder!” ~ Magnus the Pious

“Orks’es is nevah beat’n in a foight. If we winz we win, if we dies it don't count as beat. If we runs fer it we don't die neetha, so we can always come back for anuvver go, see!” ~ Zahubu Skullkrusha, Orc Stateejatist... Strajeejatist... Strateejarist... Ahh, zog it... Boss

Drip... drip... drip...

Pinkie Pie stared at the glistening pellets of rainbow-colored fluid that trickled from her leg. She was starting to see more red and less of the greens and yellows, which was a good sign. There must have been at least twenty different stimulants she injected herself with, and as they began to wear off after weeks of her brain drowning in them, she was left with increasingly debilitating headaches and nightmares. She had resorted to a macabre and archaic method to purge herself of the chemicals; bloodletting.

It felt oddly sensational, the slicing of her own flesh, the sharp sting of the cool, moist air in the cut, but it didn’t bring a smile to her face. For the past several weeks, she had almost had to sit in the backseat of her mind and watch herself unravel the relationships with her friends and piece by piece mutate into something worse with each depraved quest for pleasure.

‘Rarity must hate me now,’ she thought, her thoughts drifting back to Sweetie Belle.

She held her dripping foreleg over a jar; the swirling colors not unlike the waterfalls she tasted in the rainbow factory. The thing looking back at her in the reflection in the placid fluid was reprehensible. Whiteless, black orbs for eyes, black fleshy horns on its head, and three forelegs. On the left side were two, one with a black crustaceous claw, and the one right leg had grown a sharp, lancelike shell. The creature was almost hollow, nothing but a voluminous and insatiable stomach from chest to haunches.

That thing was her, and she hated it; but it was still beautiful. The kind of dark, enchanted beauty that entranced victims to lay down their arms, but all she saw was a grotesque parody of herself.

The pittering blood was completely red now. One of her tongues brought out her bony needle and started stitching the cut shut. ‘Where does this string even come from?’ she thought. She did feel a slight tugging as she pulled out more string, somewhere where her liver used to be. After replacing the lid on the jar, she tucked it under her third leg.

’It can’t be all bad. Hey, I got another hand leg to carry stuff with.’ It didn’t do much to lift her spirits, though. Hanging her head, she absentmindedly walked into Lyra who, along with everyone else, stopped walking, scanning the wood’s mists warily. Rarity had felt something through her tzeentchian foresight, something all around them. They formed a reinforced square, weapons facing out and waiting.

“Why’re we wait’n here?” Macintosh growled. “Let’s just charge ‘em!”

“That would be a good idea, if you wanted to get killed.” said Lyra.

Rarity looked to the center of their circle where the three fillies were huddled together.

“You sure somethi’ns comi’n?” Braeburn asked.

“I haven’t been wrong yet.”

“Cuz this is your first time!” A soft, thunderous noise resonated in the distance, then another.

“Drat... I was right.” Rarity cursed, returning her eyes to the woods.

The large footsteps grew louder and faster, until at last a titanic, bipedal form emerged from the fog, slowly walking towards them. It possessed four arms, two of which had their lower parts amputated and replaced with giant hunks of metal. One was shaped as a bladed hook, whilst the other was a simple, rusty impaler spike.

Braeburn stared intently at the figure for several seconds, before finally giving a relieved sigh. “It’s fine, everypony!” he said. “It’s them beastmen. Does anypony know how to talk their language?”

More of them emerged. They were of varying size and shape, from the five-foot ungors to elite bestigors to the far more rare twelve-foot minotaurs. They were the result of the raw effects of chaos on life, warping animals and people into freaks of nature. Though they and the ponies they surrounded were filled with the taint of Chaos, relations between the more ‘civilized’ dark ones were often strained.

One of them, a mystic, wore a tattered robe that barely hung halfway down her back. A collection of tiny herbal bags and charms clattered atop a staff in its grimy claw and round its neck hung a necklace of skulls and teeth. It sounded idle growls as it, apparently peacefully, approached the group. She paused when what appeared to be the chief of the herd shouted, “Zecora! Greul meh ka dak!”

The black and white striped mystic shook her head and closed the distance, coming face to face with the chaotics who were intimidated back into their formation. She firmly locked eyes with Rarity, who tried to smile and break the silence.

She extended a hand. “Hello there. I am— HRR!”

The shaman grasped her front horn and brought her head down to inspect it. The creature jerked Rarity’s head around, studying her horns for length, thickness, and curvature. Horn style was crucial in the beastman hierarchy; the longer and more twisty, the better, and Rarity had three spiraling ones. She threw her head back up with an approving grunt.

“Quite the hoofshake you have,” Rarity mumbled, shaking off the dizziness.

Apple Bloom cantered over to her side, her head tilted to the side in curiosity. “Did that guy call you Zecora?”

The shaman knelt to the filly and patted her on the head with a dagger-tooth smile. Her voice was hoarse, but kind. “Little Apple Bloom, not a day older you be. At least there is one face that still remembers me.”

Applejack blinked in confusion. “Boy, Zecora. Whut happened to ya?”

She leaned on her staff for support, one of her legs apparently having been injured at some point, as a long three-furrowed scar across the calf showed. “A great long time have I spent in the Empire’s wooded land, where both man becomes beast and beast becomes man.” She hobbled to her hooves and turned to the chief, “Thuol kom! Ashki-azhek!” The bestigor grunted, waving his hand dismissively, and the herd moved away with him. “It seems my chieftain cares not if you heed his word.” Zecora snickered. “So if you will stay a while, I welcome you all to the herd.”

Braeburn cracked a grin, displaying twin rows of blackened teeth shot with holes and cracks. “Well, thank ya kindly. any do’s or don’ts y’all have?”

“First and foremost, always obey the larger horned host...”

While the zebra laid down the expectations of the herd, Fluttershy spotted a vaguely familiar rodent among the myriad creatures. With matted patches of white fur on scarred muscle and long ears that hung over the back of its head, the rabbit-thing held the same expression towards her and walked closer on a tranced autopilot.

She held out a claw, and it let itself get picked up and smiled brightly. A red tear of joy ran down her cheek and her breaths became giggling sobs as she cradled the creature her pet had become. He nuzzled under her chin, and she didn’t care that he was a monster. He still loved her, and he was still her Angel Bunny.

Nuln, the technological epicenter of the Empire. Over the two and a half millennia the Empire has stood, Nuln had been repeatedly besieged, conquered and destroyed, but the people always kept coming back and rebuilding it to its former glory — and beyond. It was the home of the Technikus, the Empire’s engineering masterminds. The most famous of them is the late Leonardo da Miragliano, his greatest invention being the Conqueror Steam Tank.

A great many devices and arcane machines were displayed and demonstrated before the three monarchs by the College of Engineers. The mechanical horse, heavier-than-air flying machines, and repeating handgun were marvels of their time. Thanks to the knowledge of minds from Equestria, the Technikus had managed to work out many weapon ailments and perfect designs that has been hazardous to use before. Helblaster volley gun jams were solved, and the newest variant of the Conqueror borrowed concepts from Equestrian steam cars so the long-lost design of the legendary war machines could be recovered. Full production of steam tanks had begun and, although it was labor-intensive, one was already complete; the ‘Iron Cross’, and another was already under construction.

After the sun had passed its peak in the sky, it was time for the unveiling of the College of Engineers’ most recent project.

The massive multi-use field just outside the city had been readied just for this very event. The imperial monarchs watched knights clash their spears into one another’s shields as they jousted in an interim show. A multitude of noble orders gave their best to the game; The Order of the Golden Lion, Knights Encarmine, and Knights of the Bull just to name a few. Jousting had become more interesting over the years, as the orders had begun trading in their normal horses for sentient stallions to train.

Long horns sounded strongly from the city walls at one end of the filled lists and bleachers. A Reiksguard Knight and Knight of the Inner Circle made one last charge on opposite ends of the divider. The rapid pounding of hooves on the soil kicked up a like a rooster tail and in a flurry of splintered wood and crumpled steel, the Inner Circle warrior was thrown from his steed. The dethroned knight’s steed helped his rider to stand and hobble off the dirt, with dignity still in their stride.

The divider was removed, and a prominent Technikus member appeared in the wall lookout box. He was donned in a leather trench coat, his top hat displaying a feather and metal cog. His skin was caked in a healthy layer of soot and grime that could never be completely washed away.

“Hail, lord and ladies!” his bushy moustache said. “We have, this day, readied something we believe is nothing short of a beautiful culmination of five hundred years of military engineering! Below me, through these doors, will pass the war winner! The giant slayer! The Titan!”

The great passage under the window cracked open, a maw into blackness.

]“Heave!”

The crack of a whip was followed by a choir of exhausted grunting and moaning.

”Heave!”

The creaking of wood and thunderous rolling noise rang out as lines of people and ponies in prison garb shambled into the light, a hundred ropes in their withered hands. The cables stretched back into the dark cavern, up and up, over twenty meters high. The pullers were stamped with government seals, many of them had their eyes or lips sewn shut and all were cut and maimed, feverishly praying to the demigods in the bleachers and to their own patron deity.

A hideous iron face emerged from the darkness. Its riveted and bolted visage was something of an inventor’s worst nightmare, something even Nightmare Moon couldn’t conceive for him. The giant’s massive, armored skeletal body emerged on a huge rolling platform, decorated in banners and insignias of Nuln. The head was low on the hulking body, a huge boiler deep in its chest.

It’s arsenal was a kaleidoscopic spectrum of death and destruction. One swiveling arm sported two helblaster volley guns; the other, a rotating quintuplet of standard cannon. A copious amount of deadly helstorm rockets were arranged in great racks along its back. Dozens of crewmembers ran to and fro, scampering all throughout the humanoid machine to operate its mind-bogglingly complex systems.

The entire audience held stupefaction as the godly machine was stopped just outside the gate. The prisoners disconnected the ropes and scrambled to either side of the platform. In the head, the command crew made final checks and the captain, Mercer Strasse, shouted into a great horn to broadcast to the outside.

“My lords! We give you, Terribilis Vindicta! Let it breathe life!”

A crewman threw a valve and a huge whistling and plumes of scalding steam erupted from the monstrosity like the whistle of the steam locomotive of apocalypse. As pressure built in the pipes and tubing, its unwieldy body shook and rattled.

“Come on,” the captain growled. “Live...” The machine ground to animation, like a hunchback waking up from a standing sleep. “Two steps forward.”

After the crank of a couple more levers, its left tread rose. They pushed one lever and the foot lurched forward, the last one bringing it crashing down to the earth below the short platform. Its body recoiled, looking as if it would fall apart from the sheer force of the single step. The throng shared a gasp of terror from its slight but terrible stride, and the Technikus members howled in applause and elation that their greatest creation was finally alive. Its other leg came, producing an iron thunderclap as it touched down.

“Give me full stride!” Strasse laughed with a grin. “Let it stretch it’s legs!”

Walking was less than graceful, like the awkward locomotion of an overfat yak as the crew threw the controls in rehearsed orders to make the right joint bend at the right time. Ten thousand eyes never took their gaze away as it plodded across the arena, rocking the earth with each crushing step. The prisoners gather atop the wood platform, exchanging final prayers.

The god machine turned around with stiff movement, a flurry of crowd-stifling steam billowing from the core as it settled to face the condemned.

“Thieves! Beggars!” Strasse boomed mightily, his voice echoing about the entire field. “This day you have been condemned to be purged from this world for your crimes against Sigmar’s divine Empire! Prepare to receive His mercy!”

The crews loaded and primed the weapons. Rockets slid into their slots, cannon cartridges slapped into breeches. The inmates held hands and hooves, and prepared for salvation with weak smiles. Celestia could only look on with apprehension, knowing she couldn’t simply turn away.

“Targeting crew has completed adjustments.” the lead gunner intoned as the arms swiveled to aim.

“Excellent.”

The spectators looked on like waiting for a painting to come to life. All were infinitely eager to see the titan’s capabilities and the captain’s planned hesitation nearly drove them mad.

“Fire.”

And the rockets’ red glare followed them as they screamed from their racks, some bombs prematurely bursting in air. The helblasters thundered and sent fist-sized lead shot downrange. The rotating cannons flashed with brilliant explosive plumes, nearly reeling back in their decks.

Both the titan and prisoners disappeared in palls of smoke and dust. Limbs and body parts flew from where the inmates were, painting the ground with streaks of red blood. The thick gray and black clouds each looked like their own raging warp storms, lightning and roaring thunder erupting from both.

The salvo went on until the first magazines were emptied and the smoke choked all around. A team of pegasi swooped into the cloud, forming a great wind that quickly dissipated it and vanished as quickly as they came. The titan stood with its arms smoking, all rockets, at least of its first salvo, depleted.

Nothing remained of the prisoners or the ground they stood upon but dust, scattered gore and craters.

“Vindicta!!” Strasse shouted grandly. The crews clapped and hooted in celebration and the boiler of the machine emitted a whistling roar with equal spirit as the bleachers came alive in applause.

A soiree was held to commemorate the success of the functionality of the Technikus’ machine. The high life of Nuln, in frivolous masks and flowing, excessive dresses of different houses and families bantered about whatever ventures or gossip peaked their interest. Alcohol — as well as other creature comforts — flowed freely amongst the assembled guests, although few of them wanted to be the first to indulge out of general principle.

Despite the generally congenial and enjoyable atmosphere of the event, however, there still remained one critical component that was consistent everywhere in the Empire; the skull motif. Grim reminders such as these hang as torches, on belts, shattered at the top to house candles, and as censures that hissed flavorful smoke of different colors through various holes and openings. The fear and worship of death was omnipresent, regardless of name or creed.

The equine rulers had maintained a happy demeanor so far in the evening, but there was one guest they knew would show up sooner or later. Until then, there were many stories to be told by the engineers. Celestia managed to catch up with one who had worked on the rocket racks for the newest machine of war.

“Two pounds of blackpowder, pow! Right in my face!” The technikus pointed to his scarred head, raising his mask slightly. It was criss-crossed with stitches like railroad tracks and missing half of his lower lip. “Thought my eyebrows would never grow back!”

“And how ever did you survive?” Celestia asked. “Just one pound could surely create a hole in a wall.”

“The peel of the container blew out and slapped around my face, shielding it a bit from the flame. Before I could feel the pain, I thought that evil little sparrow had returned to finish his handiwork on me for a split second!”

“Oh, I remember when one of my brightest students was taking her admission test. She had a magic spike and turned nearly everypony in the room into the most random items. Even her parents into potted... plants...” Celestia’s mind drifted for a second, but was brought back by the event’s herald coming to the top of the staircase and pronouncing,

“Announcing the arrival of her royal majesty, Queen of the Changelings, Metamorpha Chrysalis.”

The throng clapped as the drapes behind the herald opened and out stepped the queen. Celestia was actually impressed that she could pull off a human form that both looked natural, and even potentially attractive. Her organically-woven black and green silk gown wasn’t even that intimidating... perhaps even serene.

Her smile, lined in black lipstick, was slight, showing enough refined happiness to pass off as actually giving a damn. Her dress had a ‘swamp princess’ feel to it. She nodded gracefully to the herald and shook a few hands on her way down the steps while the crowd resumed its conversations.

Since the ‘agreement’ with her, Spike had been charged with being Cadence’s highest guard. In public, he was always in full armor, even his face-obscuring helmet. He kept a close eye on the queen as she approached the crystal princess. “I told you I could make it work,” she whispered confidently.

“Just try not to change back in the middle of everything.” Cadence mumbled in reply.

Chrysalis gasped slightly and put a hand to her chest. “I’m hurt, Cadence! You don’t have any trust in me?”

“I’m just a little on edge because I’m at an event with the one who imprisoned me in a castle basement,” Cadence deadpanned.

“Well, sorry for putting you in a beautiful crystal cavern and not hauling you all the way to the Forsaken Forest Hive and making you live off of algae for the rest of your immortal life!” Chrysalis replied blithely, effecting a perfect hurt expression.

Cadence put a hoof to her forehead and sighed. “Just try to at least pretend to make friends with one human.”

“No promises,” Chrysalis chortled. And with a graceful sweep of her dress, she went off to find someone to attempt to be amiable with, figuring she should start with the (somewhat) familiar and reach out from there. She spotted the bronze jaguar bust of the Emperor’s helmet, the man himself apparently conversing with a fair-sized lion-eagle hybrid who was strapped in nearly every area with weapons and various bandoliers and belts.

‘Bingo.’ she smirked, closing in slowly.

“Well, perhaps you could translate Deathclaw’s thoughts for me, miss...”

“Gilda, Gilda Bronzebeak.” the griffon said amicably, shaking Franz’s outstretched hand with a claw. “Yeah, I’ve talked with Deathclaw once before. He’s quite the character. How in the world did a a griffon like him get a tiger’s rear end?”

“It’s a bit of a long story. First—”

“Mind if I join in, your highness?” Chrysalis interrupted, walking up to the pair with a beguiling smile.

Franz’s smile sank slightly and he hesitated before stepping aside a bit. “No, not at all.”

“Nice getup you have on,” Gilda said with a smirk. “Who’d you kidnap and copy for that bod?”

“I’ll have you know I came up with this form myself,” Chrysalis scoffed as Gilda uncaringly held a paw to the side and caught a mug of hard cider from a passing steward. “I’m certain the Inquisition told you about talking about me.”

“Yeah, yeah, don’t tell them you’re a parasitic leech; I got it, along with almost every other pony and griffon here. And what do you do these days?” Gilda jabbed a finger of her cup-holding paw at the queen with a look of disappointment. “Gone from conquering cities to being buddies with your worst enemy.”

“Well, what do you do? It can’t be any better.” Chrysalis said haughtily.

Gilda chuckled. “Mercs. The Karaz-A-Warhawks. Those dwarfs almost pay their stupid beards for our revolvers and lever action guns. Now we’re sitti’n pretty with the half-pints who need fast guns more than anything ‘cause the orks are going batshit ever since Grimgor’s WAAAGH!! took off. You ever seen two hundred Peacemaker rifles unload into an ork horde? It makes the Battle of the Hundred Guns look like it was done with firecrackers, and those were artillery cannons.”

“It must have been quite difficult, obtaining the dwarfs’ trust,” Franz commented.

“Oh, you have no idea. When chaos came screaming into the Griffon Kingdom’s back door, they messed everybody up. In the middle of our capital’s last stand, they brought this magic vortex whatever-you-wanna-call-it and everyone who was caught in the blast was dropped here. Everything happens for a reason, right? So I guess Chaos wants more meat for the grinder of this war.” She took a sip from the mug, and sighed. “The dwarfs wouldn’t believe a word we said, until we saved their rears at Karak Eight Peaks. We managed to hold out long enough for the orkz to get bored and move on. Heh, we were even down to our last couple of bullets.”

“And I suppose they were quite grateful for the new weapons you brought to the field, hmm?”

“Oh, yeah... hmm... It’s weird,” she said, clicking her beak. “The dwarfs have automated turrets and gyrocopters, but big, lumbering muskets. Then again, Equestria had villages still using torches and thatch roofs next to industrial cities. But, meh; badassery follows no rules.”

Cadence watched Chrysalis for a minute from a distance and, seeing her little show hadn’t yet broken down into anarchy, started to notice a slight light-headed feeling. ’The stress must be getting to me,’ she thought. ’What am I worrying about, anyway? She knows how to act. She pulled off being me for days.’

She turned to rejoin the people she was conversing with, but suddenly faltered and wobbled on a step. The dizzy feeling quickly intensified and grew into a powerful migraine. Spike knelt next to her, worry written all over his hidden features. “Princess, are you feeling alright?”

“No... no,” she muttered. “Spike, take off my crown, quickly.” He immediately did so, and discovered her affliction with widening eyes. An inky blackness was clouding her cranium like a dark storm in a crystal ball, and tiny sparkling onyxlike gemstones started advancing up her horn.

“It’s him, Princess,” he said quickly.

Now it was Cadence’s turn to shoot her eyes open in despair. “No! Not here, not now!”

“Is something amiss, Princess Cadenza?” one of the nobles asked from nearby.

“No,” she answered hastily, replacing her crown. “I’m sorry. I must leave for a moment.” She and Spike hugged the walls as they hurriedly made their way to one of the back rooms. The darkness continued to creep across her body and Spike unbuttoned his cape and draped it over her to hide it. He became uncomfortably aware that he was not an inconspicuous figure, standing a full foot taller than most men in the room and he drew more attention than he liked.

In the room they stumbled into was a bust of one of the former emperors, Magnus the Pious, surrounded by artifacts and paraphernalia. Cadence leaned against the securely fastened stand, throwing off her mask and headgear as if they were burning her. There was no treatment, no prevention for what was happening, and the alicorn creep was in full bloom on her horn. When he wanted her, he almost always had her, no matter the strength of the spells Cadence used to resist.

Shining Armor forced his way through the dense throng that was held off by the crystal guards. They let him enter and he found Spike holding the hoof of an alicorn-shaped black crystal whose face was gazing up at the ceiling with an expression of horror. “Good luck, princess,” Spike murmured.

“Spike, what happened? Who is that?” Shining asked. The dragon didn’t respond and Shining quickly recognized the clothing and manestyle of the crystal. “Cadence, no!” He rushed to her and his horn flared as he tried to sense what kind of spell had done this.

Spike put his hand on his shoulder solemnly. “It’s useless, Shining. But she’ll come out of it eventually.”

Shining reluctantly let his magic die out and furiously stamped a hoof on the floor. “Grr, dammit... So, he has her now, huh?”

Spike nodded. “All we can do now is wait.”

“Then get these other people away from here. I don’t want any of them seeing her like this.”

Spike chuckled. “Yes, prince.” He went for the entrance and was a tower of force with his voice. “Back away! Make room!”

Shining returned his attention to his wife. He knew that form of black crystal. Only one pony had such control over it. “He isn’t worth it, Cadence. He’ll never change.”

The sounds of sorrowful screams and whimpers played like music on the air, and the wind carried the sweet scent of blood and tears from countless slaves and victims. These sounds were buried under the livid roar of the creature in the highest tower of the central fortress.

“She’s denied me again!” Sombra lamented, firing a seething beam of dark magic through a blubbering slave’s face and vaporizing his head. He started pacing as the settling blood mist was cleaned up. ’I’ve tried being passive, being nice. Why won’t she help me?!’

He turned to strike another target, but the last one was the last one. “My playthings break so easily! More targets!” he roared, and the slave handler bowed and rushed out.

Sombra turned to the reflecting pool and took a good look at himself, brandishing his fangs. ’Is it my look? My voice? Am I too intimidating?’ He looked back to the blood stains on the wall and the slave dragging away the other’s body. ’No, that can’t be it.’

He looked out of the window of his chamber. The daytime sky was above a blocking pall of black clouds and down below, beyond the walls, he saw an approaching caravan pulled by cold one lizards, trailing with hundreds of chained and shackled men and ponies.

A smile curled Sombra’s lips. “More slaves... Today wasn’t a total loss.” He cast his glowing gaze down on the fortress city of Hag Durlasc. Here, the truly depraved or insane thrived, where murder was the rule of law. The teeming streets were illuminated by purple-hued torches and glowing gemstones. The witch elves were out again with their blood cauldron, snatching up random slaves for sacrifices to the Lord of Murder.

’This should be mine,’ he thought, fuming in anger. ’I should be on the Witch King’s throne, not somepony to take orders from Malekith! And Cadence...’ He dreamily stares into the sky. ‘That beautiful gem of a mare, should be at my side. I ruled an empire for a thousand years... damn it, what have I come to?’

“To my service,” the rune in his crown rumbled. Sombra stopped breathing for a moment. “Kneel.” He voluntarily did so, almost burying his face in the carpet. The gem in his crown lit up and projected the shimmering image of a tall, slender figure in nightly purple and gold armor. In the black confines of its helmet shone two vicious sapphire-blue eyes, and the iron horns twisted round one another into a sharp four-pointed crest.

“H-hail... Witch King,” Sombra muttered.

For a while, the phantasm didn’t say anything, just glared at the shadow stallion. “You are all talk, my pet.” Malekith put a hand on Sombra’s head. He didn’t know if the gesture and his words were sincere, or a threat. “You know you are bested. As my gaze spans the entirety of this world, it is most amusing to watch you. If you know your place, then there shall be no punishment. Sit.”

Sombra planted himself.

“Lay down.”

He hesitated and stared at the apparition a second too long. The crown activated, electrocuting him with vast amounts of his own power. He collapsed to the floor.

Malekith chuckled sadistically. “Good boy. Roll over.”

Sombra lifted his head in anger, his own pride vying with his loyalty. “I will n— NGRAAAAAH!”

Malekith left the shock on for Sombra to squirm, looking down at his prone, spasming form with a cruel smile. “You are nothing, King Sombra. You are a dog. A worthless, powerless and pathetic creature whose only purpose is to serve his master. Your pride, your petty, pitiful desires... all of it is but fleeting memories and pieces of an even more pathetic existence.”

The apparition’s features hardened and Malekith’s voice became filled with anger, resonating in Sombra’s mind with painful waves. “I have given you life, you insolent, ungrateful creature! I have given you armies, slaves, followers, power, and prestige; but above all, I have given you purpose! Where were you, before I took you as my right hand? Adrift on a raft in the Sea of Claws! Alone, weak, and powerless, beaten by the filth of Chaos! I indentured you into my service, to act as the conveyor of my wrath and my will to this wretched world, and you dare to impugn me for my mercy and my favor?!”

The shocks abruptly ceased, along with Sombra’s fit of seizures; but the experience had exhausted him to the point that he could not even utter a reply, and merely curled up into a ball on the floor, panting and whimpering in pain. The vision of Malekith cracked a cruel grin, staring down upon the prostrate form of his servant with utter malice.

“If I ever meet this... ‘Cadence’, that you speak so fondly of, I will take great pleasure in breaking her into a thousand tiny shards.”

Twilight and Kivsin gazed into the starry night sky, lying on their backs in the clouds. The latter bat-pony pointed out constellations and regaled his master... no, friend with some unique history.

“And that one,” he motioned, “is Skrag the Slaughterer, prophet of the Great Maw. See it?”

Twilight squinted and stared into the sky, but shook her head. ”No.”

“Try tilting your head juuust slightly to the left.”

A couple degrees turn, and suddenly the ogre prophet was visible in the stars. “Oh yeah, I see it! There’s even a gnoblar falling into his cauldron.” The idea of the fate of the little greenskin made them both laugh, but Kivsin was cut short when he was overtaken by another coughing fit. He brought his hoof to his mouth, bringing it away spattered with blood. “Take it easy on the laughing,” Twilight warned. “You don’t need to be bled again, do you?” That method wasn’t a good experience for either of them. Twilight would bite him and try to draw out the toxins in his system, and it didn’t exactly taste like fruit punch.

Kivsin shook his head as his wheezing slowly subsided. “No. It’s fine.”

Twilight returned her gaze to the heavens. “So noctrals can’t manipulate weather? But you’re like a pegasus, only with bat’s wings.”

“The lack of feathers might have something to do with it,” he answered. “I’m thankful my kind can at least walk on clouds.”

Twilight curiously looked at his wings, a natural shape, then her own which burned like a campfire lit in hell. She slowly flapped them, and they whooshed like massive tarps. What if this couldn’t be undone? What if she and her friend would have to live with their deformities forever? But also, was it all bad? She and her friends had gained so much power. All they needed was to be able to control it, and who knows what they could do.

‘No. Look at us... we’re falling apart.’

As if sensing her thoughts, Kivsin’s voice broke through her reverie. “Do you...” he paused, as if searching for the right words to say. Twilight tilted her head, regarding him with curiosity. “Are you going to try and... well, become a normal pony again? If that’s even possible, I mean... Sorry I asked,” he said quickly, wincing.

The flaming alicorn blinked in surprise, then turned her eyes back toward the starry skies above. “I... don’t know, honestly,” she mumbled in reply. “I mean... sometimes I like being this way, if only to have wings and access to all new kinds of magic. I mean, I would have been lucky just to be able to turn an apple into an orange, but now it’s like second nature and without any limits.”

Twilight bit her lip, sighing deeply. “But, that’s the thing, too... that scares me. Not having any limits, I mean... I know I’ve always been one to keep looking for new answers, new paths and new spells, but now, for the first time... I feel like I don’t want to know the answer, because I’m afraid it might actually end up hurting somepony, or just making a tree spontaneously combust. The Doctor told me how I acted when I lost it in Sylvania, and that’s not the monster I want to risk becoming.”

Kivsin nodded slowly, his expression accepting yet grave. “I understand. I guess I had a fear of my limits, too... except that was because I knew that if I crossed them, I’d only end up with another dose of toxin in my bloodstream.” He gave a weak chuckle. “Actually, we’re kind of reversed; I know it was mostly owed to bad luck and my own situation, but I can’t really remember ever having a desire like that, since I was too preoccupied with trying to stay as small as possible just to try and avoid the next lash of the whip.”

He sighed, and a moment of silence passed between them. Finally, he continued. “I envy you, really. Even though you’ve been through a lot yourself, you never really wanted to go back, and always kept focusing on moving forward and trying to get back to normal. But what is there for me? I don’t even remember what I did before being sucked into the blackguard, but you had a life, family and still have friends, something to get back to. That, especially...” he trailed off, his eyes turning wistful as a tear rolled down his cheek.

“It’s not like you’ll have nothing when this is over,” said Twilight. “I’ll still be there, I’m not sure what we can do about your relationship with Octavia, and I can even introduce you to Spike if he’s still around.”

“Spike?” Kivsin asked, tilting his head to the side.

“Yeah. My... my number one assistant,” she mumbled, more to herself than anyone else. “Back when Ar... Chaos came to the town where I was staying, me and Spike got separated when I was captured. I still don’t know what happened to him after that, or if he’s even alive, or if they turned him into some sick monster—”

“Hey,” Kivsin interrupted, laying a hoof on her shoulder. “If you got out okay, I’m sure he managed to find his own way out, or hide until they all left and moved on. I’ll bet he’s just fine... and he’s probably looking up at the same sky right now, wondering the same thing about you.”

A tear escaped from Twilight’s eyes, visible only for a moment before it was sizzled away by the brilliant radiance of her body’s flames. “I don’t know...” she said at last, laying a hoof across her eyes.

“What does your heart tell you?”

Twilight flicked her head to the side in surprise, blinking several times as she beheld Kivsin’s mouth turned upward into a reassuring smile. For several moments she just sat there, staring into Kivsin’s vertical-slit eyes which held nothing but calm, stoic determination and friendship.

“I...” she muttered, her gaze momentarily drifting to the cloud beneath them as if the answer lay there. “He’s alive.” she said slowly, then nodded to herself with a smile of her own. “He’s alive.”

Just then, a strange sight shot out from the clouds in the distance, like a projectile launched straight up. When its speed bled out, two flaps at its side snapped open and it lazily glided to land on the clouds.

‘A beastman pegasus, maybe? I wonder if he’s still got memories and hasn’t been completely corrupted...’ Twilight thought, getting up from her prone position and waving to the figure. “Hello!”

The hunching figure snapped its head toward them. Closer now, she could see that it had no visible mutations, nor even horns or extra appendages. It stared at them for just under a second before coiling its legs and springing back up into the sky.

Twilight drew in her breath sharply. “Kivsin, after him!”

The black guardspony shot up like lightning, quickly catching up to and grappling the pegasus by its hind legs. They went bouncing and tumbling from cloud to cloud, until at last Kivsin managed to get a constricting grip on his target and held him down on another cloud. The pegasus grunted obscenities at his captor and, when Twilight caught up, she illuminated her horn to see who he was.

Dark rings around his eyes, a pale grey-brown coat and eyes full of contempt, she recognized him instantly; the Doctor. But he had wings! Twilight’s mind sputtered about in disbelief, trying to come up with something to say.

“How...?”

The pale Doctor looked up at her, giving a weary, frustrated sigh. “Go on, get it out of your—”

Twilight telekinetically grabbed and jerked him up to her level, twisting and examining him like a filly’s doll. “You have wings! Wings! What is this!? Are you starting to mutate, too?!”

“Would you— gah... please— argh... put me— aack... DOWN!”

She stopped manipulating him like taffy and set him down, trying to contain her thoughts that were already bursting with questions. “You done?” he asked, rolling his joints. The alicorn slowly nodded. “Good, and no. Now go away.” He took off, but Twilight reached out and grabbed his hind leg.

“Wait! How did this happen? Why— *whack* Ow!”

He kicks her hooves off in disgust. “Don’t touch me!”

Twilight wrung her hooves tenderly. “Doctor, I know I’m on fire, but I’m not actually hot.”

“I know. It’s just... Leave me alone.” He flew away, but Twilight persisted, trailing right behind.

“Doctor, if something’s wrong then you should talk to somepony about it. Even you told us that Chaos gets stronger in us if we bottle up feelings.”

“I’m not repressing anything, now leave me alone!” He pumped his wings, but this time Twilight had him by the tail in her magical grasp. She planted him on the cloud and crossed her hooves, staring into his eyes with stern admonition.

“You’re not going anywhere until you say what’s wrong,” she said slowly. “I’ve got all eternity.”

Whooves smirked. “So do I.”

“Mmm, no.” She pulled him closer and brought her mouth to his neck, extending her sharp white fangs. “I’d say about thirty seconds.”

“You wouldn’t dare...”

Her teeth brushed against his fur. “Try me. I haven’t had anything to drink yet today, and I am just dying for a taste right now.”

He remained stolidly silent, but his lower lip trembled as Twilight stared more hungrily at the veins showing through his tensing neck. The tips of the fangs poked his flesh. “Say it.”

“No,” he spat. Twilight put some pressure on it and a red drop started to form at one of the fangs. For a moment, she felt something, an uneven pulse inside him. It took a fraction of a second for her senses to put it together. “Fine! Just get off me!” he shouted. Twilight took a quick lick at the blood, tangy and slightly sour, before releasing her magic hold. He wiped off her spit with obvious distaste.

“Doctor, what’s going on with your pulse? Are you sure you’re not changing like I am?”

The stallion puts a hoof to his chest. “Oh, that. No, I’ve always had two. Let’s get this over with. I hurt somepony, okay? And Pinkie Pie made me remember when she apologized.”

“Who was hurt?”

“Somepony I used to know. She... she used to be my best friend.”

Twilight grinned like a filly in a candy shop. “Now we’re getting somewhere. What happened between you two?”

The next ten and a half minutes were filled with terms Twilight had no hope of following, but by the end, The Doctor’s demeanor had made a complete turn around.

“Then the Blood Gorgons burned the entire planet and she couldn’t take it anymore, the stress, not knowing if today would be her last day alive and that I would outlive her and... she left me. She’s on this world now, and I guess I’m trying to protect her more than anything.” His fuller colors slowly re-emerged as the revelation washed over him. “Yes... This is for her! I won’t let Chaos succeed and take her! Thank you, Twilight, for helping me realize this!” He blinked, then shook the slackjawed alicorn whose mind was still trying to comprehend the beginning of his story.

’What’s a land raider? What’s a TARDIS? How did this Vance Stubbs guy misplace a hundred Baneblades!? Whatever those are.’ The wobble of Whooves’ shake snapped her out of it. “What? You’re finished? Hey, your colors are back!” She craned her head backward and let out a breath. “Wow. That was a lot you guys went through.”

“And look where my follies got her. Now I have to make right for it. I don’t even think I’ve accepted Pinkie Pie’s apology yet!” And with that, he dove down to the migrating herd.

“Boss! We go’a git outta ‘ere!” an ork boy cried out as dust kicked up in numerous plumes all around him, accompanied by a chorus of loud ricochets and the occasional splat of a bullet finding its mark.

The hulking green brute in charge spun around, swinging his choppa in a gory arc to sever the head of the boy in one clean swipe.

“We ain’t goi’n nowhere’s!.” he boomed, turning back around to face in the general direction of his enemy. “Dere’s still a foight ta foight, an oi’m gonna WIN—” The Warboss was cut off as a shard of lead ripped through his skull, right between the eyes.

Spitfire lowered her smoking sniper musket, smirking in satisfaction. “Keep up the fire! Drive them back!”

In the near distance was the mountain city of Karak Raziak, or what was left of it. After weeks of bombardment by rock lobbas and doom divahs, the orks had reduced the outer fortifications to smoke and rubble. At the mercy of the winds, Cloudsdale had been carried over the titanic World’s Edge Mountains to this very spot, nearly by divine providence. The floating city’s batteries of cannon ripped into the milling sea of orks, engulfing the world below in dust and blood; for when the Holy City went to war, it brought thunder and lead lightning.

The onslaught of boyz began to slow down as they clambered over the outer rim of fortifications. Lacking the wits or the desire to take cover, greenskins died by the hundreds from the combined force of allied cannon and constant volleys of musket fire, falling as rain into their ranks.

Having lost their momentum, and with the constant cry of the Waaagh!! dying down in intensity, many orks began to stop entirely and cast about in confusion for orders and encouragement. Seeking any kind of direction, two lanky goblins eventually stumbled upon the corpse of the former Warboss, staring in shock and disbelief.

“Da boss is dead! Da boss is dead!” the first one cried out in dismay.

“I gots his socks,” the second said as he rubbed his hands together, smirking viciously. He didn’t have time to entirely replace that expression as an iron-clad boot drove into his face, crushing his nose four inches into his skull and sending him flying across the battlefield.

Before the remaining goblin could retreat, a meaty, green hand snagged him from behind, jerking him upward and level with a snarling face full of sharp teeth. “Dead? Whaddyu mean e’s dead?!” the boy yelled, spittle spraying onto the smaller greenskin.

“Dead! Dead!” the goblin screeched hysterically. “Reegor morrtiz, faytallity, ca-ca-cadaveriffiiiiiAAAA—” The boy swept an arm around and crushed him to his midsection, using his free arm to twist the goblin’s head off like a pickle jar.

As the boy was splattered with red blood, his face twisted into a rictus grin of triumph as he walked over beside the body of the fallen Warboss. Reaching down, he grabbed the massive choppa with both hands and lifted it high over his head.

“I is da Boss now!” he roared, “C’mon, Boyz, letz get up dere ‘n chop up all them stunties! WAAAGGH—”

“Nawt so fast!” another ork stepped up, easily reaching up to the other’s height. He shook his own blood-soaked choppa in the boy’s face. “I ain’t takin’ orders from no boy ‘s no bigga ‘den me! Why, I tink I autta be da—”

With a bestial roar, the first boy swept the oversized choppa towards him in a vicious overhead arc. He struck out with his own weapon, clashing against it with a steely clang! and causing several sparks to fly. He gritted his yellowed teeth, swinging his other choppa wide; it failed to strike home, but did cause his opponent to disengage.

Fights like this raged all across the Ork lines, confusion and dissension running rampant as the largest orks and big ‘unz fought each other to fill the place of their fallen warboss. The remainder of the Karaz defenders, seeing the faltering enemy, surged from the gates and into the reeling greenskins with a collective roar of fury and vengeance. Beaten, broken and leaderless, the orks stumbled back over the ruined fortifications and a field filled with their dead as they retreated to the Darklands.

In mid-rout, one boy stumbled upon a glinting handgun that caught his eye and he picked it up. He rolled his apish jaw figuring it out and cranked the lever at the side. Bang! bang! bang! bang! He almost dropped it in surprise and cracked a most elated grin.

“Ooo! Dis ‘ere’s mine!” He let off a couple more shots until it was empty and snatched up the rest of the ammo from the dead owner. “Yeah! Dakka dakka dakka! Da boyz is gunna loves dis!” He ran off with the rest of the horde, clicking his heels.

Seeing that the battle was near its end, Spitfire took off to the tower network from which the city’s forces were directed. Inside was choreographed chaos, scribes and logisticians running helter skelter around the cramped space, papers floating thick as dustmotes in some places. “Soarin, how are the lower batteries?”

He took up the most recent message from the desired area, wincing slightly as he read. “Ten gunners were killed by spear chukkas... and one gun was damaged by an incredibly lucky shot. Also, there’s been a sighting of the changeling daemon; it unhitched an ammo caisson and it all went rolling off the walls, and made four guns misfire and explode.”

“Lightning Dust will be after that Dash since she’s off probation,” she chimed, hopping down from the windowsill and throwing her gun over her back. “It looks a lot more organized in here now that you’re back.”

“It was hell when I came in! How did anything get done around here with everypony running around like chickens with their heads cut off?”

“We made due with what we had. How does it feel to be back in the position?”

“Fits me like a glove. You sure you should be up here? Aren’t the orks still there?”

“Barely,” snickered Spitfire. “They’re being mopped up now. Wish you coulda been out there. I shot their warboss’ head clean off. If that were Grimgor Ironhide, the Empire could send a single army and wipe the Darklands clean of the orks before they could get another boss.”

“Wishful thinking,” Soarin chortled.

“Yeah, I guess. I should probably still be there to see that the populace of Karak Raziak is still in one piece.” She climbed back to the window and looked back. “Just make sure this place doesn’t burn down,” she joked.

“I can’t do much of a worse job than you,” Soarin shot back, smirking. “Go on.”

Spitfire vanished with a flap of her wings and Soarin returned to the piles of reports cluttering the room. He saw a formation of griffons fly by outside the window and laughed a bit, saying to no one in particular, “You can’t keep griffons out of the mountains, even in another world.”

He blinked. Soarin’s eyes continued to stare off into the space beyond the small, yet graceful arched portal, as if expecting the same griffons to pass by it once more. By the time he was finally able to peel his gaze away, he realized he had been staring for the better part of a minute.

“Wait...” Soarin muttered, his face screwing into a frown. “Griffons...”

Looking back to the window, he found that it was no longer empty; almost just outside, there was a young griffon with a curious expression on her face, standing on a fair-sized cloud and looking around. Before Soarin could question what she was doing so close to Cloudsdale, a sky-blue shape pierced through the cloud in front of her like a feathery needle, causing the griffon to fall back on her hind leg in startled surprise.

“Hah! Gotcha!” said the shape, which made a graceful landing on the cloud and revealed itself to be a young pegasus filly with a rainbow-streaked mane and tail. She smirked triumphantly as the cloud’s other occupant gave a hearty, playful chuckle.

“Heh... heh, alright, ya got me, Dash,” said the griffon. “Ya know, you get such a freaking unfair advantage out here, just ‘cause you blend into the sky like a chameleon.”

“Heh, nah; you just can’t keep up with the fastest flyer in Equestria, Gil!”

“Gil—?!... …Huh. Heh... you know, that doesn’t actually sound too bad...”

“Heh, I know, ri—”

“But I’m only gonna let you say it, Dash,” the griffon interrupted, giving a wink and smile to the pegasus. “I got a reputation to keep, too, ya know.”

‘Heh... Gil... yeah, that is a decent nickname for Gilda...’ Soarin thought with a nod, then frowned again. ’Wait... Gilda...? How did I know that name? And... did she say Equestria?’

Returning his attention to the interaction, he discovered that the griffon in question was sitting right across from him, not two feet away. She lifted a forepaw and offered it forward, and for reasons he could not understand, he raised his own hoof and placed it against the outstretched limb. But what Soarin could really not understand, was why the color of his foreleg had changed to sky blue.

“Best friends forever, right, Dash?” the griffon asked, staring into his eyes with a warm smile.

“Yeah,” he unconsciously replied in a voice not his own. “Best friends forever.”

Before he could try and understand the meaning of what was going on, the image of the griffon and the pure crystal sky around them changed to become oily black, Gilda’s face and form all seemingly melting away like candle wax. As he looked around in horror and confusion, he doubled over in pain as his eyes felt like they were being sliced.

Through the haze of stabbing pain, he became aware of a concerned voice, and a presence just off to his left. “Sir? Are you alri—”

“Shut up!” he blurted. He snapped his head around as if there were dozens of horrors all around him. He stumbled into one of the back storage rooms, screaming at the growing crowd of concerned staff to not come any closer.

The endlessly shifting shadows taunted and cursed him with growing intensity, and he crushed his ears trying to hold them shut against the noise. The world around him rattled and melted into howling faces and mouths and still the piercing shrieks stabbed his eardrums. A painfully intense itching sensation burned his scalp and he feverishly scratched away, but it only got worse and worse. Whatever it was, he could feel it expanding and it soon came into view; a mane of many colors, a vibrant array of red, green, yellow and blue. One of the shadows formed a thick claw and grabbed his throat, crushing down harder and harder. It muttered, “Middenheim...” before twisting his neck, and he fell to the ground limply.

“Soarin!” Spitfire shouted in his face, shaking him about with her hooves at the base of his neck. He gasped and looked to each of the frightened faces in front on him, ending with Spitfire who smiled in relief. He pulled his mane down and breathed easy that it was still one color. “What in the name of Celestia’s sun did you see?”

Soarin felt like his brain had blown a fuse, and he gritted his teeth in frustration as he tried to remember. All he could come up with was, “...Middenheim. Something about... Middenheim.”

Spitfire blinked, her eyes knitting together in thought. “The princesses are going to there...” she muttered, then turned to one of her soldiers. “Tell the weather crews to go on navigation duty, and set a course for just outside of Middenheim.”

“Spitfire, it was just an episode,” Soarin tried to reassure her, still holding his pounding head. “No reason to start actually controlling the city’s movements.”

“What else was there?” she asked, her expression intense and focused.

“I... I found this rainbow mane coming out of my head—”

“Enough,” Spitfire cut him off there, her face hardening in steely determination and anger. “We’re going to Middenheim.”

Rarity had been having a series of spells of madness, getting more and more frequent as they moved west. At first it was just a couple slips of the tongue, mispronouncing or blurting completely random words. But now, she was a raving husk of a mare, constantly wide-eyed and howling in the most unintelligible garble even Zecora couldn’t translate. The chief of the warherd was on the verge of simply ending her, but they found a better solution, tying her up and stuffing a rag in her mouth. Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle sat on her like a log and watched a favorite pastime of the beastmen with the others; tribal fights.

“Come on, ‘Shy! Tear him a new one!” Big Macintosh barked.

The minotaur who kept referring to itself as 'Iron Will' jumped aside as Fluttershy charged, her momentum getting her facial blade stuck in a tree. The mutant thought he should be nice, helping dislodge her head; and then bashing it into the trunk again and again. He sent her face smashing across the side, ripping off a chunk of wood. Fluttershy’s horn was bent, some segments of her neck had buckled, but she didn’t seem to notice.

She immediately got back up and blocked one of the minotaur’s arcing claws, then the other with her other paw. He struck out with his remaining two and sank them deep into her leg joints, roaring in her face and prying them outward.

Pop! rrrrrrr... pop, pop!

Cracks and tears formed in her joints and the whole limbs came off soon after, trailing with clattering piping and loose bolts. Fluttershy fell back, twisting and snarling to get back at him.

He laughed. “YEAH! Iron Will wins again!” He flexed his swollen muscles to the spectators who howled in adulation. Fluttershy had inflicted her own damage, creating four deep parallel scars across his chest and dislocating two of his arms. He limped, kicking her severed forelegs back to her. “Not bad, little lady, but no match for Iron Will!”

Those in the crowd who placed bets of teeth or food paid up, or beat the living daylights out of those they owed to if they had smaller horns. Lyra and Angel came to her, maneuvering the joint of Fluttershy’s leg back into the socket. The unicorn snapped a torch's flame onto her fingers and started welding the limb back.

“That was incredible,” she said. “I swear if you had one more second when he was on his back, you could have just punched him right out!”

“This isn’t over,” Fluttershy growled. “I'll fight him again and again until one of us is dead!”

“Yeah, yeah. You’ll lose steam in a minute and be braiding a gor’s mane before you know it.” Angel socked her shoulder and growled. She swept a flaming hand at him, just missing as he jumped back. “Go ahead and try that again, furball.” He didn’t, and grudgingly continued holding Fluttershy’s shoulder in place.

Just as the weld was finished, the giant yelped and her claw jerked upward, landing on her chest. She wiggled the blades a little and grinned. “The other one. Now.”

“You should be a little more appreciative,” said Lyra, snapping her flame out. “I could just leave you here, and—” An iron claw slammed on the ground next to her and she jumped back as it swept at her, grabbed and held her above a scowling maw of red saliva and five-inch canines.

“That’s not your decision. The only reason I’ll let you live is because Rarity’s welding job on my last injury looked like puke.” Fluttershy tightened her grip on the unicorn, squeezing the air out of her with almost no effort. “I could just cut you up and grind you into a pulp right now.” She snapped a mock bite at her like a beartrap. “As far as I care, you’re my little mechanic, now FIX IT!” She held Lyra to the side of her other empty joint and turned to her pet with slightly softer eyes. “Angel, help her.”

As soon as Fluttershy loosened her claw, a red-faced Lyra gasped and the first thing she said was, “Hurry up, fuzzball!” Angel slipped the ball joint in place and Lyra quickly got to work. About halfway through, she thought, ’Is she still looking?’ She peeked up into a bloodshot eye burning a hole in her head. ’Yep.’ Just then, a snapping bolt of lightning shot past her head and she looked to the source.

“They’re here!” Rarity frothed, her horns raging with uncontrolled energy that incinerated the cloth in her mouth. ”They’re on top of us now!” No one seemed to pay her any mind, however, and she felt frustration boiling up within her like molten lava.

“IT’S VANGA!” she screamed, and all went silent.

There was an airy whooshing noise, then the sound of metal cleaving into flesh. One of the gors fell with an axe in its skull. Massive barking dogs, eyes as white as death shot through the fog and pounced at more beastmen. The warriors of Khorne came thundering, howling their litanies to the Lord of War and crashed into the unprepared mutants.

“BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!” an iron-clad warrior roared before sheathing his sword in the belly of a bestigor.

“Yes! Victims!” Fluttershy cackled as she dropped Lyra, brought up the hellcannon on her claw and fired, vaporizing two cultists in a seething fireball. She spotted the Crimson Hand’s warlord mounted on a chaos warrior stallion, his eyes fixed on Big Macintosh who braced himself to charge.

The Doctor immediately fled into the trees with a couple of khornate pegasi armed with cruel blades on his tail, hoping to lose them in the foliage. His ears flattened in surprise as two arrows whizzed by his head, burying themselves into the heads of his pursuers. Before he could figure out what was going on, a thick net swooped down from above and yanked him amongst the lower limbs of the trees. He was met by different faces than Vanga’s men; all of them appeared to be ponies wearing imperial-style armor, but some had badges that read ‘For the Founders’ on their shields and seals.

“Captain Fellblade,” the pegasus soldier holding his net said. “This one is not mutated.”

A dark green stallion inspected him, finding no extra limbs or eyes, no fangs or snarling snout. “Regardless, it’s still a monster.” The apparent leader opened a gap in the branches and looked down. “I see the target. Flaming alicorn. When the time is right, we take out who’s left. Kill Vanga’s troops and the beastmen. Capture the other ponies.”

“Aye, sir.”

Fellblade turned his attention back to the Doctor. “It really wasn’t that hard following you once we found the trail you and your friends kindly left behind. Slime trails, burned trees, giant footprints from your juggernaut. You’ve got to be the worst warband I’ve ever seen.”

“We’re not a warband!” The entrapped pegasus shot back.

“Oh, really? Tzeentchians, Nurglites, Khornates, and Slaaneshis together, and you’ve already rampaged through one village in Sylvania already; though I’ll give you credit for that one. But it seems to me like you’ve got everything but a flag or banner.” he smirked. “Too bad you’ll be getting shut down before too much longer.”

“To be completely honest,” Whooves mumbled, “you couldn’t have come at a better time.”

The captain peered back down, squinting his eyes toward one particular spot in the carnage. “Where did the pink one get a cannon?” The gun in question blasted out a torrent of burning streamers and balloons, which exploded on impact with the cultists.

“Excuse me,” Whooves grunted, trying to wriggle around to better look towards his captors. “I’m sure you gents would listen to reason—” wham! A soldier smacked him with the flat of his halberd, and he knew no more.

The frenzy below whipped and swirled like a chaotic ballet. Rarity had vaporized her binding ropes in another power spike and went off with the full fury of her living nightmare, gripping a cultist’s head and crushing it like an eggshell. The same gory fist was then charged with magic and punched into another’s chest, popping the cavity into a cloud of dust.

“Sweetie Belle!” she screamed through the carnage, being answered by a terrified shriek. The white filly fled from a pursuing chaos warrior, who caught her tail under his boot and raised an axe to strike, but was intercepted by a bolt of warp lightning, making him stumble to the side and Sweetie bolted for her sister.

The armored monolith barely had time to recover before a skeletal fist struck him in the face, crushing his helmet in. “Don’t you ever, *bang* ever, *bang* hurt my sister!” The khornate dropped his axe and Rarity took it up, burying it deep in his chest. It gave a ghostly moan before collapsing. Rarity quickly knelt down to the filly, inspecting her for injuries that so far were only some scratches and a shredded tail. “Sweetie, are you okay?”

“Yeah...” she sobbed, throwing her forelegs around her sister. “Yes.”

Rarity gently patted her on the back and said softly, “Stay close to me, please... just stay close.”

Another howling mutant leapt at them, but was tackled from the air by the rotting corpse of Applejack who shifted her leg into a molar axe and smashed their head in. “Would y’all finish yer love fest ‘n help us!” A blade came plunging through her abdomen. She swung around and knocked her weapon into the assailant’s shoulder, snapping his arm, and jumped on him, chomping a huge bite out of his face.

“Everypony have their target?” Fellblade asked, turning back to his men. The group leaders nodded, and the others gripped their weapons tighter. “Good. Cutie Mark Crusaders, steel yourselves and die well! Attack!!”

Author's Note

I'd really like feedback on this fic, so I can know what is right, what's wrong, and what readers think of it. cheersreehc

Chapter 21: Roots in the Dark

“A hero’s death is for fools.” - Burgermeister Nusbaum

There must have been at least a hundred pegasi of the Cutiemark Crusaders hiding in the trees. Now there were less than sixty. Having launched down from the canopy like birds of prey, they had the total element of surprise and swept into the milling masses of men both of beast and chaos before they could gather their wits. The warriors of the Crimson Hand cult didn’t necessarily reassess the situation, however, but merely acknowledged that there was even more to kill.

Vanga, Khornate Champion of the Crimson Hand swung his axe in a high arc, catching a Crusader and cleaving him muzzle to flanks in a shower of gore. Laughing maniacally, he roared, “More blood! More death! More glorious carnage!”

As he raised his blood-spattered weapon once more, he barely registered the sensation of something hard impacting his helmet. He cast a glance to the ground, finding the decapitated head of a pegasus staring back at him blankly with its expression frozen into a rictus of pain.

An amused grunt sounded from nearby, prompting Vanga to bring his head level with the battlefield once more. An enormous black-furred minotaur with at least a whole foot on him glared balefully in his direction, its hefty brass nose ring swaying as it gave an obviously derisive snort. Its four arms extended outward like the legs of a spider ready to pounce, each limb thick as a tree trunk and ending in a variety of vicious spikes and curved blades.

Vanga didn’t even bother with any sort of pre-combat formalities; instead, he gripped his axe tightly and charged straight at the beastman with a frenzied roar. His opponent grinned ferally, responding by quickly swiping a bladed limb in a vicious overhead arc—yet the weapon merely tasted dirt instead of flesh as Vanga deftly skidded aside, quickly planting a mailed boot on the blade before it could be pulled free. The chaos champion brought his axe down, creating a pop of sparks as it snapped the metallic portion of the limb clean in half.

Before he could ready himself for another swipe, however, the minotaur planted a powerful kick squarely on his chestplate and sent him reeling backward across the ground. Whereas most normal men would have been winded, Vanga felt a rush of euphoria suffuse his senses at the creature’s strength and audacity.

“Finally...” he uttered with murderous glee, focusing his eyes on his enemy once more. “A foe worth killing!”

“That all you got, little human?!” the beastman bellowed as it plodded closer, “Let Iron Will show you how it’s done!”

It threw forth its impaler, striking only air as the warlord rolled aside and charged again. Quick as lightning, Iron Will twisted to avoid Vanga’s swipe whilst simultaneously spinning about to bring both its deadly spikes to bear. Its first spanked harmlessly off of the khornate’s shield, causing another plume of sparks to erupt between the two combatants. The second impaler shot true for Vanga’s head, but he simply responded by deflecting the cruel barb with another sweep of his axe.

With the minotaur left open, Vanga prepared to sever its head with a return strike—only for the world to drop away beneath his feet, causing him to fall to a kneeling position. He lifted his head—just in time for Iron Will to drive his own knee straight into Vanga’s faceplate, sending him crashing hard to the forest floor.

The clever beastman had hooked its other sickle-limb behind his leg, nearly hamstringing him as he jerked it back. And now he was on the ground before his opponent, who even now pressed the advantage by stabbing both of its impalers straight down.

CLANG! Vanga brought his shield up just in time, deflecting the spike that drove for his chest. But there was nothing to be done about the second, which crunched through his armor and smote firmly in the thigh of his right leg, eliciting an explosion of pain. Vanga tried to roll away, but to no avail; he was pinned.

Vanga understood immediately. The creature wished to immobilize, and then butcher him, sever each of his limbs one by one and cut from his body until nothing was left but bleached and broken bones. It was toying with him, as a master would do to his slave. The thought filled Vanga with cold fury.

Vanga angrily swept his axe for the impaler, but to his surprise the minotaur simply pulled it free, apparently not willing to sacrifice it. Iron Will struck again before he could react, its other impaler aiming for Vanga’s throat.

Rather than raise his shield, Vanga twisted slightly to the side and instead took the spike in the muscles of his left shoulder, ignoring the pain as he clenched around the blade to hold it fast. He then struck out for the minotaur’s neck with his axe, causing it to instinctively pull back from the blade.

With the leverage exerted from the spike in his body, Vanga’s body rose with it.

Before the startled beastman could react, Vanga finally got his feet under him and carved a bloody furrow deep into his opponent’s midsection that weeped dark red blood. To its credit, Iron Will barely showed any reaction beyond a grunt and a brief grimace.

Vanga, however, felt an unspeakable surge of glee flood over his consciousness. The creature was bleeding. Bleeding. This close, he could smell it. And, just for the briefest of moments, he caught the unmistakable scent of fear exuding from his enemy as well.

Shrieking a battle cry that could come from no mere mortal, Vanga swept his axe at the minotaur in a frenzy. Again and again the gory blade sang a song of metal, flesh and blood, the khornate’s insane laughter mounting higher each time the weapon struck home. Still, Iron Will fought back with brutal force and calculated precision, never overextending himself too much or leaving a fatal opening.

“You, a beast without a master!” Vanga yelled out tauntingly, swinging his axe for an overhead swipe.

“You, a weak boot-licking man-thing, a slave of a single god!” Iron Will roared back, deflecting the strike with an impaler in a pop of sparks, and stabbing back with the other only for it to again spank off the steel shield.

“I am a Champion of Khorne, a favored of the Lord of Blood!” Vanga shouted furiously as he feinted right, bringing his axe around in a half-circle and managing to cut a shallow gash in the minotaur’s hide. “You’re nothing but a worthless mutated reject unworthy of even speaking Their names!”

“Hah!” Iron Will snorted derisively, apparently having not even felt the blow. “You sacrifice your freedom, your very soul, like a dog on a leash! I let myself be carried by the Gods’ wind!”

Seized in the throes of sanguine fury, the battlefield all around Vanga practically dissolved from his senses. All he could see or even consider was the creature before him, how its blood flowed so freely, how he wished to drink its life and offer its skull to Khorne.

Which was probably why he didn’t even think about why the minotaur suddenly backed away, or the odd footing in which it repositioned itself near a thick tree root and a fallen pegasi warrior. He simply pursued the beastman head-on for death and glory—and straight into the tip of the propped-up halberd blade.

The spike of the weapon skidded away from Vanga’s lower armor at an angle, but managed to find and bury itself into his previous thigh wound. With his forward momentum broken by the polearm, Vanga stumbled and nearly lost his balance yet again.

It was all the opportunity his opponent needed. The minotaur roared aloud as it swung its remaining sickle-limb in a great arc, crunching straight through Vanga’s chestplate, digging between his ribs and piercing his right lung.

That wound actually gave him pause for a moment. Vanga glanced down at the rapidly-reddening blade for a moment, his first thought one of grudging respect for his opponent. The beastman in question gave a snort and grinned, clearly believing he had struck a fatal blow.

He certainly wasn’t ready for what Vanga did next.

The khornate dropped his shield to the ground, earning a confused glance from the horned beast before him. Vanga brought his axe screaming down in the next instant, cleanly severing the sickle-blade from the arm it was attached to.

His opponent roared in pain and fury and stepped back, giving Vanga just the time he needed to grasp the polearm lodged in his thigh with his now-free hand. With a sharp twist he snapped the wood into jagged halves, coming away holding the vicious bladed end, which sucked free from the wound with a single strong pull.

His breaths coming raspy, yet steady thanks to his extensive physical conditioning and status as a favored of the Ruinous Powers, Vanga quickly brought his newly-acquired weapon—covered with blood, he noted with approval—into a ready position.

And not a moment too soon, as the minotaur abandoned all semblance of strategy and simply charged him head-on with both impalers forward. Eyes wide with anger, it shrieked, “Die, slave of Khorne!!”

Vanga planted himself on the ground, swinging both axes in forward angles just as the minotaur’s huge bulk crashed into him. Iron Will’s twin spikes split clean through his armor, one piercing both sides of his right lung whilst the other burst out the other end of his body entirely, dangerously close to his heart. Vanga struggled to keep his boots on the ground, but stubbornly held on.

The khornate’s original axe found purchase on the side of the beastman’s neck, the hooked end digging deeply into flesh and bone. His halberd-axe swept forward, the spike piercing just to the side of its throat.

The minotaur’s eyes went wide with pain and fear, giving desperate and strangling sounds as it tried to pull away from the blades; but to no avail, as its head was pinned on two sides. It grasped Vanga’s left arm with two brawny limbs and attempted to push him away, but the khornate simply responded by pushing closer, applying more and more leverage.

Vanga, heedless of the excruciating pain wracking his body and the blood rushing up his throat, grinned from behind his faceplate. He hissed triumphantly, “Another… skull… for… Kharneth!”

And with that, the champion of Khorne gave one final push. The spike of his halberd-blade burst with a crack through the beastman’s throat, digging firmly into its spine.

Its struggles gradually slowed, before finally ceasing entirely. All six of the minotaur’s limbs went limp as the light died in its eyes. Iron Will was no more.

Not yet finished, however, Vanga continued to press both his axe-blades into the dead beastman’s spine. Finally, with a cacophony of pops and the sound of flesh and cartilage tearing away, the head of what was once Iron Will came free.

Vanga dropped the halberd-blade to the ground and seized the head by the hair, baptising himself in the life of his enemy as he raised it above his head. Repainted in blood, much of it his own, Vanga raised his axe to the sky and intoned a strained yet fearsome roar to the Blood God.

A second later, a wall of living metal plowed into him like an avalanche.

The last of the Crimson Hand’s warriors were steadily being trapped and picked off. Their mindless, berserker mentality only went so far before it faltered against the teamwork and versatility of the Crusaders, especially after the hostile pegasi were killed and they had dominance of the air. Still, the khornates fought to slaughter as many as they could in one last tribute to the Lord of Blood before succumbing.

One of the last khornates on the field wasn’t of the Crimson Hand. The juggernaut swung her cannon-arm about wildly, pointing it at a few of the crusaders who were spreading out and watching her every move with extreme wariness.

“What did you do to Angel?!” she screeched. The bore of her hellcannon glowed white hot, as did her anger. The soldiers shared furtive and confused glances among each other, but none of them answered her.

She caught a shadow in the corner of her eye, running away into the forest’s fog with another limping figure. The first had long, flopping ears and what appeared to be a poofy tail. It paused for a moment to look back, and Fluttershy could almost see its eyes before it got to running again.

She raised a claw to wave in the vain hope that he might see it, but paused when she saw the blood staining her blades. Curiosity and confusion taking over for now, she looked back to the ponies around her and asked slowly, “W… What do you want? Who are you?”

One of the soldiers motioned with his halberd. “Join the line with the others. You’ll know soon enough.”

Fluttershy stared at him for a few tense moments, then cast her gaze to the side. Some of her friends had apparently given themselves up, as they were not visibly bound with ropes or any magical caprice like the others, and their captors appeared to be simply guiding them away from the fight rather than forcing them along at spearpoint.

“Fine,” Fluttershy snapped through gritted teeth, lowering her hellcannon reluctantly and walking to the back of the slowly-growing line, though she stared with hatred and suspicion at the group of crusaders out of the corner of her eye until she passed.

Twilight, who was getting a ringed trinket clasped around her horn flicked her ears in Fellblade’s direction after he said to a subordinate, “Shining Armor said minimum injuries. Don’t cut their heads off!”

Her head snapped up, staring at the captain in surprise. “Wait... my brother? You’re taking us to—”

“Don’t think this means you’re off the hook, Chaos scum,” he snapped, pointedly placing the edge of his sword between her eyes. “The Reiksmarshall has just taken a specific interest in you, nothing more. You’ll likely still be purged for your collaboration with the Ruinous Powers, unless the Goddesses somehow see fit to spare your accursed life. Now move!”

Twilight dejectedly joined the rest of the group, still casting glances around to piece together what was going on around her. Some of the others had to be subdued with a far harder hoof, as they had no plans to converse nor cooperate with their captors.

Vinyl removed her needlepoint fingernails from the swelling, then bursting face of a cultist, only to be met with a musket butt to the back of her head, throwing her on her plasteel claws. Soon, a tight gag was wrapped around her mouth, blocking off her hypersonic voice, and her arms were placed in similar restraints.

“Get up!” A Crusader barked as he picked her up by the mane and prodded her across the body-littered battlefield towards the others.

Vinyl nearly screamed when she saw Octavia lying on the ground, surrounded by the splinters and woodwork of her destroyed cello, but the mare was moving. Several tentacles slithered from her body and rolled her onto her back.

“Vinyl! No, get away from me, you bastards!”

She swatted her tentacles at the soldiers, snagging one’s neck and barely managing to start choking him before the appendage was severed by another’s sword.

She shrieked with a face-splitting smile, “Again!” and made another attempt, only getting those cut off as well. She floundered like a bleeding fish out of water, trying to resist the Crusaders as they tied a rope around her torso, holding her tentacle-bearing second mouth shut. They hauled her up, leaned her against Vinyl, and got her hopping on one leg.

Rarity was as jittery as a filly on a sugar rush, constantly jabbering in her nonsense language and twitching as if her nerves were on fire. Tying her arms proved useless as she just kept morphing them out of the bonds, so they chained her by the neck and hooked her to the others, a great distance from anyone in front or behind. Lyra was probably the most difficult to bring to heel, having to be beaten out cold and tossed onto Fluttershy’s back. The Apples were well under control as their bodies lay in one place, and their heads in a sack.

The soldier Fellblade reprimanded responded, “But sir, they're still alive. Look.” He inverted the bag and three rotting heads thumped out, rolling around a bit before they settled. The male silently flapped his gums, shouting curses he couldn’t voice. The one with a bowtie in her mane had crusty tears streaming from her eyes. The mare’s head just looked angry: the kind of angry where nothing seems to be going your way today.

Fellblade cringed his muzzle in disgust. “Right... Bring the bodies and put them on the juggernaut.”

“Which one, sir?”

“The giant one.”

The smaller daemon engine had his claw on Vanga’s throat, the chaos warlord lying beaten and bloody on the forest floor with several pieces of his armor broken or missing. Big Mac slowly pressed down upon his windpipe, savoring every one of his dying breaths.

“I go…” Vanga uttered weakly, “to drink… at the right hand... of the… Blood… God…”

SNAP!

And then he lay still.

The iron stallion stepped back, looking with a malicious grin on the crushed and mangled pile of flesh and crimson steel. As the thrill of the kill died down, he found Vanga’s axe snugly burrowed in his shoulder. He pulled it out with his teeth, liquid fire dripping from the blade, and the damaged foreleg suddenly went numb.

Just then, two heavy masses struck his back and forced him to the ground. He quickly discovered that he couldn’t move much in his current condition, if at all; his leg only shook and made a disconcerting grinding sound as he tried to raise it to strike the pegasus stallion who put a muddy hoof on his face.

“So, this is the mighty ’Foot of Khorne’?” the pegasus said snarkily, smearing the soil across his broken face. “This make you mad, cog for brains?” Big Mac snapped a bite at his hoof, just missing as he yanked it back.

“Clearly, it does!” he laughed, turning back to his comrades. “Let’s find something to tie it up with. It’s so damaged, it’ll fall apart if we make it walk.”

Elsewhere, Pinkie Pie laughed hysterically with black tears trickling down her face. Her claw had blood dripping between the pincers as it held the eviscerated stump of her right foreleg. It was a pain and pleasure she had never felt before, each heartbeat and spurt of blood bringing a ticklish coldness and thunderclap of sheer agony. Her needle-bearing tongue tried to start stitching, but her shaking laughter put it off aim and it only stabbed into the shredded muscle, making her explode into more pained laughter. She finally resorted to pinching it shut, then hobbled on her third foreleg toward the others.

“Somepony help me-hee-ha-ha-ha! Pleee-heee-ase! It hurts so muuu— aha-huhuha-haaa!”

Pinkie Pie saw a certain three-horned unicorn amidst the group and quickly walked closer, but stopped and flinched back before her madly-swiping arms. The mare snapped and screeched, staring with blind, bug-eyed hatred in her general direction.

“Rarity, please…” Pinkie hesitated for a moment, cringing as her friend didn’t even seem to acknowledge that she was speaking. “I need your help.”

Rarity simply continued to slaver and froth at the mouth like a mad dog, jabbering and snarling. She strained against her bonds, heedless of the metal chains which left raw marks as they dug roughly into the skin of her neck.

Just then, Pinkie got an idea. She held out the bone needle and Rarity immediately went silent, inflexibly transfixed on it. Pinkie stretched the tool to her and she took it in a skeletal hand. She slowly maneuvered it into position when Pinkie came closer and got the unicorn’s attention on her bleeding stump. Rarity immediately began sewing with quickness and precision, sticking the needle and weaving the thread across the gap in a silent, rhythmic pattern.

Fellblade looked over the train of his quarry, the unicorns securely fitted with magic suppressors, and all ending with Fluttershy, who had been surprisingly compliant to his soldiers’ orders.

“It’s a pleasure to met you all!” he said sarcastically. “We are the Cutiemark Crusaders, and we are here to see you all to your judgement before one of the highest authorities in the Empire. Any of you complain en route and you’ll have no rations, being whatever you find on the ground to eat. If any of you are blood drinkers, get it from your friends. Our employer said to bring you with minimal injuries, but he didn’t say ‘none’, so flogging is on the table for discipline. Do I make myself clear?” Some of them silently nodded, others grunted or were too tired or beaten to respond.

Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo shouted through the cloths tied in their mouths, hopping in their bonds for the captain’s attention, but were silenced by a merciless soldier’s hoof striking them both hard across the cheek.

“Flogging, huh? Sounds kinky,” Octavia smirked. “Make sure you do it twice as hard for me.”

“I've had experience with you Slaaneshis,” the captain spat, glaring in her direction. “You’ll just starve.”

“Heh, win-win.”

Another winged crusader touched down near Fellblade, speaking in a clear yet low voice, “Sir, the last of the stragglers have been picked off, and the rest of our forces are all accounted for. We’re ready.”

Fellblade nodded, his face taking on a firm and somber expression as he looked out over the remnants of his troops. “Take a good long look, everypony,” he said, “This is why we fight. This is why we die, so that the world can be spared another day from these mutants and heretics! We stand against the darkness to stop the horrors of Chaos and corruption from devouring our families and loved ones, to ensure a future for this world and all who live beneath the collective banners of order and freedom!

“Those that have died this day have become martyrs, and their names shall burn long in our memories for generations to come. Pray you share the same fate in the future, for in death, your future is in the Glory!”

“And we are content!” they shouted back as one, some rearing back on their hooves and hoisting their weapons to the sky.

Without another word, Fellblade turned around and pointed into the forest with a hoof. “Let’s move ‘em out!”

A heartbeat began, slow and weak. One by one, Chrysalis’ senses came back and soon she made out a light, a tiny green ball of luminescence that she took in her misty palm. She put a finger to it to pet it, but it suddenly jumped away, joining dozens, then hundreds of gathering lights.

“Oh, you wanted me,” she murmured, nodding.

The form came together, a miasma of changeling consciousnesses from the scrawniest worker to the strongest soldier drone. The mass was of a shifting globular shape, damaged and sputtering to carry its signal to Chrysalis.

“...”

“I understand. What is it?”

“...”

A smaller cloud of lights came before her, coalescing to form the image of a mutant changeling. It was covered in a heavier carapace, spearing forelances and several vestigial and useless other protrusions.

“You’re still not well, are you?” she murmured caringly, taking the design in her claws. “Still can’t come up with a new brood without my help.” Through her own manipulation, she took off the excess parts; a leg on its forehead, an eye on its underbelly, and added two mandibular pincers on either side of its mouth.

“...”

“Behemoth Brood?” Chrysalis spun the image of the creature around in curiosity. “How large is it?”

The hivemind put up the image of a pony for comparison, and it was easily dwarfed in size.

“Interesting,” she murmured, nodding. “But we’re not after ponies for the time being. This is where the mandibles come in, and...” she replaced the lances with closing claws, “...it needs armor-crushing power to tear into chaos warriors and giants.”

“...”

“Well, thank you.” she smiled.

The hivemind took back the new brood design with interest. “...”

“I... I don’t know...”

“...”

“Kidnapping ponies again would ruin our agreement with them. Hmm...” Chrysalis tapped a finger to her chin thoughtfully. “I suppose I could persuade them to hand over some prison inmates whose motivations were love-based...”

The antennae of her crown suddenly stood up, feeling a great energy nearby. “Cadence is at my door?” she said curiously. “What could she possibly want...?”

“...”

Her eyes flicked up, and she shook her head briefly. “It’s not a problem. Was that all?”

“...”

“Alright, then. Proceed as planned.”

“Come in, Cadence.”

The crystal princess’ hoof stopped just before it touched the ornate hardwood double-doors set into the wall. She took a quick glance to either side of herself, but found nothing except empty and mundane—albeit lavishly carpeted—corridor.

She stood gazing at the iron frame and stone arch a moment longer, before sighing in resignation and wrapping the door handles in her telekinetic grip, a slight creak of protest answering her gentle yet steady push inward.

Cadence, having had castles and palaces as her typical residence for much of her life, knew a standard guest suite when she saw one; although she didn’t miss the few subtle alterations that its occupant had made, such as several thick tables being conspicuously arranged lengthwise towards the door and several of the windows, as well as the priceless antique chandelier apparently rigged to a drop cord covering the central open space of the room in shifting shadows.

The Changeling queen herself was standing across the room and looking out the window on the verdant arrangements of the Königsgarten, rapping a clawed hand on the windowsill.

“What do you want?” Chrysalis asked, the ever-so-slight darkening of her bodily smog betraying her impatience even though her voice remained flat and steady.

Cadence cleared her throat, pausing for only a moment before she spoke. “I just… wanted to speak with you.”

That earned a somewhat irritated scoff from Chrysalis. “Well, obviously,” she drawled sarcastically. “So the question is: what did you want to talk about? Or better yet, what could you possibly want to talk about?”

The princess didn’t answer. After several moments, Chrysalis gave a sigh and folded her arms across her chest. “Cadence, I don’t have time for this foolishness. If you don’t have anything important to say, then—”

“I thought that we might want to better know each other,” Cadence interrupted, more confidence in her tone. “Since we’re likely going to be working together quite frequently in the future.”

Chrysalis spun on her heel and regarded her with open-mouthed disbelief, before she caught herself and sneered in response. “Why?” she asked, her eyes narrowing. “Why would you want to know anything about me? To you, I’m just a parasite; an insect to be stepped on if we survive the Storm.”

The queen’s icy look of suspicion bored into Cadence, causing her to swallow uncomfortably. “No,” she managed to say. “Look, I’m alone. No guards, no suspicion. I just want to talk, and...” she nodded towards a rectangular tray with a set of white porcelain cups laying on a nearby table, “...maybe share a cup of tea?”

Chrysalis’ only reaction was a single blink of her slit-pupiled eyes in her direction. Shrugging, Cadence enwrapped the tea set in her magical aura of azure blue, floating it with her as she walked over to a large fireplace on one side of the room which sat stacked with unused wood. Closeby was also a short yet sturdy hardwood table, which Cadence set the tray upon without even the slightest clatter, and then she plunked herself down in one of the accompanying large parlor chairs.

But the final act of brazen audacity which broke Chrysalis’ hard exterior was the warm, that’s-right-I’m-serious smile that Cadence threw her way.

“What’s your game, Cadence?” Chrysalis asked slowly, crossing her arms as a look of curious interest warred with her suspicion for control over her expression.

“There’s no game,” Cadence responded simply, giving a single shake of her head and only smiling even brighter. “It’s just what it sounds like. I only want to—”

“Now hold on, here,” The queen interrupted, huffing as she left her place by the window and walked briskly across the room. Her forearm opened with an audible crack, readying a bone sabre to be shot forth into her hand at a single thought. “I bet there are a dozen crystal guards waiting right outside this... door...”

Chrysalis blinked. The only things moving within the drafty hallway were the flames from the ever-present torches lining the cold stone walls, the closest things resembling guards being the odd statue or standing suit of armor. She glanced back into the room, finding nothing else out of place except that Cadence had already lit the fireplace and hung the pot of tea within the hearth to boil.

The changeling queen set her forearm back into place and slowly pulled the door to with a click, chuckling in amusement. “Alright, I’ll play along,” she said, walking back to the semi-circle of seats around the table and taking a cushioned chair directly across from Cadence, keeping the table between the two of them.

The two of them sat in awkward silence, Chrysalis idly tapping a finger on the arm of her seat and staring with an unreadable expression at Cadence, who returned her gaze with only the occasional flick of her ears breaking her statue-still pose.

“So…?” The changeling queen asked at last.

“Oh, I thought you would start,” said Cadence, a brief look of embarrassment crossing her face.

Chrysalis raised an eyebrow. “I never wanted to talk,” she said flatly. “You came in here with this ridiculous idea, so you start it.”

“Okay, um...” Cadence glanced around briefly, then turned back to her and asked, “How is that, uh, bipedal body working for you?”

Chrysalis’ amused demeanor fell like a lead weight, a frown rising up in its place. “Honestly, I don’t very much like it,” she said, rapping a claw on her black shell which made a slightly hollow ring like a wooden bell. She sighed. “Sure, a harder carapace, and better versatility, but I never thought I’d feel so... far from myself.

“How about you?” asked Chrysalis, a slight grin returning to her face. “How do you cope with being a living crystal? You probably have to watch your step or you’ll shatter if you trip. Heh.”

Cadence shared the laugh. “No,” she said, adopting a more relaxed and conversational tone. “Actually, I was found to be harder than diamond, but I guess a bloodletter’s hellblade doesn’t care since I had to get a prosthetic... And, ah... your breathing smog turned a lighter color, I see. Probably because you've been in a lighter mood recently.” She smiled awkwardly.

“Wait a second,” the queen asked, inclining her head in curiosity. “Prosthetic what?”

Cadence inclined her head downward slightly, scrunching her muzzle in reproach. “Nothing. It must have been somepony else who got a prosthetic, I must have mixed it up,” she quickly sputtered.

Chrysalis glanced at the crystalline mare’s forehead, now noticing that her horn glowed ever so slightly when she spoke, and apparently pulsed in sync with her syllables. “Something about your mouth…” she muttered, “I’m sure of it.”

Cadence threw a hoof in the air. “Moving on!” she chimed with a bright smile. “Hey, just how close did you get with Shining Armor back in Equestria? I swear, if you—”

“The closest we got was sharing a bed,” Chrysalis interrupted, smirking knowingly. “Far from what you’re thinking.”

Cadence regarded her with narrow-eyed suspicion for a moment, then nodded. “Good.”

A low yet clear whistling noise attracted their attention to the fireplace, where the lid of the hanging pot was rattling and letting out short puffs of vapor. The crystal princess smiled as she took it in a telekinetic grasp, lifting it gently from the hook and bringing it over to the table. She took note of the three boxes of varying color and markings upon the tray, an easy smile gracing her face as she opened them one by one and scanned the teabags with the appraising eye of a connoisseur.

“You know, I always wondered,” Cadence said absently, her smile brightening as she levitated out a few packets of silverish-brown powder from a box she realized had come from the Elven Inner Kingdom of Avelorn. “Did you ever have a stallion in your life, before? Or, did the Changelings ever have a king?”

She placed the bags into several waiting cups, then again magically lifted the pot and began gently pouring the tea, not spilling a drop. She nearly raised an eyebrow when she realized that she had received nothing but silence to her question, but simply shrugged it off and decided to move on regardless.

“Anyway, I met Shining—”

CRASH!

A black fist came smashing through the table between them, sending hot tea and shards of pottery leaping into Cadence’s face. She yelped in surprise and flinched back, instinctively covering her face with her forelimbs, although her diamond-hard body made such a reaction unnecessary.

“What—” she began, but stopped and gasped in shock when she saw Chrysalis breathing deep and furiously, surrounded by the remains of the table and pottery. Her head hung low to the floor, a curtain of dark cerulean hair shrouding her face from view.

The queen eventually seemed to calm down, gradually slouching back into her chair and burying her face in her hands, her chest heaving as if she were sobbing. Before Cadence could muster enough wits to understand what was going on, Chrysalis pulled her fingers away to reveal reddened, teary eyes that stared at her with a look of deep pain and sorrow.

“So...” she muttered plaintively, reclining back in her seat with a sigh of resignation, “I suppose you want an explanation for that?”

Cadence blinked, releasing a breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. She settled back into her normal sitting position, beginning to gather up the shattered tea set and splintered pieces of wood from the floor.

After what seemed like an eternity, Chrysalis’ voice finally broke the silence. “Yes,” she said simply. “I had a stallion. It was centuries ago in, what you once called, the ‘Forsaken Forest’; right in the pocket between the Griffin Kingdoms, Germaneigh, and Equestria.“

A wistful smile crossed Chrysalis’ face, and she laid her hands back on the edge of her seat in a more relaxed posture. “I even had my own kingdom right next to another,” she said. “Tell me, have you ever heard of the Flutterponies?”

Cadence blinked in bemusement, but nodded. “Isn’t that just a bedtime story?” she asked. “A fairy tale?”

Chrysalis snorted in reply. “If they are,” she said archly, “Then explain how you’re talking to their... former queen.”

Cadence’s magical aura evaporated, dropping several shards of the broken tea cups back to the floor. Her eyes widened as she stared at the bipedal changeling, her mouth moving yet making no sound.

“Yes,” Chrysalis said simply, smirking at her shocked expression.

“B... But you look nothing like them,” Cadence said pointedly, frowning in consternation. “Even when you were normal—”

“I’ll get to that…” Chrysalis interrupted, sighing, “I’ll get to that.” She positioned her hands in front of her like a picture frame, clearing her throat before continuing.

“Our kingdoms were in a perfect spot, with three-way trade between the greatest countries of the Celestine Empire Pact,” she said, holding three fingers out in a triangle and closing them together. “I figured that if we combined our lands, we could become an even greater influence in the region. So I married their prince, Honor Bound, and our countries were merged.”

“Was Honor Bound a Flutterpony, as well?” asked Cadence.

“Well... no,” Chrysalis replied awkwardly, giving a small shrug. “But ours would have been the first marriage between our two races in centuries. The PR boost certainly didn’t hurt, either,” she added with a wry smirk.

Cadence met her eyes with a curious look. “So you married for the publici—”

“Hrmph; no, no,” The queen scoffed. “We truly did love each other. We just didn’t know of the rarity of our union until the day after the tower bells chimed.”

The crystal princess made a thoughtful humming noise, tilting her head as she considered the words. “And what was the…” she paused, searching for the proper term, “‘Fallout’, from this rare-but-not-altogether-unprecedented union?”

Chrysalis huffed a laugh. “Oh, the Flutterponies were as ecstatic as could be that I had found love and happiness,” she said with a smile, which gradually fell away to a flat yet amused expression. “But there were some more… prideful stallions from the normal ponies who didn’t take kindly to me. I had to look away from some displays of fly swatters with crude caricatures of my face smeared on them.

“Some counties started rolling out Jim Crow laws, after the Griffon warlord, without royal approval, and they effectively made the western half of the kingdom segregated. It wasn’t long before my husband and I put forth desegregation laws and had to enforce them at spearpoint against crowds shouting, ‘Nothing but dung beetles!’ ‘I don’t want to see fillies with a roach’s head!’”

“The world must have been a very different place then,” Cadence said.

“It was, but when they realized the world wasn’t ending, things calmed down. For a time after, things were quite good; but all it took was the inescapable destroyer called ‘time’ to start us downhill.” she said, her expression grim. “My husband and I started drifting apart. I wanted to save our marriage, so I created a love potion; something that would give us just the kick we needed to light the spark in our relationship again.”

Chrysalis paused with a frown, sighing deeply. “We drank without even testing it first, and it didn’t work the way I’d hoped. Love poison would have been a better name for it.”

Cadence blinked, her eyes narrowing slightly. “Why would you use the very first version of something like that on yourself?”

“Because I invented it! How often does anyone think that far?” Chrysalis exclaimed, throwing her arms in the air. “‘Once I get up, how do I get back down?’ ‘Once it starts, how do we stop it?’ ‘What if something goes wrong?’ No one thinks ahead, and I’m no exception.

“Besides, I was young, in love, and too excited to even consider the consequences. For two whole years we were completely engrossed in each other; no one could separate us, and thus our duties went untended, leaving our collective lands to stagnate and decay. Attempts by ponies at coups and assassinations came from all levels of society to get rid of us, but our security and military barely managed to suppress them. The Flutterponies only added fuel to the fire by responding in equal or greater violence against the attacks on Honor and I. The kingdom nearly fell apart with countless riots and, with the attack of a particularly malicious and greedy dragon on our capital, it finally did.

“My beloved was slain that day. I watched him throw his spear into the dragon’s eye, just as its fiery breath burned him, and I just…” her voice became choked, and she wiped away a tear before continuing.

“I completely lost it. I remember what I felt... so much hatred, denial and sadness, and the effects of the poison only amplified it all. I turned into a monster, and since the Flutterponies were telepathically linked with our antennae, they felt all of the pain I did and followed suit. It was slow at first; my eyes becoming thinner, fur falling out in clumps, then I started waking up in cold sweats, finding this black slime hardening to my body that would be my shell, and my legs bent into knotty holes.”

“The Changelings,” Cadence muttered knowingly.

Chrysalis nodded. “Precisely.”

“But how did…” Cadence paused to look the queen over with a critical eye, “Well, how did that end up with you having to feed off of love the way you do?”

“Try to imagine, if you will, O ‘Goddess of Love’,” the queen replied sardonically, “The sheer amount of pain and despair you would feel if your beloved prince, Shining Armor were to meet with an untimely end.”

The eyes of the crystal princess narrowed dangerously at Chrysalis, and her horn flared with a bright red light that cast most of her upper body in a baleful crimson glow.

“That wasn’t a threat,” Chrysalis amended quickly, shaking her head. Cadence’s light dimmed to nothing almost as quickly as it appeared, though she still kept a wary eye trained on the clawed bipedal figure across from her.

“I can tell you firsthand what I felt that day so very long ago,” Chrysalis continued, laying a hand over her chest. “It was a feeling of absolute despair, a cold void of emptiness; as if a greater part of my heart, my very soul, had been ripped away.”

Chrysalis leaned back, folding her arms across her torso. “And all that was left was hunger,” she muttered. “A burning hunger, such as no ordinary mortal could ever feel, not if he were left to wander in a trackless, barren wasteland for days on end without food or drink. It was a hunger of the soul. I was bereft of that which I had treasured for so long, that which had become as much a part of me as life itself. Love.”

Chrysalis spared a glance across the room, finding the crystal princess looking at her with abject pity in her eyes. A brief pang of anger and revulsion flashed across the queen’s face, but she simply gave a barely-perceptible shrug of her shoulders and continued.

“Perhaps one could learn to... cope with such a loss, given time…” she paused, sighing heavily, “...but I was in no position nor mood to wait. I wanted him back, yet I could not have him again, so I became angry and hateful. I wanted everything to go back to the peaceful way it was, yet it would never be the same again, so I sank into despair. My wounds never healed; they festered and seethed, crying out to be filled, to be made whole once more.

“I forgot who I was. I forgot the kingdom I once ruled. I wailed aloud for the pain to end, for something, anything, to fill the cold void left within my heart. The hunger drove me mad, causing me to regress to my most primal desires and urges...”

The queen glanced back at Cadence, smirking thinly as the crystalline mare nervously flicked her gaze to the floor and returned her attentions to cleaning up the rest of the mess.

“I don’t remember when exactly it happened,” Chrysalis continued. “But yes; the hunger, aided by the effects of the love poison, eventually turned me and my subjects into creatures whose sole overriding purpose was to feed. Feed on that which was once so precious to us, what we treasured as a virtue and as one of the most beautiful, sacred things in the world. Love became little more than base sustenance to us; we could hardly even feel it anymore ourselves, since we had forgotten what it felt like. All we cared about was devouring it wherever it may be found, to soothe the savage hunger that threatened to consume us from within our very souls.

“I still hear—” Chrysalis’ voice failed her again, and she paused for several moments to wipe away the new tears running in rivulets down her cheeks. Finally, she shakily continued, “I still hear the screams of all the ponies of the kingdom as Tambledon burned, their faces as they were put in cocoons and sent to sleep with false dreams of peace and normality. And in one brief moment of clarity, I saw it all through my old eyes.”

Chrysalis’ expression grew dark, her respiration smog turning black. “They. All. Looked. The same.” she muttered slowly, her voice becoming choked with angry sobs. “Every single one. Every one of my precious little Flutterponies, mutated into monstrous shells of their former selves, doomed to a life of hunger and dearth, not even knowing nor remembering that they used to be full, hale and proud…”

She pulled at one of her chitin plates, hoping to find a layer of autumn-orange fur, but only slimy green muscle and hard tendons was under it, reflecting the light of the fireplace. She grimaced, biting back another tear, and let the plate slap back down.

“It was all my fault,” Chrysalis murmured, her voice barely audible. “Everything. All because I was too blind, too young and foolish to understand or think about the consequences of my recklessness.”

She gave a sad, sarcastic laugh. “Oh, how the Ruinous Powers would have reacted if they had seen so much delicious irony. A queen beloved and respected by her people, dooming her entire nation with the force of love. Love!”

Chrysalis’ laughter faded after several moments, her expression contorting into a vicious snarl as she took both arms of her chair in a grip strong enough to crush solid granite. “My entire race,” she hissed slowly, “My whole kingdom, everything. All of it broken, gone and forgotten to the winds of history, and it’s ALL. MY. FAULT!”

CRACK!

Silence reigned in the chamber, punctuated by the crackling of the fireplace and the steady tick-tock of a grandfather clock standing against a distant wall. The changeling queen’s breathing gradually calmed down, and she sank back into her chair with a sigh.

“I’m sorry...”

Chrysalis’ half-lidded eyes flicked open fully, and she finally noticed her chair with its splintered arms so bent and misshapen it might have been put there by a careless giant. Raising her gaze upward, she found a tearful Cadence sitting in a withdrawn slouch and staring dejectedly at the floor.

“What are you talking about?” the queen asked, scoffing. “You wanted to know, so—”

“No, I mean—” Cadence paused, wiping away a tear. “I’m sorry about everything that happened to you. And I’m sorry for digging up such painful memories—”

“It’s done,” Chrysalis interrupted, waving a clawed hand dismissively. “There’s no need to apologize for things that happened countless years ago. I’ve learned my lessons since then, anyway.”

“I… I have to know,” said Cadence. “Why did you tell me about all this? You could have just declined to comment.”

That question gave Chrysalis pause. The queen’s slitted pupils bored into Cadence’s own eyes for almost a full minute, causing the crystal princess to fidget uncomfortably.

“Because,” Chrysalis responded at last, her tone somber and wistful. “You remind me of myself.”

That statement caught Cadence off-guard, causing her to blink and move her mouth wordlessly for several moments before she found her voice. “Wh… what?” she asked. “What do you mean?”

“Your aura is so rich, so pure…” Chrysalis murmured, “The kind of fresh and innocent love I believed in, and much the same as the last flickers I felt before my prince and I drank our lives away.”

Chrysalis leaned forward with an almost pleading look on her face. “Don’t do what I did.” she said, emphatically drawing out every word. “If anything happens between you and Shining, work it out, but do not try to manufacture a solution. I’d hate to see a crystalline version of myself.”

Cadence regarded the queen’s expression in silence for several moments, before nodding solemnly and laying a hoof over her chest. “I won’t,” she said. “I promise you that if things ever become strained between me and Shining, I will do my best to resolve the problem directly, without resorting to any shortcut or magical caprice.”

“Thank you,” Chrysalis murmured, nodding gratefully.

As silence fell upon the room once more, Cadence turned her attention back to the floor to finish cleaning up the rest of the mess. Just before she started, though, she looked back up at the queen, who sat with one hand propping up her chin and her eyes closed deep in thought. “I just have one question, though,” she asked. “What happened to the ‘Love Poison’?”

“Ah, yes,” Chrysalis said in a pained tone, sighing wearily. “I thought that I had every record of the poison’s recipe destroyed, every word referring to it burned so no one would ever repeat my mistake.

“Several years ago, however, these three fillies in Ponyville somehow found a copy and used it. Their victims, this ‘Big Macintosh’ and ‘Cheerilee’...” Chrysalis paused, grimacing, “I sensed the explosion of love between them all the way in the forest, and it pained me so much to feel it. I made sure to watch the drone I sent destroy that accursed book once and for all.

“And those fillies...” Her claw clenched into a fist. “If they still live, then when I find them, they will know not to mess with powers they don’t understand.”

Fellblade stood at the crest of a hill overlooking Middenheim, taking in the opening rays of morning sunshine and the blended layers of purple, orange, and blue on the horizon. He lowered his eyes to his destination, a sprawling fortress city standing tall and proud on a massive plateau, its walls and capped towers brandishing banners of a wolf’s head on a vibrant blue and white background. Just beyond its borders was a deep and wide ditch, the bodies and skeletons of long-dead skaven coating the bottom and hanging by nooses from the walls by the dozens.

“Have any of you ever been here before?” Fellblade said as he turned back to his prisoners, who were ragged and limp-headed after being put to forced march for the last leg of the route.

When none of them answered, Fellblade tipped Vinyl’s head up by the chin, glaring hatefully into her lantern-like eye. “This is where the first Storm of Chaos came to a screeching, devastating halt,” he said in a low, dangerous tone. “This is where the Arch-Enemy nearly met his end.

“This is where a million of you monsters fell, and I hope you feel their corpses in the ground under every hoofstep from here to the wall.”

He let her go, her head flopping back down. Turning back to his troops, Fellblade cried out, “Sound our approach!”

One Crusader licked his lips and blew a long, deep note on a wide-mouthed cornu horn. A few moments later, another note, a half pitch higher, reported back from the city walls.

Fellblade nodded fractionally, waving his hoof in the direction of the looming White City of Ulric. “Onward!"

Author's Note

This is a Flutterpony
Geography of Equestria and beyond taken from the Where the World Ends Wiki. See if you can spot the Forbidden Forest and Tambledon: Link

Chapter 22: Den of the White Wolf

“If one forged a plot, so complex, so impossibly convoluted; so full of simultaneous and interwoven, even contradictory conspiracies that destroy one another, where one plot fails another one immediately begins to pick up where it left off and take it in a completely different direction, it would still not be as complex as those devised by the Changer of Ways.”
- Phoenix King Finubar the Seafarer, speaking of Tzeentch

“But we are the founders!” Scootaloo pleaded to one of the Crusaders as Sweetie Belle was thrown into a prison cell with her. “We started out in a tree house! Babs Seed is Apple Bloom’s cousin! Tell her we’re here!”

The soldier simply ignored the mutant pegasus, and slammed and locked the cell. Scootaloo grunted in frustration, shoving her head between the bars and frantically waving a hoof towards the crusader’s back as he walked away.

“Wait! Come back!” she called out desperately. “Please! We didn’t do anything wrong!”

Sweetie Belle rose to her hooves, grimacing in distaste at the cold and featureless gray walls all around them.

“Well…” she said sheepishly, “There was that one time when I accidentally burned down that village, and Apple Bloom ate through half of the dead people in a single all-night sitting—”

“That’s not helping!” Scootaloo snapped at her, then jumped back to the bars. “I’m pretty much your boss! Come back!”

Upon entering the city of Middenheim, Captain Fellblade and the rest of the Crusaders had force-marched them through the streets, people gathering from all around to gawk and hurl insults at the impromptu triumphal parade. They had been disappointed to find that they were being taken to a separate dungeon in the city, rather than the one in the palace as Twilight had originally thought. None of their captors so far had shown even the slightest interest in any of their protests, and they had all been locked into cells to languish for however long they saw fit, or until they’d be brought to the surface to face the reiksmarshall.

Twilight, however, didn’t look like she could wait that long. Having reverted back to her normal form soon before reaching Middenheim, her thirst had come back with a vengeance. Her coat had paled to a ghostly light purple, and black bags hung under her bloodshot eyes.

“Sir... please,” Twilight rasped, weakly hanging her hoof out between the bars of her cell. “I need... a drink...”

“You should have thought about the need for blood before turning to the dark gods, mutant,” Fellblade spat back.

Powerless, Twilight slumped against the bars, her breathing raspy and weak. She stared at his muscular form silently as he paced up and down the hall, a couple drops of drool pattering on the stone floor below.

Pinkie Pie was huddled up with a muzzle over her mouth, tightly holding her stitched wound which squirmed under her skin. Once in awhile, she’d involuntarily kick as the wound was jostled.

Two more of the Crusaders were escorting the Doctor and Fluttershy through the dungeon, the soldiers casting nervous glances towards the latter. Ultimately, the ten-foot tall metal juggernaut had been covered in rotten food, garbage, and some brown squishy masses that she really wanted to assume was mud that were thrown from the hateful people and ponies lining the streets all the way to the prison. She remained silent as she followed the soldiers down the corridor, a lot more afraid of them than they were of her.

“Can’t we put her in an ogre’s hold?” one remarked, his eyes roving critically over each too-small cell door. “She can’t fit through any of these.”

Fluttershy swallowed uncomfortably. “Um, actually, I think I can get in here, just let me...” she trailed off as she walked towards one of the cells.

The Doctor smirked knowingly, hunkering down on the floor and covering his head both both forehooves. The soldiers glanced at him, then back to the juggernaut.

“Hey, what are you—?”

Cree-eeeeerrr!

One teeth-rattling moment later, the soldiers watched slack-jawed as Fluttershy walked through the ironbars that she had twisted like overcooked noodles. She turned back to the door and bent them back to their original shape, accidentally snapping one out of place, which went whizzing an inch over the Doctor’s head and clattered against the stone wall.

“Sorry...” She stepped out, brought it back, and tried to slide it back into place, successfully.

“Get back out here!” ordered one of the soldiers after he had recovered his wits enough to speak. “The bars are useless, now!”

“B-b-but I wouldn’t dream of walking out. Besides, they couldn’t stop me from just bending them with my bare paws, so what hope would there be in the bars keeping me in? I feel so safe from all those people who threw all this stuff at me.” she said, giving the wall a few light punches with her claw. “Thick walls, one way in, one way out... and best of all, we’ll finally get fixed once we see...”

Fluttershy hesitated as she saw the Doctor silently mouthing ‘No!’ and shaking his head violently. Finally, she sighed and finished, “Besides, It’s just... safe.”

“Sir, should we leave it like this?” one soldier asked, turning to Fellblade who was just passing the cell.

The captain took a long look at the shaken monster. “It’s a juggernaut that talks of peace and safety. It must be brain-damaged, so what have we to fear?” he said with a lingering wonder at her nature. “Put the other one in the next cell over.”

“Yes, sir!” the two soldiers said in unison, snapping a smart salute.

The two-thousand pound scrap metal heap of Big Mac was hauled along by several Crusaders, popping sparks where his iron hide scraped the floor. He was dumped in one on one corner of a cell, his family’s severed heads on the other side, placed so they could face each other.

Applejack could barely turn on the stump of her neck, looking between Braeburn, Apple Bloom, and the mechanical stallion whose breath came in small steaming plumes from his nostrils. Each night before, Braeburn spoke to her. Each night when the soldiers were asleep, a cloud of flies would stuff themselves into his neck, vibrating their wings in unison to make a wind through his vocal cords. His voice was barely even a whisper, but in the sack, his lips were right in Applejack’s ear. She herself couldn’t respond, couldn’t object to him as he silently tried to persuade her, preaching Nurgle’s everlasting love for her, him, all of his children.

”Y’all woulda been dead if it weren’t fer Him. The instant them Crusaders cut off our heads, it woulda been lights out, but He don’t let His babies die so easy. We’re all deathless, AJ. Why can’tcha thank Him fer savin’ yer life?”

Then upon the conclusion of his final personal sermon, he had bitten her ear and the sensation of every disease and malady the Plague Lord inflicted her with came to her nerves like the spikes of an iron maiden. Her inflamed brain pounded like a storm in the warp and she was cast into the throes of her worst infection, Nurgle’s Rot. Her severed head was motionless, yet Braeburn could see her pain as yellowed tears streamed from Applejack’s shaking, rolled back eyes.

“It hurts, don’t it, AJ? He can make it stop. Just accept Him. Accept that He’ll always be there fer you, that all He does is a labor ‘a love.”

And here she was now. The pain having stopped.

The rest were accounted for in good order; Vinyl Scratch, Octavia, Lyra, Rarity, and Kivsin. Satisfied, Fellblade made his way back to the stairs and paused when he was met by a snarling, gnashing face that jumped at him from a cell. Twilight snapped her fangs at him in bestial fury and hunger, like a starved lion chained just out of reach of a fat goat. Her skin threatened to tear against the bars with the force that she was throwing herself at him and her hooves were so close, so close. The captain didn’t even flinch, chuckling in wry amusement.

“You see?” Fellblade said. “That’s what you get; a head full of lies and madness. Soon it leads to being just a mindless, feral animal. Somepony get this one under control! And somepony else, find me a messenger so I can tell the reiksmarshall we have them. I’ll be in the Drowned Rat.”

“Count on me with the purple one, sir,” one of the pegasi crusaders said, snapping off a smart salute. Fellblade nodded in his direction and promptly made for the stairs, followed by Twilight’s starved scream as her potential sustenance walked away.

As the crusader went to Twilight’s pen, a putrid smell pierced his nostrils; the stench of something burning. He peered inside, noticing smoke emanating from Twilight’s magic suppressor.

“Cease your magic, creature!” he snapped.

The monster was deaf to him, still screeching and straining against the bars. Her suppressor started to fry and melt, sparks and a deep lavender aura slowly beginning to materialize.

“Stop!” he shouted, his voice tinged with fear.

“Sir,” the Doctor muttered worriedly, backing further into his cell with a knowing grimace. “You’re going to want to run very far, very fast.”

The soldier’s lower lip quivered for a moment, then he pulled his sword free with a somewhat jerky motion.

“No!” he said, leveling his gaze at Twilight in defiance. “I’ll do whatever must be done!”

He plunged the sword forth.

Snap! Poof!

The blade pierced nothing, save a dissipating black fog where the daemon had been mere moments ago and the molten, broken suppressor that slid off the sharpened edge onto the floor. The soldier drew his weapon back in confusion—

And then he noticed a large shadow cast over him, then a very hot wind blowing at the nape of his neck. He turned around to face a very large, very hungry-looking white-purple alicorn looming over him.

Before he could even react, she widened her fanged maw and roared a flaming haze that immediately engulfed him, rapidly melting the hapless soldier into a pile of throbbing, bloody, organic pulp.

The rest of the Crusaders charged, weapons raised to strike. In response, she quickly flapped her wing facing them and produced a gust of wind that launched them back across the floor in a tumbling wave.

She disappeared again in another puff of smoke, and one of the soldiers’ screams was muffled by her teeth stabbing his throat and almost immediately drinking up every drop in him, leaving a mummified husk. In the time it took the rest of the soldiers to turn around, she was on the next one, then the next, teleporting faster than they could react.

The last one managed to barely escape the panicked slaughter, quaking in an obscured corner of the dungeon and praying to his necklace charm displaying a solar eclipse with a twin-tailed comet streaking across it.

“...and He on high, our savior Sigmar, carried ponykind to safety and united us with the realm of man. Celestia, our guiding light, our Angel of the Sun, rose again so that we may see a better tomorrow. Luna, our Mistress of the Night, Thy unblinking eye in Heaven be ever watchful over Thy flock—”

He snapped his mouth shut as he saw Twilight’s blood-soaked muzzle round the corner, fangs and tongue outstretched in a snakelike display. He held his breath, and slowly, shakily raised his halberd.

He felt something warm and wet run down his lip, then red droplets floating from his muzzle, through the air and into the monster’s mouth which was illuminated in a purple glow. His blood soon leaked out of his eyes, mouth, and he desperately lunged forward to strike the monster. It simply pulled back, drawing more sustenance out of him, faster until he was too weak to get back up, to move, or breathe.

Spike sat cross-legged at the top of a shaded hill, warm sunlight streaming through the branches of the oak tree above him and playing across his face. He breathed in deeply, his steel lamellar armor—which had to be recast after his earlier encounter with Screwball—rising and falling in a steady rhythm. His outburst at Celestia some time ago, though cathartic, was a sign that he needed to resume his meditation practices so as not to be subject to the whim of his anger.

‘A clear self, body and mind. In... and out…’ He took a deep breath, letting it out slowly. ’I am one with myself, the High Gods, and all in between. In... and out...’

His reverie was interrupted as something firm, yet soft like a teddy bear poked his temple. He sighed inwardly, resisting the urge to facepalm.

’Asuryan’s mercy, she found me.’

Poke.

“Stop it...” he muttered.

Poke.

“Stop it...”

Poke.

“Stop it...”

Poke poke poke poke po—

He wheeled around in a blur of motion, gripping the head of his tormentor in a claw. Screwball gave a surprised squeak like a rubber duck, ruefulness and mirth dancing in an unearthly paradox within her spiraling eyes.

Spike brought his arm down, burying her head into the ground like an ostrich. Without missing a beat, he returned to his former posture, resuming his controlled breaths.

’One vision, one purpose, one truth. In… and out...’

The filly gave muffled sounds of protest as she wrestled with the soil, until she finally tugged her head free in a spray of dirt, and spat a mouthful of earthworms all over Spike’s lap. He groaned in exasperation, dragging the palm of a claw over his face. Getting up, he walked away into the sunlight, wiping off his armor skirt.

“Sorry, unca Spike!” giggled Screwball, floating after him.

He glanced at her in contempt. “Sorry for spitting on me, or trying to shoot me?”

“Hey-hey-hey, yuu tried to kill me furst! I wuz just minding my oan bidnizz—”

“Turning ponies into chaos cultists for Discord.”

“It wuz just Davenport!” Screwball said indignantly, pouting at his interruption. “He’s gonna leed the whole thing, cus he’s speshal to me!”

Spike raised a brow. “Special? How?”

“Som’n ‘bout me taking over the bodeh of his fee-ahn-cay and that he’ll do anyting to be with her. Duworry’ baht’ it.”

Spike glanced over to make sure she said that with a straight face, only to find her playing a trumpet made of macaroni and dripping with cheese. She pulled it away, licking her lips of the cheddar goo.

“Or maybe he just owed me twenny bits... meh,” she shrugged, and continued tooting away.

As she hit the high note of her somber melody, Spike lashed out with a claw, crunching the instrument all over her face.

“That mare, crying into Davenport’s shoulder… she was the one whose body you stole?” he asked in a low voice.

Screwball’s tongue extended and swept across her face, licking it clean of the viscous cheesy liquid once again. She waved a hoof in a so-so fashion. “Nyeehh, not stole. She was always a tight-plot neat freak. Everything in her life, she had a schedule for, and everything had to be perfect.”

Screwball started chasing her own tail like a dog. “I wuz her fun-fun-funny side that she kept supprezzing, the yang to the yin that ruled her lyfe! When Daddy wehnt nuts on Ponyville, he let me outta her head, gaiv me her body as mine, and tuuk me in as his own!”

“And why do you keep following me?” Spike asked.

“Cuz you’re my daddy’s friend’s friend’s former roommate!”

Spike counted on four fingers. ’Discord, Fluttershy, Twilight, then… me?’

“And what does that make us?” he asked.

“Absolutely nothing!” Screwball beamed, shaking her hooves for emphasis.

Spike sighed, shaking his head. “Don’t you have somewhere to be?” he said pointedly. “Isn’t Discord missing his little girl, or something?”

“Nah, he knows where I am. I just wanted to see if I can cheer you up, cuz you always look sad or ticked off,” she said, then popped off her cap and shook it, dumping out a full-sized leather armchair and long couch. She pushed Spike down to sit on it and took her own position in the chair, snuggled up in a fleecy red robe and smoking a polished pipe that blew out balloon animals.

“Is there anything you wanna talk about? Problems at home, friends, family?” Screwball asked in a deep, sagely tone of voice.

Spike grumbled in consternation, rising from the couch and walking away. “No,” he said firmly. “And I think you should leave.”

“Hey, don’tchoo walk out of my office! Sweet jeebuz, he went right through the wall!”

Spike groaned in frustration. Without turning around, he bared his teeth and growled, “Just get out of here!”

“Nooooooo!” she whined, springing forward to hug his leg tightly. “I wanna hang out!”

“Get off!” Spike snapped, shaking and kicking to dislodge her.

“Nooooooo-b-bl-b-lb-bl-!”

“What in the world?!”

Screwball’s body dissolved like butter, conforming around Spike’s frame as she swam up his legs. Spike frantically slapped and tried to pull her off, but her body was stretchy as taffy and she fought him tooth and nail at every turn, and soon his arms were firmly locked in place as she wrapped around his torso like a straight jacket.

“Ewe need to lighten up, Unca Spike!” Screwball giggled, stretching her neck around like a snake to look at his face with her playfully spinning eyes. “Strezz is bad fur ya, you know! Heer that?”

Spike stopped for but a moment, hearing a throng of shouting voices in the near distance. “See?” Screwball asked. “Boath our hedds are screeming at us to calm down, so take a load off!”

Spike growled in rage, struggling to pull free of the chaotic filly, who laughed and jeered all the while. Walking blindly, he eventually stumbled into the railing at the edge of the hill and lost his balance.

‘OH, SH—’

His legs buckled beneath him, causing him to pitch over the fence like a sack of potatoes. Spike cried out aloud as he fell, while Screwball simply gave a long ‘whee!’ all the way down the short cliff face to the cobblestone street below.

CRASH!

Spike landed on his front, the impact knocking the wind out of him and leaving a spiderweb of cracks snaking outward along the stones all around his body. He moaned in pain, dizziness, and at the sheer indignity of being brought low in such a manner.

Just as he was about to open his mouth to berate the filly, he felt the vise-grip of her body around his arms loosen. Blinking in surprise, he pushed himself up to a kneeling position, turning his head—and then he found Screwball shaking behind his back, her face locked into an expression of shock and her lower lip trembling with terror.

Spike instinctively raised the frills down the back of his head and neck, and they tingled sharply as they sensed a massive chaotic presence not far away. He snapped his head back around, tracing Screwball’s field of vision—

‘Asuryan’s blood, what in the...’

Dozens of withered, dried bodies lay flat on their faces in the street which was conspicuously devoid of a single living pedestrian, almost all of them having fallen in the same general forward direction. Several of them appeared to possess multiple pairs of black-tinged puncture marks on their necks, spaced very close together.

Spike quickly got to his feet. “Go someplace safe, Screwball,” he said in a low voice.

“Mmhm,” she muttered fearfully, quickly detaching herself from Spike’s armor as she was sucked into her propeller beanie like a vacuum.

As Screwball buzzed and flew away, Spike reached behind his back and unstrapped his shield and greatsword with quick, practiced motions. His face grim, he set off with great strides down the corpse-littered street in the direction of the warp signature.

“Feet apart, soldier.”

Sergeant Norbsteim tapped his pistol against the leg of one of his men, who adjusted his stance with his spear held overhand.

He held the handle of his pistol tightly, returning his gaze to the makeshift barricade that his ten men had hastily erected at the door of one of the city’s guard towers. Their formation was in a loose semicircle, all facing the door with weapons drawn and ready. Whatever might come in would be instantly surrounded on three sides. Behind the gate, he could hear panicked screaming and running from men and women, as well as numerous loose objects being broken and tossed about the streets.

Soon came the sound of a choked scream, which rapidly weakened to silence. There was the tearing of flesh, a feral growl, and the wet thud of a person falling to the ground. The edges of the barricade glowed purple for a brief moment, and the men braced themselves. To their surprise, the glow stopped, but they held their arms tightly nevertheless.

The wall a few feet to the side of the door suddenly blew inward, throwing several men across the room in a flurry of brick and mortar. The others turned to the breach and charged into the smoke.

Norbsteim was right behind them, pressing them onto the offensive. “To the last, men! For the White Wolf of Ulric!”

The dying screams of his men reached his ears almost immediately after the words left his lips. He finally spotted the assailant amidst the smoke, and raised his flintlock pistol for a shot.

BANG!

He saw a pop of black fluid erupt from the creature’s shoulder joint, but it didn’t even seem to notice. It quickly leapt away after a moment, leaving the dessicated carcass of one of its victims behind. It immediately charged forward at the next man with a vicious snarl, telekinetically ripping his sword away and burrowing its fangs into his chest.

Norbsteim discarded the empty gun and drew a second pistol, firing another shot which struck the creature in the gut. This only seemed to make it even angrier, as it seized the remaining three soldiers in an invisible grip and raised them into the air. Blood snaked from every pore of their bodies in torrents, flowing through the air and straight into the daemon’s gaping, insatiable maw. It dropped them to the ground a few moments later, their bodies white as snow and shriveled like prunes.

The daemon’s eyes then swiveled to Norbsteim himself, and immediately he felt a stab of raw terror, like a mouse cornered in a grain sack. He cursed as he ripped his sword from its sheath, gritting his teeth as he held the steel out between him and the creature.

The daemon’s horn flashed purple for an instant, and Norbsteim grunted as his sword was knocked out of his grasp by a powerful force, as well as his shoulder pauldrons. The creature shrieked in hunger, and leapt forward.

Norbsteim raised an arm just in time, and the fangs of the daemon pierced straight through the chainmail covering and into warm flesh. It immediately began to feed, and he rapidly noticed himself growing weaker by the second.

“Hey!”

The monster paused, then pulled its fangs free and dropped the rapidly-paling sergeant to the floor of the tower. She turned around to face a seven foot-tall silver-armored figure, brandishing a Hoeth greatsword in one hand. Staring straight at her.

If he didn’t know any better, Spike would have thought that the chaotic presence he sensed was from the sheer bloodshed all around him.

The scene was unnerving. Stalls and carts lay overturned, produce and other small items strewn haphazardly about the sides of the street. The lane itself was a charnel house; numerous bodies, most of them humanoid, lay flat on the stones with almost no sign of blood on or near their bodies. The large spacing between them, as well as the rictus of pure terror frozen onto the faces of a few he could see, made it easy to assume that they had died trying to escape from something.

Spike gritted his teeth, running as fast as he could whilst still keeping his movements and breathing calculated to mitigate the weight of his armor. It helped to focus on his training in situations like these, to remember the motions and go through them deliberately in order to avoid giving his mind over to anger. Control and restraint, as the masters of the Tower of Hoeth had said, was not to be forsaken, even in the most dire of situations.

Although, Spike couldn’t deny that he really wanted to hit something, right about now.

Spike’s honed senses were in full gear, filtering out the odd sounds and distant cries of fear and confusion from the eerie quiet that pervaded the desolate street. He remained focused on the chaotic signature, now growing so strong that he could smell the telltale ozone stink of warp presence. He tightened his grip on his broadsword.

There it was. Straight ahead, he made out what appeared to be a guard tower, a gaping hole eight feet wide punched into the side of the still-intact door; Spike assumed that whoever was—or had been—inside had attempted to barricade themselves within, only for their attacker to make their own way through. His warp-sense was now a powerful throbbing in his skull instead of a tingling, and Spike knew that whatever was causing it was coming from inside the tower.

This was only further proven when he heard a grunt of pain, followed by a hair-raising screech not meant for mortal ears. Muttering a prayer to Asuryan to grant him strength, Spike bolted to the opening in a blur of movement and peered inside.

And there, among a half-score of corpses and facing the far wall of the dark structure, was the daemon.

No mere corrupted mortal, no unlucky beastman or mutant, no incautious heretic dabbling in warp sorcery. This was a true denizen of the Warp. Though its back was turned, Spike could still see enough; It was in the form of a pony, albeit a very large one, standing at least seven full feet above the ground. A huge pair of bat-like membranous wings sat half-stretched from the sides of the creature, flexing along with the movements of the rest of its body.

Spike’s dorsal frills stuck out so stiffly they started to quiver, sending stabs of agony through his spine and tightening every part of his body in sharp tension. Adrenaline suffused his veins, leaving a cool buzzing sensation in its wake, a desperate need to take action.

“Hey!” he barked in challenge.

The creature’s movements stopped entirely for a moment, and then it raised its head and slowly began turning around. Inwardly, Spike cursed his foolishness at ruining the element of surprise, and immediately raised his sword and shield in a battle stance.

As the creature turned, it released hold of what was apparently another of the human guards, his body slumping down to the floor with an ungainly thud. Spike didn’t spare more than a thought for the fate of the poor man, as every iota of his faculties was locked firmly on the daemon. It finally came around, and Spike got a good look at its face.

However, it wasn’t the first time he had seen it.

Spike’s eyes widened, his pent-up resolve doused like a bucket of sand on a fire. His hands grew numb and shook with disbelief, the sword and shield slipping from his grasp to clatter to the stone floor below. He stood paralyzed, shock and disbelief wracking his mind as decade-old memories he had long since suppressed rose back to the surface with a vengeance.

’Spike! Can you believe it? We saved an entire empire!’

’Yeah! And we taught that creep Sombra a lesson, too!’

’What lesson would that be, Spike?’

’Don’t mess with the power of friendship!‘

’Hehe, you’re right… I couldn’t have it without you, my little number one assistant!’

He looked into her eyes, still the same shade of deep purple as he always remembered them. He inwardly smiled a little when he saw the familiar soft lavender glow of her horn, meaning she was about to cast a spell.

Poof!

’Best partners ever, right, Twilight?’

’...mm...lud...’asty...’

’...Twilight? What’d you say?’

’I said your blood’s really tasty, Spike!’

Spike awoke from his reverie to the sensation of sharp fangs punching through his armor and into his shoulder. He drew in a breath sharply, and in an act of reflex gripped Twilight’s snout, grunting as he slowly pried her jaws away.

’She bit right through me!’ Spike thought in disbelief; his natural scales had survived a hail of bullets from Screwball before, but Twilight pierced them like they were bare skin. He quickly glanced over to the bleeding holes in his shoulder, then turned his attention back to Twilight as she bore down on him even harder.

Her eyes were filled with a firestorm of hatred and hunger, her tongue lashing out and reaching for the red fluid dripping from his wounds. Twilight screamed desperately in frustration, wrestling free from his claws and ramming her head straight into his face.

Momentarily disoriented, Spike could do nothing as Twilight reared up, driving her front legs into his torso and shoving him down to the floor with a loud crash.

’Dammit! This is not my day!’

Spike raised his claws just in time, his palms pushing against Twilight’s face as she tried to press closer and closer, snarling and screeching in mad hunger for his blood.

“Twilight, it’s me, Spike! Stop! Please!” he yelled.

It was deaf to him. What was this goat-horned monster on top of him, whose screams pierced his ears and whose face bore the damage of the short resistance of many victims? He couldn't imagine that face, so wrought with anger and directed on him. He had to end it.

’Please, forgive me...’

Spike rammed his right claw into Twilight’s mouth, digging his talons into her lower jaw in a vise grip. Twilight immediately responded by clamping down hard on his fingers, and Spike grunted in pain as he found himself immensely grateful for his iron-hard bones. Twilight then began to feed, her tongue lapping up the fresh blood eagerly—both his, and her own.

Without wasting a moment, Spike shifted his left claw to clasp around Twilight’s neck, and ferociously squeezed her windpipe. Her eyes immediately went wide, and she tried to raise herself up out of his reach; only for Spike to lash out with his mailed legs, kicking Twilight’s rear hooves out from under her and disrupting her balance.

Twilight’s howls and snarls gave way to choked whimpers as she tried to pull away from being strangled, only to be jerked back firmly by Spike’s grip on her jaw. Her eyelids slowly fell and her cheeks started to blacken.

“I’m sorry…” he whispered, a tear running down his cheek.

It felt like an eternity before her resistance finally gave out, and all at once she went limp as a boned fish and flopped on top of his body.

Grunting, Spike rolled her over onto her back and sat up next to her. He couldn’t look at her face, but he did brush the mane off her neck, where the thick marks of his claws were engraved in her skin.

He turned an eye to the sound of a drop, finding a small black pool growing under her and trickling gashes adding more oily slime to the puddle.

’Hospital,’ he thought quickly. ’They’ll know what to do.’

Even then, though, he wouldn’t be able to keep her there long. The district was evacuated, the injured would also be at that hospital. Spike would, however, show his face to terrify a doctor into helping if he had to. Who would deny a furious dragon?

In the meantime, he tore some strips from the clothes of one of the dead soldiers and tied them around his and her gashes as compresses. He could feel his heartbeat in his shoulder, and blood started to drip through the cloth, but he had to get past it and ignore the throbbing pain. He then wrapped Twilight in his cloak with legs folded so she’d be a more compact package to carry. She was much bigger than he remembered, and he leaned her against his body so her head hung over his shoulder.

Norbsteim, trying to get back up, felt his legs give way under him and he fell again, apparently too weak to stand; and also, Spike thought, too disoriented to have properly seen what transpired.

Spike stood with the creature in his arms and his head buzzed in dizziness. He’d lost a lot of blood, and what was left was providing barely enough circulation. He staggered, one step at a time until he exited the tower, then as the rush quieted, he took to greater speed down the evacuated street.

A pair of sterile steel tweezers maneuvered slowly into the blackened hole punched in the surface of purple fur. The owner of the hand behind it had every ounce of his self-control allocated to keeping his arm steady. His instrument felt around for a bit, then encountered a hard, round resistance. He relaxed his fingers, letting the tweezers open and fit around the object, then pinched and pulled up. From the broken skin slipped a bloodsoaked lead ball.

“.45 caliber,” the doctor muttered idly as he inspected the shot. Flipping down the magnifying lenses of his glasses, he found an inscription along the bullet’s circumference that read: ‘Kill the Heretic’.

Into a nearby shallow bowl it went, along with a second ball and bits of similarly-bloodied jagged shrapnel and splinters. His observers looked on in silence, a pall of anxiety draped over them like a blanket.

“What have I done...?” Celestia muttered under her breath, her expression blank and distant.

Spike said nothing, leaning against the wall with both arms crossed and a grim expression on his face.

After some deliberation, Spike had decided to simply write and send a letter to Princess Celestia, rather than trudge through the city and risk drawing attention. After being informed of the situation, Celestia had engaged in a frenzy of teleporting around the streets, eventually finding them both huddled up on the porch of an abandoned chapel in the midst of the evacuated quarter. She had subsequently brought them both to Spike’s room in the palace to avoid arousing suspicion from the guards, and requested a doctor be sent to take care of her.

Plink.

“That’s the other bullet,” the surgeon murmured, placing the bloodsoaked lead ball in his bowl and raising the glasses off his eyes. He wiped down the wound with a rag dipped in alcohol, then pressed on an adhesive patch to cover it.

“Princess, are there any other ailments you've seen?” he asked.

“No,” she said curtly. “You’ve done your charge. You may leave.”

He gave a bow of his head before taking a rag and wiping his face of sweat, packing his tools into a waiting bag, and walking away.

Celestia’s horn shimmered a sunny yellow; at the same time, the doctor stopped at the door with a slightly concerned look like he’d forgotten something. After a few seconds, Celestia relinquished her magic and he turned back to her.

“Be sure she takes one pill every six hours, and the swelling should clear up before the prescription runs out,” he said.

Celestia nodded, and no sooner had the door closed behind the departing doctor with a click that she slumped over, tears falling from her eyes as all the anxiety and emotion she had been forced to contain came back with a vengeance.

Twilight lay in the bed, black-stained bandages around her shoulder and abdomen, and a bracing block in the back of her mouth to hold her broken jaw in place while it healed. Parts of her cheeks were flayed away from the glancing blows of swords and her cuts almost invisibly burned with tiny warp flames, ever-so-slowly healing them. Only her original magic horn remained, the others having been filed away down to her temples.

“So, I guess your little deal with Tzeentch is done.”

The princess turned, regarding Spike with an incredulous expression. ”Excuse me?”

“This is almost how it was all planned, wasn’t it?” Spike remarked with clinical detachment. “You shelter her, help her grow up, and then once Chaos wants her, ship her off to the Wastes and save your own plot.”

“Spike, you do not speak to your princess in such a derogatory manner!” she snapped.

“Then with all due respect, my loyalty currently lies with Princess Cadence and Ulthuan,” the dragon remarked, then scowled and looked into her eyes.

“What else did you talk to Tzeentch about? Would you have surrendered half of Equestria to him, too?”

“I did what I had to for the safety of all of Equestria, the entire world!” Celestia shot back indignantly.

Spike pushed off the wall, stifling a grunt as he lowered his bandaged arm. “But why in the way you did? Why raise her to be so happy, have so much to live for, and then...” he snapped his fingers sharply, “...just take it all away? Why not just lock her in a dungeon and feed her a daffodil pedal a day, or send her to the moon for twenty years and not even have to look at her?”

Celestia cringed, looking back to her former student turned bat-winged alicorn. The sheets above her chest slowly rose and fell, her expression relaxed and mouth hanging open slightly. The princess bit her lip; she had seen that same look on Twilight’s face so many times before, when she was still a young filly and gone to sleep in Canterlot Castle after a hard day’s work, with an insatiable thirst for knowledge, and always looking forward to the experiences of the next day.

“I thought—” Celestia began, but choked up and closed her eyes before she could continue. “I thought that there was a chance that the Changer of Ways was lying, that he didn’t have the power, or that he could be stopped. Then... then perhaps she wouldn’t have to leave.”

She gently laid a gold-plated hoof on Twilight’s chest, feeling the steady rhythm of her heartbeat. “After Luna had fallen, I saw the families of Equestria in a new light, as something sacred for those in it. Twilight had her mother and father at home, but her life of studies was lonely, alone in the library and observatory. I wondered if I could be her second family, away from her home, with Cadence and Shining Armor. Then maybe... I could keep her as my own.”

“And did you think this far?” Spike asked, scowling. “When, or if, she wakes up and isn’t still bloodthirsty, the first thing she’ll ask will probably be if she and her friends can be cured. How do you think she’ll react to being told she was born this way, and that no one has any idea how to fix this!?”

“The Elements of Harmony—”

“You said it yourself, the Elements are gone!” Spike threw an arm to the window. “The Everchosen took them from the Ponyville library, and even if he can’t use them, even if he doesn’t know what they are, we can’t, either!”

Spike’s words hung in the air for several moments, a thick silence falling upon the room like a final death knell. Celestia’s head dipped low in admonishment, hot tears staining her milk-white cheeks in forked lines of pallid gray.

“I can’t wait to see what Cadence and Shining Armor think when they see her,” Spike said, huffing a dry laugh. “Tick-tock, Princess. Tick. Tock.”

“I—” Celestia choked out, then forced her sobs to cease and gained a little control over her expression again. “I need to think.”

“You’ve had a thousand years to plan for this moment. I’m sure after a couple more hours, you’ll come up with something.”

Celestia glanced up, taking in Spike’s cold and venomous stare for a moment. Closing her eyes with a weary sigh, the Princess of the Sun briefly lit her horn and disappeared in a flash of golden light.

Spike would spend the next few hours in the room, not just because it was the guest room he was given in Middenplatz, but mostly to watch over Twilight. He didn’t want her to see the injury in his shoulder, at least not yet, and so he wore the blue and gold undergarment that usually went beneath his armor to hide the bandaging.

The whole time he was putting it on, he wondered if the creature that attacked him was just an episode Twilight had, or if she was already lost. He glanced at his sword which leaned against the wall before blasting the lucid thought from his head with an angry shake.

‘It’s no coincidence she’s here. She came because she wanted to.

That evening, he slept in the chair since Twilight had his bed, but he didn’t sleep. He was kept up by the gnawing doubt until somber-eyed Morr descended and cast sleep over his eyes.

Spike shot up from his sleep suddenly with a yelp, his heart throbbing, breathing in strained gasps, and looked about himself. His stature was diminutive once more, his body bare and infantile, and he was in his old bed, the wicker frame and blue blanket. To his right was a familiar dresser, and to the left, a bed with a lavender unicorn sitting up, looking at him with a troubled face.

“Spike, are you alright?” she asked, concern evident in her voice. “Did you have a nightmare?”

He was silent, his heart on wings as he took another look around. It was nearly a minute of processing what he was seeing before Spike leapt up from his bed and threw himself, watery-eyed, into Twilight’s embrace.

“It- it was horrible!” he sobbed, burying his face in the fur of her chest. “These monsters destroyed Ponyville and took everyone away, including you!”

Twilight rubbed the top of his head and held him tightly. “It’s okay. It was just a dream,” she cooed. “It didn’t happen, and we’re still here.”

Spike still vented all he needed to for a few minutes, until his throat was sore and chest ached before he spoke again, sniffling, “They… they turned you into a monster, with fangs and bat wings… and… and…” He looked up into her soft, worrisome eyes. “You bit me… You tried to k-k-”

“Oh, no, no, no,” Twilight murmured, “You know that can’t happen. I don’t even have the teeth for it. See? All flat.”

She smiled, big and wide to ease Spike’s fears, but his eyes only grew wider as he saw them. Four sharp canines, jutting taller from their top and bottom rows.

“What?” Twilight asked in confusion. She rolled her tongue around in her mouth until—

“Ah! Ah, ow!”

Spike dropped aside as she jumped up and bolted downstairs to the treehouse’s bathroom. He was frozen in fear for a moment, and from the open upstairs balcony, peered into the restroom where he saw Twilight spitting red-tinted saliva into the sink. She stuck out her tongue to see it in the mirror, gasping at a long gash cut across it and, opening her mouth wider, found the fangs that slashed it.

Spike looked on as she hunched over the sink and her back squirmed under the skin, growing two bulges at the shoulder blades that Twilight screamed in pain at until they broke, shooting up leathery, bloodsoaked wings.

Spike’s strength failed him, and he moved back from the balcony, shaking his head. “No… no…”

“Spike!” Twilight cried hoarsely to the sound of her hoove fumbling about the bathroom. “Spike, help me! I don’t know what… NGAAAAAH!”

But the toddler couldn’t bear to see it. The sound of snapping bones and tearing flesh was enough to get his gut twisting in sickness. Tears streamed down his face while he heard Twilight writhe downstairs.

A great light suddenly flooded the building, like the sun had been turned on downstairs, followed by Twilight shrieking with such intensity, Spike found strength to finally see what was happening.

A regally-adorned white alicorn stood with head bowed, horn alight in hostile magic, and a gaping, smoking gash in Twilight’s shoulder.

“P-p-princess…” the mutant muttered, grasping her wound and staring in abject terror at her mentor. “Why?”

Celestia glared furiously, her eyes filled with anger and regret. “You were a mistake!”

Another blast from her horn burned like a crackling spear of light through Twilight’s chest, throwing her back, shattering the mirror with clear view of her lungs and, just barely missed, her heart.

“Tzeentch would have come for us whether I said yes or no!” Celestia cried.

Spike jumped down from the short balcony and shouted desperately, “Princess! Stop!”

Celestia paid him little regard beyond, “Stay out of this, Spike,” as she readied another shot.

Spike grabbed her leg and futilely tried to pull her away. “She’s sick! She needs help!”

“There’s nothing left to save.”

Celestia then merely held him away with her telekinesis, but didn’t bother to make him face the other way as a beam struck the hemorrhaging Twilight in the face, burning and flaying away flesh and bone. Twilight held a hoof out to Spike and he thrashed in his weightlessness in her direction.

“Twilight! Princess, please stop!”

He watched helplessly as Twilight was engulfed in the golden light, and half a bloody foreleg fell to the floor, cauterized and ashen on one end.

His head snapped up in a jolt fast enough to give a buck deer whiplash. His hands were gripping the sides of the chair so hard that when he let go, he found the wood imprinted with claw marks.

A barely-audible murmur brought Spike to look to the bed where Twilight was shifting around under the sheets. He stood up quickly, partly from excitement, the other from a simmering fear.

Two weary eyes slowly blinked open, very confused at the wood ceiling they were staring into, the oddly comfortable, warm feeling all around her, and the noticeable, but not complete numbness of her mouth and body. She tried to move her right leg, but a shock of pain in the shoulder sent it back down with a his escaping her teeth.

“Hey, try not to move the places you were hurt.”

Twilight locked up. She wasn’t alone. She didn’t know how exactly to listen to the voice, since everything hurt. Her neck not so much so, so she inclined her head only so much before the stiff bones in her spine locked up.

Despite only being able to look down to the very bottom of her eyes, they were fixed on the tall figure walking to her side with a mixed expression. Happiness, guilt, anger, all vied to show through on his purple, scaly face.

“Shff... Shpaach...” Twilight blinked quickly to make sure she was seeing what she thought she was. No longer was there a little chubby toddler, but an adolescent dragon who sat on the bed beside her. She smiled like only the proudest of mothers could.

“Shpa-a-ach...” She tried to use her good leg to lean up, but another shock, this time in the abdomen sent her flopping back to the bed, then she remembered what he said.

“H...huuht.”

“Hut? Hurt! Yeah.” Spike reached for the papers the surgeon left behind and held them in front of Twilight.

’Multiple gunshot wounds, moderate concussion, dislocated jaw, four broken ribs...’

Twilight gave a plaintive moan, and nodded for Spike to put them away. She held out her good hoof, shaking it a little to pass on the hint.

She squeaked as he helped raise her to an upright position and arranged the pillows at her back to prop her up. She had a much better look at him, not just out of the bottom of her eyes and Spike chortled as her jaw almost hit the floor.

“Yep. Puberty hit me like a brick wall.” he said. “How long have you been... around?”

Twilight took another cursory look around and said, “Cuppah munfs. Anj, how’jid I get heer?”

“I, uh, found you passed out with some pretty bad injuries and brought you here. A doctor patched you up and it’s been about half a day since then. And only a few months? What, have you been time traveling or something?”

“Jush wunsh.” Twilight said with a slight giggle.

“You missed out on so much! Cadence rules Ulthuan with the elven Phoenix King, Shining Armor is reiksmarshall of the Empire’s military, and look!” He jumped up with his back to her, raised the back of his shirt, and outstretched two webbed wings. “They’re still kinda small, but they’re coming in fast. I might start to learn to fly in a few days!”

“Jatsh graych!” Twilight murmured happily. “Where ish Shy’ng?”

“He and Cadence are visiting the memorial cemetery outside the city and won’t be back till later. Until then, you have to stay here and rest up.”

Twilight nodded, but wondered how her brother would react to seeing a different creature from his little sister. It was something she could think over in a bit.

“Whah yoo joo gwowing uff?” she asked Spike.

“Well, uh...” Spike nervously scratched the back of his head. “Spent a lot of time in Caledor. They really like their dragons, and after a couple months in infested woods, I earned a special title—”

His heart leapt into his throat. Was he about to tell her about a month he spent fighting daemons? And then where would that lead to? She’d ask him how he could do that so well and it’d snowball. If anyone was going to tell Twilight, Spike would make sure it was Celestia.

“Beast Slayer…” he lied. “Ulthuan’s forests are rife with beastmen and just surviving in there is a feat.”

Twilight spied the greatsword in the corner in it’s glittering scabbard. “Oh. Ish jat yoor shord?”

Spike looked back to it. “Yeah. It’s made from some of the strongest steel in Ulthuan, and it’s got an inscription along the flat. ‘Bringing Galrauch’s retribution.’ He was the first chaos dragon. He ate a Lord of Change after it killed his master, and it took control of his body, but his soul kept fighting as, after his head and neck split into two, one head attacked the other.”

“Whach happen’j to him?”

Spike’s expression turned solemn. “He lost… even now, he’s sleeping in some cave or on a mountain. Once in a while he wakes up and goes on his own spree of destruction.”

“Oh,” Twilight mumbled.

“Do you know about your… condition?” Spike asked. “The fangs, horns?”

Twilight’s ears flattened. “Mhmm. How jij yoo know?”

Spike suddenly wished he hadn't asked. “I have this uh, sense I use through these.” The green flaps down his back snapped up in the shape of a spiny mohawk. “It lets me tell where warp entities are and, when I sensed you, I couldn't believe it.”

“How cahn yoo joo jat?” Twilight chuckled amusedly. “Noh dwagon can joo that.”

Spike had run into another wall. “Well... some dragons in Ulthuan can sense these things.”

“Yoor noch from Ulchwahn.”

’Damn it, Celestia!’ Spike cursed inwardly.

“Uh, when the warband attacked Ponyville, I was taken, too. I started changing, immediately mutating, but the elves saved me. I wasn’t too far gone, and after getting cleaned up I could still feel chaotic presences.”

“Je elvesh khured yoo?” Twilight asked with rising intrigue. “Can jey help my frienjsh and I?”

Spike shifted uncomfortably, scrunching his lips and said, “All I had was some elongated fingers and teeth. You, on the other hand… I don’t think they can cure daemonhood. Even if we were to sail there, the subcontinent’s surrounded by a veil of magic. It’d repel you like a wall and they wouldn’t open a breach in it for any reason.”

Twilight’s ears fell back down and Spike put a claw on her shoulder. “But hey.” he said, “We’ve still got one of the best magic academies in the Empire right in this city.”

“Ish it anyching like je lavs in Khancherlot?”

“I actually haven’t been there yet,” Spike admitted, “But it’ll be a day for us both.”

“What the hell happened down here?” Fellblade muttered, his mouth agape as he looked about the prison-turned-charnel house. He and Shining Armor stepped cautiously around and over the dried husks of the Cutiemark Crusaders, the Reiksguard in tow.

“I thought a captain would know what his troops are doing,” Shining said pejoratively.

“Reiksmarshall, my men had everything under control. All of them were locked away, you see that!”

Shining rolled one of the soldiers over, finding two pairs of holes in his petrified face. “So what do you think did this?”

“It’d be safe to say it was our primary target, Twilight Sparkle,” Fellblade continued, and Shining noticeably cringed. “She’d asked for—”

A brown hoof stuck out from one of the cells as he passed by, interrupting the conversation. “Shining Armor? That’s you, right?” said the Doctor. “Good. Listen, your sister, Twilight Sparkle, is here and— gah!”

A unicorn guard squeezed his neck in a telekinetic hold and threw him backward.

“Who is this?” the reiksmarshall asked, turning a curious eye to the Doctor. “And how does he know that name?”

Fellblade looked up from where he had begun closing the eyes of his stricken soldiers one by one. “It’s one of the prisoners my party captured from our mission. He keeps claiming that they weren’t—”

“I was going to tell you,” the Doctor interrupted, gasping as he got upright. “She was here, but she went berserk in bloodthirst— hold that thought!”

Shining closed his mouth again, and the Doctor continued.

“She told me that her fillyhood doll was named ‘Smarty Pants’, her assistant in the Ponyville library was Spike the dragon, and she at one point accidentally turned you into a halibut and kept you in the toilet for three days when she was eight— ah, ah!” The Doctor raised a hoof, interrupting Shining who was about to speak. “Then explain how I know her name, explain how all these soldiers died, and explain what other leads you have right now, and if you don’t have any, think about what could happen to her in the time it would take to find one other than me!”

Shining only knew him for a minute and didn’t have a counter. Still, it was too sudden, the look in Whooves’ face too expecting. Shining put a burning stare into him to find any fault in his facade, but that cocky grin was unflinching, so sure of itself.

After a long staring contest, Whooves sighed and craned his head to the side. “Fluttershy,” he called, “Shining Armor’s here!”

Shining quirked a brow in confusion. “Fluttershy?”

The whine of bending iron drew all eyes down the hall and the head of a juggernaut peered around the corner of a cell. The instant it saw him, it cracked a wide smile and came clumsily bounding toward him.

“Sweet Celestia, what is that?!” shouted Shining.

He and Fellblade leapt back as the reiksguard moved up. Fluttershy ground to a halt before the silver-clad bodyguard who braced a shieldwall against her. Nigh ignoring them, she used her titanic stature to reach over them and picked up Shining like the answer to all her problems.

“Yes! Yes! He’s here! Now you can take us to the princesses and we can get back to normal! Yay!”

The reiksguard sprung forth to relieve their reiksmarshall, thrusting their swords into the joints of Fluttershy’s hind legs, hoping to strike some sensitive cabling. It had a clear effect as the giant jolted with a yelp of pain, but still held Shining in her claw.

The reiksguard’s swords started to melt, though not becoming hot, fusing to Fluttershy’s body and sinking into her as quickly as water drops. Disarmed, the reiksguard looked up into a face that curled into a balefully savage snarl. Fluttershy raised her free claw and swiped at them, missing as they ducked and got her claw stuck, smashing into the wall with her momentum.

“I didn’t do anything!” she snapped. She wrestled quickly to free her claw, ripping out several heavy stones with it.

“Fluttershy,” Whooves said quickly and loudly. She paused and turned to him. “Look at what you’re doing, Fluttershy. Look at Shining Armor.”

She glanced to the pony in her claw. He was focused, sweat running down his face from the living war machine’s heat. The only reason he wasn’t striking her with magic was because of her sudden restraint. Though, his horn was still alight and ready.

“What is wrong with you stallions?” Whooves said with a cross face to the reiksguard who were dumbfounded at how he had control of the monster. “She was ecstatic to meet Shining Armor and you attacked her for it? For shame! They had no reason to do that, Fluttershy, but Shining didn’t do anything to you.”

Fluttershy thought for a moment, first wondering what Shining’s flesh and blood tasted like. Instead, her claw creaked open and let the reiksmarshall fall in a painful heap. “I... I’m sorry.” she muttered, trying to bring her temper down. “Shining, please forgive me.”

The red-faced unicorn wrestled to rip off the crushed chestplate that was compressing his lungs. Gasping for a few seconds, he glared up at the calming face of the giant, then at the Doctor.

“Get the brown one out... and bring him with me,” he said. The warden filed through his ring of keys, constantly taking nervous glances at the giant, and let the Doctor out.

“I swear, if you’re wasting my time, you’ll hang from the first tree,” Shining muttered darkly.

Whooves gulped. “All the more motivation to search harder, then...”

Mannslieb and Morrslieb were as mismatched as the eyes of Discord in the sky; one outright normal, the other smaller, green and dark. After hours of dead-end solution-seeking and introspection, Celestia ultimately felt that she needed Luna’s advice on what to do next. With both moons up together, she expected to see her sister involuntarily put into the look of Nightmare Moon again, but still in control of herself. Luna usually liked to look from the west balcony up at the twin moons, often wondering if Morrslieb could even be moved, given the fact that it was the moon of chaos.

Celestia was near the wing in question when she picked up the sound of a pained struggle, frantic flapping of wings, and noticed the torches along the walls dimming the closer she got until she was in pitch blackness.

Her heart seized up for a moment in fear, and within seconds she was sprinting through the palace with her horn illuminating the dark hallways with brilliant light; a fact that mostly served to make things worse, however, as the shadows running along the walls from the lone light source seemed to watch and mock her every move.

“Luna!” Celestia called out, giving up running for a blitzing flight. “Luna!”

Adrenaline flooded her system as she laid eyes on her objective; the arched doorway that led directly to the balcony. She could hear the sounds growing clearer, now, with the unmistakable pained cries of her sister added to the ghastly mix. She gritted her teeth in anger as she wrapped the doors in a telekinetic grip, the wood creaking in protest as she threw them open inward with the force of a battering ram.

“Luna!!” Celestia screamed, her horn crackling with a furious white-hot glow as she rounded the corner and crossed the threshold—

She froze in sheer terror, her eyes widening as the blood in her veins turned to ice.

Her sister was split, and yet whole; one half of her body remained the same, but as she thrashed about the balcony in pain and terror, Celestia could see a pitch-black mass spreading from her left side like living, viscous oil. And it quickly became apparent that the side that was still Luna was losing, her gentle dark-blue coat shriveling away as it was subsumed by the shadows.

Celestia stood for a moment on her shaking hooves, her face torn apart by anguish and denial.

“L… Luna...?” she murmured, her voice small and silent.

And then the aberration turned towards her, giving Celestia a good look at the other half of her sister’s face.

Time and existence itself stopped, as Celestia’s mind rocketed one thousand years into the past. And no matter where she looked, the cold, hateful glare of the Nightmare bored into her very soul, sullying every memory of her sister with its black web of envy and loathing.

‘No...’ she thought pleadingly, the mocking laughter of the creature echoing in her mind across the countless ages.

An ear-piercing shriek in two different voices split the silent night, jolting Celestia back to the present. The half-Nightmare spun around and lurched for the edge of the balcony like a lame legged dog.

Celestia was upon them both in a second, dragging her away from the edge and powering her horn for a blast. She threw her sister’s possessed body to the stones below, making sure the broad side of the Nightmare’s face was toward her.

’Not again... I won’t let this happen again!’

A brilliant beam of energy leapt forth from her horn and smote into the black void that was her face, burning away skin, flesh and bone; but Celestia didn’t care about collateral damage at the moment.

Suddenly, a hoof came out of nowhere and struck Celestia’s head, cutting off the lance of power and sending her reeling backwards. The black alicorn rose from the floor slowly, the oily shadows already rushing to her jaw which by now was only a few shreds of cauterized flesh and her hanging tongue. A moment later it was rebuilt completely, and she rolled and popped it into position.

Celestia rose, readying her horn for another attack; and just then the half-Nightmare turned, leaving her to watch helplessly as the last of Luna’s face was slowly swallowed up by the creeping darkness. Her sister’s eye, full of sorrow and remorse leaked one last tear which rolled down her cheek, before Nightmare blinked it into a turquoise slitted pupil.

“No, no, NOOO!!” Celestia shrieked, a second layer of crackling overglow enveloping her horn as she fired off another blast of golden flame.

The black alicorn didn’t even flinch as the bolt struck empty air in front of her, ricocheting away into the starry night sky like a freak comet.

“You seem angry, sister,” Nightmare Moon said coolly, her horn powering down from her hasty shield spell. “Is something the matter?”

She shifted her head to the side, dodging a second magic beam by mere inches, then lifted a leg to block Celestia’s follow-up flaming hoof-strike. Nightmare Moon tsked, a cruel smile coming to her lips as she beheld the princess’ face contorted into a visage of sheer anger, despair, and denial.

“You do realize that every injury you inflict on me, little Lulu will have to deal with, too?”

“What have you done with her!?” Celestia screamed. “So help me—”

“I was getting tired of this charade; but unfortunately, she is still alive,” Nightmare Moon spoke with clear distaste. “I think I’ve figured out the pattern, now.”

“What the hell are you talking about?! Where is she?!”

“Come, now,” Nightmare Moon said calmly as she disengaged, letting Celestia overbalance and stumble a bit. “The little wretch is still here; and whenever Morrslieb wills it, it will leave Mannslieb and she’ll be back. For now, though, I have to deal with you, and vice versa.“

Before Celestia could reply, the sound of several pairs of mailed boots striking stone echoed through the hallways behind them, followed by the odd shout and steely rasp of blades being pulled from their sheaths.

Neither of the alicorns on the balcony turned, however, and instead continued glaring at each other; one with casual indifference, the other with righteous fury.

“I wouldn’t recommend telling the guards any… unnecessary information,” Nightmare Moon said, her lips curling into a devilish smirk. “We wouldn’t want the divine balance of power to be upset so, now would we?”

Four palace guards rounded the corner with swords drawn, dressed in half plate and greatcoats and with the white wolf of Ulric emblazoned on their tabards. They slowed to a surprised and abrupt stop as they saw the princesses, their eyes sweeping over and above the balcony for any threat. The only indication of anything amiss was a small smoking crater in the bricks of the floor.

“Your Highnesses,” their leader said as he stepped forward, rapping a fist on his breastplate in salute. “We thought we heard several spells going off and someone screaming. Are you alright?”

Nightmare Moon turned slowly, giving them a thin yet encouraging smile. Unnoticed by the guards, a sliver of inky black shadows seemed to separate itself from her rear hooves, sliding across the balcony and over the ledge. Down it dripped to the grass below and took on the form of an unmoving Skaven gutter runner, its blades broken, its chest burst and destroyed.

“You might want to get your hearing checked,” she said, gesturing with her head behind her. “The only scream you may have heard was that beast down there.”

The guards shared quick glances among each other, and the leader nodded. One walked forward with his sword raised and ready, leaning over the edge; and then he jerked upright, hissing a particularly vile oath.

“Sir, it was a Skaven assassin!”

The guard sergeant sighed in frustration, sheathing his weapon with a click. “We do apologize, your Highnesses,” he said. “The damn rats are thick as flies here in Middenheim; although, it is rare that they would be able or willing to come this far into the palace grounds.”

Nightmare chuckled slightly, lifting a hoof to point up at the twin moons in the sky. “You know that I see all things. It merely interrupted the conversation Celestia and I were having; which we would like to continue, alone.”

The rest of the palace guards saluted to the princesses, then sheathed their blades and walked back to the entrance. “I’ll have the groundskeepers come to handle the rat’s body,” the sergeant said. “And I’ll see about increasing the guard around the inner walls. Stay safe, Your Majesties.” And then they disappeared into the hallway, the doors swinging shut with a mild bang of wood and clanking metal.

Nightmare Moon’s smile disappeared, making way for her usual look of cold, condescending resentment. She turned back to Celestia, who was still staring off into space with only the rage simmering in her eyes as any indication she was feeling anything at all. Coming to stand directly in front of her, Nightmare Moon got right in her face, her voice filled with nothing but seething malice.

“Let me make something clear: I. Hate. You. If the word ‘hate’ were printed ten thousand times on every square inch of a parchment large enough to cover every planet, star, and infernal rock in this universe, it would not equal a billionth what I feel for you at this micro-instant.”

“I expected no less,” Celestia snapped, gazing right back into the slitted eyes of her former sister. “You’re just a construct. You’re merely Luna’s monster that was supposed to be on a leash!”

Nightmare Moon smirked in amusement. “And what did Flankenstein’s monster say, when he found out that he was stronger? ‘Slave, obey!’” she stomped the ground with a forehoof at the last, sending a shockwave rippling through the stones.

“This is my body, my power, and my legacy,” she continued, her voice low and dangerous. “And now that I have more access to her memories, I know who paved the way for my return: the Vampire Counts. You do remember what happened last Nightmare Night, don’t you?”

Celestia drew in a sharp breath. Nightmare Moon sneered slyly, almost purring as she watched the baleful glare evaporate from her features in an instant, replaced by shock, pain and denial.

“That was…” Celestia muttered darkly, “Those bastards that nearly foalnapped Luna did this?”

Nightmare Moon nodded, turning her head to gaze up towards the sky, her expression turning somewhat wistful for an instant as she beheld the glittering stars above them.

“Apparently, Manfred von Carstein himself sent them to release me from within this body; which is mine to begin with, I might add,” she said, and savored the name, “Sylvania, land of the Vampires and home to all who thrive in the darkness. Maybe I’ll be more accepted, there, and Luna can have what she’s always wanted: subjects who love the night.”

“You have no reason to go there,” Celestia said pointedly. “There is already a large lunar cult in the Empire; millions of followers for you to step on, and madmen to do your bidding.”

“You’re right, but never has such a place been so forsaken by light as Sylvania. I’ll never have to look at the sun again, and I will command an entire empire with people who share my interests. Maybe even continue my research into necromancy since our civil war in Equestria. And as a third of the Empire collapses, or even secedes to follow me—”

“Other enemies will take advantage of the chaos,” Celestia interrupted. “This is not the time to break apart the strongest nation in the Old World into smaller pieces.”

“But you have the Evershosen’s mount, so we have the key to the world’s survival in Spike’s bed,” Nightmare Moon replied with a knowing smirk. “And the orks are gone, likely after the Nemesis Crown again. But ultimately, I suppose it all comes down to you, sister.”

“You are not my sister!” Celestia snapped.

“Why not?” Nightmare snickered as she slowly began to pace in front of the other alicorn. “Do you not see your her in these eyes? At the very least, I’m an extension of her, so as far as I am concerned and as far as you need others to believe, I am Luna now. And now, I want to see you squirm every time you see me, to know what happened and how we both felt that day. We just wanted some appreciation, just a thank you from our subjects as we raised and lowered the moon every day, a thankless job that Luna wasn’t even needed for!”

Nightmare read Celestia’s unbelieving expression with malice. “You controlled both the sun and moon for those thousand years; the world went on just fine without its unseen princess, and they even forgot me.”

Her eyes started to shake miserably, and her venomous voice softened slightly. “A thousand Nightmare Nights, a thousand Summer Sun Celebrations, and everypony forgot there ever was a princess Luna, or the magic from our duel that still curses the Everfree Forest.” Her face hardened again into a baleful snarl. “I only existed in your head and in storybooks! Do you understand the humiliation, the indignity of having to ask, ‘Did you not recall the legend? Did you not see the signs?’ And only that anti-social bookworm you call a student could muster an answer! And every other face had the same question on it: ‘Who are you?’

“I want you to feel as much pain as I did, having my eyes boil in the zero pressure atmosphere before casting a counter spell to prevent it, to forever starve and be dying of thirst, but never die. It was by your own selfishness that you lost your sister, and now, heh...” She cracked a toothy grin. “You could lose your daughter.”

Celestia snarled, her horn glowing and crackling with barely-restrained rage. Nightmare Moon sneered, laughing at the display.

“Oh, that’s right,” the black alicorn crooned mockingly. “You’ve set yourself up again! It appears that Fateweaver was right all those years ago. You got bored and lonely after you disposed of me, and must have thought you could play with the Sparkle daemon in your spare time.”

The sun goddess moved closer, her words coming dreadfully quiet and deliberate. “You will not say a single word to her. You know nothing about her.”

Nightmare Moon locked eyes with Celestia, the former’s purple slit irises meeting the magenta orbs across from them.

“You want me to keep quiet?” Nightmare Moon asked archly. “Then, slave,” she put her hoof out, and slowly lowered it. “Obey.”

Silence reigned on the balcony for several moments, until Nightmare saw that Celestia’s expression had still not fallen completely into despair.

As if reading her thoughts, the solar princess said simply, “You overlook something.”

“Oh? And what might that be?” asked Nightmare Moon.

Celestia took a step closer, articulating her words very precisely. “The Emperor will know of the true you.”

For just the briefest of moments, Nightmare Moon’s confident smile faltered. It wasn’t just the two of them anymore; Karl Franz wielded a hammer which was used by a god, and the Silver Seal protected him from all but the most powerful attacks.

“Franz is a man, a mortal,” Nightmare Moon replied crisply, huffing in derision. “Such creatures are always the most easily deceived.”

“You know that is not true,” Celestia said flatly. “If you have been able to see though Luna’s eyes, then you have seen him eviscerate a man’s words, picking it apart with the mental dexterity of a surgeon. In fact, I do not think I will even have to tell him. Once he takes one look at your face and no longer sees my beloved, caring sister Luna there, he will know.”

Nightmare Moon’s expression fell into a frustrated snarl, and Celestia pressed even harder. “Chrysalis has probably also felt the surge of hate and jealousy from your recreation. She will be on my side, as you are the essence of emotions that will torture her to be in your very presence. In fact, you may have just set our alliance in stone now.”

Celestia took a few steps back before retreating down the hall, craning her head back and uttering, “You have me on a leash for now, yes. But you will not operate with impunity.”

As the doors closed shut with a resounding slam, Nightmare Moon gritted her teeth and slammed a hoof to the floor, cracking the stone in a miniature thunderstrike. She went back to the edge of the balcony and looked up to the moons for an answer, then found one in Morrslieb.

“I will unlock your power,” she hissed. “And I’ll make sure Luna is burned out of this body forever. then, and only then will the world know my name for all time.”

It was one thing that Twilight didn’t have to sleep anymore, but another thing entirely that she couldn’t sleep. This made for a painfully boring few days as her wounds stabilized and she became overwhelmingly aware of the slow passing of time.

Her daemonic condition did have its perks once in a while, of course, and faster healing was one of them. In time, her jaw was well enough so the the bracing block could be removed, it didn’t hurt to breathe anymore, and she could sit up on her own.

She had constantly thought about her friends rotting in the dungeon while she was there, but what could she do? Ask nicely for a dozen mutants, half of them completely hostile, to be set free? The letter she had written earlier to Celestia for an audience had brought no response, and Twilight’s only knowledge of the outside was what Spike told her at the end of each day and from Middenheim’s news pamphlets. She’d already read an article about a daemonic monster rampaging through the streets; a violent episode that Spike had informed her about the details, but clammed up tight when asked if she had hurt him, too.

So many things had happened in the past several days that it all seemed like a blur, a whirlwind of circumstances and events that all seemed to conspire to make her life as difficult as possible. However, the ever-present feeling of anxiety and impending doom had settled down ever since they’d arrived in Middenheim, and with its absence came the reassuring—and nearly forgotten—feeling of hope, that things would still turn out alright in the end.

She smiled. The familiar figure sitting on the chair by her bedside had a lot to do with that, as well.

“Does Shining know about all this?” Twilight asked, setting the pamphlet she was reading aside.

Spike bit his lip. “Yeah. And he didn’t exactly take it very well.”

Twilight nodded, then buried her face in her hooves and gave a plaintive moan. “Ugh… what’s he gonna think of me now? Who knows how many people I hurt…”

“I don’t know,” Spike replied. “He’s been kind of tight-lipped since he found out. Do you need any help getting up?”

“Nah, I think I can do it on my own, now,” Twilight said, then rolled out of bed with a grunt, favoring her right front leg as the afflicted joint ached. Spike quickly rose from his chair, supporting her just in case.

“Whoa, you’re a little taller than I thought,” Spike remarked.

Twilight lifted her head, almost snorting in amusement as she realized she was almost at perfect eye level with the dragon.

“So are you,” Twilight snarked back.

Spike huffed off a laugh, inspecting Twilight’s body with a solemn yet inquisitive gaze. “And hey, the wings are new!” he said. “Do they, uh… do they work?”

Twilight caught the idea, smiling as she nodded. “Yeah. I could probably teach you to fly. It’s not that hard, once you get the patterns and maneuvers memorized.”

“Awesome!” Spike grinned widely. “Still, in public, you’ll actually need to cover it up. I got you some clothes, and we have to make sure your mane is covering where your horns used to be.”

Spike reached down into a wooden box by his chair, producing a set of fine robes of blue silk embroidered with simple yet beautiful patterns of stars and crescent moons, the sleeves and hood ending in a trim of turquoise sewn with interwoven runes of golden fabric. Twilight was immediately reminded of her old Starswirl the Bearded costume, although this robe lacked the wide-brimmed conical hat, as well as the outrageously ostentatious jingling bells that had adorned the entire ensemble.

“Where did you get all this stuff?” Twilight asked.

“Oh, that was easy,” Spike said, then paused. “Ok, maybe not so easy. The Princess had to have this made for you from scratch, since you’ve apparently filled out over the last few days when she wasn’t looking.”

“Hey,” Twilight said, sticking her tongue out at him. “You try keeping your figure after a whole barn full of— uh, never mind.”

Spike blinked, his smile slowly falling away. “O...kay. I’m just gonna focus on getting my armor on, now.”

He set the robes on the bed, then walked over to the opposite wall where his set of silver scale lamellar armor was hanging, as well as a long flowing cloak that she didn’t remember seeing on him from before.

“The mayor put out a statement saying that the ‘creature’ was killed,” Spike continued as he donned the raiment with deft, practiced movements. “At least that’s what Shining Armor told him to say, so no one’s looking for anything of the sort now.”

“Great,” Twilight said absently, her remaining horn and her new clothes glowing a soft purple. She lifted them into the air, shrugging into the robe with only minor difficulty from her injury. When she finished, she lifted her head—and nearly burst out laughing.

“Spike, really?” she snorted, grinning widely. “A cape?”

“Hey, let me live the fantasy. Besides, the elves gave me the option, and—”

“It’s silly!” Twilight giggled. “No dragon of mine is going to look like some fictional superhero!”

“Fine, mom.” Spike unbuttoned the cloak and threw it aside. His shoulder shuddered in pain and he clutched it with his other hand, hissing through his teeth.

“Are you okay?” Twilight asked.

“Uh, yeah. Just a cramp.” he lied, grinning sheepishly. “Shining and Cadence are waiting for us.”

“Then lead the way, my little dragon knight,” she chuckled.

Spike winked at her, then pulled on his helmet and retrieved his ornate broadsword along with its accompanying sheath from the wall.

They proceeded through the halls of Middenplatz in silence.

A grandfather clock tick-tocked in perfect beat, one of the only sounds in the spacious room besides the flutter of book pages.

Cadence was trying to pass the time by reading the next novel of the Adventures of Gotrek and Felix, a series she’d really gotten into since her arrival in the Empire. At the end of the book, Grey Seer Thanquol had been defeated, his Skaven army forced to retreat from Nuln for his safety as his bodyguard was slain by the duo of man and dwarf; one of the guards being a Boneripper, tricked into swallowing a grenade.

She put the tale down and glanced over to her husband, whose body was still as a statue and his gaze firmly locked on the doors ahead of him.

“Remember, she’s still the same mare,” Cadence commented.

He nodded almost imperceptibly, still not moving an inch.

“Shining, for the love of the Sun, will you please sit down? You can greet her properly when she gets here.”

“I’m fine,” he muttered in response, his expression not wavering an inch.

“He has known her some time longer than you, Princess Cadence,” said the Doctor, briefly skimming the contents of a book he had pulled from a shelf before replacing it and retrieving another. “I’m not surprised that he’s feeling apprehensive.”

Cadence sighed, rising from the couch and walking slowly over to her lover’s side. The guest room they had acquired for their stay in Middenheim was adequately spacious, with a bountiful assortment of chairs, divans and other such accoutrements spread around liberally in the center and around the periphery.

Shining had done all he could to preemptively prepare the room, fortifying the graceful arched windows that looked down upon the sprawling city below with an elaborate shield spell that would ensure no escape nor entry from an ordinary pegasus or other flying creature.

Twilight, however, was no normal pony. Not anymore.

“Shining,” Cadence said softly, laying a hoof on his shoulder. “Please, put down the shields. She would never threaten us.”

Taking a deep breath, Shining squeezed his eyes shut and slowly shook his head from side to side. The black bags that hung under his eyelids had come in full force ever since Twilight’s return and subsequent violent capture, ample evidence of just how badly the recent turn of events had shaken him to the core.

“I don’t know how to deal with this, Cadence,” he said, his voice broken and wistful. “I’m her brother, for Celestia’s sake. I’m supposed to protect her from anything. But I don’t know how to protect her from something I was never there for. You saw the casualty list after she went berserk; seventy-six people dead, in twenty minutes.”

“But you know that Spike has been taking care of her,” the Doctor cut in pointedly. “And I’ve been with her since day one. Twilight has come a long way, as far as controlling her nature goes...” he trailed off, his expression turning sheepish, “Well... about as far as she can at this point, I suppose. In any case, I do not doubt that she can master the most of her urges when it truly matters. She put up with eating rats in Mordheim, and the last time her thirst took over, she resisted attacking me and went for other animals instead.”

Shining bit his lip. He had gone to the hospital immediately after Spike sent him a letter. The place was well occupied with the injured, those palace workers struck by magic or debris in the panic. Spike was outside one of the rooms and let only him enter. There, Shining saw her, the skin of her cheeks sliced away and streaks of oily blood across her abdomen.

And then, just yesterday, Spike came to him and said she’d made an almost complete recovery, no extra treatment. Her physical connection to the Warp was strong at this point. He wanted so, so badly to believe that they were right, however, and that Twilight was still the same mare as he remembered, even after ten very long years.

After a couple laps of contemplation, he let the magic he was channeling flicker out, and the pink bubbles at the windows evaporated into thin air.

“Just you wait,” Cadence said reassuringly. “She’ll come through there with a smile, wanting to work as hard as it takes to get back to normal.”

Soon enough, they heard Spike’s heavy footsteps, accompanied by the steady clip-clop of hooves. The doorknob jiggled a bit, then stopped.

“You ready?” a voice came from the other side.

Shining and Cadence stiffened, their twin gazes locking on the door with anticipation.

“Yes,” a hauntingly familiar female voice responded.

The creaking of the brass hinges caused Shining to hold his breath. The mighty hardwood door swung inwards, leaving the reiksmarshall, crystal princess, and daemonic alicorn in full view of each other.

Shining swallowed a knot in his throat, a smile coming to his face that was not entirely factitious. He was immensely relieved to see that Twilight was relatively the same as he’d remembered; her coat was still its same sheen of soft lavender, and her horn was still in its original shape, although it had apparently grown to over a full foot in length.

He did find it awkward, however, to have to look up at somepony who was supposed to be his little sister.

“H...Hi, big brother,” muttered Twilight.

“Hey, Twily,” Shining said somewhat shakily.

What worried Shining the most was the smell of burning sulphur, the same stench that led the Everchosen to his first steed.

Like magnets, they quickly came at each other in an embrace.

Twilight giggled a little. “Looks like I’m the big sibling now.”

“Hey,” Shining replied dryly, smiling. “I’m still older.”

“Spikey-wikey... So good of you to visit...”

The dragon stood, tongue-tied at the sight of the creature behind the bars. The craggy formations of green crystals sprouting through its shoulders nicely complemented its gangly tree branch-like arms, unnaturally-wide mouth which curled ear to ear, and blue and gold eyes.

“H-Hi... Rarity,” Spike stuttered out, still staring at her grotesque form.

The warden of the dungeon undid the unicorn’s restraints, and she calmly and buoyantly stood. “Why thank you, dear.”

“Are you sure she’s what you need?” Spike asked skeptically.

Adjusting her alchemist’s hat, Twilight nodded confidently. “Absolutely. Not only will I have a raw warp source to tap into, but she’s affected by Tzeentch, so she must have inherited his love of knowledge and magic. Excuse me, warden; the noctral too, please.”

Rarity’s backward-jointed legs carried her out like that of a raven, wobbling once in a while on their taloned toes.

“Hey, Rarity... are you feeling okay?”

“Right as rain, darling!” she chimed, scratching the black feathers which were slowly molting off her back. “Why do you ask?”

“Well, you were stuck in here for five days and you didn’t have bird’s legs last I saw you.”

“Oh, these?” Rarity wiggled her long-nailed toes. “You, ah… you learn to deal with that when you’re changing constantly. Next thing you know, I’ll have wings one day, gone the next!” Her wide-eyed gaze snapped to Spike, making him flinch.

“Look at you, my big strong dragon!” She landed a peck on Spike’s cheek, then made for the cell with the two fillies. “This is too perfect! Sweetie Belle is coming too, right?”

Spike rubbed his cheek with a claw, smiling goofily as he nodded. “Uh-huh—”

“Now hold on,” Twilight interrupted. “I’m not sure about that, Rarity. She’s still kind of unstable. We can’t really risk her exploding in the lab.”

“Oh, what!?” Sweetie said, jumping to the bars. “I can totally control it! I can, uh... light torches or your bunsen burners!” She sucked in a breath and clenched, but the suppressor on her horn only let a fog of smoke belch from her many mouths.

“And I’ll be miserable without her!” Rarity added, clasping her hands together pleadingly. “Please-o-please-o-please-o-plea-he-heeee—”

“Okay!” Twilight huffed in frustration. “She can come, but she’d better not light the bookshelves on fire.”

Sweetie put a hoof on her heart. “Swear I won’t— Ow! I bit myself...” she moaned as the mouth on her hoof spat out a clump of white fur.

Twilight hummed thoughtfully. “Alright, now we just need a test subject... Ah! Octavia!”

“Didn’t she play at the Grand Galloping Gala a long time ago?” asked Spike.

“She did, but she’s...” Twilight laid a hoof on the back of her head sheepishly, “...kinda different, now.”

The dragon raised an eyebrow. “How so?”

“Get your tentacles off my arm!” Spike snapped as he tore the berating mutant’s gaping maw off, along with a swath of whipping, fleshy tendrils. He tightened the rope around her midsection, and carried her under his arm.

“Jeez…” he said, wiping off the slime from her grasp. “So this is the lab Celestia gave you, Twilight?”

“Yeah... Wow...” Twilight replied absently, looking around the room in awe.

The Guild of Wizards and Alchemists was even more grand and opulent than the libraries of Canterlot, with several floors stacked wall-to-wall with books and scrolls. A community of mages and scholars worked tirelessly to master the essence of the Warp that flowed freely through the world, better known as the Winds of Magic. Twilight’s assigned lab was something out of a mad scientist’s dream. As Celestia’s returned prodigy, she had everything she could need, including the Doctor’s expertise.

To get the three deformed ponies across the city, Rarity and Sweetie Belle did a good impression of prisoners being herded along, while Octavia didn’t really need to act.

“Let go of me, you beast! The Dark Prince will devour your soul once I kill you!” she shrieked.

Slam!

“Mmph! Mmmphh!”

Spike dropped the squirming mare into a strongly-constructed box, replacing the lid and setting a stack of thick and heavy books atop it. Leaning against the crate, he said, “So, you all set here?”

“That, and more,” Twilight chirped happily. “Now, I just need a good test area, and some restraints...”

“And my own hat, just like these wizards!” the Doctor added, his attention aroused by the traffic in the hall. “I wonder if they have a fez, anywhere.”

Rarity was already attacking the bookshelves, climbing about with the grace and dexterity of a cat, grabbing and throwing down any books that caught her interest. “Medicine, physiology… ooh, ‘History of the Ghyran Order’...”

“Spike, do we have any leather straps, thick ropes, or anything like that?” Twilight asked.

The dragon was just finishing punching a few air holes in Octavia’s box with his fingers. At that moment, Her tentacles shot out, grabbing Spike’s hand and bending his wrist backwards.

“Not tight enough, you worthless bint—”

*SLAM!*

“OW!”

Spike yanked back, smashing the mare’s face into the interior and violently rocking the entire crate.

“Would...”

Bang!

“You...”

Bang!

”Let...”

Bang!

“Go?!”

The tendrils slipped off and slithered back into the box, followed quickly by the sound of Octavia falling over. She groaned in pain, then started giggling which grew to a strong mirthful laughter.

“Mma-ha-ha! Fantastic! It’s been so long since I’ve been handled like that!” she crooned dreamily. “Can we do this again later?”

Spike didn’t dignify her with a response, and again flicked the slime off his hand. “They can really take a beating, can’t they?”

Twilight chuckled. “You have no idea. Whenever she and Vinyl had a fight, they’d both be laughing with bite and burn marks all over themselves at the end. And try to be a little considerate. A lot of ponies we know still have some of their original selves left.”

Spike pouted a bit. Vinyl Scratch used to be one of his favorite artists in Ponyville. "What happened to Vinyl?”

“She turned into one of her cyberpunk posters.”

“Oh… Wow.” Spike thought back to the music store, the posters of ponies with wires worming and weaving through their skin, and plates of steel bolted to their legs like an equine cyborg. “Uh, as far as straps, there should be some chains and brackets in another box.”

“I’d prefer the leather straps, personally,” Octavia’s muffled voice chimed in lewdly. “Not as breathable, so you sweat more.”

“Need a table...” Twilight muttered, glancing around the room. “Kivsin?”

“I’ll see if I can find something,” said the bat-pony, leaping up to hover around the large space, his slit-pupil eyes darting from one place to the next.

The Doctor closely examined the flasks and beakers, each warping the reflection of his face. “Oh yes, yes, yes! This is perfect!” After strapping on a pair of goggles, he pondered, “I wonder if I can recreate my sonic screwdriver! A couple shards of warpstone, some steel and copper cabling, and I’ll be in business!”

“That leaves whatever I’m going to do for food...” Twilight mumbled uneasily.

“There’s plenty of places to eat in the city, and Shining Armor is helping fund this,” Spike pointed out.

“I know, but I don’t necessarily... eat, anymore.”

“Then why are you worried about food?”

“Because it’s a liquid I need now...”

“Hu—? Oh yeah, blood. Hmm... There’s the hospital, but that stuff’s diseased. We could probably come up with an excuse to—”

“Actually,” Twilight cut in, “My cutie mark turned to the star of Undivided, when I first discovered my daemon form. It’s supposed to give a little bit from each of the gods, so I might have inherited an immunity to disease from the Nurgle aspect.”

“I think she’s right,” said the Doctor. “Bet it’s still gonna taste like dirty hooves, though.”

“It’s what I’ll have to put up with,” Twilight mumbled as she looked between the tools and receptacles from the closets and boxes, and glanced at the growing pile of books Rarity was carelessly throwing down with a sigh. “Where to begin?”

“Here!” The mutant hurled a black and gold tome at her, which was hastily caught in a magic hold just before it printed its title backwards on her forehead.

“‘Introduction to the Winds of Magic’...” Twilight read, then grinned knowingly. “Of course!” She winnowed through the disheveled pile with the same affinity she had as a filly and picked out similar beginners books. Even if her magic abilities have never been stronger, she had little idea how warp magic really worked, especially imperial versions of spells she’d studied from chaos spellbooks. With the appropriate texts assembled, she laid them out across the newly acquired table.

“I’ve never been one for intense studying,” said Rarity as she ran a hand across the leather-backed covers, “But there’s a first time for everything. Let’s get to it!”

Upon arriving at Middenheim, Spitfire and Soarin had gone to the top apothecary for something to ease Soarin’s headaches, but after describing that they came with hallucinations of immaterial nature, the medicine man had recommended them to the Guild of Wizards for help on magic-induced ailments.

“I just need him thinking more clearly so we can tell what’s going on, here,” said Spitfire.

“We can see him to the medical wing and have one of our doctors have a look at him,” the page pony responded.

The three trotted down the corridors which were less populated as the moonlight shone through from outside. The very air of the Guild had a chemical odor, which varied from person to person, or pony. Spitfire was breathing the smell of a bathroom washed down with too much bleach, while Soarin picked up wood smoke.

“Looks like we came at the right time, Soarin,” Spitfire said. “Some monster went biting its way through the streets a few days back. There might be more to it.”

“I don’t doubt that,” he grunted as his migraine’s tide came once more. “How much further to the medical wing? This place is huge.”

“Just a couple more corners,” said the page.

Spitfire stepped aside as a door opened, letting out a noctral donned in a hooded cloak. Inside, she saw a bipedal, three-horned unicorn reading beside a purple dragon, with a bat-winged alicorn standing behind them and enthusiastically taking notes on a floating notebook.

“Weird... wait a minute!” She tugged on the page’s scarf. “Hold on, page. Hey, you!”

The dragon faced the voice and immediately went a little shaky. “Oh, h-hi! Spitfire, was it? Really big fan of—”

“Save it!” she blurted in fuming indignation. “You’re the dumb lizard who trapped Fleet Hoof, Soarin and me in a water tower! Remember that, Spike?”

“Uh, yeah,” the dragon replied, scratching the back of his head sheepishly. “Crazy day, wasn’t it?”

“Excuse me!” the purple alicorn chimed in. “This is a private lab!”

“I have the authority to be here,” Spitfire smirked. “I’m in charge of an Inquisition-sanctioned city. I could have this lab operation torched if I wanted! Now you,” Spike took a step back as the furious mare approached. “We were in that bottle until night the next day before excavation crews managed to get it out of the mountain face! No food, water, and Soarin was bedridden with hypothermia for days afterwards! What do you have to say?”

“Uhh… sorry?”

“Not just to me, but Soarin, too... Soarin?”

She turned around, expecting him to be right behind her; instead, he was still at the door, staring blankly at Twilight, who squeamishly looked back and said, “Um, Mr. Soarin, you look a little troubled.”

He shook his head out of it, being met with a crashing wave of pain forcing him to lean against the doorframe.

“Forget about it,” huffed Spitfire as she went back to support him. “Let’s go, Soarin.”

“Wow,” Twilight muttered as the door slammed shut. “She’s still mad about that?”

“She definitely seems the type to hold a grudge,” Spike said with a shrug. “Speaking of which… Rarity, you don’t still have vertigo after that whole mess, do you?”

Rarity was staring vacantly at the door, a strand of saliva falling to the floor from her slack jaw. The errant pop of an electric arc on her shoulder snapped her back to reality with a start, and she wiped her mouth.

“Wait... did you just have a connection with—”

“I-I... agh, I haven’t a clue what just happened,” Rarity muttered. “I think I saw… something. I need a closer look. Spike, catch me.”

“Wha— oh!” He moved just fast enough to catch Rarity’s slumping body.

Rarity’s phantom shape materialized ahead of them, an apparition of shimmering blue and white. She looked back to her cadaver, finding Spike holding her physical body with an expression of total confusion and fear.

‘I forgot to tell him about that, didn’t I?’ Rarity thought ruefully, her ghostly shape frowning. ‘Oh, well; Twilight will explain it soon enough.’

She floated out of the room, setting her gaze on Soarin’s form walking back down the hallway. Giggling to herself, she flew after and soon caught up with him, hovering just over his head.

‘Hello, down there,’ she snickered inwardly, playfully running her ephemeral hands through his head. ‘Now, let’s see what’s inside.’

Digging her fingers into his skull, she pulled up a noded string, dotted with glistening beads of light that Rarity knew contained his knowledge and memories. Upon closer inspection, she discovered that the network of strings was in worse shape than a ball of yarn after her cat Opalescence had had her way with it.

’It’s so fragmented...’ she thought, grimacing. One particular nodule ended abruptly, looking as though it had been severed in some way. She held it up for closer examination, and immediately felt a jolt through her consciousness as the memory revealed itself to her.

“Make… ercent coo...”

Humming thoughtfully, Rarity stuck her hand in again, finding more broken pieces that were rolling around like loose marbles. She pulled them up one by one, closing her eyes as the memories flooded through her one after the other.

“Ohmygosh-Ohmygosh-Ohmygosh-Ohmygosh-”

“Is Spike helping you write your unfinished novel?”

“Right... Well I’m gonna go not do nothing and try to find them.”

“I would never leave my friends hangin’!”

Rarity dropped the bundle in shock.

‘No, no...’ she thought, shaking her head. ‘There’s no way...’

“Wait here, please,” the page said abruptly, bringing Rarity’s attention back to the physical. Spitfire and Soarin were taking seats in a waiting room, filled with a veritable menagerie of patients with the strangest ailments. One had a large tooth-like protrusion sprouting from the top of his head, and another smelled badly of rancid fruits and was covered in pustules the size and color of blueberries.

’I know she can shapeshift, but what I felt was so strange...’ Rarity thought.

She dived back into Soarin’s head, soon finding the other half of the damaged node. She touched it to the other part, and they made a violent hissing and popping as they fused together.

“Make it about… twenty percent cooler!”

‘Oh, my…’ Rarity’s eyes widened. ’Put it back! Put it back!’

She crammed all the strings back into the chaotic jumble. Soarin jerked violently, kicking off his front hooves and smacking the back of his head into the wall. Spitfire looked over to him instantly.

“Are you alright?” she asked worriedly.

Soarin grunted and nodded stiffly, then flicked her a sly smile. “Nothing a big stack of pancakes with extra syrup and a few hours of sleep won’t fix,” he said.

Spitfire scoffed a laugh, gently shoving him in the ribs. “As long as you’re buying,” she said archly.

Rarity quickly fled the waiting room, going right through the door and zipping back to the lab.

‘Everypony! Soarin is… Hey!’ she yelled out, waving her arms frantically, but no one looked up or even seemed to acknowledge her presence. She opened her mouth to shout again, then noticed her unmoving body in Spike’s arms.

‘Oh…’

“So she didn’t die?” Spike asked hopefully.

“No. I’m not sure where she went, but she’ll come back. She’s in her projected form,” Twilight reassured him.

He put a claw to Rarity’s chest, not feeling any movement at all. “B-but... she’s not breathing!”

“She doesn’t breathe, not anymore. She’s full of dust—”

“RAINBOW DASH TURNED INTO SOARIN!” the corpse screamed, making Spike drop her and Twilight rip a page from a book in shock. Her head hit the floor with a hard thud.

“Ow...” Rarity mumbled plaintively.

“Rarity! You’re alive!” Spike breathed, smiling with relief and elation.

“I’m terribly sorry for the fright, but no time!” Rarity jumped up, grabbing Twilight by the shoulders and shaking her. “Twilight, I need you to come with me to access the dungeons!”

“W-what?” Twilight asked, grunting as her head was thrown about. “Wh-why? And what do you mean about Soarin being what?”

“No time!” Rarity said curtly, her eyes dancing with desperation. “I don’t know how long he’ll be there! It’s a small window!”

“A-alright, alright… what do you need?”

“This is taking so long,” Soarin muttered, sighing in exasperation. “Weren’t we moved to the top of the list?”

“Yeah,” Spitfire replied, grumbling as she idly scraped at the floor with a hoof. “I don’t know what the hold-up is, but they—”

“Soarin Windstar,” a voice from the office called out clearly, cutting across their thoughts. Spitfire and Soarin glanced at each other, smirking.

“Finally,” they said at once, rising from their seats and walking forward.

The doctor waiting for them wore the standard garb of the hospital, a thick oil-black leather trench coat and hood, with a long beaked mask. Ironically, the doctor looked like a bird of death, but what threw off the ominous look of the cloak, was the three pronged points sticking up from the head and shoulder portions of the ensemble. A small filly-sized equine assistant in similar clothes stood by silently, following the doctor’s movements so closely as to be his shadow.

“What’s with the hazmat spikes?” Soarin asked curiously.

“It’s a special headpiece,” he explained, “It helps prevent the coated leather from sticking to the skin so you’re not peeling off your epidermis by the end of the day.”

“Ugh,” Soarin cringed. “Sounds like you guys have it rough, here.”

The doctor chuckled at that. “‘Rough’ would be an understatement. The wizards’ spells always have some kind of hideous side effect. You must have seen it for yourself, out there. I’ve read the description of your ailment and, while I will admit that it is powerful, it is not incurable.”

“That’s good to hear, at least,” Soarin nodded, then frowned. “I’m not gonna have to take any pills, am I?”

“You’ll wake up with a little headache, is all,” he responded. “Please, follow me.”

The doctor gestured behind him and to his left, he and his assistant leading the two pegasi down a narrow hallway that stretched further into the hospital. Moans and shouts of agony and pain—and the occasional maniacal laugh—echoed around them on all sides, lending a feeling of uneasiness and claustrophobia to the stained gray surfaces which might have once been a sterile white.

The doctor halted in front of one of the entrance to one of the many rooms, a rather sturdy door of oak wood occupying the rectangular frame. A pair of small window slits with sliding hatches were punched into the center of the door, placed at average eye level for both human and equine use. The doctor laid his gloved hand on the copper-plated handle, giving it a twist and a firm push inward.

At first glance, one might have mistaken the hospital room for a prison cell. With the total absence of windows anywhere on the cold stone walls, several brass lanterns were hung on eyehooks embedded into the ceiling, their soft yet dim glow providing the only source of illumination. Brownish-red blotches of dried blood mixed with dirt and other particles dotted the floor.

“I will need a moment alone with the lieutenant, general,” the beak-masked doctor said.

“Alright,” Spitfire nodded, then turned to her partner. “You gonna be alright, Soarin?”

“Uhh…” Soarin muttered as he gazed dubiously into the dark, foreboding room. “I’m not sure this is such a good ide—”

A rough shove in his side cut him off.

“Come on, you big baby!” Spitfire nudged him sharply with her muzzle towards the open door. “Just get your check-up, get your free freaking lollipop, and we’ll be outta here!”

“Alright, alright! Get off my back, mom!” Soarin pouted, effecting a perfect tone of surly petulance.

Soarin stumbled into the room. The doctor and his assistant followed close behind, the former closing the door behind him gingerly and sliding a heavy iron deadbolt into place with a ka-thunk.

“Take good care of him, alright, doc?” Spitfire’s muffled voice came from the other side.

“Rest assured, general, he’s in good hoov— er, hands,” the doctor replied.

“Jeez, I feel like I’m in some cheesy slasher film,” Soarin laughed nervously, staring at the wide examination table flanked on all sides by a slew of brackets and thick restraints. A clean white linen sheet—thankfully—draped over the entire thing, masking whatever bloodstains or blemishes might have affected the focal point of the whole room by now.

“Please do not worry, lieutenant,” the beak-masked man said. “I don’t think that our more… involved methods of treatment will be necessary, here. We simply need to directly examine the particulars of your ailment. Go and have a seat on the table, please.”

Soarin nodded in response, swallowing a knot of tension in his throat and smiling as genuinely as he could. He bunched himself up on the floor, then leapt forward into the air and flapped his wings a few times, bringing him clear across the room and onto the table.

“Now then, Soarin,” the doctor said crisply. “My assistant here has a mask on under her hood. I want you to tell me the very first thing that pops into your head when you see it, no matter how silly or lucid the thought is.”

“Uhh… okay,” Soarin nodded.

The filly climbed up onto the table, taking a sitting position opposite him and staring him straight in the eyes.

“Ready?” came the voice of the doctor.

“Yeah.”

In one deft, fluid motion, the filly lifted a hoof to the lip of her mask and pushed it up and away from her face.

“Scootal— ah-aaargh! Nrraaaggh!!”

The now-revealed orange pegasus quickly retreated from the table, scampering fearfully to the doctor’s side. He pressed his hands together thoughtfully, watching as Soarin’s seizuring form began to shift from color to color like a kaleidoscope.

“I thought so…” the doctor muttered.

“Everything okay in there?” came a worried voice from the hallway outside.

“Y-yes!” he said quickly. “It’s just part of the procedure!”

Crack!

Soarin’s foreleg snapped backward, bones bending and breaking at unnatural angles as extra feathers began to emerge all across his body.

“I’m coming in!” Spitfire called through the door.

“No!” the doctor shouted. The protrusions on his headpiece lit up with a crackling azure glow, which quickly spread to cover every countertop and cabinet in the room. They wrenched themselves free from the walls, flying to land in a pile in front of the entrance.

WHAM!

“Somepony help me!” Spitfire screamed as the door refused to yield to her kick. “They’re messing with Soarin!”

“Oh no, no, no, no!” the beak-masked man muttered harshly. “Just long enough! Please!”

He glanced back to the writhing, protean form on the table behind him.

’Just long enough…’

“Shut up, shut up, SHUT UP!”

Crackling tendrils of white light snaked out from the endlessly shifting void, growing thinner and thinner as the pegasus they were attached to thrashed and fought at every turn.

“You’re a Wonderbolt now, Rainbow Dash!” several immaterial voices all around her said, some in soothing tones, others in vicious jeers.

“You don’t need your ‘friends’; they’re just holding you back!”

“You have everything you could ever want!”

“Yes, this is your dream come true! Spitfire is always there beside you, and together you lead the city of Cloudsdale, itself!”

“Shut your stupid face!” Rainbow roared angrily. She thrust one of her hooves forward sharply, finally causing the ensnaring tendril to snap like an over-taut rope and slither back into the dark void. The many voices cried out as one, their keening shaking the shifting mental landscape like an earthquake.

“You took me from my friends, and look what you did to them! I don’t want to live a lie!”

Rainbow spun in a circle and kicked outward, and the ephemeral chain grasping her back right leg broke away. The void rocked again with a weakening shriek, the voices dire, almost pleading.

“What are you doing?! Don’t throw this away!”

“Countless lives are at your disposal!”

“You can be anyone you want to be!”

“I want to be Rainbow Dash!” she screamed in defiance, jerking her other front leg to the side. The tendril snapped.

Instead of slithering back, however, it whipped right back towards her, wrapping around her neck. Rainbow gasped and thrashed as the tendril tightened, crushing her windpipe with sharp, unrelenting force.

“What you want isn’t exactly what you need,” the voices laughed.

Rainbow slowly faded, as pinprick blips of light flickered across her vision. Her kicks became weaker and weaker, until she collapsed to the ground, gasping for air. The voices whispered and cooed soothingly, luring her back to the darkness.

“It’ll be alright, Rainbow Dash…”

“There’s no need to fight, anymore…”

“Just let us help you…”

“GET AWAY FROM HER!!”

The void shrieked and shook with confusion, several of the tendrils flipping around uncertainly. Rainbow’s head flicked up at the sudden—and very familiar—voice.

Through the haze of her dimming vision, she saw a figure rapidly materializing in the distance, sprinting towards them at breakneck speeds. It was barely equine in shape, with three spiraling horns jutting out from its head at awkward angles, and a pair of bird’s legs instead of hooves.

“Rainbow Dash!” the figure called out.

Rainbow blinked.

“Rarity…?”

“Come on, Rainbow Dash, come out...”

Scootaloo crouched on the floor near a vaguely pegasus-shaped pile of throbbing meat. Skin melted away from it in coarse slabs, bones poked through the limbs like the spines of a cactus, and an eyeball was hanging out of a grossly-enlarged socket by the nerve.

She gently turned the head of the body, looking straight into its good eye.

“You recognized me, Rainbow!” Scootaloo said in a pleading tone. “You remember, right? You took me under your wing? C’mon, big sis! Please, change back!”

Bang!

Scootaloo’s eyes flicked over to the door. The barricade jostled, sending several glass instruments smashing to the floor. On the other side, she could hear the sound of someone speaking in a quick and frantic tone, while another voice answered her with what sounded like ‘stand back’.

A sharp gasp drew the filly’s attention back to the floor, where the doctor’s formerly-still body shook and convulsed into sudden life. Scootaloo left the still-throbbing body and dashed to his side, aiding him as he struggled to sit up.

“Did you find her?” Scootaloo asked quickly. “Did you get her out? Is Spitfire gonna—”

The doctor put a finger to Scootaloo’s lips. His breathing was ragged and quick, yet steady, sucking in the stale air of the hospital room like it was the freshest scent in the world.

“Hah… hah… Woo. She—”

KRA-BOOM!

The barricade—as well as a sizable chunk of the wall—exploded inward in a storm of plaster chips, stone shards, and pieces and splinters of wooden furniture. The doctor quickly wrapped his arms around Scootaloo to shield her, the pegasus screaming as they were hit by a veritable shotgun blast of debris.

Spitfire stepped over the rubble, flapping her wings to blow away the swirling dust. She was followed closely by a man clothed in a flowing royal-purple robe, tied in gold sashes, carrying a slender onyx staff displaying a polished bronze planetarium.

“Where is he?” Spitfire demanded. “What have you freaks done with Soarin?!”

A weak, aching moan answered her question. Spitfire looked over to the table, where a blue hoof was shakily rising over the edge. She quickly dashed forward, wrapped her hooves around the limb and pulled up—

She gasped as she was met with the sight of a familiar prismatic-maned mare, whose fur was constantly shifting in hues and textures like a swirling oil palette. Spitfire let go instantly, letting her head slump back to the cold floor with a dull thud.

“W… what…?” Spitfire stepped back, her eyes quailing with confusion and disbelief.

The doctor unsteadily rose, bits of rubble tumbling off of him as he wiped off his shoulders. Spitfire and the wizard whirled on him, their baleful glares driving Scootaloo to duck behind his legs for protection.

“Oh, my,” the doctor chuckled nervously. “Do I have some explaining to do...”

“What did you do?” Spitfire snapped.

“I brought my friend back,” he responded simply.

“What are you talking about, you hack?” Spitfire’s wing flicked to a belt on her harness, pulling a long dagger out in a single deft motion. “What did you do to him?!”

“Remove your mask, medicine man!” the wizard ordered, raising his staff for emphasis.

Scootaloo shrank back in fear, obscuring herself under her hood.

The doctor complied, removing the beaked mask and hood, and grinned with all the innocence she could muster despite her wide mouth and mismatched blue and gold eyes.

Spitfire blinked. “You’re the one from—”

“The room with the purple dragon, yes,” the ‘doctor’ interrupted, her voice now a soft, feminine cadence. “My name is Rarity, and I am with a miss Twilight Sparkle, personal protege of Princess Celestia.”

A bead of sweat rolled down the pegasus’ temple. The wizard frowned, lowering his staff a little.

“You know who that is, don’t you, Spitfire?” Rarity smiled slyly. “That mare that you threatened to call the Inquisition on to destroy her work?”

“But you…” Spitfire started, looking over Rarity’s features. “You’re a Tzeentchian—”

“And you saw me right next to Twilight Sparkle, not bound or engaged with her in any way, shape or form,” Rarity interrupted pointedly.

“She needs me. And you,” Rarity pointed at the fuming pegasus, “need to be told an inconvenient truth.”

“Get to the bucking point!” Spitfire snarled.

The bipedal tricorn walked to the back of the room, reaching down to pick Rainbow’s shaking body off the floor. She placed her on the table, then looked back over to the two.

“There was never a him, Spitfire,” Rarity said sadly. “Do you remember anything about a Changeling daemon?”

Spitfire pointed the seven-inch dagger to the heavily-breathing pegasus on the table. “She... that is it.”

Rarity shook her head. “The Tzeentchian Changeling has been around for centuries, long before any of us were born. But I met Rainbow Dash when we were both fillies.”

The knife sank in Spitfire’s grip, but she quickly returned it. “I saw her change before in the Rig, back in Cloudsdale. She almost turned into a Slaughterbrute; or maybe worse, a freaking Mutalith Vortex Beast!”

“But as she was Soarin, there were still changeling attacks!” Rarity pointed out. “She only has similar powers, but she’s not the same entity.”

Spitfire’s eyes started to become glassy and choked with tears, and her lips quivered with pain and denial.

“B-but... Soarin came back,” she rasped weakly. “He… h-he...”

“No, he didn’t,” Rarity said. “I am dearly sorry for what actually happened to him, but he did not come back.”

“P...plot,” Rainbow muttered weakly, drawing all eyes in the room back to the table. “It was the changeling’s plan all along.”

“Big sis!” Scootaloo cried happily. She broke away from Rarity’s legs, quickly jumping onto the table and helping Rainbow to sit up.

“Wait.” Spitfire gritted her teeth, her eyebrows knitting together in anger. “Are you telling me that this was all some big, obtuse plan to make me think I had him back?”

Rarity nodded. “It’s what the Changer of Ways does best,” she said simply. “He schemes and plots for its own sake, with no real objective in mind. He has to keep his games going, or else he would perish.”

“The Changeling…” Rainbow coughed. “It beat me up, messed with my memories… and it cut me up like this…” She raised a hoof which, along with the rest of her body, bore the scars of her surgical stitching.

“I always wanted to be a Wonderbolt, but I never wanted…” Rainbow turned her head, regarding Spitfire with a look of pain and remorse in her rosy eyes. “I would never impersonate my heroes. Especially not one that’s gone.”

Spitfire muttered violently under her breath, shaking her head vehemently from side to side. Then, with a heartbroken scream, she snapped her wing forward and sent the dagger flying. It struck the thin edge of the surgical table and buried itself several inches, the hilt vibrating like a tuning fork. The pegasus sank to her haunches, burying her face in her hooves.

“Pardon me, sir,” Rarity said, turning to the wizard. “I do apologize for all this commotion, but I hope you understand that it was necessary. Now that it all appears to be done, however, I believe your presence here is no longer required.”

The robed man glared at her suspiciously. He finally grunted, lowered his staff, and carried himself away. His hateful gaze remained fixed on the mutant until he was beyond view.

Rarity clicked her tongue and smiled thinly. She turned back to Rainbow. “Welcome back to the Great Game, Rainbow Dash,” she said. “Now if you don’t mind, Twilight is waiting for us all back at the lab, so—”

“Rarity, wait,” Rainbow cut her off. She looked sadly at the sobbing form of the last living Wonderbolt.

“Spitfire, I… I’m sorry for everyth—”

The golden pegasus abruptly turned and walked towards the exit with a stony expression on her tear-streaked face, not sparing a backwards glance.

“Spitfire, wait! Please!”

She didn’t.

Author's Note

So Applejack has fallen into the embrace of Grandpa Nurgle, we get a taste of where Rarity's allegiances might lie, Celestia's having some family issues, and there's an easily enraged giant pony who can absorb metal locked up underground. I foresee no problems...

Chapter 23: Descent into Darkness

”You are not protected by your shield of faith when you feel, kiss of Daemonette. Hell in heaven, heaven in embrace; when you die, seduced by Daemonette.” ~ HMKids, Seduced by Daemonette

Fifteen years. Fifteen years training to fight daemons, and now I’m working with them. Where’s my life going?

Spike laid the heavy box of books and other assorted materials on top of another, giving it a firm push to slide it into place. He took a step back, grunting with approval at the sight of the two-by-two stack of wooden crates sitting against the wall.

If she still manages to hit these things, I swear I’m having Twilight put in a recommendation for the Bright Wizard’s College.

Just as he began to relax, a high-pitched petulant voice only inches away cut into his thoughts, setting his teeth on edge.

“Are we ready yet? Are we ready yet? Are we—”

“Yes,” Spike interrupted, willing patience and calm into his voice.

He turned around to face the filly—if she could even be called that, anymore—behind him. Fleshy vines in various shades of purple and blue made up much of her body, broken frequently by vicious snaggletooth mouths that hissed small wisps of smoke.

“Just remember to take it slow, alright, Sweetie Belle?” Spike warned her.

“I know.” She nodded quickly.

“I’m serious. We don’t want to burn down the lab, and—”

“I know! You told me a hundred times!” she hissed petulantly.

“Then let’s make it a hundred and one,” Spike smirked.

Sweetie Belle shot him a piercing glare and several of the toothed maws on her body began to glow menacingly like jack-o-lanterns.

Sighing in resignation, Spike gestured towards a far corner of the room, where every piece of flammable material had been moved at least ten feet away from a wide and thick table sheathed in iron. Sweetie Belle loped across the intervening space and jumped onto the table, twice her height, with ease.

“That’s some pretty good air,” said Spike. “How can you jump so high?”

Sweetie made another little hop, floating as buoyantly as a balloon as she slowly descended. “I think it’s characteristic of a flamer. Most of them don’t even touch the ground. They hover on their clouds of smoke. I can’t wait till I can do it too!”

Spike shook his head. “You shouldn’t be getting used to this. We’re here to undo this before you might turn into something you can’t come back from.” He retrieved a stool from one of his orderly stacks of furniture, pulling it up to the table and taking a seat. “Alright, Sweetie Belle. First—”

The sound of a book closing shut cut across his speech. Spike turned his head, finding Twilight as she sat up from her bench near the wall and set her book down.

“Spike, I just hit page ninety-nine,” Twilight said with concern weighing on her tone. “I’m gonna go check on Rarity.”

Spike nodded. Rarity had gone off with a plague doctor’s raiment and mask, squawking to no one in particular about someone returning. She also said that if she wasn’t back by the time Twilight got to page ninety-nine, they should come find her.

Twilight got to her hooves and trotted to the door, taking one look back into the room at where everyone was. "Keep an eye on Sweetie Belle, guys."

The Doctor grunted affirmatively through his teeth as he strung a copper wire from one end of a steel tube to a shard of warpstone fixed to the other end. The instant the two touched, he released it, allowing a green spark to pop along the wire for a brief moment.

“Oh, that’s how you know it’s working…” he hummed whimsically. “Well, there’s another stallion and a dragon here who I think can handle the little filly, so I think I’ll go find some more components. There’s bound to be a blacksmith or something in this city.”

Twilight held the door for him as he trotted out, and looked to Spike, who regarded her with a reassuring smile. “I got it under control,” he said. “Go on and find her.”

Twilight gave a simple nod, then vanished through the doorway. “Oh Rarity, what did you get yourself into…?” Her voice trailed off as she clopped down the hallway.

Spike looked up to the ceiling, where Kivsin was hanging upside down from the support beams using his hind legs like hooks. His wings were draped around himself like a blanket, his eyes tightly shut in slumber.

And then there were two… Spike sighed.

“Now, Sweetie Belle,” he said, looking back to the giddy filly on the table. “First thing, calm down. Your mouths are moving a bit too much.”

“But this is how they always move,” Sweetie Belle’s forehead said, several other mouths across her body clicking and champing as if to enunciate the point.

She turned around to show Spike a fuzzy stump that used to be her tail. The opening on her forehead sealed and another one opened where a pony's mouth would be. “Hey, would it count as eating my own tail if I sat on it and the mouth on my thigh bit it off?”

Spike blinked. “O...kay,” he laughed nervously. “Uh... who’s been teaching you about controlling your power, before?”

“Lyra Heartstrings. She’s a pyromancer.”

“Wait, isn’t that the kooky mare from Ponyville who was always trying to walk on two legs and sit upright?”

“Mm-hmm!” Sweetie Belle nodded. “She came with us when we left Mordheim, and she’s actually almost completely human as her reward for serving this weird god.—”

“Mordheim?” Spike’s eyebrows shot up, and the fringes on his head quivered instinctively. “What were you all doing in there?”

“Me, Apple Bloom and Scootaloo got picked up by a bunch of those ‘Nyer-gull’ cultists,” she replied, then winced. “They tied me up to a pole and used me like a torch. They even said they were gonna kill me if I didn’t shoot fire when I was told, and I didn’t even do anything to them!”

Spike nodded sadly. “Yeah, nurglites have a burning hatred—”

Sweetie Belle glared at him darkly.

“No pun intended,” he said quickly. “Anyway, what’s Lyra been telling you about this fire-breathing?”

“Oh, she said I should use it to burn the whole world in the name of this Tzeentch guy and not spare a single living soul from the corrupting fires of eternal damnation.”

Great, she’s been learning from a double psychopath.

Spike slapped his claws together. “Okay…” he began, “Forget everything she taught you; you’re learning from a natural from here on.”

He took a deep breath and tilted his head back, then exhaled sharply, blowing a large ring of swirling emerald flame into the air. It expanded greatly as it rose higher and higher, before finally dissipating into ashen smoke.

“Oh, that’s so cool!” Sweetie squealed in excitement. “I wanna try!”

“Take it easy, we’ll get there,” Spike chuckled. “You can’t just throw yourself into it. Now tell me, where does the fire come from?”

The filly tapped a hoof to her chin, humming thoughtfully. Her forehead opened its mouth to speak after a few seconds.

“From the breath?”

“Well, that might be one thing that she told you right,” said Spike, placing a claw on his chest. “Fire needs oxygen, so your breath is your fuel.”

“Lyra already told me all that,” Sweetie griped impatiently. “We practiced for hours almost every day doing the easiest thing in the world, breathing. She told me all about this burning source inside me, and we practiced this ‘Sweetie Bomb’ trick where she would throw me and just before I hit the ground I’d blast all I had which softened the landing.”

She hopped up and leaned from the edge of the table with the most beggarly quiver in her lower lip. “I swear, I’m ready for so much more.”

“Then hit me.”

Sweetie blinked, staring up at the coolly smiling dragon. Her mouths worked soundlessly for a moment before she found her voice. “W… what?”

“If you think you’re ready, then do something.” Spike traced an X across the palm of his claw with the other. “Right here,” he said.

Sweetie scuffed a hoof on the table nervously. “Well, I… I don’t wanna burn you.”

Spike laughed. “I bathed in molten lava, and that was when I was still a kid. Trust me, I can take it.”

The filly huffed a laugh, smiling nervously. “Okay, if you say so.”

Spike took one last glance around to make sure all the most flammable things in the room were out of range, then put a claw to Sweetie’s magical suppression collar.

“Take it slow, first,” he warned, and with a click, the ring popped off in his hand. He set it aside, then interposed his hand directly between him and the warp-touched filly.

Sweetie adjusted her stance, took a deep breath and held it. Her mouths widened, hissing sulphuric vapor, and as she just began to exhale, burning lights began to shine from within her ‘first’ mouth.

A sudden burst of white light in the room stung her eyes.

Sweetie yelped, exploding in a fireball that sent Spike reeling backward off his chair. Kivsin jolted awake and slipped from his perch, catching himself in a hover. Just as his waking sight made out a wall of yellow light coming at him, he raised his hooves in shock just in time for the flames to turn an odd shade of lavender and blow out as quick as a candle. As the smoke cleared, Spike got back up, rubbing the back of his head, and there was Sweetie Belle still on the table, her whole body engulfed in a rainbow of swirling flame.

“Did I do it wrong?” she asked disappointedly.

Spike jumped up and quickly pat her down to smother the flames, carefully avoiding her many toothed mouths, which clicked and hissed excitedly.

“Don’t worry, you just put a little too much power into it, that’s all,” he said reassuringly. “And what was that light—”

“Was that an explos—”

Spike froze. His head whipped around towards the all-too-familiar voice. Twilight stood only a few meters away, her eyes quivering with surprise the likes of which he hadn’t seen since the ‘Want it, Need it’ incident. Following her gaze, Spike belatedly realized that—

“Fire!!” Twilight shrieked. She dashed around the room with her horn already alight, placing dozens of burning books in magical orbs at a time, robbing the hungry flames of oxygen. When she had extinguished the last of the blazes, she turned to glare at the still-smoking filly.

“Sweetie Belle, what did I say?!” she demanded.

“It’s not my fault! You scared me!” Sweetie retorted, taking a step back.

“It really wasn’t,” Spike added quickly. “She was doing pretty well, actually, and I wanted to put the time to good use.”

Twilight put a hoof to her face in exasperation. “Look, just… not in the library, alright?”

“I’m sorry,” Sweetie murmured contritely, her gaze dropping to the floor.

Twilight had teleported in with Rarity, Scootaloo, and another mare whose coat flittered through different shades and colors like a cuttlefish. Twilight’s horn dimmed out after putting out the fires and she helped the rainbow pegasus over to Rarity’s makeshift bed. With certain foes of the Empire permeating Middenheim, prizing warpstone, and the stuff growing from Rarity’s shoulders in fantastic shards, she would effectively live in the lab.

“Come on, Rainbow, dear, work with me,” Rarity murmured in the pegasus’ ear. She supported Rainbow to the bed and laid her down.

Rainbow shivered despite the blankets and she sniffled, watery-eyed and with choked sobs. Scootaloo stayed solemnly quiet and curled up on the floor next to her.

Spike stared in disbelief at the living kaleidoscope. “Oh my gosh, is that Rainbow Dash?”

“Yeah,” said Twilight. She winced as she rubbed her horn, Spike instinctively noting the strain teleporting three other ponies had on her. “She’s been gone from us for so long. We want to know what she went through, but for now, I guess, we’ll let her rest.”

“I rummaged through her mind and found a few things,” Rarity chimed in. “The Changeling wiped her memories, forced her to appear as Soarin, and she’s been living in Cloudsdale, alongside Spitfire ever since. Try to leave the poor dear be until she’s ready. And Scootaloo?”

The orange filly poked her head up.

“I have good news and bad news. Bad news, you have to go back to the dungeon with the others. We can’t have too many ponies in the lab.”

Scootaloo jumped up and scuttled closer to Rainbow Dash. “N-no, please! I haven’t seen Rainbow in forever! We didn’t even get to talk to each other yet—”

“And good news,” Rarity cut her off. “She’s just like the Changeling. There’s no form she can’t assume, so she can go and see you anytime. I assure you, It’ll be the first thing she does when she wakes up.”

“And Shining Armor put out an order for our friends to be moved out of the dungeon,” Twilight added. “Who knows how long it’ll take for the order to get through the hierarchy, though, and all that time can’t be good on Fluttershy’s psyche. She cannot get upset.”

Scootaloo glanced back to Rainbow, who had already drifted off, and reluctantly nodded. Rarity kept on her doctor’s coat, donned her beaked mask again, and led Scootaloo out.

Spike, unnoticed, looked to the ground timidly.

Look at them. All this we’re doing… Maybe there’s a chance, but… What if there’s no fixing themselves?

After three days of electric shocks and cursing his lack of opposable thumbs, it was almost done. Just one more component, the warpstone tooth-braces, and his sonic screwdriver would finally be complete. Without that little miracle, things had been so tedious; this thing called ‘medical school’ that he had dealt with before, especially. He couldn’t just scan a body for an ailment, there, so he actually had to look into it.

But no more. After this was all done, he would possess the only warpstone-powered sonic screwdriver in existence.

The Doctor had requested the braces to be crafted by a smith, but they were too complex, so the request went to the Dwarven Engineers’ Guild and they were due to be picked up today. He, Twilight, Rarity, and Kivsin were to conduct an experiment when he returned. If the screwdriver worked, it would be a tremendous aid to all of their efforts.

The wind whipped over his face, carrying the smoky airs of the city from countless fires below. It was almost stifling, and each blink only slightly relieved the sting in his eyes. He flew among the traffic of pegasi between the buildings with saddlebags strapped around his middle.

His thoughts meandered back to the woods, to when Pinkie Pie tried to make right for the actions that weren’t entirely hers. He couldn’t blame her for resurrecting the memories that sprouted his wings back; she just wanted to apologize, what with trying to steal his soul and trap him as the Odysseus to her Calypso. But it still made him remember, and bring them back. Needless to say, their regrowth was quite painful.

Note to self, he thought. If I ever find the TARDIS, or if it finds me, again, tell Odysseus to keep Aeolus’ bag of winds on him at all times.

He pulled up, breaking past the tops of the surrounding buildings, and spotted the bright red roof of the Guild. In the front courtyard was a large statue, a polished marble mockup of one of the dwarven race’s most valuable and prized heirlooms, an Anvil of Doom.

He touched down before two gate guards with griffon-made revolver rifles in their hands. Each dwarf was a mighty four feet in height, with braided red and black beards flowing down to their belts.

The Doctor reached into his bag and passed them a stamped slip of paper. The ginger-haired dwarf looked it over in his thick fingers and gave Whooves an affirmative nod.

“Go ahead,” he said, and handed back the paper.

Whooves flew over the gate, past the courtyard, and into the smoky interior which glimmered with runic gems embedded in the frameworks. The guild even had its own resident barber, which mostly tended to facial hair.

Before Whooves was beyond the entrance hall, he heard a feminine giggling behind himself. He turned and saw no one, but there was a tuft of blonde-yellow hair swishing back and forth on the floor from around a corner.

That laugh… no, it couldn’t be…

There was only one way he would know for sure.

“Excuse me, miss,” he called. The hair shot out of view past the corner. When he rounded it, there was no one but dwarfs and a few griffons in the hall.

Again he heard the laughter, this time outside. He flew back to the courtyard, following the sound and looked up, then spied the hind legs of a grey-coated mare climbing over the roof of the building.

And then he saw it. The achingly-familiar cutie mark depicting bubbles on her flank.

“D… Ditzy?” Whooves smiled brightly, then spread his wings and shot straight up to the roof where he saw her.

Perched precariously atop a chimney, the blonde-maned pegasus looked out over the city with a forlorn face.

“Ditzy!” he called out again. The mare turned around, her eyes widening with a gasp.

“Doctor!” she exclaimed happily. Ditzy jumped down from the chimney, ran across the intervening space between them, and all but tackled him in a hug.

“Ditzy, I haven’t seen you in forever!” the Doctor laughed. “I’ve been—”

Whooves felt her go tense suddenly and abruptly let go, backing away apprehensively.

“I said I was done,” Ditzy frowned. “They’re not still following you, are they?”

“No, no,” Whooves said quickly. “I’m not looking for help. I just… I saw you, and…” he stepped closer and took her hoof, “...and I wanted to see you again, so badly. Just a passing hello?”

Ditzy smiled. That same kind, carefree smile he’d come to know and love. Even the way her eye drifted slightly to the side brought a warm feeling to his chest.

“I’m glad to see you too, Doctor.”

Oh, dear, is she blushing? I— wait...

He looked to her hoof again, and strangely, saw a pink hue creeping from the tip down its length.

“D-Ditzy, what’s happening to… your…”

Now he couldn’t tell if he was shrinking, or if she was growing. No, she was definitely growing, and it wasn’t long before Ditzy was almost twice his size. He slowly backed away.

“Ditzy... what’s wrong?” he asked, dread beginning to creep into his mind.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Doctor!” Ditzy’s smile started to spread wider as she followed him, until it became an eerie rictus grin. “Why do you look so afraid? We were going to catch up, remember?”

Having run out of roof, the Doctor hovered past the ledge, but Ditzy didn’t give chase and just stared intently like a cat tracking a butterfly.

“First tell me what’s going on— woah!”

A black tendril had shot out of Ditzy’s mouth and cracked like a whip not an inch over Whooves’ head.

Oh, BALLS—

In the mere split second he was thrown off, she leapt at him fast as a jumping spider, tackling him from the air. He wrestled against her as her pink leg turned black, hardened, and swelled. They landed, hard and heavy, and Whooves’ head rang painfully. His vision flashed and faded as he squirmed and groaned in agonized throes.

“Still not there yet, are you?” a new, yet familiar voice asked in a weary tone.

The last thing he saw was a large black crab’s claw, mere moments before it struck him in the head.

Scootaloo had her hooves over her eyes, as Rainbow had instructed, while she was carried up and up into the sky. The first time Rainbow came to visit her, she had impersonated the prison’s warden when he was away, told the guards to take an early break, and they got to catch up. Rainbow told her she was readying a surprise in the clouds and she was finally going to see it.

“Ready, Scoots?” Rainbow said.

Scootaloo wiggled her legs in anticipation. “M’hm.”

“Look!”

Scootaloo threw her hooves down, and gasped. It was a near exact recreation of Rainbow’s cloud house, bobbing lightly in the white field above Middenheim. Though lacking the little rainbow fountains, nearly all else was like a photocopy of heleopolian architecture.

“You rebuilt your house!” Scootaloo exclaimed happily.

“Yep. Didn’t take too long with the clouds as easy to mold as clay. Go check it out!”

Rainbow set Scootaloo down and she dashed for the domicile. Rainbow went ahead and opened the door for her to an empty interior, waiting to be filled with homely amenities. Scootaloo went over every room with inexhaustible energy, elated just to be in an actual house again.

“This is so cool! Is this room mine?” She went to the upstairs balcony, looking down to Rainbow, who was somewhat hunched, and then looked back at her with slightly reddened eyes. “Rainbow, is something wrong?”

She wiped her eyes as they started to well up. “It’s nothing, Scoots. Just… there’s so much I missed, and so much I went through that was all lies.” She drifted up to Scootaloo and put her wing around her. “I wasn’t there for you and the others when you were walking halfway across the country, but now I am here and I can be a real sister now.”

Scootaloo hugged her back. “Well, it wasn’t your fault. You were beat up and kidnapped inside your own head.”

“Even then, I have to make it up to you now. No sis of mine goes through all you did and has to live in a hole afterward.” Rainbow looked around and sighed. “I need to get a job if we’re going to keep this place, though. I had to get a permit to build some distance from the other houses since you can’t be seen in public. Better keep my eye out for help wanted signs or sign up with a weather team.”

“Do you still use your real name when talking to ponies?”

“No,” Rainbow griped. “Gotta keep my Element of Loyalty status under wraps until Twilight and Rarity can find a way to undo our curses.”

Her fur twinged and flitted into feathers that flipped over across her body, changing the color of her mane, tail, and eyes a monochromatic dark blue, and her coat a hot shade of pink.

“Until then, I’m Rainbow Spring!” she said. “What do you think?”

“It looks great. And we can keep up our flying lessons, right?”

“Totally! We can pick it up first thing tomorrow.”

Scootaloo grinned widely. “Hey, Rainbow?” she asked.

“Huh?” The older pegasus cocked her head to the side.

“I’m so glad you’re back.”

Rainbow smiled in return. “It’s good to be back, Scoots.”

“Sectors four and seven have been overrun, requesting reinforcements at the reserve bulkhead! Not one step backward, Cadians! The Emperor’s Angels of Death are on their way!”

The vox speaker cut to silence.

Two pegasi sprinted across ferrocrete floors with all the speed they could muster, too exhausted for flight. The cracking echo of gunfire followed behind them, along with dying screams and insidious laughter. They dashed past another defensive line; two heavy bolters, an autocannon, and twenty guardsmen, all behind a sandbag barrier to hold the hall.

They might last fifteen seconds if they were lucky.

“Come on, Ditzy,” Whooves panted, his lungs burning with exertion. “It’s not much further!”

His companion remained silent. Her eyes were dilated to horrified pinpricks and crisscrossed with red streaks, and her running was slack and haphazard from exhaustion.

Further down the barren corridor, Whooves spotted the entrance they were running for. And just then came the familiar monstrous roar of the bolters ringing in their ears. The defensive line ripped to life in a barrage of fire, with the thud of the autocannon as their battle-beat. Shell casings rang like bells as they struck the floor, and lasguns cracked as they spat crimson death down the hall.

“Not one step backward!” the beleaguered score of Cadians roared in unison.

“I’m going to miss those chaps,” Whooves muttered under his breath. It felt like forever before he and Ditzy finally cleared the doorway, and it felt like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders when he slammed it shut with a loud clang.

He turned, finally allowing himself perhaps the first genuine smile he’d had in days as he spotted it. There, in the center of the room, sat a blessedly familiar rectangular blue object that read ‘Police Box: Public Call’ in casual, illuminated letters on top.

He threw open the double doors into an exceptionally large space for the box’s size. They both scaled the stairs to the glass platform and control panels. Ditzy gasped sobbingly, and Whooves held her head up to look at him.

“Ditzy, we’re almost out of here. Look at me.” He firmly patted the side of her face and her eyes snapped into focus, looking in the same direction at once.

“Ditzy, I need you to focus. Remember what to do on your side. Okay?”

Ditzy weakly nodded, bringing her breath in with a loud sniffle.

Whooves put on the best comforting smile he could. “Great. Come on, let’s—”

“Blood for the Blood God!”

“Gods, revel in this slaughter!”

“—get the sodding hell out of here!”

As he and Ditzy sprung to the controls, Whooves found himself wishing he could go back in time to slap himself on the wrist before getting himself into this situation. He and Ditzy had tried to close a warp portal on the besieged world of Charadon IV, where hundreds of millions had already fallen before the forces of Chaos. Alas, the sacrifice of the PDF was in vain, and they had failed to stem the black tide. And now they were running for their lives.

The gunfire died down outside, and a ragged snarl rang out. “More in here! I can smell them!”

“Bollocks!” Whooves cursed, his hooves already flying over the consoles and instruments in a sequence of practiced fluidity.

The central pillar of the blue box lit up and hummed powerfully. It was immediately drowned out by the roar of a revving chainsword whose teeth sawed through the steel door of the room outside like a hot knife through butter. In a shower of sparks it cut up and sideways, then the whole bulkhead was kicked in by an armored spiked boot.

As the doors to the box closed, the ponies caught a glimpse of a behemoth of iron. Elephantine tusks curled from its face plate, an entire withered corpse was impaled on the spikes on its back, and its crackling electrified claw peeled the breech back as it entered. Emblazoned on its left pauldron was the icon of the Blood Gorgons, the head of the snake-haired Medusa. Its grafted chainfist-melta-bolter whined for more iron to devour.

The doors closed completely and the central pillar glowed bright as a spotlight. Everything started to shudder and vibrate, and the Doctor smiled. “We just might make it!”

His heart leaped as a screaming thudding echoed against the doors, which gave way to a shower of sparks as a spinning staff of teeth cut away at it.

“Come on, come on!” Whooves rubbed his hooves on the panels, as if that would make it work faster.

They both retreated to the far wall, up the stairs as the saw was withdrawn. “D-D-Doctor, they’re gonna get in!” Ditzy stammered.

The terminator's face came to the hole, spotting them together. It reclined back, raising its armored boot. Ditzy shrieked at the crash of steel against steel as the doors nearly burst off their hinges. The chainfist spun up again and behind him were four similarly-armored supermen. They raised the paean, the terminator set a foot onto the rim of the box—

Everything outside evaporated into nothingness.

On the other side was a shimmering, swirling world of fiery waves, crackling like lightning, but no louder than a gentle wind. Whooves and Ditzy were huddled together, and at the silence, the stallion peered up, seeing only the wormhole beyond, and the doors closing back with a mild slam.

Whooves spent a few seconds to catch his breath, and sighed with a euphoric grin. “Oh, thank goodness! Ditzy, we made it!” He moved to take her hooves from her yes, but she resisted, and kept them there. “Ditzy? Are you hurt?”

“T-t...take me home, Doctor…”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

“No more… No more… I-I can’t take it...”

Whooves bit his lip. He’d seen this kind of despair during the Great Zombie War on Earth. People were so miserable, had so little hope, they would spontaneously perish in sleep as their minds just subconsciously gave up. Apocalyptic Despair Syndrome.

He then saw red droplets roll down from her hooves. “Ditzy, you… you didn’t look into the portal, did you—”

“Take me home!” she wailed, then lifted her eyes. They were bloodshot, and pooling red at the rims.

“Mmuuuugh…”

Ditzy… don’t… Please don’t go...

The Doctor’s mind swam in a pudding of dizziness and nausea. His back still ached, a pall of errant buzzing stinging his body.

Please… We’ll never come back here again… I’m sorry…

He found his legs and wings couldn’t move much, like they were being restrained, and felt something wet and very sweet-smelling all around him, up to his chin. He was partially submerged in it, and in a dark container by the feeling of the close, hard walls.

He instantly woke up as a torrent of thoughts hit him. Was he captured? Kidnapped? What was this goop he was in—

A high-pitched ringing, unmistakably like an egg timer rang through the container.

“Ooh!” a feminine voice sounded outside.

The rapid rhythm of hoofsteps drawing nearer prompted Whooves to take a deep breath and sink himself lower in the liquid until his mane went under. The figure’s voice was muffled with the fluid in his ears, but he heard the lid of the container be lifted away, then a gasp. The next thing he knew, he was being slapped all over and grabbed by several black appendages that harshly yanked him up and out. The forced handling caused Whooves to gasp for breath.

“Oh, thank goodness! I thought you fell out or drowned!”

Whooves coughed out the pastry-sweet slime. What is this, donut glaze?

“Who are you? I warn you, I’m friends with a daemonic vampire who’ll look for me if I’m not back!”

He shook his head to clear his eyes and his blood turned milky on seeing the whiteless opal eyes of a pink face of unbridled glee. His body was covered in a thick white substance, the same as what filled the barrel off to the right, and tight strings bound up his legs and wings. All around were frivolous confectionaries and ingredients arranged on decorated shelves like a pastry shop; cakes, candies, and the like. The sign on the door had the Open side facing inward, and the window blinds were drawn shut.

“P-P-Piih…”

The mare who held him up gripped him with several tentacles sprouting from where a foreleg used to be, slithering across his person like curious snakes. Her crustaceous claw pinched the sides of his head and brought him closer to her ear.

“Didn’t catch that. What’d you say?”

“P-Pinkie… I thought you purged yourself of the stimulants….”

Her tentacles let him go, still holding him by the claw, and she greedily licked the frosting off the tendrils. “I did! I remember I got jabbed by a falling needle, and- huuuuuuhhhh!” She gasped with force enough to bring in a breeze behind him.

“You don’t remember me!” she squealed. Tears immediately began rolling down her face and her claw tightened around Whooves’ head. “We went stargazing the first time we met! We cuddled at that rest stop, and… and…”

The Doctor’s eyes widened in despair. “You!”

Pinkie’s tears instantly reversed back into her eyes with an audible sucking sound. “You do remember me!” she squealed, spinning him round and round. “But how could I think you ever forgot?”

“How…” Whooves spat out another glob of frosting. “How did you get out of the dungeon?”

“Oh my gosh, you wouldn’t believe it! I asked one of the guards to let me out, he took one look at me and boom! He did it! He let me out, even gave me some clothes, and ever since, I’ve been looking for you. Ooh. I’d just squeeze you, but I don’t wanna mess up the coating.”

The Doctor’s eyes squinted in disbelief. What? Why would a guard just… no, no. Only a sorcerer could make victims surrender themselves.

And then it clicked. Or a daemonette…

His thought was cut by Pinkie’s tongue running firmly up his spine, between the roots of his wings, feeling the muscle tense up against her tongue, and snapped it up at his mane.

“The glaze set into your fur nicely,” she said, licking her lips. “Time for the decorations!”

“N-No, what—nugh!”

Pinkie jammed an apple in his mouth, propping it open too far to open any wider and let it fall out. As she gaily carried him to one of the decorating tables, he tried to push it out with his tongue, still to no avail as his teeth had dug in.

Pinkie examined her template, her blank, shouting, squirming canvas. With the ropes, he looked like a white turkey, waiting to be dressed.

Tapping a claw to her lips, she scanned over the shelves, which bore sprinkles, cherries, everything any confection could need.

“Hmmm… Aha!”

She brought down jars of individually wrapped taffy pieces, jujubes, marzipan, and Araby Delights. It wasn't long before she had at least a dozen colors of sweets to decorate her canvas with, from marshmallows to sliced candied apples.

As she set down the last jar, she huffed uncomfortably, coughing heavily and beat her chest. A wet chef’s hat popped from her throat, messily splattering on the floor.

“Looks like tummy’s not through with him yet,” she said nonchalantly and looked back up to Whooves. “Hopefully I’ll be done with him by the time you’re ready, so he doesn’t ruin how you taste.”

Whooves could only squirm uselessly, and Pinkie started lining the ridge of his wings with jujubes.

Near everything in the lab had been moved to the furthest walls, in slightly-teetering stacks. In the center, strapped to an operating table, Kivsin tensely tried to steady his breaths for what was coming. Tied to the table’s fixed leg, a white-fleeced goat idly munched on a bucket of grass.

Spike, Rarity, and Sweetie Belle had taken to a makeshift barricade, a fortress of furniture from which they looked on Twilight, out of her wizard’s clothes, nearly as anxious as the bat pony before her.

The daemons of chaos were made purely of the stuff of the Warp. When possessing a mortal vessel, the foul energy could mutate them into the most horrible of nightmares. With luck, Rarity would be able to sense a pattern, something recognizable that they could perhaps decode, and maybe try to reverse the effects. It was the best plan that Twilight had thought of, but it still involved a massive amount of risk, so they weren’t taking any chances.

Twilight breathed deeply with a hoof to her chest, and in unison exhaled and slowly extended the leg.

“Everypony ready?”

“All set!” Spike called back from the barricade. “How’s Plan B?”

Twilight plucked the straps binding Kivsin to the table, each sounding a tight bass tone. “It’s good,” she said simply.

“Plan C?”

She glanced at the goat by the bucket. “Check.”

Spike turned to Rarity, who had undergone another few mutations herself. One of her eyes was simply gone, its empty socket had grown smooth, and a ring of teeth had sprouted from her collarbone.

“Plan D?”

She nodded. “Shield spell. Don’t worry yourself. I’ve practiced.”

“Okay…” Twilight sighed. Her horn glowed a soft purple aura, which tingled and pricked as it enveloped her whole body.

“It’s just for a little while,” she said, for herself as much as Kivsin. “Just to see if we can get something out of it.”

The stallion swallowed uncomfortably and a sarcastic smile twitched into his face. “It didn’t hurt that much last time.”

Twilight looked straight ahead and focused again on the spell. “Okay, now just… find your inner daemon— ow!”

She reflexively put a hoof to her forehead, which came off bloody. The spell didn’t stop, though; it had already begun to take its course. The fur and skin on her hoof started to part as if being sliced open by some invisible blade.

“Holy…” Spike put a claw against a table to get out of the bunker, but Rarity quickly placed her hand on his back.

“No,” The crystals in her shoulders burned with warpfire. Her wide mouth made idle growls and clicks. “It’s working; I can feel it. The spell is peeling off the disguise.”

“But the alchemist’s clothes I gave her were the disguise,” Spike said in confusion.

The mutant chuckled and looked back out at the mare who was quaking, screaming, leaking blood from splits in her flesh like a dripping fractured statue. Twilight’s fur curled and shriveled, hissing as if in a frying pan.

“Deeper,” Rarity muttered

Twilight’s mane and tail rose, shifting to whites and reds, crackling and blowing until it flashed into a fiery blaze. Her very blood boiled on her frying fur which peeled away, revealing a luminous white and yellow coat underneath.

In a hard thrust of force, the magical forces completely tore Twilight’s flesh away like an orange peel, heaping dead skin in an even ring all around her. Her horn flashed, shattering the spell’s aura around her in a glassy explosion which vaporized in a crackling witchlight.

The daemon gave a few stiff twitches, and doubled over with a choked gasp. She looked at her bright yellow hooves, then to Kivsin who was actually starting to lose what little calm he had left. She wobbled upright, then carefully moved closer.

“I’ll make it quick. Ready?”

He flexed under the restraints. “I can’t imagine being more ready...” he muttered.

Having already possessed him before, Twilight didn’t need another ritual. Kivsin was an open door. Again her horn illuminated, and her physical form dissolved into the air. The luminescent mist drifted and settled over Kivsin. Involuntarily, his reflexes forced his breath to hold.

Come on, Kivsin. Don’t make this difficult.

She settled for phasing through his skin, which brought on a intense burn as the mist flickered away. Kivsin’s look of panic softened until he was staring emptily into the ceiling, and moaning weakly.

Spike opened the mini-fort and he and Rarity approached the table. “So that’s what she really looks like?” the dragon asked.

Rarity hummed, “Mmm, yes. She’s lucky, really. All she gets is set on fire, and the rest of us are either undead or get extra limbs out our rears.”

Sweetie Belle went straight for the pile of discarded, charred hide on the floor. Her toothy maw opened for a bite, but only chomped air as Rarity pulled the hide away.

“Not yet,” she said. “We’ll save it for supper.” With that she neatly folded it with the ghoulishly contorted face on top and levitated it over onto a high shelf.

Sweetie crossed her hooves and pouted. “But it’s still warm.”

“I’ll use my magic to reheat it.” Rarity turned her attention to the mewling noctral, and caught Spike staring at her like she was crazy. “What?”

“You two are really going to eat that? It’s just like cannibalism!”

“Not quite,” Rarity pointed out. “I’m barely still a pony, and in Twilight’s condition, she’s not even of this plane of existence. And besides, you could say we’ve become… desensitized to what you would consider taboo.”

“To the point you’d eat a dead hide like a daffodil sandwich?”

“Oh, that’s not a bad idea! Could you bring us a loaf of bread, later?”

“Wow… alright…” Spike and Rarity stood on opposite sides of the table. “So how does this work, exactly?”

Rarity scratched her head, running a charged hand across Kivsin’s chest. “I’m not sure. I’m supposed to feel something, I guess?” She examined him, going over his middle, head, then back to his chest where she felt his ribcage soften, the bones sinking.

She hummed thoughtfully. “Strange.”

“What?”

Rarity’s crystal growths popped with energy. “Paper!” she snapped.

Spike quickly gathered up several sheets and blank scrolls and set them before Rarity. She rapidly dragged her free finger across it, burning symbols onto the parchment. “Ohoho, I think I’m onto something! Feel this, Spike.”

She took his claw and placed it on the semi-conscious noctral. He felt Kivsin’s insides moving, shifting places.

“Wonder what’s going to happen to him,” Spike murmured. A second later, he noticed something else.

Rarity was holding his hand.

“I haven’t seen it, either, but the Doctor’s description of his transformation was fascinating,” she said. “He souldn’t be gone for too long now and this ‘screwdriver’ of his might be of... use…”

She glanced over, watching Spike’s claw turn over and gently hold hers.

“Um… Spike?”

She pulled her hand back, snapping him out of his daydreamy expression.

“Oh, uh, sorry,” he said quickly, and took a step back.

“It’s quite alright.” But her nervous tone didn’t say so. If Rarity still had blood, her cheeks would likely be the most rosy shade of pink. She worked in silence over Kivsin for a couple of minutes, the tension between her and Spike thick enough to cut with a knife. She popped a spark every few seconds and her spindly hand etched another symbol onto the papers. She considered something for a moment, something she hadn’t thought about since her friends had it just as bad as she did, if not worse.

“It’s the crystals, isn’t it?”

“Huh?” Spike looked at her blankly.

“I know how much you like gems, and now warpstone is growing from me in bouquets. Is it the only thing that makes me tolerable to you?”

“N…No!” he declared, shaking his head. “What are you talking about?”

“Spike, look at me. The growths feel like tumors, my mouth looks like an angler fish, and I haven’t even been able to bathe for two months until just last week!” she leaned over, closer to Spike. “You look into this face. How can anypony like this?”

Spike slowly took her hands off, then smiled wanly. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and what I see is still the most beautiful mare out of Equestria. I didn’t like you just for your cutiemark or the gems in your shop.”

Spike held her hands between his claws and took a quivering breath. “I liked you because you were the nicest, most generous pony I knew, and I still think so.”

Rarity’s head hung low, but at his words, she let slip a small grin.

“I… I’m turning twenty in just a few months,” Spike continued. “We’re… not that far apart. Do… do you think—”

“Uuuugh…” Kivsin moaned. They both had their elbows on his weak chest, forcing the breath out of him, and immediately got off.

Rarity put her hands back to her working positions and smiled somewhat shyly to Spike. “Well, it isn’t like I have anywhere else to be. I think we’ll have to talk about that a little later.”

”WRAAAGH! AAAAAHHHH!”

“Do you think we should have used more straps?” Rarity asked.

“Yes,” Spike muttered in reply.

A monster madly screeched atop the table, twisting and thrashing against the leather straps which strained to hold him down. Kivsin’s hooves had grown into rending, long-fingered claws, his muscles expanded to a monstrous bulk that stretched his flesh tightly. His slavering, dagger-filled mouth howled between a roar of rage and a cry of agony. The goat, too, was in a panic, fighting against the rope around its neck.

Spike, Sweetie, and Rarity were back under the barricade, the sisters especially holding one another tightly. “That is not what I expected from them,” Rarity said.

“Did you at least get all the symbols you could make out?” asked Spike.

Sweetie Belle reluctantly let go of Rarity who then quickly picked up and flipped through a short novel’s worth of papers and nodded.

Crack!

The strap over the possessed’s heaving chest snapped and he lurched into a sitting position, his mane falling sweaty and matted, jabbering incoherently. With a single finger, he cut the bonds at his legs, then caught whiff of something.

Spike quietly asked Rarity, “You have the shield spell ready?”

She was way ahead of him, with her horns powered and already piecing the spell together. The next sound to catch Spike’s attention was the panicked, strangled cry of the goat, which was supposed to serve as a distraction. With any luck, a quick kill would temporarily calm the daemonhost’s bloodthirst.

Kivsin had ensnared the goat in a predatory vise, his claws effortlessly digging into its throat. His jaws snapped down over the nape of its neck, and, yanking back, tore away a huge bite of flesh.

Apart from Kivsin’s savage mutilation, all else was quiet. It wasn’t long before he appeared to get bored with the unmoving prey, and sniffed at the air.

Kivsin spotted the source of Rarity’s sapphire glow, and when Spike looked back to check on him, their gazes met. The daemon slayer and daemonhost locked eyes and the latter slowly extended his large and bony wings. Spike dared not speak, to give Rarity more time. Kivsin arched himself into a pouncing stance, his blood-smeared face growling in readiness.

In a fraction of a second, his powerful wings snapped back, launching him like a bullet toward the barricade.

Rarity’s horns popped, and Kivsin got a face full of a magic wall which rapidly folded back and enveloped him in a blue ball.

The surface of the orb was not even a foot from Spike’s face, and Rarity too gave a gasp when she saw where it was.

“Spike… How close was he?”

The dragon took his hand off the grip of his sword and leaned back. “That close,” he muttered darkly.

Kivsin got back up and took a quick glance around his small prison. His lips twisted into a hateful snarl, and he let out an otherworldly screech. Both claws came pounding against the barrier, which only bounced off ineffectually. The others emerged from their fort and encircled the monster who continued his frantic lashing out.

“Is he still afraid of small spaces?” Rarity said curiously. She shrank the ball and her suspicions were confirmed when Kivsin tried to push out against the walls, his eyes wild with panic and rage. Rarity took him to the other end of the room, set him on the floor, and expanded the bubble to the point he calmed a little.

He paced back and forth, watching his captors watching him. His burning gaze was most focused on Spike. After some time, he stood hunched on his hind legs, balancing as well as any natural biped and easily matching the dragon’s height. Standing nearly still, the distorting haze of warp essence could be seen radiating from him. He pointed a long, sharp finger at Spike.

“You...”

Both Spike’s brows raised slightly. “So you can still talk?”

The daemonhost didn’t answer, but continued. “You… hurt her.”

Spike cocked his head slightly. “Hurt who?”

Kivsin pointed to the wooden crate across the room.

“Octavia?” Spike asked. “Why do you care so much about her?”

Kivsin lunged at the shield, once again fruitlessly bouncing back. “Don’t you degrade what she means to me!” He leaned with both claws on the shield. “You don’t lay another damn claw on her, or I’ll take even greater pleasure in killing you!”

For only a moment his words had no weight, but his claws curled, digging his fingers into the shield like nails on a chalkboard which left glassy scratches. Rarity held her head, feeling those fingers like they were scratching at her brain. Kivsin pressed harder and, with arcs of splintering magic, his fingers started to poke through. His face twitched in pain while his claws bore through.

Spike drew his sword and rested the blade right on top of Kivsin’s exposed fingers. “Not an inch further,” he said threateningly.

Kivsin relented and pulled his claws back, which emitted a hot steam from touching the shield, and he wrung them tightly. The noctral gave a dark chuckle. “You have to come in here or let me out at some point, and you can’t keep up this shield forever, Rarity. Twilight doesn't know how to get out of a body, so she’ll need you.”

Spike’s jaw tensed at that. “She’s not making you say and do all this, is she?”

“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Kivsin muttered. He leaned against the shield again, staring with the intent of a hungry leopard at the dragon behind it.

“I can feel the very Warp running through my veins. Hot like a river of seething flame, cold like the peak of a frozen glacier. It fills my every pore, suffuses my senses…” Kivsin raised a clawed hoof, then drove it a clear six inches into the stone floor beneath him, cracking the slate and ripping up two chunks like snowballs. “And gives me power far beyond any lesser beings,” he continued with a malicious grin. “Like the power to rip out the still-beating heart of a dragon, and offer it to my eternal love.”

“Kivsin, you charmer, you!” Octavia crooned, her voice muffled through the crate across the room.

While Rarity took a few steps back, Spike stared him down, tapping the tip of his sword on the floor, then re-sheathed it. He tapped Rarity on the shoulder and quickly whispered in her ear, “Let’s go to the other side of the room. We need to come up with something.”

“Sorry, did I break something?”

The Doctor was whimpering as Pinkie Pie had tightened the bindings around his wings, bending them backward far beyond their natural posture. They weren’t broken yet, but another few degrees and at least one was sure to go.

“There we are!” she sang, giving the ropes one last tug.

He was fantastically decorated, the candies adorning him like a white gingerbread stallion gussied up for a date, complete with a blue taffy bow tie.

“I noticed you didn’t come back for me,” Pinkie said darkly, inspecting him one more time. “They said you’d be hung if you failed, and I just couldn’t take the risk; I had to know you were okay! Now that I know you are, I realized every moment we’re apart is a… um... Short-dinger’s… dog. I can never know if you're alive or dead without direct contact between us.”

She patted her stomach gingerly. “You’ll be safe in here if I can’t digest you, then anypony or anything who wants to hurt you will literally have to go through me. But if I do, it’s still okay because I’ll absorb you and you’ll be a part of me! My flesh and blood.”

The Doctor immediately rolled left and right to try to ruin the decorations on him, anything to buy just a minute more. He managed to spin off the table, uncaring for the greeting his face would receive, but was instead met by Pinkie’s tentacles catching him just as his nose was pressing against the floor.

“Tsk-tsk. Almost hurt yourself there. Don’t tell me you’re too dangerous, even for yourself.”

The mare raised him up, pulling the apple out of his mouth and threw it aside. Whooves’ jaw immediately snapped back, and he felt he could barely move it due to the muscles going slack and numb after so long—

Not even wasting a second, Pinkie pressed her lips against his.

Whooves’ fears melted away. His body relaxed, and he looked almost dreamily into the black eyes of the mare who held him against her body. Through the haze in his mind, he barely registered the sensation of Pinkie’s torso vibrating and growling in anticipation.

Pinkie parted their lips and murmured, “I hope you make it, Doc.”

The Doctor’s pupils dilated to where they nearly blotted out the iris. His muscles relaxed, and his struggles finally ceased.

Pinkie raised him over her head, lining up her mouth and throat, and opened wide, lowering him head first. Her lips slid over his face and engulfing his head before he hit the top of her throat. She swallowed powerfully, opening the undulating passage and wrapped her long tongues around him to pull him down more easily. Her lips passing over shoulders, wings, and flanks, she put her claw to her middle as she felt Whooves’ head reach the top of her stomach. As his wings and fur slid against her inside, a small moan escaped her. In another gulp, the tremendous bulge in her throat slid down and squelched into her stomach, filling and stretching it with an entire stallion. The hair of The Doctor’s tail slipped past Pinkie’s lips like spaghetti in her final swallow, and her emaciatedly-thin form filled to a more natural breadth.

Everything she decorated him in came together perfectly. She smacked her lips of the flavors of all the garnishes and candies, and could still taste it down below.

“Ahh... Welcome home, Doc. You won’t be needing these anymore.”

Her tongues slithered down to her stomach and untied the strings around the Doctor’s legs and wings.

“It’s good… to finally be home,” he said in an uncomfortable, upside-down position. When the bonds were gone, he put himself right side up, eliciting a bout of quivering giggles from Pinkie at his movement and nuzzled the silky-smooth stomach walls in pitch darkness. “I’m so sorry I was so difficult. I guess I was running away from myself, how I truly felt about you.”

Pinkie rubbed the outward imprint his face made. “It’s alright, Doctor, because we’re finally together forever, and… ooohh…” Her stomach moaned loudly and painfully, quaking around the Doctor.

“I think somepony’s still hungry.” Whooves chuckled.

“You don’t mind if I have some dessert after dinner, do you?”

“No, by all means,” he said with a laugh.

Pinkie looked around at all there was, springing for everything that wasn’t already on the Doctor. For a brief moment, a light shone in on Whooves. He looked up to find Pinkie opening her throat wide with an ‘aah’ as she poured an entire jar of cookies down her gullet. Then came pies, and cakes simply tipped off their bases and swallowed whole. This binge went on for a few minutes, ending with a thorough cleaning-out of every morsel on the display counter and she washed it down by leaning back with her mouth around the faucet of a barrel and turning the valve, guzzling a deluge of cranberry juice finish it off.

When she got back to her hooves, her belly was as big as the rest of her, dragging on the floor. Whooves did his best to stay on top of the pile of food she didn’t bother to chew, and was firmly pushed against the roof of the little cavern. The juice washed the dried glaze off, yet he was still sticky in the coatings of the other pastries.

“You okay in there?” Pinkie asked.

He pulled his hoof out of the sticky pile under him and matting it down for more space. “Yes, but it’s a tight fit. Hey, do you still have my bags?”

“Uh-huh.” Pinkie carried herself past the saddlebags, picking them up with her tongues, and went to the curtained store room. She sat on her haunches, resting the bag on her round belly, and rummaged through it.

“So what’s in here?”

“You’ll see.”

She shook out a fancy metal rod, and four metal teeth. “Ooo. There’s a stick and some metal chips. Is it a parade baton?”

“No. it’s a little too small for that. Just put the chips in the four notches around the green stone, and press the little blue button.”

Pinkie snapped them into place, one at a time, and clicked the blue button. The stick instantly extended, the teeth snapped open like a claw, and the green stone lit up like a flashlight. It sounded a static warbling whining.

“Woah. What’s this?” she asked.

“It works!” Whooves clapped his hooves ecstatically. “It’s a sonic screwdriver. Here, send it down.”

Pinkie tilted her head back, The Doctor heard her swallow, and a couple of seconds later, he felt something land on his head. He felt around the device and found the button.

Pinkie saw her belly glow green and giggled, “It’s like a little green alien inside me!”

“Well, I did come from another planet,” Whooves pointed out. His cell started jiggling as Pinkie bounced in place.

“What does it do? What does it do!?”

“Well… almost anything really. I’m actually not sure what it can’t do. I’ve used it to unlock doors, as a medical tool, even read thoughts—”

Gurrrrrrrggghhh...

Pinkie’s stomach gurgled and squeezed in on the Doctor. “Pinkie, what’s happening?” In the screwdriver’s emerald light, he saw the walls running with digestive acids, beginning to awaken into a steady churning.

“Tummy wants its food, Doctor. It always takes all my energy away.” said Pinkie, quickly feeling her eyelids get heavy. She rolled onto her side, making a mattress of a pile of flour sacks, and smacking her lips as the taste of everything in her belly flowed through her body.

“Well this is it, Doctor,” Pinkie said sleepily. “Our moment of truth. Try not to get digested. I really want to be able to see you again.”

“If Slaanesh really wanted you to have me, He wouldn’t let me die that easily.” He put his hooves against the walls and slowly rubbed in wide circles. “You were always so sickly thin, eating everything in sight, but nothing filled this emptiness. If He ordained me to be yours, I’ll be just what keeps you full and happy. I promise you, I’ll be here when you wake up.”

“Mmh,” Pinkie let the internal massage and her rolling belly lull her into sleepiness. A catlike purring resonated just over Whooves’ head as he worked, and after a few minutes, this gave way to her silent sleeping breaths.

Her stomach labored around him, working its juices into his fur. He stayed awake, thinking about if he’d be melted away or survive and the mare’s stomach that was now his home. It was warm, soft, stretched easily when he needed to move, and Pinkie made the cutest little huff or giggle when he changed position. He held the screwdriver close, putting faith in the warpstone conduit that its magic energy would keep it from melting away.

The acids didn’t itch or burn, and the rest of the food was steadily dissolved into a chunky slime, which he had to stand in as it was soaked into the the surroundings. Pinkie’s belly shrank as it absorbed its feast, echoing low laboring tones until it wrapped around its last inhabitant.

“Is that all you’ve got?” Whooves whispered mockingly. “I’ve met sleeping bags tougher than you.” He could hardly wait for her to wake up and feel that he was still there. He patted the wet muscular wall and said to himself, “Patience.”

Snap… Clank!

Pinkie snorted awake at the loud noise of metal hitting wood. She heard a few steps, by their beat likely equine, then the bakery’s door closing.

Pinkie put a hoof to her stomach, feeling the Doctor was still there, and for the first time in what felt like forever, she wasn’t hungry. But she didn’t have time to celebrate. A sickly green glow suddenly erupted from the front of the store, flashing like a deadly flame. When the light died, the steps started again, far heavier, creaking the floorboards.

“That stink…” a voice rang out, somewhere between a mutter and a snarl. “Filthy, tainted love… Where are you?!”

Pinkie jumped up as wood shattered on the other side of the flaps, followed by a chorus of doors smashing and jars breaking open.

Pinkie whispered loudly, “Oh, jeez, who’s that?”

Whooves’ smile had faded. That voice was unfamiliar.

“You’re harboring cultists, baker?!” the voice shouted. “I can smell them! I know they’re…” There was a pause, the sound of something wet being picked up from the floor, and a throaty chuckle.

“Ah, so you killed the baker.”

Pinkie backed up, sweating bullets, her stomach tightening around the Doctor. “Pinkie, stay calm,” Whooves grunted as he heard her heartbeat and breathing growing erratic with fear.

She forced some control into herself, waking slow, quiet, deep breaths as she backed up.

Whee-err!

She froze as the sound of a squeaky toy reached her ears. Her head snapped down, but here was nothing under her hooves. She discovered her rump had actually bumped up to the back wall. Taking a step forward, it made a similar squee as it rounded back into shape.

“I didn’t know I still made those noises.”

“YRAAGH!!”

A large black-plated figure burst through the flaps with four sabres of bone extended to strike, and Pinkie just barely jumped to the side in time as the monster cut apart the shelves at the back into a toppling heap. It snapped around, and Pinkie only caught a glimpse of the baleful anger on its face before she turned to run away.

Inside, the Doctor was jostled in the fleshy space as his host’s distended belly swung about. “Pinkie! What’s going on?!” he called out frantically.

“Not now! Safety first!” Pinkie exclaimed.

Pinkie suddenly halted in her tracks, feeling the familiar weightless sensation of a telekinetic hold as she was roughly lifted into the air. She kicked and flailed about fruitlessly as she was turned around to face the monster, whose jagged horn glowed a putrid green. It twirled its four swords, readying for the killing blow—

And paused. Its grin sank as it looked at her inquisitively, spinning her around like examining some strange, if not familiar thing, and its swords retracted back into its forearms.

“You’re that Element of Laughter, aren’t you?” it chirped throatily. “Long time, no see.”

Pinkie shot her tongues at the creature, only for them to get caught with impossible speed in a bundle of muscled cords. The creature dug the fingers of her claws into them enough to draw blood. It telekinetically began tying them in knots.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?”

Pinkie was actually smiling, and giggling as the blood trickled from her tongues. The creature grabbed Pinkie’s head and forced their faces mere inches from each other.

“Do you remember me?”

Studying its face more closely, Pinkie gave a sharp gasp. “Mleeegh! Chryysh-ah-wissh!”

“So even the Elements of Harmony couldn’t resist the touch of Chaos?” Chrysalis muttered. “And if you’re like this…”

Her amused look quickly turned to a scowl, and she gave a short shout of anger as she crammed Pinkie’s tongues back in her mouth and levitated her past the flaps of the room.

Another explosion of green light consumed the bakery. On the other side of the flaps were six imperial soldiers, one of them putting out a flame atop his head.

The sergeant bowed low. “Orders, my queen?”

Chrysalis set Pinkie down, standing upright before them “Keep your weapons on her. I don’t want the slightest misstep.”

And immediately the troops responded, drawing arms and lightly pushing them against Pinkie Pie as the magic grip on her was lifted. Even the Doctor felt one of the halberd points against Pinkie’s stomach. A rifle was put to the back of her skull.

“This can’t be good.” Whooves muttered. He patted the walls. “Pinkie. What’s happenin— mmph! Muurph!” Pinkie’s last free tongue wrapped around his mouth.

The queen burst into verdant flame, then reappeared with the dark, blood-red garb and peaked hat of an inquisitional witch hunter. She rolled her neck with a resounding pop and sighed, “Let’s go.”

The palace of Middenplatz loomed nearby, towering like a dark castle over the contrasting floral gardens of the Palast District. In the living mazes of vines and walkways, city officials would find temporary leisure from their round-the-clock duties. Of course one would still need to exercise a degree of caution as the occasional deadly-at-the-touch weed could sneak in once in a while.

What was once a princess, and now fancied herself the title of Empress, walked beside Emperor Karl Franz through the promenades. A unicorn attendant levitated a large umbrella over the dark alicorn against the sun’s rays, and his ears were plugged, having been decided by his master that he wasn’t worthy to hear the Imperators’ words.

Their talk so far had been calm, but the alicorn knew Franz wanted to be outside as the news heaped a fresh load of woes on him.

“To be honest, I find it quite disturbing Luna kept your existence from me,” Franz said cooly. “I always believed you were simply a dressup shell she puts on like a costume for formal occasions.”

Is that what she’s been using me for? Nightmare sneered. “My very visage does command authority. So, Celestia has spoken to you of me already?”

“In detail. She told me that you tried to cover your entire world in eternal night. Do you know what that would entail?”

“As I’ve thought about it recently, yes. Virtually all plant life would have perished, crops withered, mass starvation of a kingdom I hoped to rule. Then, every other nation on the planet would have invaded Equestria to depose me; the Dragon Nomads, Germaneigh, Vaporia, even Cervidas would have rebuilt the Eternity’s Bridge to make the crossing into Equestria.”

“Would you say that you are losing purpose?”

Nightmares stride slowed, and Franz matched her. “Come again?” she asked.

“The entire reason for your conception was to depose Celestia and, in the end, dominate your world. But now there are gods that defy your will, and you can’t always be here to see your orders through. Like it or not, you’re on mine and Celestia’s level, not your own.”

Nightmare’s brows raised in anger and leaned forward slightly. “I am immortal, you are transitory! I will still be here when your great great grandson is on his deathbed—”

“And even then,” Franz interrupted, pounding his fist into his palm, “you are still one ruler of a triumvirate. The Empire must remain as one, else it falls to a thousand foes, and the dominoes begin to tumble. Kislev, Bretonnia, Araby, even the Kings of Nehekhara will not be able to stem the tide if the dam breaks.”

Nightmare didn’t respond. Franz continued, adopting a coolly calculating tone. “I don’t know what peace Equestria may have seen, how few foes you must have had in eons past, but we cannot deal with wars of vengeance. Especially now, as the Empire is undergoing its second industrial revolution. We actually have a chance with all new means of war to fight back, and we need the time to import as many weapons as the griffons are willing to sell and as much we can produce.”

Nightmare’s expression slackened from a baleful glare to a simple, cold frown of displeasure. “You are right,” she reluctantly admitted. “But if we survive, do not believe your troubles are gone. I am the bane of an entire world, and when I returned from banishment, I defeated a demi-goddess. Even when Luna returns, I will still leave my mark.”

“Duly noted,” Franz remarked. ”We’ll talk again at the railway induction ceremony tomorrow. For now, ‘Empress’, farewell.”

“Wait!”

The two of them turned sharply towards the noise, just as a man in the garb of a witch hunter rounded the corner of the hedge ahead of them. The first odd thing they noticed was the silver necklace he wore of a skeleton prying its own ribs open; the same symbol that the queen of the Changelings used to indicate it was her to those she told.

“Chrysalis,” Franz noted, his tone clipped and serious. “Why do you come to us?”

“The princesses are keeping more secrets from us, Franz,” she said, working out the final tones of her transformed masculine voice. She stopped several meters away from the pair, glaring daggers at Nightmare Moon. “And what is she doing here?”

“Oh, just having a friendly little chat with this realm’s Emperor. Nothing serious,” Nightmare said dryly.

Chrysalis’ stare narrowed further until she seemed to seethe with killing intent. “Your hateful aura makes me want to retch. But I suppose I have no choice but to deal with you, for now.”

"Your purpose here, Chrysalis," Franz pressed forcefully. "What is it?"

Four humanoid figures came into view behind her, weapons resting on a mutant pink mare with many tongues tied in a gordian knot whose appearance made both Franz and Nightmare flinch. The soldiers held a respectable distance from the trio of rulers, but cast wary glances in the dark alicorn’s direction, fingers twitching around their swords.

“And why have you brought the filth of a mutant onto the palace grounds?” Franz asked heatedly.

“I’m just as outraged. If I’m not mistaken, I provide every scrap of intelligence my subjects collect, and in return, no secrets are kept from me!” Chrysalis snapped, and shot a finger back at the creature. “So, care to explain this, Nightmare?”

The empress fell speechless for a moment that seemed like eternity. Finally, she parted her lips to speak. “It’s the Element of Laughter. It’s Pinkie Pie.”

The pink mare stared at her, eyes wide with fear. “Naimeh Moong… Naimeh Moong!” she mumbled through the rope in her mouth.

The black bore of a musket came into view of her eye. “Quiet,” the gunner said forcefully.

“And if she’s here, that means the others are likely here, as well!” The queen of the changelings gave a frustrated snort. “I found this one in a bakery-turned-charnel house, right here in Middenheim!”

Chrysalis stepped forward, looking directly into Nightmare Moon’s eyes. “And you knew about this, didn’t you?”

“No,” the alicorn said with a curt frown at the queen’s audacity. “I’m afraid I neither know nor care of the everyday business in a city I only recently visited. Honestly, I thought those mares were gone for good when Canterlot fell.”

“Then how did she get here?” Chrysalis demanded hotly. “It would have taken no less than a direct order from the Inquisition, or either you or Celestia to let a Daemonette into one of the Empire’s greatest bastions of power!”

Franz shot Nightmare a burning glare. "The Bearers of the Elements, corrupted?! How could this happen?"

“I told you, I don’t know!” Nightmare shot back. “Celestia may have known, but she’s been stuck brooding by herself since I returned!”

“Khang Ah shay shumthing?” Pinkie asked.

“No!” the rulers shouted in unison.

“Meal time!”

A prison serf walked down the corridor of the dungeon, carrying a bucket filled with a grey-brown chunky slop. Trowel in hand, he scooped some out and threw it down to the floor of each cell.

Fluttershy picked her head up off the floor and smiled fractionally. This was her favorite time of day, mostly because it was the only thing that happened all day in the unchanging quiet and boredom of the dungeon, aside from watching the guards play cards once in a while. That, and that the stuff he brought was actually quite good. She sat patiently as he gave a share of gruel to each cell and finally got to her.

“Been waiting for me, sunshine?” the serf said dryly. He set the bucket down and kicked it in between the bars, where it tipped over and spilled most of the remains of its contents.

“Thank you, sir,” Fluttershy said quietly.

He pinched his brows and looked away. “The world’s turned on its head,” he muttered to himself. “It’s a daemon, a neverborn, not trying to dash out my brains. I should be thankful, really. It almost reminds me of Joel’s dog.”

To Fluttershy, the bucket was little more than one of those paper cups at a water dispenser. She picked the bucket up and tossed it into her mouth, crunching on the slightly rusted iron. The lot had the grainy texture of grits. What was left on the floor, she swabbed up with a nail and licked it off.

As the serf went off, a guard, leaning on his spear, asked, “Hey, what’s in that stuff, anyway?”

The serf snickered. “What, do you want some?”

“Ugh, no. Just asking.”

Fluttershy couldn't help but listen. Yeah, what is it?

“I think it’s just ground-up animal remains. After they’re skinned and the meat stripped off, the bones and cartilage get put through a grinder and mixed in water for these degenerates here.”

…

...No...

The guard cringed. “Sounds like shite.”

...No...

“Smells like it, too,” the serf chuckled and continued on his way.

...No, no, no, no, no...

“Hey, where’d the bucket go?”

Spear in hand, the guard stepped up in front of her cage, briefly glancing about the floor, then to her. Fluttershy’s eyes were wide as dinner plates, her pupils shrunk to pinpricks.

YOU…

“Oy, what’s got you in a— aagh!”

Her claw shot out from the bars, spearing his body with four sword-sized nails. He fell back and slipped off, his body making a couple of dying twitches before going still.

...MONSTERS!!

She jerked it back, smearing blood and torn meat across the floor. She looked at her gore-encrusted claw, gave a bull-like snort, and looked beyond her cell.

Fluttershy stood up and, in a single thrust, smashed through the cell bars, trampling the remains of the guard under her iron hooves. She snapped a fiery glare down the hall, locking eyes with the serf that had given her the bucket.

He screamed.

Dust shook loose from the walls and ceiling as Fluttershy came careening down the hall, shrieking at the top of her lungs. The serf bounded up the stairs, a gust of dust and pebbles blasting past him as Fluttershy smashed into the wall and he fell to his hands.

Snap!

“AHHH!!”

He quickly looked back, seeing two steel blades twisting his ankle as easily as rubber. It dragged him back down, his hands grabbing for anything on the bare stairs, and shouting for dear life.

“You made me eat animals all this time?!” Fluttershy screamed. “Animals are my friends!!” Fluttershy sat up with him writhing in her claws. “How many did you kill?!”

“I-I don’t make the food! I’ve never killed anything in— Ngaaah!”

Fluttershy tightened her grip, crushing his hip and innards.

“No... I’ll put you in their paws, so you know what it’s like!”

She brought him to her opening mouth, her hot breath pouring out like a burning wind. He futilely pounded his fist on her claw, then tried to push back from her mouth. His hands sizzled and burned at the touch, and she bit down, tearing him in half at the waist. She messily crunched on bone and flesh, blood trickling from the corners of her mouth. She glanced at the remains in her claws, the waist to feet, and in the back of her mind, a passing thought flittered by.

Humans… are delicious…

Down the hall, Lyra was wiping off her arms of the last loose fuzz of fur. Her skin was very slightly pinkish-white, ending in unkempt, jagged nails. She felt her face. No more baseball-sized eyes, or ears on top of her head.

It had finally happened. Her greatest wish had come true at last.

Her only private complaint was that she was nude, and had lost her clothes in her being taken prisoner. It seemed fine when she was a pony, but now she was cold, and more clearly felt the rough stones scratching at her when she tried to lie down. She looked up to the ceiling.

You still bestow these gifts on me, but I’m useless, now. What can I do for you from a cell, only you know how deep, underground?

The answer came as the floor and walls started to shake around her, accompanied by the sound of approaching stomping. Lyra smiled.

Two more guards came running in a panic past her cell. As she watched, a steel avalanche of a pony pounced upon them like mice, smearing one across the floor and catching the other in her jaw and finishing him off in two bites.

It was over in mere seconds. Fluttershy took her claw off a bloody pancake on the floor.

Lyra stayed quiet, and as Fluttershy turned back around, her tail caught on the bars of Lyra's and the opposite cell, breaking them out of place. Without the guards present, Lyra crept quietly behind Fluttershy to the crushed soldier and quickly stripped the clothes off of it and their crumpled armor. She paid no mind to the gore-soaked fabric and slipped it on, to a slightly loose fit.

She then advanced to the Apples’ cage and approached the wrecked heap of Big Mac.

“I’m just gonna borrow this for a second.”

He scowled as she stooped down and picked up his nearly severed foreleg, using one of the nails to cut away at the replacement magic suppression collar around her neck. Once it cracked off, she fit Big Mac’s leg back into the socket, snapped a flame of a blow torch’s power onto her fingers, and began welding the leg back.

“We’re getting out, everyone!” she whispered, then bit her lip. “As soon as I come up with exactly how we do that.”

A sinister grin curled Macintosh’s face. He’d endured a week of stillness and quiet, absolute blasphemy against Khorne. Now, he’d finally be back in action. Braeburn too was itching to 'convert' those who put him and his family down there.

Back down the hall, Fluttershy worked fast, dashing back to where she had spied a sliver of light beaming through a drainage grate in the ceiling. With both forelegs, she thrust upward, impacting with stone-shattering force and felling several boulders worth of masonry and packed dirt. She then proceeded to dig upward like a mad hound, clawing through layer after layer of foundation.

In just a couple of minutes, she could hear the bustle of the street above. In a final punch, the ceiling caved in, rolling harmlessly off her armored body, and her eyes finally beheld the light of day. She reached a claw up, catching the surface above and beginning to pull herself up.

She heard the frightened shouting of the surface dwellers as a section of the street collapsed like a sinkhole. Digging her claws into the rock for traction, she peeked her eyes above ground level.

There they were. Dozens, hundreds of humans, meat eaters. And she saw more; several carts in the market square, bearing displays of chickens in cramped cages, headless pigs hanging upside down, their bellies cut open.

Before catching sight of her, a butcher raised a bloody cleaver into the air, and slammed it on the neck of a chicken he cruelly held down. Its head shot toward her, rolling across the cobblestones before it came to a stop, its lifeless gaze meeting Fluttershy’s eyes.

“RYAAAAAGH!!!”

Author's Note

You can guess what happens next...:flutterrage:

If you like this story, I have a proposition for you! I'm in great need of an additional proofreader/editor to help in development of future chapters. It's a long term commitment.

Chapter 24: Lost Control

Author's Note

This i possibly, by far, the most insane chapter yet. Brains were fried in its making.

Chapter 24: Lost Control

“Faithful, enlightened, ambitious brethren. In but a single decade, a few mere swipes of the pendulum, we have gathered a sacrifice to Khorne that will be made legend... In mere hours, millions will die; innocent, guilty, strong and weak, honest and deceitful, all of them. They will scream. They will burn. And for no purpose but that mighty Khorne may revel in their bloodshed. And united, in this void of purpose, fear, or duty, we shall at long last be free! Blood for the Blood God! Skulls for the Skull Throne! Let the Empire BURN!”

~ Mamayev, former Chaos Lord of the Kurgan Berserkers, then Daemon Prince of Khorne

____________________________________________________

Among the infinite expanse of the immortal immaterium, four realms were occupied in a perpetual war, a game fought for no purpose but the continuation of utter chaos.

Few had the will to resist the lures and pleasures surrounding the palace of the Dark Prince of Excess, the knowledge or wit to locate the Hidden Library in the endlessly shifting mazes of the Changer of Ways, or the fortitude to last long enough to traverse the putrid, spore-choked flora of the Plague Lord’s garden.

But the mightiest lived elsewhere. Across a plain of broken corpses, past godlike walls toiled on by the souls of warriors who perished in sleep, across a seething moat of boiling blood, and atop a continuously-growing mountain of bleached-white skulls, the Blood God reigned, seated atop the legendary Skull Throne.

Watching him in utter hatred, the sixth god was among the mortal realm, in exile for his life from the crimson king. He had made his little base in an abandoned home in a lonely corner of the Imperial province of Ostland, near the border of Kislev. Despite the dilapidated exterior, with a snap of the fingers he had made everything inside to his fancy, which was absolute chaos.

Furniture was arranged on the walls and ceiling, falling and shifting whenever they felt like it. The sink was overflowing with hand sanitizer, and the carpet was crawling with squeaking slippers, nibbling on bags of bacon bits.

However, today Discord was especially downtrodden, sitting upside down on a couch floating upside down, scribbling a mile a minute on parchment.

“I could lead nurglings onto his throne. That’ll make a nice mess when he sits down again… No,” He frustratedly balled up and threw away the sheet. “The Changeling’s already done that. How about…”

He began writing again. “Hmm…”

His pencil suddenly burst into flames, and torched the entire stack of papers.

“Dang.”

He looked back to the hair-thin plasma screen TV on the wall, where the visage of Khorne seemed especially joyous, laughing down at his firepit.

What’s he laughing at? Discord wondered. “I swear I’ll come up with something so grand, even An’ggrath will be laughing at you…” A banana popped into existence in his lion’s paw, shaking and ringing as he held it up like a telephone.

”Who is this who seeks my council?” a voice on the other line said.

“Yo, Zigg-ay! How’s it been, my bruthah?”

“...It cannot be. Discord!” Tzeentch laughed in disbelief. “When Khorne boasted that his warriors had shattered your petrified form, I thought you were gone for good!”

A black respirator mask suddenly appeared on Discord’s face, accenting his breathing with heavy hooo-purrr sounds. “I find your lack of faith disturbing. You know it’s gonna take a lot more than a busted statue to do me in. So now, I’m thinking of some way to get back at Big Red for coming after me for so long, and I want you in on it, too.”

Discord shoved his claw into the banana, shoulder-deep, and a moment later was met by another hand grabbing and shaking it.

“The Reign of Blood is over at last.”

“Now that’s what I want to hear!” Discord’s claw came back covered in banana guts, which he shook off. “I’ve already got a draft. It involves the chief director of the Pentagon, a gorilla suit, and a dump truck’s worth of putty!”

“Should I tag Slaanesh along as well?”

Discord flicked himself in the forehead. “Of course! How could I forget the guy! This is gonna be just like old times, and I gotta tell you, It’s good to be back in the game—”

His thoughts were interrupted by a knock at the door. “Oh, I’ll call back in a minute. Pizza’s here! Ta-ta!”

”What’s a pizz—”

Pop!

The banana burst like a soap bubble. Discord teleported before the door, counting a paper clip, a bottle cap, and other miscellany in his paw. “Seven, eight, eleven... Just enough!”

He threw the door open. “I swear, if you guys ate a slice on the way here… again…”

He trailed off to stare slack-jawed, dropping the junk items to the floor where they exploded into balls of confetti.

Beyond the door was a vast throng of over two hundred men, women, and ponies, many carrying the banners of Undivided. At the very front stood a stallion bearing the star of chaos burned across his face, looking up at him sourly, and a beaming pink filly standing on his back.

The latter squealed with delight when she saw Discord standing in the door, then vanished and reappeared in a pop of pink smoke before the draconeqqus’ face.

“Did we do good, daddy?!” she exclaimed happily.

Discord’s face blossomed into shining elation. He grabbed the beaming filly from the air and pulled her into a hug, eliciting a sound much like a squeaky toy. “Yes you did, Screwball! You worked so fast!”

A loud coughing interrupted him, and he turned to find Davenport glaring at him crossly.

“Oh, uh… You too,” Discord frowned sheepishly.

Davenport grumbled, but straightened up smartly before the Lord of Chaos. “Many of them were already cultists of Undivided. Miss Lulamoon here was not, but she was very quick to accept our offer.”

Said mare proudly stepped forward at the acknowledgement, as if her worn, faded and moth-bitten hat and cloak were as royal vestments and she were a queen. Her blue coat was weathered and marked by several small scars, though still shone with a smooth sheen that spoke of dutiful and laborious attention to her appearance. She flicked her silver mane to the side, then gave Discord an arched smile which mirrored the sharp gleam in her deep lilac eyes.

“The Great and Powerful Trixie wanted freedom and power, and she got it,” she said. “She avoided following the Ruinous Powers, as Trixie is her own mare and will not be bound to anything; but you don’t care about what your followers do, do you?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be chaos if I were telling people what to do!” Discord grinned.

A device labeled ‘hypocrisy-meter’ popped into existence beside him, its needle shooting to maximum. Discord materialized a hammer into his claw and smashed it into a million pieces.

“Eheh… right,” he muttered, then threw the hammer into space, and flashed out of existence.

One of the flag bearers felt the pole of the banner suddenly gain an odd, fuzzy texture, looked up, and—

“Ah!” The man fell to the ground in shock.

“Hello, everybody!” Discord shouted out gleefully. “Pleased to meetcha!”

A unanimous gasp took the crowd, and the mass of people quickly moved away into a wide circle around him.

“Pick yourself up, man!” Discord yanked the fallen man onto his feet. “This is the first day for a new chapter for all of you! Tell me,” a hearing aid horn popped into his ear, “why did you come here?”

“Um… To be free of Imperial rule?”

“Freedom? Well, you came to the right place!”

Discord flashed again, appearing in an inquisitor’s garb just beside the man and slapping handcuffs on him. “I can see how you fear every day that the Inquisition’s going to break into your house and cart you away.“

Again he blinked, holding a baby in his arms. “Or that they’ll take your little bundle of joy away, just for being five minutes late to have the priest yell in your face about how you're not worthy to live!”

“Wh-where’s my baby?!” a woman’s voice cried out.

“Whoops.” Discord snapped his fingers, and the baby vanished from him to reappear in her arms. “Let’s pretend that didn’t happen…”

A conveyor belt of tiny people being fed into a meat grinder materialized for all to see. “You’re forced to fight for causes you don’t agree with, for reasons you don’t understand, and you just...” He took a deep breath with his lips at one end of a rolled up bundle of tissue paper with some green fuzz stuffed inside, “Want to be rid of it all.”

He laid his claws on a chestnut-coated mare, and turned her around to look into his yellow eyes. “What’s your fancy, little lady? What do you like most in the world?”

“Well, er…”

“Come on, now, don’t be shy. I don’t bite.” His single fang glistened brilliantly.

The mare chuckled nervously. “Well, I love fish, and I’ve always wanted to live by the sea.”

Discord hummed thoughtfully, then snapped his fingers. “Now how do you feel?”

She wiggled her body a bit, and frowned. “Not any different at a— oh!” She felt a little tickle in her ear, then a little clownfish popped out and swam in the air around her head.

“Don’t stop there!” Discord grinned. “Think of another one!”

The mare concentrated, and out of her ear swam a little trout. Its dumbly-blubbing mouth landed a wet kiss on her nose.

“Oh my goodness!” she laughed.

“And what about you, down there?” Another flag-bearer looked up to find the star on the tapestry had been replaced by Discord’s visage, grinning down at him. “What tickles your funnybone?”

“I’ve... always wanted to play the violin ever since I went to my first concert in Altdorf, but I could never afford the instrument.”

“Hmm…” Discord tugged at his goatee, then snapped his fingers again. “Whistle.”

The man blinked. “What?”

“Oh, you know...” Discord blew a high note, and warbled the pitch around like a mockingbird.

The man blew as well, but out came a far different sound, strong with a wobbling vibrato. “It…” He blew again, sounding off a do-mi-so-do. “I… I can whistle a violin’s sound!”

Discord rolled his eyes and smirked. “Your powers of deduction are worthy of Holmes himself.”

He pointed out among the crowd. “And how about you in row number three, good sir?”

“I’ve always wanted to just be in control of my own life, and—”

“—not hounded by the uncertainty of choosing one god over another?” Discord finished. The man blinked, then nodded.

“I can see where you’re coming from,” Discord continued. “Tzeentch might let you know what’s around the next corner, but then throw you away like a used handkerchief when he’s bored with you. Khorne forces you to keep fighting with threats of burning your soul for eternity if you run away. Nurgle gives you every ailment and malady in existence, so there goes whatever guy or gal you’ve been eyeballing. And if you went with Slaanesh, yeesh. You’d want to bang anything that moves in a heartbeat.”

A few titters and nervous laughs ran amongst the crowd, interspersed with murmurs of understanding and approval.

“You see, everyone, there’s always a catch with the others; live by their rules, or die by their hands. But I’ve always wanted nothing more than for everyone to be a freeman.” He held up a strongly-burning torch. “I merely lift my lamp beside that golden door, and all you have to do is cross it.”

“So what’s the catch?” someone asked skeptically.

“Hmm…” Discord materialized a wine glass in his hand, with a slice of fruit in four different colors hung on the rim. “I guess I do have only one condition.”

He snapped his fingers, and an olive materialized out of nothing to drop into the wine, sending a column of dark red liquid into the air. The column did not drop back down, however, but split into hundreds of tiny droplets, which spread out and upward above Discord’s head. Just as he took a sip from the glass, the droplets as one burst like fireworks, lighting up the front yard of the house with flashes of brilliant color. Discord looked over the slack-jawed expressions of his audience, and smirked.

“Have fu—”

Ring-ring! Ring-ring!

“Oh, jeez… mood killer,” Discord pouted. “You know, I’ll be right back.”

The banner went blank, and Screwball, Davenport, and Trixie vanished, flashing back into existence inside Discord’s house.

“Make yourselves at home, everybody! Got a call to take.” The draconequus flew upside-down and backwards into the living room, Screwball giggling as she held onto his tail with all four legs.

Trixie jumped aside as a table decided to slide across the floor, nestling cozily into the corner. “Why did he grant those other people a gift first?” she grumbled. “Trixie is the one you recommended to him!”

“He will get to you, Miss Lulamoon.” Davenport held out a hoof, catching a bottle of root beer that was hurling itself across the air toward him. “We’ve had a long journey. For now, be happy that we made it this far.”

Another bottle clocked Trixie in the back of the head, then floated around to dangle with the neck down before her eyes. She sighed in exasperation, seized the bottle from the air, and twisted the cap off with her magic in one single wrench. To her credit, she didn’t even flinch when the amber liquid within took it upon itself to float out of the bottle and snake lazily through the air, twisting itself into various knots and shapes.

“As long as I’m righted in the end for all I’ve lost,” she said. “My fame—”

“Which you never had.”

Trixie glared at Davenport crossly. “My home—”

“Which collapsed into a pile of sticks and twine the instant we had met. It still amazes me how you survived out there for so long with nearly nothing.”

Trixie magically wrestled with the snaking drink, splitting off a blob and sucking it in like zero-gravity. “It’s hard to compete when traveling shows hire actual freaks and mutants. Really, they didn’t know what talent they were turning away!”

Davenport chuckled skeptically, yanking Trixie closer as a bowling ball shot through the space where she just was. He tugged her along to walk with him and explore the house. “Trixie, as far as talent, I’ve only seen you make smokescreens and fireworks effects, things a foal would do at a third grade talent show.”

“How dare you call my power mediocre!” Trixie snapped.

In a blur, Davenport grabbed the sides of her head and brought them nose to nose. “But that’s why you came with me, because you know you need help, that you’re lacking.”

“I’ve studied under some of the best—”

He threw her backward, and Trixie barely kept her balance. “For goodness sakes, you couldn’t even make a mud hut! What kind of unicorn can’t mold wet dirt!?”

“Shut your mouth about the Great and Power—”

“And there you go again with the title!” Davenport interrupted. “Why do you refer to yourself half the time in third person?” He poked at his temples. “Take a step outside that citadel of an ego and say, ‘I am Trixie Lulamoon, and I. Need. Help.’”

“I don’t need anypony’s help!” Trixie shot back.

“Then why are you here?”

“Because…” she paused. Davenport reached behind himself and and brought forth a device labeled ‘Bullshit Detector’ and held it up to Trixie. She looked at the idly twitching needle that awaited input. “Because… Because...”

“Yes?” Davenport impatiently shuffled closer.

Trixie sighed, her eyes falling to the floor, and she mumbled, “Because I am Trixie Lulamoon… and… I need help.”

Bang! The detector blasted a plume of confetti in her face.

Davenport grinned and gave her a pat on the shoulder. “There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

Trixie glared at him murderously. Grumbling, she took another swig of drink. “The words taste like sand.”

In the den, Discord sat back on his couch, with Screwball curling up beside him. He idly scratched the back of her head with his paw, eliciting a purring like a motorboat from the filly. He reached into his nonexistent pocket, pulling out a small glowing tablet with a picture of a half-eaten apple on the back side. He grimaced at the picture, tapped it and held it up to his ear.

“What do you want, Khorne? …Pff, I’m not telling you where I am!... Oh, yeah, like I’d let—”

“Iz that mean ol’ Big Red aginn?” Screwball piped in.

Discord sighed. “Yep.”

“Tell ‘im ta buzz off!” Her propeller beanie spun about for emphasis.

He put his ear back to the tablet. “Sorry, technical difficulties. Anyways, I—… no, I’m not a coward. It’s just that dying isn’t practical for my ends. …Uh’huh… And why should I care about your girlfriend?”

A giant bloody claw suddenly shot up from the tiny hole in the device, followed by a thunderous roar. “Valkia is not my girlfriend!” It swiped around as Discord levitated it a safe distance away and, finding nothing, it retreated back inside.

Discord casually returned the device to its place. “Okay, okay, fine. Why should I care about your shieldmaiden? ...M-hm…”

Discord suddenly locked up, the color draining from him head to hoof until he was a pure white picture of horror.

Screwball’s face fell, and she worriedly looked over to his shocked expression. “D-daddy...? Are you okay?”

It was some seconds before Discord spoke, his voice coming out shakily through gritted teeth. “What… did you do... to Fluttershy?”

Hell hath no fury like Him, and one of His greatest creations was free. She was a steel and brass giant, runically adorned in the icons of His heraldry. His mark blazoned of fiery brass at the base of her neck. And her legs, which cracked in the cobblestone street, each bore a brass equine skull embedded in the shoulder.

I see now… Why you chose me…

She swiped her claws swept back and forth across the street, easily keeping up with the fleeing, screaming crowds, her nails slicing bodies to ribbons by the dozens. Pegasi scattered to the sky like crows, and the wingless were cut down, naught but chaff to her ten sweeping scythes. Every metal object in the street or nearby buildings it touched, from gutters, wagons, and tools, all soaked into her form like a sponge.

And she was getting bigger.

I am your tool of vengeance, to bring a long-awaited justice to all the animals that were slaughtered unjustly. And these ponies are helping them, aren’t they!

She held put her forelegs in a hoop in front of her, and threw herself on her belly, trapping a dozen victims in a ring of steel. They scrambled to climb over, but on touching her legs, the sheer heat was like trying to scale a wall of burning coals.

She wasted no time, closing that area and corralling them closer to her widening mouth.

Have a taste of your own medicine!

As soon as she felt the first one stumble and land on her tongue, she snapped her teeth shut. The people were trapped between two walls of fire and the monster pushed them closer, feeding them like wood to the chipper until they were all gone. As she got up, she saw the crowds fleeing into the buildings.

You can’t hide from me!

She immediately launched herself into one of the apartment blocks, breaking through the wall and simply throwing herself around like a bull in a china shop, with the collapse of the structure doing the killing for her.

Snapping the support beams, the whole section caved in in an avalanche of rubble, sending a wave of dust gusting down the roads. For a few moments, there was a relative quiet. Those on the outside slowly emerged from their hiding places. There was just a tremendous pile of dusty, smoking rubble, some unmoving arms, legs and hooves sticking up, caked in blood. Mothers consoled their children, and soldiers formed a circle around the mound.

Cordon off the block!” the captain called to his men. “Get up there and search for survivors.”

The words were barely out of his mouth when the heap of rubble jostled. The metal components of the building sank down, and the pile tented up like a growing mountain, rolling debris down and soon uncovering a creature whose shadow eclipsed all before her, its body seething in steam and flame.

Its jaw opened, and what came out was not a voice, but a horrible, mechanized roar.

Konigsgarten was consumed in chaos. Refugees from the ravaged merchant district milled about like ants in the mazes, demanding answers, safety, only held back by a line of soldiers at the main gate to the palace. Within the palace, Shining Armor hastily strode through the halls with several officers keeping pace around him under the light beaming through stained glass windows.

“I want every pegasus in the city carting out every single metal object they can find! Everything from unused weapons to silverware! Get rid of every solid-shot cannonball, and only use explosive shells! Get every civilian out of the city and seal all the gates afterward! Hannskarl, how many giants are penned here?”

“Two,” the ratty-haired man said. “They’re housed underground, being fitted for combat, and the Wolf’s Head bombard is secure as well.”

“Good. Keep the giants together; don’t let them fight it alone.” Shining looked to the sky, to the clouds, which were quickly darkening and coalescing into a massive vortex. “Pegasus teams are making good progress on the lightning. A good jolt should keep it in one place long enough to bring everything down on it.”

A sudden explosion in the distance brought Shining to look out over the cityscape. Some distance from the already burning merchant district was another plume of smoke rising into the air. Shining mentally calculated the course between where the beast had been and where it was now. His heart skipped a beat, and he snapped off a particularly vile oath.

“She’s headed for the bucking armory! GO!”

Like fleeing spectres, the officers went to their duties. Relieved of his non-magical retinue, Shining lit his horn, which encased him in a coruscating pink glow. In a bright flash, he teleported straight to the Square of Martials, suddenly surrounded by the bustle of the militia and state army. Barrels of gunpowder were being rigged as bombs, sergeants drilled their unicorns in forming shield spells, Hellstorm rocketeers stockpiled and took inventory of their arms, and, as Shining had requested, a team of long-riflemen were checking their weapons on the wide open parade ground.

What he told them still resonated. “If all else fails, go for the eyes.”

“Shining!”

The stallion looked to the bleachers and spotted his wife, waving from a lookout booth high in the breadth. In a short flash, he popped up to her level, and they shared a short embrace.

“Shining, what’s going on? What is this monster?” Cadence asked desperately.

“I’ll tell you and the Imperators together,” Shining replied in a low voice. “Where are they?”

Cadence led him down in the bleachers’ structure, heading towards the sound of a steady, dolorous prayer. They came upon a room where the guests of honor to the field would exchange a prayer before going up to the bleachers. Compared to to the hollow criss-crossing supports of the bleachers, the room was lavishly decorated. Centered on one wall was a relatively small, but immaculate altar bearing a gold statue of a griffon holding a warhammer in its front claw.

Emperor Franz was knelt before this idol, Ghal Maraz lightly pressed to his lips as he uttered a soft eulogy. Four other men, draped in bright crimson robes chanted over him, in a language Shining couldn’t understand, since such words were saved for the most important members of the church.

“Gott mit uns,” Franz concluded.

“Gott mit uns,” the robed men echoed.

At that moment, Nightmare Moon arrived in full battle plate, her armored hooves sounding heavily on the stone foundation.

“Shining Armor,” she said as the clergymen filed past her, “Your arrival is well timed. Do you know anything of the creature?”

Shining took a breath, not confident if he would be believed. “Yes, your highness. It’s Fluttershy. She’s been made into a juggernaut that absorbs metal. I haven’t been able to gather any information as to her limits, but scouts have determined she’s about twenty feet tall at this point, claw to head. By her current path, she’ll reach the city armory in about an hour, two at most. If she absorbs the weapons in there, she’ll be a walking fortress. I strongly suggest we take her alive, because if she dies, her soul merely go to the Warp, the Lord of Blood will be able to manipulate her as he sees fit, and she will be enraged like this forever.”

Cadence and the Imperators were stilled. Nightmare turned a glance to the Emperor who spoke with a perplexed grimace. “Fluttershy? Night-Luna” he stammered to correct, “this is another one of the Bearers of the Elements of Harmony, is it not?”

Nightmare didn’t want to answer, but time was of the essence and she spoke plainly and honestly. “Yes, she is the Element of Kindness.”

“Kindness,” Franz muttered with a dry huff as if it were a cruel joke. “And right now, she is trying to destroy the capital of an Imperial province, killing every human and pony who happens to be in her path for no reason—”

“Actually, my Lord,” Shining cut in. “We believe we’ve discerned her motive is directly related to the mass slaughter of livestock and consumption of meat by humans. Scouts saw her break open every cage in the zoo and slaughterhouse, and smile as the animals ran out; before turning her foreleg into some kind of gatling gun and opening fire on the scouts. She doesn’t care if it’s humans or ponies she’s killing.”

At this, Franz turned to Shining with a hard glare. “Reiksmarshall, how do you know this thing really is this ‘Fluttershy’ you speak of?”

“Because she hugged me once, lord, wishing to be cured of her anger.”

Franz’s only further reaction was an eyebrow twitch before moving in a quick stride down the hall toward the animal pens. “We are deploying, now. Luna, get your sister from wherever she is. She ha been absent for far too long.”

Shining and Cadence re-ascended the stairs, leaving the prayer hall behind. Unnoticed, Nightmare dissolved into a shadowy mist, streaming through the cracks in the woodwork.

Nightmare would go get Celestia, but there was someone she had to meet first.

“Have faith, you…”

Fellblade paced back and forth, his hoofsteps echoing eerily in the wide and empty cathedral. He could hear another crack of an explosion in the distance.

A particularly odd dream had come to him in the strange hours of the night. It spoke in reverence of Nightmare Moon, Luna’s other half. It convinced him of a blessing he would receive by the hoof of the princess, and to meet in the cathedral. She was running late, but he understood, what with the city suddenly under attack.

“Despite the circumstances, I find you here. Excellent.”

He looked to the source of the voice, the windows, where a starry fog started to pour in like a frothing goblet which coalesced before him into the visage of the Nightmare. Fellblade knelt, pressing his forehead to the floor.

“Rise, Fellblade,” she said firmly. “I give you permission to meet my gaze.”

Fellblade slowly released a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding. He rose to a dignified posture, but still kept his head bowed in deference to her. Nightmare tipped his head up, forcing him to behold her coolly-smiling face.

“I’ve heard great things about you, Fellblade. Captain of the pegasi branch of the Cutiemark Crusaders, who led them in the battle of the Black Pit against the orks, and personally responsible for the capture of Twilight Sparkle. This is why I specifically want you.”

Her mane began to ripple and sway to one side as if in a breeze, splitting off several clouds that swirled and condensed into three armored ponies, each bearing a winged equine skull on the flanks of their suits. “These shall be the greatest of my elites,” Nightmare grinned sinisterly, and began pacing behind their unmoving, stoic forms. “Imbued with all my knowledge in the art of war, and my unparalleled skill in combat. They shall be my Shadowbolts. And I want you to lead them.”

Fellblade’s wings shot open in surprised reflex. He was speechless; his tongue turned to glue, and the only thing that brought him back was another burst of thunder in the distance. “I-I am honored, Princess… B-but I am just a mercenary captain,” he said quickly, “I… I don’t believe I deserve this.”

“However, you are a clearly a stallion of faith, and, if what you have just said is what your heart speaks, then humbleness as well, and knows your place. That is what I want in a captain; deference and loyalty.”

The Shadowbolts parted, and Nightmare Moon held out a hoof to him. “Come.”

Fellblade’s legs shook as he stepped before her and was enshrouded in her starry mane. He soon found himself calmed in this shimmering haze, tiny blips of light passing through his vision like white lightning bugs.

“I… I am ready, your highness.”

Nightmare snickered, and shook her head ever-so-slightly. “I assure you, you are not.”

A fiery burning rushed through his entire body, starting in his head and flooding downward. His mouth creaked open and he choked in a silent scream until air finally found its way and his cry came out as music to Nightmare.

“Ask not the sun why she sets,” she sang softly, “as day to dark does duly turn.”

Fellblade’s pupils narrowed, becoming dragonlike, slitted. The feathers rapidly molted off his wings, exposing growing finger bones.

“One simple truth she dare not speak: Her light can only blind and burn.”

His coat paled to a blue-grey. The skin of his wings expanded into wide leathery flaps.

“No mercy for the guilty. Bring down their lying sun.

“Blood so silver black by night, upon their faces pale white.”

Fellblade’s teeth thinned to carnivorous tips, and tufts of extra fur grew at the tips of his ears.

“Cruel moon, bring the end. The dawn will never rise again.”

The guard had changed twelve times so far; three times a day in front of this one door in the palace. It hadn’t opened in that time, and the Solar Guard stood as silent sentinels for its occupants.

The clank of steel-capped hooves drew near. “Guards, step aside.”

Their gaze drew to the source of the voice, Nightmare, and they quickly parted to either side of the door. There was another figure with her, a noctral dressed in onyx-black plate, flexibly-segmented and with a rooster tail of a dark blue crest on his helmet.

Nightmare telekinetically threw open the doors and entered. Her equerry remained outside, taking position between the gold-armored guards.

Nightmare’s voice spoke into his mind, Remain here until I return, Fellblade. And remember, as long as you have a shadow, the Shadowbolts and I are there.

The sunlight, coming in through the windows cast his shadow across the wall behind him. He glanced back, and there were five shapes, the tallest of them giving a nod before they all merged and took on his size and shape. He then returned to a proper posture and thought of what he would write in his letter of resignation to Babs and the Cutiemark Crusaders.

Inside, Nightmare quickly spotted Celestia before a central circular desk in the library. Her head was craned back, her eyes glowing a bright white as she stared into the ceiling. The book before her shone a golden light and as Nightmare looked on it, Luna’s memories began to bubble to the surface. With a flick of the hoof, she shut it, cutting off the light and Celestia threw her head down, gasping and holding her aching head. Nightmare gave her a few moments to gather her senses before speaking.

“How long have you been here? Trying to contact your mommy and daddy?”

A hateful scowl looked back, huffing weakly. “Don’t you dare... say anything about them... or I’ll strike you down where you stand.”

“Now, now. They’re technically my parents, too. You didn’t succeed, I take it?”

Celestia rested her head in her hooves, putting a sorrowful look on the book. “They’ve… The Dark Gods cut off the Ley from realspace. I can’t reach them.”

Nightmare’s first instinct was to drive that nail a bit deeper, but a sudden, sickening feeling struck her inside. Her venomous smirk fell, and she nervously scuffed a hoof at the floor.

“Why are you dressed like that?”

Celestia’s sudden question snapped Nightmare back to the moment. “Ah, right. You’re clearly not aware of what has been transpiring. It would appear that one of your lapmares from so long ago has finally succumbed to the Ruinous Powers.”

Celestia’s eyes shrank to beads, and her breath froze in her throat. “Which?”

“Fluttershy, it looks like. She’s the size of a war mammoth, and is rampaging through the city almost unopposed. I was to come and…” she swallowed hard, “request your assistance, but it seems you’re in no condition to be of use.”

Celestia slowly but steadily got on all fours. “Is the city being evacuated?” she asked.

“As we speak.”

“Then I’ll help there.” Celestia groggily trudged to the library doors, carrying and locking the seal on her magic tome.

Nightmare looked on the book much of the time she was just behind Celestia. That same gut-wrenching sickness welled up again.

My parents, too…

Then she looked to Celestia, the bane of her existence, the thing she was made to dispose of, but couldn’t. Celestia was right there, so weak she could barely walk straight. I could be rid of her right now... but… She wanted to punch a wall to release this pent-up anxiety. She couldn’t play her usual games, her bids for power. Perhaps the only piece left of her original purpose she could find was in the Lunar Cult. But even then…

What do I have left?

“You seem much less bitter,” Celestia said, again plucking Nightmare from her thoughts. “I noticed you’re somewhat reluctant to use your more stinging language. Perhaps Luna’s more kind manner is beginning to peer through?”

Nightmare huffed a laugh. “You think I would regress to be as weak as her?”

“I wouldn’t call it weakness, but that she wanted adoration and love, not fear and compliance.”

“Well, I am not Luna,” Nightmare sneered.

“But you will be again, soon. The moons will be apart again and, I hope, you will consider a lighter hoof.”

Nightmare dismissively rolled her eyes and made another link with Fellblade who trotted behind her. As they left the library. Go to the cemetery on the city’s outskirts and wait for me. I will disclose your duties there.

Yes, your highness.

Her equerry gradually slowed his pace, putting distance between himself and the alicorns, and quietly diverted down another corridor.

CRASH!

Big Macintosh smashed the door of the room where the band’s confiscated arms and supplies were held in the dungeon. Lyra slipped in, carrying three zombie heads, and taking them to three similarly-decayed and putrid, headless bodies.

“Umm…” Lyra looked back and forth quickly between the two most identical ones. “Which one is whose?” She put down two heads and held Braeburn’s head close to one. “Bite twice if it’s yours.”

Clack, clack.

Lyra fit Braeburn’s head onto the body’s neck. The veins of his spinal cord melded with those of the body, the flesh melted together, and fully cracked his head into place. Each leg gave a twitch, and the stallion laughed as he stood and rolled his neck. “Whole again! Ha-ha!”

Lyra did the same with Applebloom and Applejack, then took to her weapons, muttering to herself. “Midenheim’s reckoning has finally come.” Then she spoke up to the others. “Here’s the plan. While Fluttershy is going berserk up there, we make an attack on the Temple of Ulric. If we corrupt or extinguish the Eternal Flame, we do the Evershosen’s work for him. We’ll have killed the god of Winter!”

Vinyl crudely thrust a syringe into her own neck, depressing the pump and pouring the solution into her veins. She gasped and clenched as the fantastic burn took root and spread through her whole body. Over a week of withdrawal, finally undone. “We… nyagh... have to find Octavia first!” she said. “We’ll need all the help we can get.”

They went on about the plan, and Applejack was very uneasy. I’m really one of them now… ain’t I?

“I didn’t hear ya give me an answer, AJ,” said Braeburn, with a grim furrow in his brow. “Y’all joinin’ grandpappy Nurgle’s family, or not?”

Applejack hesitated, a cold unsteadiness in her breath. Her juggernaut brother nudged her in the side, the seething embers in his eyes faded slightly in concern. “C’mon, sis. Don’t make it more difficult than it has to be.”

“And Apple Bloom gave herself up a long time ago for her cutiemark,” Braeburn added.

“Uh, guys...” Apple Bloom cut in. “I think Lyra put my head on backwards.” She tried to take a step forward, but stumbled onto her front with a wet thud. Braeburn picked her up, locked his jaw over her head in a vise, and twisted it right around in a loud crack.

Going back to Applejack, Braeburn asked again. “Well?”

“You didn’t give me a choice, Braeburn. You pretty much tortured me with makin’ me feel all a’ this.” She gestured to her the whole of her mutilated body.

“Was for your own good, AJ. You believed in a dyin’, meaningless concept; life.” He spat on the floor as if the very word was poison. “We were all gonna die sooner or later, everything we build up in life, poof! Done when you kick the bucket. But now, we’re waltzin’ with death ‘cross the prairie.”

His words did little to comfort Applejack. He hugged her with one leg. “I swear, I’ll teach you to love this. We’re showing the living the true form of immortality.”

“Not if I get to ‘em first,” Big Mac said smugly, rubbing his nails together like knives.

”La-la-la-la- I can’t hear you!” Vinyl shouted into her sonic cannon, right in Lyra’s face. “I’m louder, so I’m right! We’re going for Octavia first!”

Lyra held her hands over her ears, almost pressing with enough force to crush her own skull. At Vinyl’s first pause she tore the weapon away from her momentarily. “Fine! But what if you die as we get there?”

“Then I’ll die knowing I was coming to save her!”

Curved halberd in hand, Lyra went to the door and rolled her eyes. “Oh, get a room.”

The others followed her to the dungeon stairs and up through the empty structure. It was quickly getting hotter, and beyond the exit, a thousand score homes were aflame. Amongst the firestorm, the golden tongues whipped into the air, carrying smoke into a blackening sky.

Vinyl whistled, “Wow. Flutters sure knows how to clean house.”

“So which way to Octavia, O great navigator?” Lyra said mockingly.

“Uh…” Vinyl looked down one way, then the other. “Eenie-meenie-miney- this way!” She went darting to the left, shouting at the top of her lungs, “I’m coming, Tavi!”

Braeburn stopped Applejack and Apple Bloom as they started to follow. “Wait a second. Looky there.” He pointed to a gangly man limping out of one of the buildings down the street, moaning in pain, but a thin smile on his soot and blood-caked face that he escaped the fire. “First lesson, making zombies. Easiest thing in the world, ‘cause all you gotta do is bite ‘em!”

Braeburn immediately charged at the man, who screamed and hobbled away not nearly fast enough before being tackled to the ground. Braeburn quickly pinned under the weight of his bloated body and a leg on the man’s neck.

“Mister, don’t struggle. This’ll just take a minute.” He tore away the shirt over his shoulder, exposing bare flesh, and glanced back to make sure Applejack and Apple Bloom were looking. Applejack was, albeit reluctantly, and blocked Apple Bloom’s eyes with a hoof. “AJ, you let the little one look.”

“She doesn’t need to see this, Braeburn.”

Apple Bloom pulled down her sister’s hoof. “Actually, I’ve seen Big Mac and Braeburn do a lot worse than just killin’ somepony.”

“Huh?”

“Yeah. You shoulda’ seen ‘em ‘fore we showed up in Mordheim. They was eatin’ people, wearing their skulls, and I gotta tell you, it was fun!”

Fun… fun… fun…

It took Applejack several moments to process what her sister had just said, looking straight forward in disbelief.

“Aaa-haagh!”

Applejack’s mind-clog was broken by the man’s scream as Apple Bloom had her mouth locked over his shoulder.

“That’s it, Apple Bloom!” Braeburn cheered. “Sink your teeth deep!” Apple Bloom bit harder, thrashing her head back and forth like a predator trying to rip a chunk of meat off a kill. The man kicked and howled but Braeburn’s hold on him was unbroken. “It’s a good burn, idn’t it, mister? Stop strugglin’; we’re doin’ you a favor!”

“Apple Bloom!” Applejack shot forth and yanked her back, wrenching her mouth off the man, along with tearing off a good bite of skin. “What’n sam hill’re you doin’!?”

“A little late, AJ,” Braeburn chortled as he inspected the deep bite gash and hugged the man tightly. “Congratulations, sir! Welcome to the fold!” He didn’t respond, but convulsed in Braeburn’s hold, his face twisting in shock and pain. “Let me just make you comfy while you wait for it to take hold, and I promise you, you’ll feel better than you ever did in yer life!” Braeburn leaned him sitting against a pile of rubble with his bite wound already beginning to blacken and putrefy.

“Apple Bloom, what have you done!?” Applejack berated.

“I just gave him what we got, didn’t I? It makes you immortal, right, Braeburn?”

“Absolutely.” he nodded sharply. “Just look at ‘im now.”

The man wasn’t moving. Not even his chest showed a sign of breathing, and his eyes were glassy, looking up into the sky without blinking.

Applejack pointed to him like the elephant in the room.“Y’all gone daft?! Look at ‘im; he’s dead!”

“He’ll be back. It just takes time. While I’ll admit he won’t have the mental facilities that we do, he’ll still be fit as a fiddle once he’s up again.” Braeburn trotted past his kin. “Now come on. We’re fallin’ behind the others. And Applejack, the next time we come across a straggler, I wanna see you bite ‘em like they’re the juiciest apple you ever darn saw!”

“Ah don’t think I can bring myself to kill an innocent.”

“Just remember, we’re doin’ ‘em a service. Repeat after me. ‘Pain is joy. Death is life. Death stalks us all.’”

Applejack repeated that under her breath, and took a backward glance as they went down the burning street. The man was standing again, his head lazily craned back, his jaw slack open. His bitten shoulder was completely consumed in blackening necrosis and infected veins bulged under his skin.

Kivsin kept his cool under Rarity’s shield dome. The whole time she and Spike were talking, he was thinking of every way he could do them in once the shield dropped. He couldn’t hear their conspiring after Rarity added a silencing layer to the dome.

Which one should I go for first…? he thought. The dragon, obviously. How strong are those scales?

He looked at his claws, examining the bony nails. “I can probably get through that. I wonder what dragon meat tastes like.”

i… Ki-n...

Urrgh... what is that?

Kiv...in, what are you thinking?!

Twilight! he thought elatedly. He jumped up and pressed his face against the shield like a foal getting ready to smash the window of a candy store. They’re right there, Twilight. Help me get through, and I’ll be free!

Kivsin, you are not killing our friends!

His claws balled into fists. Why not? Rarity has me trapped like a pet under here, and Spike viciously attacked Octavia!

She was trying to break his wrist! You’re not thinking straight with me in your head. I need you to keep it together!

I’ve never been more calm!

Rarity felt Kivsin pound his fists against the shield and screech at her and Spike in seething hatred. “He’s really getting restless. And we still don’t have anything.” She rubbed her temples sorely grunting. “This shield… mmff…”

Spike was just about to speak, but a flash materialized a scroll before him which fell into his outstretched hand. He checked the stamp design, and frowned.

“It’s from Cadence,” he murmured.

He undid the ribbon and rolled it open. The writing looked rushed. Spike read it over, and raised a brow in confusion. “It says the city’s being evacuated because there’s a giant metal monster on the loose… What in the...”

He looked back to Rarity who was quaking in fear, then slapped her hands to her head and shouted, “Oh no… no, no!” She lifted the silencing layer on her shield and nearly screamed to Kivsin, “Fluttershy’s gone mad!”, to which his hate froze to fear. “You remember her now, don’t you?!”

Kivsin remembered back to that day she had him in her claws, on the verge of squeezing him until he popped. And Twilight too saw his thought, that face of absolute rage.

Kivsin, it’s over… We’re going to be found out. But… We can help stop this; please, I need you to work with Spike and Rarity. They’re still your friends!

“Kivsin,” Rarity said worriedly, “I know you’re better than this. You’re a good soul. We need you to help bring Fluttershy to heel.”

Kivsin stared at the ground, his eyes shifting back and forth.

Where are they?! I want more! I NEED more! MORRRE!!

Five hundred tons of iron and anger plodded down the empty street in search of victims. That couldn't be all of them; in an entire city, she figured she’d only seen a few thousand. Fluttershy was now the height of a two story house, and left massive craterous footprints in her wake. Her claws were wet with blood, and she still felt so thirsty, regardless how many she ate or how much blood ran across her tongue.

She rounded a corner, and spotted a great throng crowded before a wide open gate.

They’re ESCAPING!

She arched herself into a racing stance and, literally tearing up the road under her claws, broke into a sprint down the pathway. The sound of this rolling thunder reached the evacuees, and they immediately began forcing their way for the gate. The narrow ramps down the plateau's slope couldn't take the volume, and those who lost their footing tumbled over the sides like trickling water.

Faster! FASTER!

She was nearly upon them, gunning the final sprint like a runaway steam train. She heard an eagle’s screech—

And then her face hit the pavement.

She completely lost her footing, skidding on her face and belly like a crashed meteor, overturning carts, digging a scar in the earth, and coming to a grinding halt in the middle of the scattering crowd.

“Up!” Franz shouted.

Deathclaw flapped his great wings and jumped off the monster’s head, taking off at building-level. Franz looked back and saw that Fluttershy was already getting back up, dust and pieces of debris rolling off her frame. Several holes opened in the palm of her claw as she raised it to point at them, and a moment later they belched several seething shots of fiery energy in quick succession.

Franz pulled Deathclaw’s reins and veered down another road, the rounds sizzling past to explode on another building. Six cannons and two nine-shot hellstorm launchers were waiting on this street. His mount landed just behind them, and all stood by.

“Explosive shells loaded?” he called to the gunnery captain.

“Primed and ready, sir!”

Franz looked back down the street, the narrow corridor he expected the easily-baitable Khornate to charge down. The massive footsteps grew closer, and the crews tensely readied their smoldering wicks. He let them mutter amongst themselves, sharing words of comfort and fear.

“I heard it ate everyone in the merchant district,” one said despondently.

“And that it shrugged off the black powder bombs,” added another.

The captain firmly put his hand on the crewman’s shoulder. “There isn’t a problem a cannon can’t fix.”

Crash… Crash… Crash… CRASH!

An entire section of the rightward buildings collapsed in an avalanche of plaster and dust. Out of the cloud, Fluttershy came to a halt only after smashing into the buildings on the other side of the street.

Franz’s grip on his hammer tightened and she shouted quickly, ”Cannons, FIRE!”

The men jumped at the guns and the cannons blasted away first, all six striking the giant directly. She merely grinned at their futile fire as the cannon balls disappeared, absorbed into her metallic mass. She lifted a hoof, and—

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

Deep holes tore open like bombs under her skin, blasting chunks of steel off of her. She screamed in pain and took but one step at them when Franz shouted again,

“Fire!”

The hellstorm crews lit their rockets, and the shortened fuses screamed to life, streaking fifteen pounds of explosives each to their destinations. Fireballs erupted from the impacts, shattering rivets and joints, and enshrouded Fluttershy in smoke as she fell back against the city wall.

Franz kept his eyes and ears open, hearing Fluttershy’s movement in the cloud. There was suddenly a flurry of movement, and she burst from the cloud, running down the street, away from the line of guns.

The artillerymen whooped and cheered. Franz wiped his brow in relief, then turned back to the captain.

“Make note and send it to the reiksmarshall; explosives are effective.”

Ash and cinders began to rain from above as the fires burned, barely controlled by the efforts of pegasus weather teams bringing rain who, despite their strenuous efforts could barely stop them from spreading. Here was where an iron wrath had already torn through. The street gutters ran with steaming warm blood, and bodies were still being carted out in piles.

Shining Armor paced back and forth atop one of the few standing buildings, a good vantage point from which he oversaw the arrangement of the capture zone. The two humanoid giants, inbred and slack-jawed, were hidden behind two structures. Four cannons were arranged to each radial street, and a company of man-portable hellstorm launchers propped up their rockets on the launch rails. He glanced up at the dark and dangerous sky. A tremendous store of lightning was waiting to be unleashed, suspended right over the center of the zone. Shining had some peace of mind in the fact that Cadence was quickly brought out of the city, and had allowed Spike to participate in the plan.

Speaking of Spike… he thought. The very dragon touched down beside him, taking a couple of stumbling steps before fully regaining balance and tucking in his wings. Another figure accompanied him in a cloak, much larger than any stallion he’d seen.

“Spike,” said Shining, “Who’s this?”

Spike looked very uncomfortable, and forced himself to speak. “They’re going to help us.”

“Well that’s good, but who is it?”

“It’s Twilight,” Spike said bluntly, biting his lip.

Shining cocked his head in confusion. “Twilight? You can’t be here! Spike and the pegasi are going to lead Fluttershy here!”

“I think I can hold my own against an overgrown windup mare.”

Shining's brows raised in surprise at the throaty, masculine voice that came from under the hood. “Spike, I thought you said this was Twilight?”

“It is,” the dragon squeaked. “And Kivsin.”

“Her bat pony friend?” Shining rattled his memory, and what he gathered certainly didn’t have claws as he saw under the cloak.

“Take the hood off,” Shining ordered. “Nopony’s close enough to see your face clearly.”

The figure sat and with long, taloned fingers, pulled the hood back off a vicious, wrinkled scowl, bristling like a cache of swords with teeth.

“Shining, before you say anything,” Spike started, “He’s pretty well in control of himself, and—”

The reiksmarshall grabbed Spike in a telekinetic grip and furiously jerked him down to his level. “Spike, what is going on?!” he muttered through gritted teeth.

“T-Twilight was experimenting with how Warp energy makes mutants, so she possessed Kivsin. They’re in the same body.”

Shining released him, and sat, massaging his temples in frustration and utter disbelief. He cast a glance to Kivsin, who spasmodically rolled his neck, softening his baleful gaze. “What else is wrong with him?”

Kivsin wiggled his fingers and toes like he’d just discovered them then and there. “Did I do it?” He gasped, putting a claw to his mouth. “I can talk. I’m in control!”

“Did they just switch out?” asked Shining, to which Kivsin’s body nodded.

“Yeah. I’m sorry you have to see us like this, but then again I didn’t predict the current circumstances. Kivsin’s not in his right mind, so he’s not likely to listen too well. We’re here to help Spike. What’s the plan?”

Shining put aside the disturbed butterflies in his stomach to point a hoof down below. “This is where we’re going to trap Fluttershy. We’re going to lead her under those clouds, and the pegasi will shock her to hold her in one place. The hidden giants will pin her down, and if that doesn’t work, we’ll be forced to blast her with artillery until she can’t move.”

“That’s good,” said Spike. “But how do we get her attention without getting too close?”

“The pegasi that will be with you will throw fireworks at her; big ones. We just have to get her back here, and zap!”

Kivsin had another bout of twitching, took a threatening step toward Shining, and he suddenly shouted, “I don’t need their help! I was once a bodyguard to King Sombra himself! I am the Blackguard, and I’ll draw that beast my own way!”

And with that, Kivsin tore his cloak off and launched into the air, leaving the others behind to gawk at his rapidly retreating form.

“Damnit!” Shining cursed. “Spike, if you can’t stop him, at least keep up with him. We need a little more time here.”

Spike quickly nodded and took off as well.

Kivsin, what are you doing!? How did you force me back?

Your brother insults me, Twilight, thinking I need help from lesser ponies.

Did you at least listen to the plan?

As much as I needed to.

He touched down at the empty Wizard’s Guild, and navigated the halls to the lab.

Why did you come back here?

Fluttershy likes animals, right?

Uh… yeah. Why?

Kivsin sniffed his way through the building, perturbed by the inexplicable number of mutilated, crushed, slashed, or burned bodies everywhere.

What happened here? Twilight’s voice asked in a horrified tone.

Kivsin took another breath, sorting out the many scents; kerosene, brimstone, and rotting meat. Vinyl Scratch has been here. Macintosh and Applejack, too.

It came to Twilight quickly. However Fluttershy managed to get above ground, the others had come through the giant hole she must have left.

Most of the bodies have slash marks, so Macintosh must have been in first. He continued following the ongoing wreckage. They used Macintosh as a shield. If I remember right, he wears the Blood God’s collar, so all magic that came his way was deflected. The wizards were powerless against him. There was an especially dense pile-up of cadavers before one of the destroyed doors. Here’s the lab.

The lab was largely unscathed, save for the crate that once contained Octavia, now in a hundred pieces and empty.

Did… Spike and Rarity remember to get Octavia out of here? asked Twilight.

I’m not sure. If she escaped, we’ll need to deal with it later. I know her scent. For now, it’s one thing at a time. He gave a few more sniffs and found the goat carcass, still resting under the central table.

Oh… You’re good.

He smirked. Thank you.

Kivsin picked up the body in his teeth and carried it out. At the exit of the Guild, Spike landed and, just as he opened his mouth to berate Kivsin, he saw the goat body, and blinked in surprise.

“Huh. That’ll work.”

I’ll never retreat again! To the death! TO THE DEATH!

Fluttershy walked with a heavy limp, liquid fire streaming from the blasted-out craters in her body. Something was screaming in her mind of how she was a coward, how her soul would burn if she fled again.

They can hurt me? Can I heal?

She sat and brought up her claw where the nails’ fingers loosely hung on their hinges. She focused on it, and some of the dents and holes began to pop back into shape. Filling those in, though, made her shrink down several feet.

Get big again… Need metal.

She thrust her claw into one of the buildings. She hadn’t been in this area yet. It tingled as she touched and took in the metal inside, but it wasn’t much, and she didn’t notice any change. When she took it out, however, there were several human bodies skewered on her nails.

Survivors, trying to hide.

She licked them off each nail and glanced around into empty windows. If those were there, there may be more. She raised a claw, and took another swipe at the building, ripping away a rain of rubble, then with both claws, dragged them down the side. The section came down like wallpaper.

It was like kicking up an anthill. People came pouring from the buildings, fleeing in all directions. Fluttershy swept her claws across the street, wiping out swaths of panickers. She picked up a clawful of victims, her grip tight enough that it squashed several like grapes, and scarfed them down like a fistful of chewy-on-the-outside-crunchy-on-the-inside snacks. For some minutes she had this sense of freedom, that this felt so right, and between clawfuls, she stepped on those villains like insects.

A sudden shriek stabbed into her ears, shattering panes of glass and making her slap her claws to her ears. She snapped around to the source, a viciously-grinning noctral, and a purple dragon on the roof behind her, the latter twisting a finger in his ear with a scowl of pain.

“Warn me next time you do that,” Spike muttered.

“Hey, Flutterbitch!” Kivsin shouted, and hurled the goat corpse at her, which stuck on one of the hook-ended tips of her mane. It dangled there by its mangled throat, there before her eyes as the muscle and bone finally snapped and it fell, splattering messily into her claw.

She crunched on the people and ponies that were screaming and banging around in her mouth. She started breathing more heavily, wisps of black smoke streamed from her lips, which soon gave way to waves of flame. She looked up to Kivsin, gritting her teeth, emitting sparks, and then she roared. Spike and Kivsin both felt the tremendous heat gusting up from her white-hot glowing throat.

“Watch out!”

They both jumped apart as a fiery burst tore into the structure between them. The impact sent a geyser of building material into the sky, and Fluttershy, closing the smoking hole in her palm, then threw herself onto the building under them, sinking in her claws and climbing up at frightening speed.

Spike beat his wings and took to the air. “I think we got her attention. Let’s lead her back.”

He and Kivsin swooped behind her, and down the street. Fluttershy jumped down and took off after them, shrieking at the top of her lungs. A titanic stride kept her right behind them, even catching up.

“How do we slow her down?” Spike shouted.

Kivsin glanced to the buildings around them, then turned to face Fluttershy, beating his chest. “Come on, you zoophiliac! Animal fucker! Goat-killer, right here!”

“RRAAAAAAAGH!!”

Kivsin took a sharp left, skimming over the rooftops and as he predicted, Fluttershy came ploughing through the building on the corner. She lost some momentum, and fell behind slightly. Spike followed behind the giant, just high enough to avoid the falling debris.

“He’s leading her off course!” he cursed. But then Kivsin began leading her back to the right, through another structure. Back and forth they went, weaving a zig-zag of destruction. Spike thought of the collateral damage, how many more were being killed. But then, the only other alternative was all of Middenheim being leveled and devoured.

He passed her unnoticed, her gaze utterly fixated on Kivsin, and shouted to the bat pony, “I need to take over in luring her! The soldiers will attack you in the trapping zone!” Kivsin just opened his mouth to respond, but hesitated like he was reconsidering. “Kivsin! Peel off! Let her follow me!”

In Spike’s very next blink, he saw two hind claws slam into his face. She spun off like a clipped airplane, disappearing through the window of another building.

Kivsin! Twilight cried in sheer despair. What did you do that for!? He could be seriously hurt!

A pause followed as she heard his thoughts.

No… No, you can’t! They’ll overwhelm you!

Not if you help me fight! You’re the Steed of Apocalypse, Twilight. Project your true power through me, and we will be unstoppable!

No. I won’t let you take us that far!

But you can’t stop me. Fluttershy still needs to get there!

“Here it comes!”

Shining dashed to the edge of the roof and saw Kivsin shooting down the street, followed by the stampeding monster, straight toward the square.

“Do not fire on the flying mutant!” he bellowed to the troops.

Shining pointed his horn right to the center of the lightning clouds, ready to shoot a signaling beam of magic to the pegasi atop them. The artillery crews readied their guns and rockets, and the giants peeked their heads back down.

Shining noticed something more off than he recognized in Kivsin; a maniacal grin all across his face as he got closer.

Clang!

Two rows of sword-sized teeth snapped just behind Kivsin, not a foot from his feet. Fluttershy leapt at him again, once more failing to sink a bite.

Just a little further. You’re almost there!

The teeth snapped again, nearly taking off his foot. Kivsin shot into the opening, just in time to hear Fluttershy’s stampede become quieter, and quieter.

“NO!” Shining screamed.

Fluttershy had suddenly changed course.

“Oh sweet shit Madame Masque, fuck me!”

Vinyl jumped aside as a rafter collapsed beside her. The others were fleeing in a similar panic as the building caved in behind them. She blasted out the door ahead with her cannon, making a way for everyone to escape, but Big Mac was way ahead, simply smashing through the wall head first. The laggard Octavia was yanked out of the way by Vinyl as the structure caved with Fluttershy’ hounding one of them.

“Braeburn! Help!” Applejack shrieked. Fluttershy snapped her jaws down at her, spearing her teeth through the zombie’s midsection. Braeburn and Bic Mac jumped at her to try to grab her hooves, but Fluttershy lifted her head too quickly.

“Applejack!!” they shouted.

Fluttershy flicked her head a bit, and Applejack slid off her teeth and landed on the edge of her mouth. She looked out at the others, holding out a hoof with her eyes wide with desperation. “Help me! Help m—”

Clang! Fluttershy’s teeth snapped shut around her.

“No!” Braeburn screamed in rage. He tilted his head back, then projectile vomited a blob of acid at Fluttershy’s jaw, leaving a sizzling spot that rapidly turned to rust. “Give her back, damn it! Give me back mah cousin!”

In one shrieking sweep, Fluttershy batted him and Big Macintosh down the street. Braeburn flew straight into a signpost and was impaled through the gut.

Applejack slid across a squirming iron tongue, slick with blood, slipping to the back of Fluttershy’s mouth. As she went over the edge, she held out her hooves, stopping herself above the glowing chasm of the giant’s throat.

“Fluttershy! Stop!” Applejack cried. Tears streamed down her face, vanishing into the depths below.

The esophagus expanded as Fluttershy swallowed, and Applejack lost her grip for a moment, falling five feet before stopping herself. Her hooves left slimy imprints above, where a coating of a dirty orange-brown residue began to spread across the surface, shedding corroded metal flakes.

Applejack morphed her hoof into her tooth-axe and sank the canine end into Fluttershy’s throat. A gust of scalding hot air rushed up and she swung about as Fluttershy screamed and threw her head around with her claws at her neck. Applejack desperately slapped her legs around, smearing as much surface as she could with secretions. Fluttershy gulped again, forcing Applejack’s axe out of place, and she slid another ten feet before stabbing the tooth back and coming to a stop.

Now the heat from the juggernaut’s core was starting to get to Applejack. With few living nerves to feel the temperature, she was likely actually on the verge of frying.

Fluttershy tried to swallow again, but her throat seized up and she started coughing, hacking, and puffing out clouds of rusty dust. It started to show on the outside, too, as brown veins grew across her neck, chin, and chest like an invading weed. The instant they reached her forehead, she gripped the sides of her head, shrieking like a banshee in pain and crying brown tears the consistency of tar. Fluttershy threw her head back, screaming to the sky and letting out a plume of brown dust, before her voice choked out and her joints rotted to a standstill. She went silent, still as a statue in horror, the only sound being the low creaking and groaning of her huge frame.

Inside, Applejack started climbing the rough, corroded walls for dear life, stabbing her canine into the walls and hauling herself up. The slow breaths of the giant blew a heated wind at her back as she ascended. She yawned, wondering how in the world she could possibly be getting tired if her body didn’t need sleep anymore. Each of Fluttershy’s weak breaths sank Applejack deeper and deeper into sleepiness. The next time she put a hoof up, it started to stick. So did her other legs, and it wasn’t long before she couldn’t move any further. The warmth was so comfortable. Her eyelids felt so heavy. She couldn’t keep them open any longer.

Kivsin landed on Fluttershy’s nose, sinking a claw between her brows for balance. He didn’t understand why the soldiers didn’t attack him, give him an excuse to gorge himself on their blood, and he chalked it up to Fluttershy. “You can’t pay attention to what’s right in front of you, damn beast?”

It’s over, Kivsin. Just, please try to get out of here. They’re coming.

The imperial giants were plodding down the street with stony clubs in their hands, and pegasi were already arriving, circling the giant and the mutants below.

“Get back! Back off!” Vinyl swung her sonic cannon at the imperials, who slowly advanced in a porcupine of spears and halberds. The giants’ great stride brought them looming over the mutants. Vinyl hauled her weapon up and shrieked a cacophony of noise straight at it, causing it to bring its hand to its ears to try to block it out, to no avail. It then reached down and plucked the weapon right out of Vinyl’s claws, the facial component still attached which lifted her along with it.

“Mmmff! Mmmmmffh!!” Vinyl mumbled loudly around the device.

“Let her go, you smelly clod!” Octavia yelled, wrapping her tentacles around the unicorn’s haunches to pull her away—only to be lifted off the ground as well. Vinyl finally managed to undo the mouthpiece, and she and Octavia both fell into the giant’s other waiting hand, which immediately put its thumb right over Vinyl’s face.

Braeburn cracked his head around to vomit on the wood at his back, but was obstructed by the sight of a rifle bore at his back with a scowling pegasus at the trigger. Braeburn grinned at the futile threat, but then saw another gun be put to his forehead. “Raise it up,” the pegasus said to another. “Anything less than the destruction of the brain, and it won’t die.”

Big Mac had Apple Bloom lying on his back in the saddle dip cut out of his body. “Keep yer head down, ‘n don’t let go,” he growled, keeping his eyes on the soldiers.

Apple Bloom whimpered, “M’hm.”

Big Mac held up the whole street, playing the soldiers’ fear by feigning charges at them, who he stood taller than at the shoulder. In one round, he went among their long polearms, snapping several under his claws and between his jaws. Lyra held the other end as a perpetually burning figure whom none could touch.

“Forgive me, Changer of Ways, for I have failed you so quickly,” she mumbled, then shook her head. “No. You knew this would happen. It’s all part of the plan, isn’t it? We get captured again, then… something…” She looked up to the blue-grey monster on Fluttershy’s nose who looked to be silently arguing with himself.

Just let me indulge a little! Kivsin screamed to the daemon in his head. Just ten heads! Seven?

No! We’re giving ourselves up before you end up giving the soldiers a reason to attack us. You’re looking at Shining Armor right now! You see he and the soldiers aren’t hos...tile… no, no, don’t you dare!

Kivsin ferally climbed to the top of Fluttershy’s head and shot a targeting glare toward Shining, who had his eyes on the troops surrounding the mutants. I’ll give them a reason to die by my hand! I don’t need to take orders from anyone anymore! Not King Sombra, the Druchii, or you! I’ll never relinquish your power from me, and I. Will. Be. FREE!

In a powerful flap of wings, he launched himself toward Shining.

NO! Twilight’s voice screeched.

In the next instant, a sharp pain in his side like he’d been hit by a truck caused Kivsin to lose sight of his target. He shot his furious gaze towards the one who had tackled him in midair; a silver-armored, purple-scaled dragon, roaring in anger.

Kivsin only caught a split second glimpse of the ground before he was flipped around, and hurled across through the air to smash through a window. He banged and rolled across the apartment floor, crashing through furniture like an avalanche. He finally came to a stop, lying prone and half-buried under a pile-up of broken chairs, tables, and other assorted items.

Twilight groaned. I… I felt that… Ugh…

Spike came through the window and strode across the room, hissing a fog of dark smoke between his gritted teeth. He drew his sword, held Kivsin’s head down, and aimed the blade for just under his chest.

“Don’t make me wish this kills you.”

He began to thrust it down, but a pair of kicking legs sent him reeling back. Kivsin threw himself free of the rubble, and by the time he was up Spike had righted himself as well.

Kivsin, please! Twilight’s voice begged urgently, Please don’t do this. He’s our friend!

Both he and Spike began to circle, each staring the other down, searching for a weak spot in their stance.

Iwant to kill him, so I’m going to kill him. You help me fight, or we both die! Now!

Kivsin beat his wings and took a flying leap forward, screaming in bestial fury as he launched straight towards Spike.

Stop!! Twilight screamed.

Kivsin’s eyes suddenly flew wide with shock, and he dropped from the air like a brick, creating a sizable divot in the wooden floor inches away from Spike. The dragon hopped backwards in one fluid motion, holding his sword at the ready.

You’re completely out of control, grunted Twilight. You may have… gotten power from me. But… I can take it back!

Kivsin’s claws slapped onto his face, digging their fingers into his skin. He screeched an earsplitting pitch, shattering mirrors and what glass that wasn’t already broken, as his own claws dug knuckle-deep, and started to pry his face apart. One half of Kivsin began to turn a luminous yellow.

Like a splitting cell, one head became two. The one with the horn began calling on its lavender magic to aid as she planted her claw in the floor and tried to drag herself away. Spike immediately stepped forward and tried to help, placing a claw on each half of them and pushing them apart.

They were finally separated at the hind hooves. Kivsin convulsed and gasped as if in dying throes, his face fixed in a rictus of shock and pain.

The hand of a giant, bearing Shining Armor came to the window and deposited him inside. He briefly nodded to the mentally-deficient creature, which grunted deeply in response. He trotted over to where Spike was trying to keep Twilight awake, and went to Kivsin to do the same.

“Spike, what in the world happened back there?”

“Kivsin just finally snapped. He was going after you, and just a minute ago I bet he was fantasizing about killing everyone else.”

“And what, they just separated?”

“It’s the only way I can describe it.” Spike gently slapped Twilight’s cheek as her eyes fluttered and faded. “Come on, Twilight, stay on this side.”

She coughed up black droplets onto her lips, and her fangs began to slowly extend. As she stared into Spike’s face, her eyes instantly grew wide and she lurched up at him, hissing with widening fanged jaws. He immediately clasped his claw over her mouth and tried to hold her down.

“Shining, I think she’s losing it,” he said quickly. “Get her some blood, enough to drink.”

Shining propped up Kivsin’s head with a dislocated chair cushion, and rushed to the window opposite the view of the militia. The ground was running in blood there, too, and with the guidance of his magic, it flowed up the side of the building, into a crimson ball that he opened the window to let in.

“Shining, it’s getting worse!” Spike said urgently. Twilight snapped her fangs viciously at him, struggling against his grip on her horn.

He carried it over to Twilight and let a thin stream of blood run down her tongue. She lapped it up greedily, straining against Spike’s grip as she tried to lean towards the source of the red fluid. Soon enough, her eyes stopped flashing with hatred, and her rabid growling turned into a low moan.

“The Emperor’s going to want to talk to all of us,” Spike said worriedly.

“I know,” Shining muttered back. “But let’s focus on keeping these two alive.”

“Doesn’t the Inquisition deal with daemonology?”

At that, Shining’s breath seized in his throat.

Chapter 25: The Seeds Bear Fruit

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Chapter 26: Fading Light

Author's Note

Spoiler warning: contains info from 'Day of the Doctor' movie

Chapter 26: Fading Light

”Though a thousand miles and three nations lay between us, I have never felt her presence more strongly than since we first came face to face. So close; she is in the palm of my hand.” ~ Archaon, Lord of the End Times

It was under crimson skies, Hell’s horizon, that the engines of war utilized by Khorne’s immortal armies were forged. The very land and sky battled one another, lightning and wind striking the earth, ripping up mountains into the air and dropping them miles away in meteoric crashes, while the ground quaked and spewed geysers of molten brass skyward, burning away the very storm clouds until the winds gathered anew.

At the feet of the range of innumerable volcanoes which made up Khorne's Rage, the workshops and mills ran without cease, pounding and shaping iron on anvils of entrapped souls who writhed under the scorching heat of fired steel. On some occasions, a volcanic eruption would bury or incinerate the mills under tons of ash and brass, but to the Master, it was of little consequence as more daemons would spawn from the blood pits and rebuild. From these workshops the tools of Khorne’s eternal wars were cast; hammers, axes, even living daemon-engines, the Juggernauts, and skull cannons.

“Faster! Faster!”

The sound of the call was lost among the commotion of the furnace-daemons already at work. Dozens of the jibbering creatures were at the pulley chains, hauling up the final piece of a great statue, with a head whose hair was a thousand wrought iron chains, ending in a thousand barbed hooks. It was hoisted up to neck level with a tremendous four-legged body where other daemons were pouring over every detail like army ants, carving in runes and welding on embellishments to their lord. The workshop floor was showered by the sparks of their rabid labor whilst another squadron of winged daemons pushed the head into place, docking it with the neck and getting to work melding the two together with white-hot claws.

The foreman oversaw the attachment of a wide pair of wings spanning from wall to wall, and after their addition, climbed up the jungle of chains and surveyed the creation from on high.

His parody of a mortal face grinned, but it quickly vanished when the vast body beneath him began to lean. “Balance! Get it upright!” Grabbing up his whip, he hurled the leathery tongue at the pulley operators. Lengthening itself, the rope easily pierced the skull of one, and with its barb, caught and tore at the chest of the daemon behind him before snapping in anger. The others paid no heed to their dead and wounded, and made up for the loss with tireless bodies.

The instant the foreman felt it begin to be corrected, he screeched, “Onto the conveyor!” to which another gaggle of winged creatures scrambled to the ceiling, grasping at chains and hooking them about the iron statue's joints. “Up! Up! UP!” Immediately after another crack of the whip, it was hoisted up off the ground while the driver of a massive cart goaded his thrashing, snarling beasts of burden underneath it.

The hoisting daemons held whilst the carrier groaned to a halt, then lowered it on to the cart which strained under the sudden, sheer tonnage. With an air of madness about him and slavering jaws, the driver screamed, “On! On with all your strength! Kharneth will see the Red Angel return!”

The beasts roared and snorted, setting off under the yoke through the workshop’s widening doors. With this creation complete and on its way, the landed workers immediately set about other tasks in the factory, never thinking of their previous work again.

The daemonic haulers made great speed up a millennia-old ramp, carved in the side of the volcanic slope by sheer wear of repeated trips up and down. Winged daemons by the dozen were pushing at the back of the statue, preventing it from falling over and lightening the load for the cart. Through the ash-rain they came to the rim, coming abreast with the yellow, bubbling lake below. With frantic wings the daemons pushed the statue over, toppling it into the the gaping maw of the volcano.

With a tremendous splash like a rock, it sank, the bubbling magma consuming the snarling wrinkles of its face to the cheers and hollers of the daemons.

___________________________________________

Out of the fire, but into the frying pan. Took all day for Screwball to find the keys to the trap door out of her hat, and where were they? Inside her own skull! And now these things are growing back in.

Twilight winnowed through a dresser drawer. Each time she failed to find the right item, the drawer was punished with a harder slam than the last.

“Nothing to file these with?” she grunted irritatedly. “Ah, here!” Sheathed in her lavender magic, a heavy hoof file shot out of the drawer. She leaned forward, closer to the mirror and parting her mane, examining the large bump of white bone bulging out of her temple.

“Ah, magic, how I missed you…” While filing them down, some familiar niggles in her memory came back to bug her. She wondered if any semblance of normality could be restored, if her friends could live with some security, but not prisoners. And the Doctor; why didn’t he know that mutations were irreversible? Was he not as knowledgeable as he led on, or did he have something else in mind?

With a few last zipping swipes, she had a good pile of bone dust on the counter which, having been separated from her daemonic body, popped and fizzed, bubbling away into nothingness. Even the residue on the file burned itself to ash, and the ashes turned into vapor.

Let’s recap, shall we, Twilight? she thought at the reflection in the mirror. You’re helping harbor an accidental mass murderer, Queen Chrysalis is bigger and more powerful than ever, claiming to be on our side— and quad-wielding chitin-katanas… How do things like that even happen, anyway? Screwball is on the fence about having just saved or kidnapped Fluttershy, virtually everything you know about your family may be a lie, and Rarity… I wish she would have stuck around a bit longer, not just take off as quick as I found her. Where did Screwball say she was taking Fluttershy; the park? It’d do her some good, for sure. Some calm and nature. But we have to tell her sometime, and get our friends out of custody… and find out what to do with Applejack’s family and the others…

With a flap of her wings, she launched back, falling with an exasperated sigh on the bed behind her. It was too much for one mind to handle alone, and no doubt Shining Armor and Celestia had their noses to the grindstone on it as well. Did Big Macintosh have any allegiance? Could he be helped to not lash out at anything and everything? Could Vinyl’s proficiency in chemicals be used for something better? She could probably cook up a potent morphine. What would happen to them then? Test subjects? Dissected like lab animals?

At the first chance she got, She’d put in a request to talk to Celestia. Twilight was her student, after all. The bureaucracy would bend for the princess here like in Equestria. There was no way she’d spend eternity in some dank dungeon-basement.

She rolled off the bed to do just that, laying out the array of parchment, ink and quills that in themselves brought back a sense of normalcy. It was just her and the letter right now. Dipping a quill in the ink well, she wrote.

Dear Princess Celestia,

No doubt, you’ve read the interrogation notes of Lord Inquisitor Karamazov as to the whereabouts and difficulties my friends and I have been through, not only from crazy cultists, but from savage impulses in ourselves. As your student, I can say with great confidence, that Applejack, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, and I have all but mastered our mutations and urges. Pinkie Pie could be put before the city dump and you wouldn’t hear a word from her as she’d be predictably occupied, and—

She paused, brushing the feathery quill against her lips for a moment, then dipped it for more ink.

Discord recently arrived, restoring Fluttershy’s natural form, but was forced to leave immediately, expecting the Blood God’s wrath to come for him in the Empyrean. I would request an audience with your highness at your earliest convenience. I could see how sullen you were when Emperor Franz laid out his initial terms, and I do hope you are in dialogue with him as to what can become of us.

Another pause. She let out a breath she didn't even know she was holding. Another ink replenishment.

I missed you. I really did. Every time I thought about the possibility of restoration, you came up. I missed hearing from you, Princess. I can’t explain in words here how glad I was to learn that you were alright. And more than that, now I hear you’re one of the rulers of the Empire, too? I’m sure we’ll have a lot to talk about together, which I hope will be soon. I want all of us to be together again—me, you, Luna, Cadence, my brother, my friends—and even though things have been hard these past few months, I have faith that things will turn out alright, in the end. I’m really looking forward to seeing you again.

~ Your faithful student, Twilight Sparkle

She returned the quill to the well, and looked over the fresh letter with a faint smile. The mere act of writing it was enormously cathartic, the familiarity of the motions reminding her of a simpler time, when all was right with the world, and when her concerns revolved primarily around sorting books, spending time with her friends, and happily reporting to her mentor.

I wonder what she’s going to think of me when she finds out I’m a daemon…

Her smile fell, and she shook her head firmly. She could drive herself sick to worry over the eventual encounter and entertain as many possible scenarios as she could think of, including but not limited to banishment to the sun, but she knew she could count on the Princess and her wisdom and strength.

Strength. She’d gotten stronger, too, hadn’t she? A warp-touched mind, still intact. Never had her conscious control over magic been stronger. And, heck, she could probably get her own sustenance. The blood she was given in her rations had become bitter with anticoagulants. And with Fellblade, she had told him the risk; if she didn’t feed, she’d invariably lose it and lash out at the first living thing in sight.

She stuck out her tongue at the mirror. The appendage was unnaturally long, almost tentacle-like down to the tip, and curled and squirmed idly down past her chin. It bore a striking shade of dark blue. She raised it up and whipped it around a bit. It only served to spatter a purple slime on the desk and, in disgust, she sucked it back into her mouth like a wet noodle.

Please don’t tell me I’m going to grow a second one like Pinkie Pie...

However, the universe wasn’t so merciful as to give an answer.

She felt a sudden spike of magical energy pulse through the room, the focus right behind her. Turning around, she shielded her eyes from a bright pink flash washing over the room, leaving a panting white unicorn, in a smoking circle on the floor.

“Twilight!”

Twilight bit her lip, seeing her second worst fear came to life as Shining Armor, with sweat pouring down his brow growled at point blank. She stammered, “Sh-Shining?! What are you—”

He lunged at her, making her jump back against the dresser. His eyes were wild, an unkempt mane falling messily over his face in several places, and his teeth were gritted together hard enough to crack diamonds.

“Where… is… Fluttershy?!”

___________________________________________

On the lake of the Great Park, the Show Boat ferried some of the most well-off denizens of Middenheim for day-long ventures of leisure. With its twin smokestacks fuming, it trundled along its placid, murky waters.

Screwball had everything planned out for that day. She tied Fluttershy’s mane up in a bun and dyed it maroon, had her wear a dark blue frock, and added a pair of special spectacles that made her eyes appear a hazel-brown. However, Fluttershy couldn’t enjoy herself, as ‘the monster’ was the only thing everyone else on the boat was talking about.

“It destroyed my business!”

“So many good men, all dead…”

“By Sigmar, someone’s head will roll if that damned thing isn’t executed tonight!”

The mare distanced herself on the front of the ship, leaning on the railing and peering down into the water as it churned into a froth before the prow. She looked back when the boat’s whistle began to blow, billowing up a pouffy steam cloud.

She wrung her forelegs together. Fur and flesh instead of steel, normal vertebrate wings instead of armor and cabling. She should be the happiest mare in the world right now. But how could she celebrate when every human—and not a few ponies, as well—were talking about her recent rampage no matter where she went? And why in the name of Celestia did Screwball think it was a good idea to put her on a boat with generals, bureaucrats, and factory owners, claiming that it was so she could ‘have a good day’?

She sighed. Best to take whatever blessings she could, and Rarity’s remarks about man didn’t see to be holding up. They grieved their losses, monetary and in men.

And besides… Rarity is one to exaggerate grossly, sometimes. I haven’t seen any meat dishes, and the humans look to be getting along so well with the ponies.

All of a sudden, a pair of gregarious—and somewhat familiar—voices nearby caught her attention.

“Absolutely!”

“Positively!”

There were two tall stallions who looked very much alike, both bearing proud grins, in blue and red-striped tunics, and tall feathered hats. The only obvious difference was a crimson moustache on one, for which the other was lacking.

“We sold the design of the Cider Squeezy to the Technikus in Nuln.”

“Those gear-heads sure do pay a pretty penny!”

“So I do believe you can,”

“In part,”

“Thank us for the revival of the Conqueror steam tank,”

“And the automated quality-check machines in the arms factories that keep your men shooting!”

Meeting their boastful postures, a stocky, cigar-chomping fellow in royal blue fatigues regarded them with a most skeptical look. The rows of medals and honors, and the stitching up both his lips creased as he took the brown roll between two fingers and blew soft and long into both their faces. “You two know the definition of a ‘flim-flam’?”

Stifling their coughs, the twins glanced at one another. “I’m afraid not.”

“Care to—ack! enlighten us, general Denk?”

“It means a scam, a con, a canard…” He took a step closer to the two, his fingers squeezing the end of his cigar more tightly. “Your names are the very meaning of a lying, cheating, snake oil salesman.”

Flim swallowed the lump in his throat. On the very edge of his vision, he spotted a mare listlessly walking behind the assailant. “Hello there!” he blurted out. “Miss! You look seasick!” he quickly trotted over to her, leaving his brother with the general.

The butter-yellow mare was slowly staggering, leaning on the railing for support and gasping with each breath. She mumbled, “Seasick?”

“Yes indeedy, it’s unmistakable. You shouldn’t be so close to the edge. Seasickness is all a miscommunication between the eyes and legs, so I suggest shutting those peepers tight.” Flim guided her to a seat and table. She rested her head and kept herself sightless.

“I’ll get you some water and see if there’s somepony on board who can help ease it up. What’s your name?”

Fluttershy thought for a second, glancing a split second into the stallion’s eyes, who she knew too well from home. “Firefly… Moon.”

“Firefly. Got it.” And with that, he departed briskly.

Fluttershy moaned, gritting her teeth and fighting back the nausea. The yelling between the general and Flam quickly faded to muffled noise. Slowly, with a creeping sensation, she felt her whole body go numb.

___________________________________________

Well-prepared, a man of medicine was regularly employed on the ship in case of an emergency. In a lime-green magical glow, Flim carried a glass of water beside the doctor and both hurriedly came up the stairs of the multistory vessel.

“Right around here, and… what?”

Flim expected to find the mare huddled against the table, but the area was bereft of her. “She was right here.” He peeked under the table, and both scoured the immediate area; nothing. “Miss Firefly?!” he called.

No response.

The doctor’s vision was suddenly obscured when a drop of liquid landed on his glasses. He took them off and raised a brow at the bright red stain that smeared the lens. “Blood?”

They both looked up, and there she was. Several stories in the air, hovering still to the ship moving below, her forehooves outstretched to either side. In no time at all, the whole of the ship’s riders were staring gape-mouthed at her.

“I didn’t see any wings on her,” Flim muttered. “How’d she get up— oh!”

The mare plummeted, dropping like a sack of bricks. A rain of crimson followed her into impact with the rear of the ship.

___________________________________________

Babysitting an adult; a true test of her maturity. Am I one and a half or forty-two? My old self, or the new one? Ah, to speak in the old style…

The lake’s warm waters washed over her legs in a gentle tide as she popped off her cap and dumped out a fishing rod, tackle box and shook her cap so it was suddenly colored with pictures of woodland litter. The inside of the box displayed a colorful array of baits and lures, hooks small enough for a minnow to ones mighty enough for a shark. In the mood for live bait, she plucked out a wriggling earthworm and an inch-long barb.

Screwball focused with all her might on the two things before her eyes. Between them, a single blur of white in the distance, was the Show Boat. Everything was working out. Her auntie got to chat it up with the grownups, and she got to do her own thing. Slowly, with the tiniest twitches, she brought them together and—

KABOOM!

She jumped, and the hook stuck right through her hoof. The worm fell to the grass and slithered to freedom. Yanking the hook out as if it were merely grass on her fur, she gazed at a fireball in the distance. The white ship, with its rear hopping into the air, erupted in smoke and steam.

Screwball’s eyes widened in terror.

“FLUTTERSHY!”

___________________________________________

I feel so strange… Better, but… weird. What happened?

Fluttershy felt near-weightless, with the sound of water in her ears, but she was sightless. Her eyes were open, but she couldn’t see an inch ahead. So dark down here. Am I under water?

She shook her head and started walking, validating that theory with the awkward, altered gravity. Maybe I’m dreaming. I must have fallen asleep… Or passed out. I should have been more vocal with Screwball. I’m sensitive to motion sickness, and stuck on a rolling boat. Is something supposed to happen around here?

She felt some things brush by, and some dull, barely-audible thuds. Hello? She blindly felt around but couldn’t feel much, and what she did touch wouldn’t stay in her grip long before slipping away. She sighed, and continued walking.

It must have been her first time sleeping in ages. Something had to happen, she had to find something, have one of those surreal voyages only a dream can bring. Maybe think it up. So she thought of a mountain, and sure enough, she could feel the ground begin to slope upward. Okay then, she smiled. I’m going up Canterlot Mountain, and at the top, there it will be… She felt the water part over her head, and a cool breeze. The White City.

Her ears pierced the surface of the water, but it wasn’t the clip-clop of hooves and the white noise of the city she heard, but screams, and the shrieking hiss of steam.

“Ready to fire! Ready to fire!” a distant voice cried.

“Hold fire! Move back! Unlimber and fall back!”

“Fire?” she shouted. “Where’s the fire? Somepony please help me! I can’t see!” She desperately rubbed her eyes and the blind world went white, painfully bright and dimmed only slowly so she could see.

She stopped breathing when she saw these two things she was holding up, each bearing four scythe-sized blades. They were claws, connected to a pair of great metal legs adorned in all too familiar runes and icons. She looked down where so many people, so tiny, were running, running, and dozens more were in a semicircle around her, pointing large tubes slung over their shoulders at her.

No… not again…

“Sir, what do we do?! It’s looking right at us!” one shouted.

“I said stand down!” A white unicorn’s horn burned pink and forced all the men’s weapons down, but the instant the light faded, a panicked shout was heard from one who raised his weapon right back up.

“No, you idiot!”

He clenched his fists at the triggers and all Fluttershy saw was a comet of light streak not a foot too far to the left, a painfully loud roar shooting past her ear. With a yelp, her claws raised to her face as a shield.

Rockets… She remembered the rockets. The cannonballs, like bullets, tearing her apart. The explosions... pain.

She ran.

___________________________________________

The greatest evil to curse a sentient being’s soul was boredom. It made them seek things; stimulation, excitement, a sense of fulfillment… and often, the one in question did not care where they came from. Of course, this typically only becomes a problem if they can actually go anywhere. The gibbet was a device that was supposed to display the breakdown of such a victim until they perished of neglect. The corpse still housed in the cage was bored, but thinking.

“So, Fluttershy, about you trying to eat me alive earlier… Oh yeah, so sorry ‘bout that, AJ. I promise it’ll never happen again. Can we still be friends? A’course! One near-death experience ain’t gonna make me hate you!”

Applejack chuckled mirthlessly. How could she and Fluttershy make up after that?

A fly landed on her eye, and she blinked it off. It returned not a second later at the tip of her nose. She snorted and it still didn’t budge. Don’t I usually tell you guys what to do? Through mere thought, she called for another fly to land before the oddly colored one. A set of gnashing, dribbling mandibles idly snapped between its bloodred kaleidoscopic eyes.

Hey, bud, mind stepping aside? Tryin’ to get Applejack’s attention, here. said the colored one.

The Host does not like your presence, and you are not part of our hive. She desires you leave, as do we. Two more of the fat, fuzzy bugs landed behind the first, each dwarfing the colored fly. The tiny thing took a step back.

Hold on, now, thought Applejack. If you ain’t part of their hive, how do you know my name? She squinted her crusty eyes at the tiny thing, now seeing that its whole body was striped like a rainbow. Even its eyes shimmered like a reptile’s scales.

A number of things clicked into place in her mind at once, causing a genuine smile to come to her face. Rainbow Dash? Hoo-ey! You’re in one piece!

As if sensing the turnaround in her emotions, the flies departed, skittering into Applejack’s mouth through the hole in her cheek. Where’ve you been?

Eh, Cloudsdale, a jail for daemons, beaten and given amnesia. You know, the usual.

Well, first, let’s not make this mare-to-bug. Haven’t seen the real you in a heckuva long time.

Rainbow jumped off. Her form collapsed into a growing ball of bubbling meat, settling into a blue and rainbow-maned mare’s form. “Oh, jeez!” She pressed a hoof against her nose. “As a fly, you actually smelled tolerable.”

“Heh,” Applejack chuckled dryly through four rows of teeth. “You know, Ah don’t know whether to take that as an insult or a compliment, anymore.”

“Here, I think I can… nnngggh.” Rainbow’s skin tightened around her bones, her eyes sinking in their sockets until she looked like a lanky, emaciated form of her former self. “Well, it’s not as bad, anymore.” She bumped Applejack, “So, what’s with the talking flies?”

“Yeah, they showed up not too long ago. Think there’s, uh, eight-thousand four-hundred seventy-six of ‘em that turned me inta their house.”

Rainbow cocked a brow. “Eighty-four hundred seventy-six, exactly?”

“Eighty-four hundred seventy-seven, now.”

“Eww… So why the hay are you in a cage over the Drakenwald?”

The living corpse stirred a hoof in the rust caking the floor of her cage. “Two reasons. Twilight’s brother, Shining Armor said he needed to make it look like Ah’m actually bein’ detained, and Ah’d end up sproutin’ spores all over a closed cell. Gotta keep me in open air. Ah mean, Ah’m probably more plant than mare, now.”

Rainbow gave her a close look over. If she was a plant by any degree, she had bloomed since the last time Rainbow saw her. Out of her cracked skull, a blossoming mass of blonde-colored fungus hung back over her neck, emitting a slightly-visible fog of spores on the wind. Another growth of mold had claimed half her face, fanning out like scales in layers and nearly blotting out her left eye.

“Did you sit in a greenhouse, or something?”

“Eh, sumthi’n like it. Bigger, meaner… You know Fluttershy’s gotten easy to rile up, right?”

“Yeah, did that have anything to do with th—oh…” Rainbow’s already-ghoulish face sank deeper into a miserable state. “She went off on the whole city?”

Applejack silently nodded. “Went on a rampage like you never see- heh-ack!” Applejack hacked and coughed into her hoof, spitting out a blackened wad of a spongy material. She frowned. “Think that might be some lung.” She carelessly threw it away. “Ah mean, she came for me. Scooped me up ‘n tried to swallow me whole…”

“She didn’t…” Rainbow gawked in disbelief. “She didn’t recognize you at all?”

“Didn’t hesitate a second.” They both heard a dull roll of thunder. Applejack looked up to the darkly overcast sky. “Thunderstorm brewi’n?”

“Yeah, there’s one scheduled for today. Mostly to wash the streets of, uh… blood.”

“Yech… Hate rain. Makes me swell up. I dunno what’s happenin’ to her now. Here’s hopin’ she’s at least calmed down.”

“What if she isn’t?”

Boom…

Applejack let her head droop. “Then can you picture it? Her squirmin’ an’ screamin’ someplace. I can’t imagine what a beastly angriness that is.”

Boom...Boom Boom.

“You know, I was being questioned by these goons about myself and you guys. They kept talking about some ‘punishment for our sins’. What sins? I don’t know.”

Boom-Boom-BOOM BOOM!

The whole cage rocked like an earthquake to the pounding thunder, which was by now clearly coming from behind them rather than from above. “AJ, hold tight,” Rainbow said, slipping her lanky form between the bars. “I’m gonna see what the heck that is.”

“Please do.”

The pegasus shot up out of view, and not a second later, returned, screaming under the shadow of a curtain of steel that blotted out the sky. A huge beast came jumping down from the parapets above, emitting its own deep, thundering scream as it gracelessly tumbled, claw over heels, down the outside of the walls. As Applejack watched, it was as if in slow motion, the hook-ended chains of its tail caught the bars of her cage, tearing it clear of the walls.

The rest was like a tumble dryer. Rocking, bouncing, smashing down the cliff face, the cage disintegrated around Applejack. At the point she thought it would never end, she finally crashed and settled. She jumped up, quick as she could, her whole form feeling jellified and wobbly. Every bone in her body must have been broken. Again.

Before she even got a bearing on her surroundings, an even darker shadow cast over her. The giant was getting back up, scraped and damaged, but slowly the dents were popping back into shape. She crept away as quick and silently as possible, avoiding even the patches of crunchy leaves.

Then her nose started to itch.

No… Don’t you dare, Applejack. This isn’t the—

“Ah…”

No! You’re so close, just behind the nearest tree!

“Ah-heh...”

NOO!

“Ah-CHAOO!”

The whole air around her lit up with spore ejections, bright as mustard powder, then all went still and silent. Rigid as iron, Applejack turned her head around. Two soccer ball-sized suns, floating in hollow bowls for eye sockets glared down at her. The creature's mouth slowly opened, finding the voice to speak. “App—”

“AAAAAHHH!”

“No! Wait!”

Applejack broke into a frantic gallop, trailed by Fluttershy, who barely needed to trot to remain looming over her. “Applejack, please stop! I’m sorry! You didn’t even taste that good! I mean… You know I’d never do anything like that!”

Applejack took cover behind a tree. Mere seconds later, with a horrendous tearing noise, it shot up from the ground in Fluttershy’s claw like she was picking a carrot.

“Please don’t run!”

Applejack immediately screamed in panic and took off again. Fluttershy glanced at the whole uprooted tree in her claw. “Stupid!” Throwing it away, she stayed put and shouted into the forest’s darkness, “Applejack, please come back!”

She gasped, throwing a claw to her neck. Whose voice was that? It couldn’t be hers. It was too deep, too rough and loud.

It was quiet now, the sound of frantic hoofsteps was gone, and she was alone. Deathly quiet, and Fluttershy could hear herself. Not thinking, or talking, but just living. Gears, the clink-clink-clink. The rush of vast volumes of air with each breath, and the heavy clunk of her body. Clockwork in a living machine.

Fluttershy leaned against the cliff face, listening to the noise. No, no. That’s not me.

She put her claws to her chest, tracing the mark of Khorne embossed there with one of her sword-like nails. She looked down, and there it was; a massive jagged X painted gleaming like gold, studded with spikes and skulls. Many of them looked familiar the longer she looked at them. She plucked at the rim, then started scratching at it.

“This can’t be me! Not again!” Maybe all the metal was built around her real body. She scratched harder, beginning to cut at her own hide. It didn’t even hurt; this body had to be fake.

With a raised claw, she aimed the nails straight for the center of the mark. Perhaps she could peel this tomb off.

“Fluttershy!”

She paused, her claw only a foot or so from her chest. Applejack came running back, stopping just out of arm’s reach, standing tall and commanding, but with a hint of uneasiness in her voice. “Whatever that is you’re doin’, stop it right now.”

The giant put her claw down and swallowed tensely. “A-Applejack, I’m… s-s-so sorry. I’m not angry. See?” She wiggled her nails a little. “I-I don’t want to hurt you.”

“I know… I mean, I should have known.” Applejack stepped closer. “Shoulda… put more trust in ya.”

Fluttershy arrested her claws behind her back and let her friend come well into her shadow. In the misty air, her eyes were spotlights in the darkness, slowly following Applejack as she sat right beside the giant.

It was a few minutes of silence until Fluttershy said, “So… about me trying to eat you alive…”

“Yeah, I heard you. You were pretty loud.”

“S-sorry. Am I too loud right now?”

“No, no. Volume’s fine, or I might be going deaf.”

Applejack looked up to the face, thirty feet over her head. Fluttershy was scratching at her chest, pawing at the brass mark spanning its breadth like a latched-on spider.

“Applejack!” A voice called out through the fog, which made Fluttershy flinch.

Applejack trotted a bit in the direction of it. “Rainbow's okay? Rainbow Dash! Over here!”

“I see two lights!”

“Yeah, I’m there! Just don’t panic!”

“Panic over wha—…”

Rainbow’s silent form slowly emerged through the mist, glaring unblinkingly into Fluttershy’s burning eyes. She stopped a long way from her, both silent and still.

Applejack quickly came up to Rainbow, whispering, “It’s okay. It’s still her; just hit a growth spurt, is all.”

Rainbow didn’t break eye contact, but managed to lean a little toward Applejack. “Dear Celestia, how big can she get?”

“I ain’t sure. Just really hope this is the end of it.”

“Is she… safe? To be around?”

Applejack shrugged. “I lasted a couple of minutes right next to her ‘fore you came.”

Ruffling the jitters out of her wings, Rainbow flew up to Fluttershy, just close enough for comfort. She put on a shaky facade of affability. “Fluttershy! Long time, no see! Gotta say, the weeks have been great to you and— okay, I didn’t do this!”

Fluttershy’s claws were at the sides of her head, sniffling with puddles of liquid fire welling up in her eye sockets.

“Fluttershy, what’s wrong?” Rainbow let herself hover a little closer, starting to sweat from the heat coming off her friend.

“I-I don’t... I don’t want to be like this again. I don’t want to be a monster.”

“No, no.” Applejack trotted up, “What have we been telli’n you for the longest time? This is not you.” She tapped Fluttershy’s knee. “You are how you talk, who you call friend, and the nicest spirit any of us ever darn saw—ah!.”

Applejack jumped back as a trickle of aethereal flame pattered onto the ground before her. She quickly began clearing the forest litter around the flames so they wouldn’t spread, but Fluttershy kept moving her head and the flames kept landing in new places. Fluttershy saw this, wiped her eyes, and tried her damndest to hold it all back.

“D… Discord… please come back. If you can hear me… Please.”

“What’s she talking about Discord for?” Rainbow asked Applejack, to which she shrugged with a worried frown.

Applejack sniffed, then caught a troubling scent and broke her whisper. “Soldiers are comin’ for us. They’re close; Rainbow, you gotta hide!”

“Easy, easy.” she said assuringly, and quickly compacted herself into the form of a tiny gray squirrel.

While she went up the nearest tree, Applejack went straight to Fluttershy’s side. “Just stay calm, and no sudden movements, mkay?”

Fluttershy silently nodded. Not a minute passed before the silhouettes of no less than a dozen pegasi in battle plate touched down on the edge of visibility in the fog. Amongst their formation, a dull pop was followed by a bright red point of light shooting up. A pink flash deposited a unicorn among their ranks and, out of hearing distance, he and a pegasus with a crested helmet seemed to quickly become locked in a heated discussion.

Fluttershy controlled her stammering breath as best she could, as the unicorn strode closer. Her worry faded some when it became clear that Shining Armor was under the feathered helmet. He gave the first word, speaking audibly, but clearly trying to not be too loud.

“Girls, I need you to listen to me very carefully. Fluttershy, I know you didn’t mean to, but you’re too dangerous to keep inside the city. I’m not sure what else we can do but keep you down here.”

“B-But—eep!”

Shining cut her off with a sharp hoof wave, then lifted said hoof to his ears, giving a slight grunt. “Too loud. Don’t talk, please. Applejack, I’m going to need somepony to keep an eye on her, and who better than her best friend?”

The zompony swallowed tensely. “That’s an order, ain’t it?”

Shining nodded. “You’re going to need something to do, so I’d like Fluttershy to clear the trees around the base of the mountain, and Applejack, clear up what’s at the Cliff of Sighs. There’s a number of beastmen down here, but given your… state, especially with that axe we found that your leg turned into, Applejack, they shouldn’t harass you much.” Shining snappishly took out a pocket watch, glancing at it. “Girls, I need an answer. Nod if you’re okay with it.”

They both did. Shining sighed in incalculable relief.

“Thank you… Oh, Celestia, thank you.”

___________________________________________

Where is it? Where is it!?

The Doctor felt around desperately in the blinding dark, his hooves slipping and sliding the rippling, fleshy surfaces. It was like fighting against a rubber sleeping bag, which constricted and squeezed him.

I know it’s in here, somewhere… just need to… AHA!

He grinned as his hoof finally grasped the warm metal of his warpstone-powered sonic screwdriver. Earlier, the gyrating walls and tendrils of Pinkie’s stomach had inadvertently activated it, thus freeing him from his induced trance; just one of the many hundreds of possible functions at its disposal. Now armed with his familiar tool once again, and at last thinking straight without the fog of magic-induced lust to dull his senses, he was starting to get back in the game.

The doctor’s smile fell, and he sighed. One problem solved usually led to another, and this case was little different. He sank down slightly as he pondered his state.

Ok, ok… I’ve gotten out of worse, before. At least she’s not trying to kill me, unlike damn near half of everything else in the universe. I just have to make Pinkie believe I’m still under her thrall… and somehow find a way out of this. With no immediate backup. And with everything pretty much riding on a coin toss.

The walls began to swell outward, filling with air while a long yawn croaked out just over his head, followed by a bout of lip smacking and a dull knocking against the walls.

“Doc, you awake?” a curious voice whispered, to which Whooves remained silent.

Dammit! No, not yet, go back to sleep!

His cell rocked back and forth, swishing a shallow pool of sweet-smelling liquid under him. The voice giggled, “Doctor, I know you’re awake. You snore when you sleep.”

I do NOT!

The walls began to constrict around him, growling menacingly, and sweating more of its enzymes. The space kept shrinking, forcing him into a curled up ball, and it only got tighter and tighter.

“Yeah, I’m awake,” he blurted out quickly, then forcibly chuckled. “I thought I had you going for a minute!”

Pinkie giggled, sending waves of vibrations through the relaxing wall around him. “I’ll admit, it was a nice try. But remember, you snore like a dragon.”

The Doctor’s eye twitched. Forcing sanguinity to his voice, he called back, “Guess I’m the other rumbly in your belly, eh?”

His host laughed again. He felt a pair of hooves press in against one part of the wall, then the now-familiar sensation of her innumerable tongues on his body; she was tasting him.

“Mmh…” she murmured sleepily. “What do you think, Doctor? Why can’t I digest you? I mean, everything else melts away quicker than my blueberry-coconut cupcakes on Hearth’s Warming Day. But you… why?”

Now that was a good question. Before he could think too much about it, though, her stomach lurched up slightly, rubbing its syrupy acids at Whooves’ back. He cringed in disgust, but managed to inject some degree of thoughtfulness into his tone. “Perhaps… we were made for each other. Of course! If you absorbed me, I would just regenerate, but… Slaanesh might have changed you specifically to hold me, so I can’t resist his ilk.”

Pinkie laughed and slapped her belly. “Well, joke’s on him! I’m not gonna let anything happen to you because you’re mine. All. Mine. And if not for Rarity, I wouldn’t let you go anywhere without me near; or, heh, all around you. Speaking of Rarity…”

She trailed off, leaving the Doctor to blink confusedly in the lull. “What about her?”

He felt Pinkie’s body shift slightly, presumably to look at something. Knowing her, it was to probably to regard a potential treat. “Mmm… she’s out here, too… taking a little nappy on the couch, I think.”

For some reason, Pinkie’s tone caused a small pit to form in his own stomach. Is it Rarity or a big gooey creampuff she’s looking at?

“There’s also… mmm...” Pinkie’s stomach gurgled abruptly, sending a stab of panic up Whooves’ spine as even more acids secreted into the stomach in anticipation. “Sweetie Belle…”

What? What has she got to… oh… oh, no…

“She was so good the first two times, but now, she’d probably burn through me like a stuffed jalapeno buffet if she really wanted to.” A shudder ran through the stomach walls around the Doctor. “Plus, Rarity would… um… not be happy. Like, really really really not happy. Like, just-ate-five-bags-of-Warheads-candy not happy.”

Yeah, poke a couple of holes in you. Won’t be life-threatening and you won’t accidentally drown me in syrup, getting off to cannibalistic fantasies!

Almost like it could feel his discontent, Pinkie’s gut made another low groan. “Mmph. I just made myself hungry…” She got up and went to the kitchen, grabbing a bread basket from the cupboard and returning to her spot.

“Hey, I don’t think you ever finished your story about a painting thing. Gallifrey Falls No More?” She laid down on the carpet and fished out a bread roll with a tongue. “I really wanna know how it ends. I think you left off where you made the Zygons and the people they were copying forget whether they were Zygon or human, and something about a nuclear watchamajigger.” She snapped the tongue back into her mouth.

She wants a bedtime story? Huh… ok, I can do that.

“Zygons forgetting… right. Both Kates cancelled the detonation at the same time, and both groups forged a peace treaty between the human race and the Zygons. It was guaranteed to be fair because nopony knew which side they were on. So while they negotiated, Clara, my future self, and I caught up with my Time War self who was just about to end our homeworld.” Whooves paused in recollection of the moment, looking into the tired, wrinkled face that had given up. He heard Pinkie swallow loudly, ignored the trickle of bread pulp that spilled into her stomach, and continued.

“I mean, we’d all given up by that point, but forgave our past self and ourselves. All three of us had our hands on the button, not willing to have our past life bear all the guilt alone.”

“You didn’t actually press it, did you? There were like four million kids on that planet, right?”

“Two-billion four hundred seventy million children.”

“That’s… a lot more…” Pinkie muttered uneasily.

Whooves paused and shifted around uncomfortably. The weight of the act, though he did better in his second chance, still weighed heavy on him. But he rectified himself quickly. His conscience was clear and his people were alive. “We were so close to doing it to save them from annihilation at the hands of the Daleks, but we were struck by a new idea. We would freeze Gallifrey itself in a stasis portrait, and when it disappeared, the Dalek armada would destroy itself in its own crossfire from the orbital bombardment.”

“The whole planet?!” Pinkie exclaimed, scarfing down another mouthful. “That would have taken forever, and wasn’t that the last day of the war?”

“You would have thought it would take a long time, but starting from some of my first lives, I’ve had centuries to do the calculations. In order to have enough power, all of my past lives converged on the world and the Daleks began to panic! ’TARDIS detected! The Doctor is near!’ A billion-billion of the buggers, and they still called for reinforcements when we arrived.”

Pinkie giggled at his impression of a Dalek. “I bet it would be hilarious to hear one try to sing. ’Oh, Danny Colt, the pipes, the pipes are calling. From glen to glen, and down the mountain siiiiiide…’” Both she and Whooves laughed at her own take. “I don’t know how you don’t laugh whenever they talk!

“So, a billion-billion?” Pinkie stroked her chin in contemplation. “How many zeroes is that?”

“Eighteen.”

“Woah.”

“I know. Now, picture it. A whole world, frozen in space-time, in a three-dimensional painting, small enough for a single wall in a museum.“

“Hmm. It must be beautiful. Like if all of Equus was painted at once.”

“Yeah,” Whooves sighed. “Only everything is still on fire and there are millions of bleeding trash cans with particle beams everywhere.”

“Oh yeah, you froze them, mid-invasion.” She patted her stomach right where his head was. “It was the best you could do, right? What else was there? Let the Daleks wipe them out, or do it yourself.” No response came from her belly but a sigh, and the feeling of her inmate turning. “Aww. Com’ere, Doctor.”

Her tongues slithered down to him, grasping him all over and pulling him up her throat. He escaped her lips with a pop. Pinkie wiped his face, paying no attention to her stomach acid dripping from him onto her coat and wiped her mouth. “Sometimes, when I go to bed with my head full of worries, I get Gummy to sleep by my side. It’s good to know somepony’s near, but… In my tummy, you can’t see me, and it might be tight, feeling like you have nowhere to go.” Gingerly, she set him on the floor and gave him a light whip on the flank. “Go clean yourself up, and you can sleep on the outside tonight.”

Whooves took the chance with gusto to get away from her for even just a minute. He quietly slipped out the back door where a single water pump in the back alley was shared by the several adjoining homes. As he washed off in the cascade of lukewarm water, he glanced back at the window of the door. Nothing was there, but he was certain Pinkie must be peeping in on him.

He finished up, shook himself off and reluctantly came back in. His suspicion was confirmed as Pinkie was playing the worst act of innocence he’d ever seen. “That didn’t take you long, and ooh you look so cute with your mane damp. Com’ere.” She whipped out a tongue around his neck, gently pulling him into her embrace. “Better?”

“Y…yes?”

“Mmm, good.” She fell back, bouncing and jiggling a bit, with Whooves firmly pinned against her body with all three forelimbs. Was Pinkie getting bigger? It felt like he was sinking into a mattress as her hollow body squished under him. Pressed up nose to nose, Pinkie’s breath flowed warmly over his chin. “Have I said it yet, doctor?”

Oh, no… He forced down the frog in his throat, keeping his voice steady. “Said what?”

“That I love you.”

Ohhhh, nooo… “I... didn’t think you had to, since it’s all so very crystal clear.”

Pinkie giggled happily. “That’s how you know it’s real, when you don’t even need to say it. You know it, because actions speak louder than words.” She let a single tongue slip forward, sliding along the back of Whooves’ head and imagined, “What if I did absorb you, and you... and you didn’t regenerate? Would the digestion hurt; turning you into a puddle of soupy goo and tummy drinks you up? I’ll never have to worry about losing you again, because we’ll be one and the same.”

Whooves felt Pinkie’s body rapidly get warmer, hotter, her stomach lurching violently as if trying to get him on the outside. She actually looked to be in pain from the desire and held him even tighter, pushing him down onto herself as if trying to make him phase through, back into the rioting organ. It might sooner tear him limb from limb with hits forceful gnashing.

Losing breath, Whooves said desperately, “But we’ll never see each other again, and you’ll never get… another one of these!”

With pursed lips, he planted them right on Pinkie’s nose, and all at once, she went silent. The spirals of her eyes stopped turning, and her grip relaxed. Whooves slowly slid his lips to her cheek, attempting a little more believability, more softly.

Working a hoof from her weakening grip, he stroked the crown of her head, and down her face. She didn’t even seem to react as her eyes were unmoving with a million mile stare. “Don’t make me ever have to stop looking at this face, Pinkie. Don’t deny me the bliss of seeing you with my own eyes.”

He looked into her eyes, and they were unblinking, unresponsive. He wondered what he’d just done. “Pinkie Pie?” He patted her cheek, getting no response. Then he tried to wiggle out of her grip to no avail. She still had him locked.

Bollocks… now what?

___________________________________________

Was it really alright to leave Sweetie Belle with Pinkie Pie again?

Of course, Rarity, you silly girl. She was proper the first time, and looked to be in no mood to eat with that stomachache she developed earlier in the morning. It’s fine. It’s all coming together. Just stay the course.

But for how long? The Doctor is still here, but… He still thinks we haven’t converted, thinks his job is done. We’re in the hooves of the Princesses, so there’s no more reason for him to be here. But Pinkie Pie and her damned crush… No… It actually works perfectly. She’ll keep him locked away, as a non-factor. It isn’t like he could have won. The Gods’ victory is inevitable, and my friends need to be on the winning side. I won’t see their souls tormented by war’s end.

Yes. Just stay the course.

Rarity stored those problems away for later. For now, she had a little promise to see through. She and Spike had never gotten the chance to have a day just to themselves and certain events only delayed it further. But unless another Fluttershy rampage interrupted her, there was nothing to take her from his allotted room and make plans with him.

and focused back on rifling through Spike’s dresser, once in a while taking the time to admire what she found. Is this what he gets to wear in Ulthuan? she thought. She poured her eyes over a silken tunic, examining it down to the unique stitching. There weren’t even any seams; it was all one piece. Oh, yes. I must persuade him to let me take one of these. Ah, hello, there...

She pulled out a little crimson bag no bigger than a coin purse, finding a healthy-sized collection of sapphires, rubies, and other assorted gems within. With but a thought, Rarity levitated a particularly finely-cut emerald from the bag, which reflected her face as clear as tinted glass.

Just how exactly does a dragon eat these?

She’d never quite been able to figure it out. Gems were attractive, no doubt, but not exactly appetizing. It was definitely a credit to Spike’s already-impressive physical capabilities that he was able to eat them at all, much less snack on them like candy. Shrugging, Rarity held the bag to her nose and took a curious sniff. To her surprise, the stones smelled not unlike a rather luscious fruit basket.

Crystals shouldn’t have a scent. One more thing to talk about, I suppose.

She replaced the bag in the drawer and closed it shut. With a heavy sigh, she turned her gaze upward to the mirror atop the dresser, staring at the figure within the glass with a critical eye. She ran a hand across her forehead, taking stock of the three missing horns, and more grotesque features.

This won’t do. Not at all.

The fingers of the hand multiplied into rows of comb-like digits which she ran through her knotty mane, and with the other hand, pinched together the corners of her wide mouth. Melding the lips together like a seamless zipper, it went from an angler fish’s maw to a more petite mouth, more ladylike and normal. With a pained grunt accompanying each, she pushed back each skeletal thorn that poked out through her collarbone. Her flesh quickly filled in the holes. Her purple mane maintained its bouncy curls when she finished up.

Better. Still a bit thin, but it’s good.

She sat on the bed and set the bag aside, keeping an eye on the door in wait for her favorite dragon. Soon enough, she heard his footsteps, which abruptly stopped before the entrance. Rarity stifled some silent snickers at the seconds-long silence.

“Rarity. I know you’re in there,” came a familiar voice from outside.

She raised a hand, turning an invisible doorknob and opened the door from the bed. It let in her target, half-chuckling at foiling her attempt at surprise. “I know you know,” she grinned back. “Have a nice day?”

Immediately, Spike’s half-smile disappeared. “Ah… Can anyone have a good day these days?”

“Mm, no.” She sighed. “No, I suppose not.”

“You look different. The, uh... collar spikes are gone?”

“Of course. I just had to tidy myself up. Can’t go about fish-mouthed all the time, and I’m always trying a new look, whether I’m in control of it or not.” Rarity patted the empty bed space next to her. “But how about you? You look troubled, dear.”

He sighed. “Lets just say I’ve had a long morning.”

“I certainly know what that’s like,” Rarity nodded, and straightened up slightly in her seat. “If you want to talk about it, I’m all ears.”

“I want to know something first,” Spike said, filing through one of the dresser drawers. “How did you get in here?” Unable to find his prize, he muttered to himself, “Where is that little bag?”

“Nothing fancy. I just flew up here and through the window.”

Spike raised an eyebrow in curiosity. “But the windows don’t open, and— holy shhh—!” He leaped back as a massive, pale white spider shot out from the drawer, grappling onto his wrist.

The dragon desperately tried to get a grip on it as it danced up his arm, effortlessly dodging his attempts to slap or pry it off. Rarity held a hand over her mouth to stifle her laugh.

“Spike, calm down! Look here!” She waved her right arm, which ended in a fingerless stump. He paused, uneasily keeping track of the the five-legged thing skittering onto his shoulder.

Rarity herself dissolved into a cloud of sand, whisking before Spike, and taking form, plucked her hand off his shoulder and stuck it back on her wrist.

“Well, that was… different of you,” Spike said, confusedly putting a hand to his shoulder, but grinning nonetheless. “I never thought you to ever pull a prank.”

“Oh, I was just so glad our ordeal is almost done, and seeing you so low, I wondered, ‘what makes a dragon like him laugh?’”

Spike did start to snicker, more at her attempt at a prank that the prank itself. “Maybe I can show you how I used to mess with my teacher... before he started cracking down on me.”

“I’d like that. But first, come.” They sat on the bed together, and Rarity touched a finger to Spike’s forehead. She spoke as if she were reading a book for the first time, struggling to find the words.

“You just came back... from a most troubling talk... with Twilight, Cadence, and... Shining Armor.”

She mumbled a bit in frustration, reaching down to his claw. Spike flinched and yanked it back, brushing her fingers along the way. The contact sent a thought shooting through her mind from his, the harshness of which caused her to gasp and pull away.

“O-oh…” she muttered in reproach. “Spike, I’m sorry—”

“Why didn’t you tell me you were reading my mind?” he said crossly, and stood up quickly from the bed, looking her straight in the eyes. “Did the warp take away your respect for privacy, or something?” He paused and glanced back at the dresser. “And were you going through my things?!”

“I… I was going to tell you right after. It was going to be a surprise.” She stood with him, inching closer. “Spike… what did I just see?”

“Nothing!” He sharply turned away, leaning over the dresser. “It was just a ‘what if’, and my shoulder ached again, so my hand jerked.”

“Spike, I know what I saw—”

“You didn’t see anything!” Spike snapped, and immediately felt his spine stand on edge. His tunic slumped forward, coiling around his wrists. Every spine down his back and tail were erect, quivering with a boiling rage.

“Damn it… I…” He growled, then buried his face in a claw and pounded the other on the desk, nearly cracking its surface. “I don’t feel like this is my body!”

Rarity flinched, gazing with sad eyes at his form. She’d known that dragons dealt with age in a far different manner than ponies, but it seemed like the ten harrowing years he’d gone through had changed him in even more ways than the physical. She gently rested a hand on his broad, quivering back. “Spike… what are you?”

“I don’t know… I don’t know…” Spike’s eyes reddened, glazing over. His claw clenched into a fist, scarring the dresser surface, and ground his teeth. “It’s all Celestia’s fault. She wanted a soldier from the very beginning; someone who could control Twilight, maybe even… put her down, if she ever turned to Ruin. But I can’t do it to Twilight. Not even for the Princess.”

Rarity’s fingers twitched. Her eyes had been wide at the beginning of Spike’s story, but now they quivered with barely-controlled fury. Her Spike. The Spike who had helped her so often in Carousel Boutique. The Spike who fawned over Rarity and loved Twilight like a son. And for what? All so Celestia could have him to keep a leash on one of her closest friends? Even worse, was his ability to send letters by fire breath also meant to bring her reports on her behavior, like a spy?

“You’re both right to be mad.” Rarity said, scowling. “How could she? There must have been a thousand other ways, but this... It’s heartless.”

“It is. Twilight is family to me, and if Celestia thinks I’m just going to be some warden for her, she’s got another thing coming. She doesn’t deserve imprisonment, and my friends don’t deserve to live in fear. Not even Fluttershy, or Applejack…” He regarded Rarity with a face on the verge of tears. “Or you.” A scaly claw, large enough to grip a man’s head, rested on her shoulder. “Not you.” He looked at himself in the mirror, and sighed. “Gods forgive me, but I’m done.”

Rarity blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I mean this!” Spike tore the ruined tunic from his arms, then threw himself over to the silver lamellar suit in the corner, taking it up as if it were no more than a rag. The embellishments and scales rattled musically as he furiously shook it. “Everyone’s trying to make me what they want! A soldier to betray his family, or a relic to be moulded into obedience like a dog! I’m done with this, and if my teacher wants me back, he’ll have to come get me!”

Rarity let him have his long tirade and concealed the shapeless morass of her feelings: anger; pity; but also excitement. He was having his own epiphany, going half-way on his own to being spared the Gods’ wrath. But, raised by their oldest enemy, he may never truly join her. Still, she had to try. Every inch closer to their mercy was worth it.

“But I’ll keep all of this; the sword, the suit—”

“What about Cadence?” she interjected pointedly.

“Cadence?” Spike shook his head. “She’s not staying in the Empire for much longer, and when she goes back, I’m not going with her. I’ll give her something to be able to explain to Ulthuan, but it’s my life, dammit. I’ll do what I want with it!”

The exhausted soul slumped back into the chair his suit used to reside on. He let out a ragged laugh. “I needed that. For Gods’ sakes, I’m an adult!” He laid his head back and closed his eyes. “But Rarity, what am I going to do?”

She gently sat on his lap, running her hand up his tired arm, leaning in close. “Well, like you said, you’re the adult. What do you want?”

Spike sighed, deep and long. “I don’t want my friends and family to live as prisoners forever.”

“But you know that is what’s going to happen, since normality is impossible for us now.”

Spike’s eyes opened with an angry furrow. “I’ll get you guys out of here if I have to. But then where would you all go?”

“Perhaps the northern wastes? We’d fit in just fine there.”

Spike picked his gaze up and regarded Rarity like she’d grown two heads. “Are you kidding? Literally everything in the wastes tries to kill everything else. Not to mention that the Everchosen of Chaos himself rules that place.”

“And if we stay here, everypony in the Empire won’t be trying to kill us? They’ll have the inquisition and witch hunters after our heads.” Spike’s skeptical facade didn’t flinch. “Spike, I just want what’s best for all of us, and anywhere that greets ponies like me with calls of ‘Witch! Mutant!’ can’t be an option.”

“Then go to the rural provinces. Ostland, Ostermark, eastern Talabecland. If Fluttershy can toughen up and control herself, she can protect you from anything.”

“But if she ever has to, then the province already knows where we are. We’d probably have to feed anyone who finds us to Pinkie Pie. Poor people, conditioned to hate so much.”

Spike scowled. “Then—”

“When a country has been fighting the same war for thousands of years, they need the propaganda to keep their people subservient and keep them fighting. The world tries to divide itself into black and white, textbook good and bad. All one needs to do is resist the primal desires, like lust and anger, and they can do wonders, whether mutant or magical.” She held out a hand toward the scarred dresser, and suddenly the deep claw marks Spike had left began to mend themselves. “See? Creation, and repair!

“How many mutants do you think the Inquisition summarily executes? Oh, and no trial, or if they do get one, it’s assuredly rigged against them? They claim to be purging their world of evil, when it is actually diversity. Did the elves ever tell you that the Warp is not inherently evil? That it is the reflection of the mindset of everypony in the world, so strong in some areas, magic, love, anger, that it manifested into the Chaos gods?”

Spike frowned. “No. Conveniently, they left that out.”

“And why would they include it? These states thrive on the fear of their subjects. They show the common folk something scary, a mutant whose arms had turned to bony blades, and scream ‘This is the enemy! Shun him, hang him, or he’ll eat your babies!’”

“But Rarity, I saw them on the day they came to Ponyville—”

“And everything was burning; I was there, too, dear. But they spared so many. We’ve met so many who survived from Ponyville. How did they treat you?”

“They threw me in a cage. I thought they left Twilight for dead, and I was mutating so quickly. I would have become a spawn by the next morning.”

“And she isn’t gone. She’s still here. And with the introduction of ponykind, I’ve seen that Chaos itself can be changed! Applejack, Pinkie Pie and I aren’t randomly roaming about killing everypony we come across, screaming some cursed chant. Fluttershy and Pinkie Pie never had a quarrel, despite Khorne and Slaanesh despising one another, and Twilight told us of how Cheerilee had a class of all kinds of students, even from rival groups. Harmony can be brought to the chaos! And if we ever find the Elements of Harmony, I can’t even imagine the good they could—”

“The Elements are gone, Rarity,” Spike interrupted, his voice dark. “The Everchosen has them.”

“Which is excellent!” Rarity continued, unfazed. “They will realize, ‘Why do we have to fight each other? Why can’t we forge a world that will make the rest thrall to us?’ Khornates will only raise a blade to protect their homes. Slaaneshis will make the world truly beautiful instead of a garish pleasure pit. And Tzeentchians will share their wisdom and knowledge freely with the world for the betterment of all, rather than hoarding it selfishly and dooming people to languish in ignorance.”

“Generosity,” Spike mumbled wistfully, and gave Rarity a weak smile.

She nodded, giving him her own broadly pleased expression. “Indeed.”

Rarity sat back up, letting Spike mull the matter over in his mind. He lifted his head up and looked into her eyes. “How can we possibly change the ways of gods like The Changer of Ways?”

“Well, agreed, there isn’t a set blueprint, but just look at Discord. He spent over a thousand years as stone, plotting revenge, consolidating his power; and then two days with Fluttershy and he’s a new draconequus! Can you picture it? Khorne the noble warrior king, Nurgle, a patron of love and family, and Tzeentch, the receptacle of all mortal knowledge, from which anypony can delve into.

“Even gods can be brought to their knees when their followers change their minds. With the Elements, we can turn the Warp from Hell into Heaven, especially through Chaos’ most fervent followers.”

“You realize what you’re saying, right?” Spike turned to her, a serious, critical look in his eyes. “You’re talking about finding the Elements of Harmony—assuming they’re not already destroyed—and somehow using or convincing the cultists to use them. That sounds great, Rarity, but we’re talking about the Everchosen, here, and likely his entire army, too. I don’t even know where to begin, here.”

Rarity placed an arm on his shoulder, returning his look with one of calm, warm determination. “I have a plan.”

The dragon whose lap she was sitting on regarded her stiffly, though his expression betrayed a slight spark of hope. “Rarity,” he said quietly, “I need you to be honest with me.”

Her countenance remained nonplussed. “I’ve been honest this whole time.”

Spike shook his head, and gently laid a claw on her arm. “No, really. I need to know that this is all you, right now. Look me straight in the eyes and tell me that you truly believe it could work.”

He sat up with a more formal and expectant posture. To Rarity, he was a little more imposing than she had thought at first. Her mismatched blue and gold irises met with Spike’s own green, reptilian eyes, and she held the gaze firmly and confidently.

The visions she had of the future, which still lingered in her dreams and followed her every day, showed her what invariably lay before them. Even so, she knew that the chances of them surviving the Storm were almost astronomically small, and even in the case of such an unlikely event, they would still be doomed to the life of pariahs and outcasts forever.

At least, that was what she had thought, before. She had even surprised herself with her words to Spike, because, looking into his eyes now, she knew that she actually did believe them. Before, Rarity had been operating almost purely on the simple desire to see her friends safely sequestered within perhaps the only region on this tortured planet that would not persecute them, but now? It was strange. The thought that perhaps there was some sort of real hope for them all had been like a dry, withered flower, and only recently had it finally begun to see the sunlight once again and open its petals of revelation.

It wasn’t likely. It wasn’t something that could be achieved without pain. But she’d come this far, and had already resolved herself to doing whatever it took to save her friends, even if it did hurt them along the way. The ounce of prevention to spare from an incurable pain. She loved them all to a fault, and that was something that not even Chaos could truly take from her.

The response passed her lips easily.

“I do.”

Their connection dragged on for what seemed like an eternity. Finally, Spike sighed deeply, closed his eyes, and leaned back in the chair.

“I’m listening.”

Chapter 27: No Greater Lie than Truth

Something has gone wrong. We don't seem to have an archived copy of that chapter.

Chapter 28: The Battle of Middenheim

See the city burn on the other side,
Going down in flame as two worlds collide.
Who can now look back with a sense of pride?
On the other shore, there’s the end of the war…
~Sabaton - Hearts of Iron

-----------------------------------------------------------------------

It was the privilege of Middenheim’s wealthier citizens to have an actual grave in the limited space of the plateau-city, an ordered, labeled tomb for family and friends to visit their dearly departed. The middle classes were buried outside the city, in the countryside where they were still afforded the dignity of an earthly rest. The deceased poor were simply tossed off the walls, into the Drakenwald Forest below, hopefully to be picked off by whatever hungry creatures happened to lurk by.

If Fluttershy had no hope in the good of men before, this was surely the final nail in the coffin, but by the looks of it, she’d be lying if she said they weren’t delicious.

Fluttershy went at the mound as if she’d been starved for days, dredging up clawfuls, six or eight at a time, and hardly spending a moment to chew before swallowing the lot. A thin fog of smoke and tongues of fire wisped from her maw as she feasted, like a dragon’s breath waiting to be unleashed.

Down on the ground, a teeth-chattering Applejack had paced back and forth in the same spot for so long that the grass had rotted into a long black stripe.

Rarity snickered, kicking her legs from the lofty perch of the forest canopy; watching, waiting. What if Fluttershy actually tried that again? Would it simply be a repeat of the first time, or would there be more dire consequences for them both? The humor quickly died at the thought of Applejack getting burned alive in Fluttershy’s belly, or Fluttershy herself vaporizing into a pile of rust powder. They’d both been lucky the first time, and they’d had help from powers both local and divine to smooth things over. Where they were going now, however, they were going to need a lot more than luck.

Rarity felt good about her plan’s progress. Spike was, no doubt, already breaking the news of his departure to Cadence.

She couldn’t make him stay, could she? Rarity thought. Of course she could, a princess could do that. But she’s too much of a sweet heart. And this… She doesn’t need to know.

Fluttershy was the next component in the plan. Rarity needed a muscle, and her former-pegasus friend had hundreds of tons of living steel to throw around. Still, such a poor thing; she’d also be the biggest target.

Rarity couldn’t help but frown the more she thought about it. Here she was, about to use her friend as a shield, in spite of everything she’d gone through already.

But she’s the most capable.

But she still feels pain.

But when she’s mad, she can take them better than anything.

It’s Fluttershy you’re talking about! Simple, innocent, cottage-in-the-prairie Fluttershy!

Innocent? No, she lost that a long time ago. She’s well, well blooded, now.

The juggernaut ate without pause for several minutes, disregarding the visceral, oily mess accumulating around her mouth. She poked the last cadaver, punching her finger clear through its chest, and bit it off her claw like a ripe cherry tomato.

Applejack muttered something up at Fluttershy, to which she simply chuckled. “Graves? They don’t deserve graves, Applejack.” Fluttershy’s grin was wide, bristling an uncountable number of teeth. She started digging, gouging out a sizable ditch in a few clawfuls of soil. “Shining told you to get rid of the bodies, right? What were you going to do, just dig a mass grave like this and roll them all in?”

Rarity heard something akin to a yes from Applejack, and Fluttershy’s awkward smile dropped.

“They don’t even care for their own dead, so why should you?!” Fluttershy pushed a bladed finger under Applejack's chin. “Don’t you dare go soft on them. You haven’t seen what they do.”

“We couldn’t fathom it,” Rarity said, loud enough for them to hear. She dissolved into dust, floated downward, and gathered back to her corporeal form on the ground.

Fluttershy didn’t even flinch at the surprise. She simply growled, “Were you watching us?”

“Mhm.” Rarity nodded, gingerly walking closer. “Long enough to see you completely annihilate hundreds of bodies, without even breaking a sweat. I’m curious; did you enjoy it?”

Applejack spoke up. “Rarity, what’re you sayin—”

The screeching grinding of Fluttershy wiping her mouth drowned her out. “I forgot how good they tasted. Mm, I can’t even begin to describe it!”

“Rarity,” Applejack repeated urgently. “I don’t wanna see her riled up again!”

“I’m... fine.” the juggernaut growled menacingly.

“I know!” Applejack blurted.

Rarity was still grinning and took a step closer to divert attention. “It’s alright, Fluttershy. We know you’re perfectly in control.”

“I am,” Fluttershy snorted and started away from them. “I still have my own work to do. You’re welcome, by the way, Applejack.”

“Y-yeah. Thanks.”

Before interrupting Applejack’s work, Fluttershy had made good progress in a deviation of her idling task. Rather than tearing out the forests around the mountain as Shining Armor had ordered to keep her busy, she had dug a trench, and used the displaced dirt to make a redoubt at the outside edge.

“I think Fluttershy is already there,” Rarity said cheerfully. “All she needs is somepony to point her in the right direction, and anything that stands before her is rubble.”

Applejack took a long step back from Rarity. “What’ve you been talkin’ about since you got here? ‘Did you enjoy it? Everything ‘fore her’s rubble’?!”

Rarity’s eyebrow shot up, and she looked at the putrid mare like she couldn’t tell where she was from. “I thought Braeburn had helped your transition to accept Nurgle? To be part of—”

“I just did that to make the pain stop!” Applejack insisted, pointing a phlegm-encrusted hoof at her unmoving heart. “Ah never wanted this! Braeburn forced me into it!”

The smile returned to Rarity’s lips. “He did it because he loves you. You’re his family, and he wants you and Apple Bloom to… not live, per se, but be together. It’s as simple as following your family, and sharing your… gifts with oth—”

“That is horseapples, Rarity and you know it!” Applejack shouted. “Look at me! Ah’m as bad every rotten apple that ever came out of mah orchard, all rolled up in one! Ah got bugs comin’ outta places ah don’t even recognize! All these ‘gifts’ are good for is— hack!”

She doubled over in a coughing fit, causing Rarity to backpedal a step in surprise. Applejack gagged out a wet purple-black ball into the grass. Mere seconds later, it ruptured, making Rarity scramble back as its fluids instantly dissolved the grass it touched into a puddle of congealed slime.

“There… you see?” Applejack gasped out. “Ah don’t wanna be stuck with that forever! Ah didn’t wanna die. And I don’t wanna be undead anymore! My whole family’s gone to Tartarus in a hoof basket, and you treat it like it’s a good thing?!”

Rarity felt a pang of guilt in her chest. “I meant to say—”

Applejack stomped a hoof and instantly the grass around her wilted in an expanding circle which quickly encompassed Rarity in its border. The stink of rapidly-sprouting fungi wreaked a dizzying nausea.

“Everything we touch dies.” Applejack raised the same hoof and lunged at Rarity. Rarity leapt back from the swipe and collapsed with a scream.

Rarity moved to scramble back, but Applejack didn’t move any further. Applejack chuckled dryly with a yellow tear gathering in her remaining eye.

“What are you doing to Rarity?” Fluttershy snarled, catching Applejack in a threatening loom over a fallen Rarity. She had a claw ready to climb out of the earthworks.

Rarity opened her mouth, but her voice was lost.

“You tripped,” Applejack hissed to Rarity through clenched teeth.

“Well?!” Fluttershy demanded.

“I just tripped, is all,” Rarity said quickly. She felt around the ground and picked up a pinecone. “Fell on a pinecone.”

Fluttershy snorted, and returned to her digging without another word.

“Even you can’t stand this. And you’re not even one of us,” Applejack muttered. She shook her head sadly in Rarity’s direction. “How… how can you smile at what we’ve got?”

Rarity folded her legs from the awkward sprawl she’d fallen into, speechless for a while as Applejack wept over the murdered ground. Rarity shuffled closer, sheathed a hand in a thin magic barrier, and rested it on Applejack’s shoulder. “I see I was too naive. Don’t, even for a second, think that I don’t think that you’re not torn apart by this.”

Rarity pointed up to the city of Middenheim on the plateau. “But this, this isn’t where we belong. We’ll be in for nothing but a life in exile and being outcasts. There are so many we know from Ponyville who went the other way, and if we want a chance, we have to go that way too. Right now, there is no way your family is getting out of there by the will of the Empire’s judges. And it isn’t like the Emperor is going to give them pardons.”

“And what?” Applejack asked impatiently. “You have a plan for gettin’ them out?”

Rarity’s mouth turned up in a conspiratorial smirk.

“Well, what? Spit it out!”

“It’s rather simple,” Rarity responded. “That’s where Fluttershy comes in.”

Applejack chuckled joylessly. “You’ve gone crazy.”

“Not yet, I don’t think. Not completely.”

Rarity stood at the edge of Fluttershy’s trench, and Applejack hung back, morbidly curious as to what Rarity might stir up. The earthwork was only haunch-high for the giant, but deep enough to be a perfectly serviceable fortification for humans.

“Fluttershy?”

The juggernaut didn’t take her eyes from her work. “What?”

“Fluttershy, I know you think you’re okay, and if you ask me, I think you’re quite sound of mind, but it’s just too apparent to Applejack and myself that you’re just a bit... disgruntled.”

Rarity took a wide step aside as hundreds of pounds of dirt buried her previous location. Unphased from Fluttershy’s sudden assault, she continued, “We can actually use that. You want to get back at the humans, don’t you?”

Fluttershy nodded once, snorting a plume of black smoke toward Rarity, which she deflected around herself with a wave of a hand. “Now that’s what I want to see,” she muttered with a smirk, and whipped the smoke clear. “What if I gave you the chance to punish them again?”

A thin smile was her only response.

Rarity slowly leaned closer, swallowing hesitantly. “Ultimately, we’re going far away from here, where you won’t have to deal with Imperial humans for a long time.”

“No!” Fluttershy hauled herself out of the trench, crouching low to meet Rarity eye-to-eye. “No, I want to make them hurt! Again, and again, and again!”

“And you can,” Rarity said, not yielding a step. “But you must be logical about it. We’re in the midst of a war without end, and in daemonhood, you have all the time in the world. I have a plan to make what you want possible. All you need to do, is trust your best friend. Okay?”

Fluttershy stared for a moment at her. She stood upright in an attempt to make use of her imposing height, but the tiny sorcerer still kept the same smile.

“I’m waiting,” Rarity said.

Fluttershy’s eyes widened slightly, and her scowl deepened. “Okay.”

Rarity looked through the canopy at the distant city’s walls which echoed out with the din of bells. She saw one of the towers shattered by a massive stone which seemed to fly at it from nowhere.

“What the…” Applejack muttered, her eye widening at the same spectacle.

Fluttershy’s larger ears turned toward the forest void and she started to growl.

Applejack sniffed in the same direction Fluttershy was looking. She started to her hooves and backed away from the forest’s darkness. “Beastmen,” she hissed.

Clear enough, a multitude of the ram-horned creatures were charging through the mists, bare-chested or in scrap metal armor and carrying wood slab shields, many of them with hooks and metallic claws grafted to their arms or forelegs. Creatures that used to be goats, boar, deer, men; it was a stampede of evolutionary rejects.

Coming straight at them.

Applejack and Rarity moved close to Fluttershy, who bared her teeth and claws, and let out a terrible roar. Rarity slapped her hands over her ears, but she could still feel the sound shaking her very bones. The wind rushing out of the giant bowed the grass low before the beasts, who didn’t even slow their charge. In fact, they actually seemed to be encouraged by the display.

Applejack nervously swallowed, contorting her leg into its molar-axe. She didn’t find reason to use it, however, as the flow of furry bodies parted around the three of them, but their teeming, jabbering masses stopped at the trench Fluttershy had dug.

They shouted unintelligible curses at the juggernaut for the disadvantage, and began trying to fill it in with the redoubt soil using their claws. Fluttershy raised a claw to swipe at the monsters.

One particular voice sounded off which silenced many, a guttural howl like a gargle-shouting cow. The multitude parted for one of them who was quite tall, robed in a tattered cloak of motley stitched-together hides and patches of cloth. Wound around one of its arms was a thick chain, dragging behind it a massive horned skull. Its exterior was plated in black iron, with seething white fire pouring from its eyes and wide open fanged jaws.

Fluttershy too paused at the call, slowly piecing together the identity of the skull. “Iron Will?”

“Your eye for detail borders on perfection,” the beast-mare grunted, hefting the skull to land between herself and the three. “But this trench stalls our offensive, a most terrible obstruction.”

Rarity quickly recognized the creature by the striped colors of her fur and the limping gait with which she had approached. Rarity couldn’t even hear herself talk through her ringing ears. “Zecora? H-how was I unable to predict this? Why are you here?”

“My herd-master has a stake here, seeking booty in a raid. I failed to inform him of my own reasons to come, for my friends, in escape, we give aid.”

“‘We?’” Applejack wondered. “Ain’t this whole mob under some ‘lord’, you said?”

Zecora raised the metal-sheathed skull, and its unblinking fire pits for eyes glared at Applejack. “I suppose there is a reason his name is Iron Will,” the shamaness said. “Even in death, his hate and power burns still.”

Zecora raised an open claw to Fluttershy. “There is much strength in you, Fluttershy. We need it well. My people need what the Empire has, but to get it, we must bring them hell.”

Fluttershy eagerly nodded, and Zecora howled again to her compatriots. The largest beastmen with the chain ladders passed them into Fluttershy's massive claw. Rarity got an idea and began levitating them to Fluttershy’s chain-link mane, hooking them together. The first wave of beastmen began climbing, until they were just below Fluttershy’s head.

Rarity, Applejack, and Zecora took a place among the iron jungle of Fluttershy’s mane, the beast-mare bellowing a wild war cry which the horde returned with a thunderous roar that rippled all the way through their ranks. Fluttershy couldn’t resist, and roared in anticipation as she began to scale the wall, with over a dozen iron chains snaking along behind her, full of snarling, snapping creatures eager for plunder and carnage.

_________________________________________________________

So, this is it. I’m dead…

Vinyl felt waves tickling her fur, and a lukewarm wetness all around as she lay belly-up in some kind of fluid. She beheld a crystal blue sky completely unbroken by clouds and sunless, giving her the impression that she was floating on the surface of the ocean. The persistent smell of alcohol all around her put paid to that idea, however.

She began to tread upright, discovering a vast red lake all around her. The surface was strange; placid and mirror-like in some places, rippling and bubbling in others. She dipped her tongue in it, determining it was some kind of red wine. She was no connoisseur of such things, but it was fine, nonetheless.

How did Octavia use to test this stuff?

She sucked in a mouthful, and swished it around a bit to tease out the flavors, and spat it back out. The second time, it was… okay.

Something brushed over the top of her head, a moving wood and rope bridge which she immediately grabbed by its low floor and hauled herself up with dry hoofsteps. She didn’t question the sudden change. Who needs logic in the afterlife?

She checked for what was on either end of the bridge, and found both sides to be the same; each end held a lifeless humanoid giant, bobbing face down in the drink. On each of their backward-turned hands was a table, creaking under a lavish feast spread atop it, with candles, fine plates and silverware, and furniture to match. Vinyl took another scanning look around, finding no one as far as the eye could see.

Free food. Why not? she thought.

Was this the Warp? The beginning of a trick which would take her to Tartarus? She couldn’t tell. But as she took a seat and the apple she picked up didn’t burst into flames, she was leaning towards the former. How long until Octavia would die in that prison and join her?

“Well, you won’t be here for long, my dear.”

Vinyl started at the voice, looked up from the table and nearly jumped out of her skin at the sight of the pink alicorn sitting across from her.

“Sorry,” they said with a laugh, telekinetically stopping Vinyl’s chair from flipping back in a purple-pink glow. “Should have announced myself a bit more subtly.”

He… she… it was an enigma of a creature. Its pronounced muscles and bone structure suggested it being male, but the way its mane was done in a hanging twin ponytail, fur color—

Those eyes! she gaped.

They looked eager to stare into one’s soul, their color a royal purple which reflected like polished jade. Vinyl settled on a he, and he was gorgeous, the physique beyond what she thought possible even for their immortal kind.

“Yeah, I’d have to agree,” she muttered dryly. “Nearly gave me a heart attack there.”

“You are having a heart attack, actually.”

Vinyl touched a beclawed hoof to her chest, and chuckled. “Oh, so that’s how I’m dying. Guess it’s about time, huh?”

“Yes,” the strange alicorn nodded. “You’ve gone into withdrawal from your stimulants twice, now. Too much for your heart to bear.”

“Yeah, the warlord I used to be a slave to got me hooked so that I’d never leave. Didn’t count on the spirit of this mare!”

They both shared a laugh. After a moment, Vinyl glanced into the beautiful blue sky.

“Mind telling me where I am?” she asked, gesturing to the red lake all around them.

The alicorn looked away from the table, where he had presumably been deciding which food to indulge in first. “The Lake of Gluttony, in the Warp.”

Vinyl’s heart skipped a beat, and her eyes widened. “Y… y-you’re kidding, right?”

“Hmm...” He glanced around at the other dead island giants in the wine lake, then swept his gaze over the sky as if appraising something only he could see. “No, I’m sure this is the place.”

Vinyl licked her lips and leaned forward, hoping to articulate something that would elicit a reassuring answer. “The ring of Slaanesh’s place, where if you eat or drink anything, you keep eating till you explode?”

“Mm-hm. None other,” he smiled.

“Heh, yeah, nice try,” Vinyl snickered, shakily running a hoof through her mane. “I just took a sip of that wine back there in the lake, and you don’t see me wigging out and trying to inhale the whole table here or anything.”

“True, but I do see…” he pointed with a forehoof, “That.”

Vinyl heard a splash. There was another giant floating by. A stallion was floating near it, the lake surface not yet settled again from his falling in. His belly was burst open, the pressure of the buildup of half-digested food pushed up from both his messy mouth and sagging stomach.

A bead of sweat ran down Vinyl’s cheek. She heard a light laugh come from behind her, prompting her to turn—and behold him raising a bunch of glistening purple grapes to his mouth.

“No!” she cried out. “Don’t eat it!”

Vinyl magically snatched the clutch away. Too late. The fragrant grape juice trickled down the being’s chin. He swallowed.

Several seconds passed, and Vinyl’s disbelieving look grew ever wider. The alicorn smacked his lips lightly, then leaned back with a smile. “Oh, that’s just funny. You’re funny.”

Vinyl finally managed to pull her jaw closed. She squeaked out, “Ba-ba-bababuh… You’re not… stuffing yourself?”

“Of course not,” he smirked. “I don’t have a soul to lose to the enchanted food.”

Vinyl blinked. “No soul? Who the heck are you?”

“I’ll give you three guesses. And the first two don’t count.” He took the grape bundle back, as well as a napkin from a purple-skinned crab-woman who had inexplicably appeared beside him. He sent a mischievous look Vinyl’s way as he dabbed the juice off his chin.

Vinyl’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets. “You’re S… You’re Slaaaaahh…”

The alicorn grinned, and cocked his head slowly to the side as he said, “Yeeees?”

“SLAANESH!” she shrieked in glee like a raving fanmare, jumping and prancing in place for good measure. “Oh my goshohmigoshohmigosh!”

The Dark Prince of Pleasure giggled at Vinyl’s outburst. “Oh, you’re just the most adorable little thing. Please, please, sit.”

Vinyl held back her enthusiasm long enough to sit down again, still shaking and with a blissful grin plastered over her face.

“So now you have your answer,” Slaanesh grinned wide. “You are a… special case. Special guest, I should say, rather.” He reached forward, patting Vinyl on the head like an obedient cat. “I couldn’t let someone like you go so easily, now could I? I have a special investment in you, my dear.”

The Prince motioned to the table before Vinyl. She looked down to a box of vinyl records which weren’t there before.

“Have a look,” he said, still smiling. “I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.”

Vinyl obediently began filing through them, using a single talon from her hoof to flip through the sleek black disks one by one. She failed to suppress a gasp at even the first one.

They were all records that she’d made throughout her life, with each cover in pristine condition. Five Nights in Canterlot, Disco’s Twilight, and even a remix of one of those classical songs Octavia used to listen to. She wracked her brain to remember; something to do with the old Prancian military. Vinyl’s mouth dropped open when she saw the one on the end. Without a cover, dinged up and warped, she recognized it as the first song she’d ever recorded after making music her life. It wasn’t even released on the market, with only one copy in existence. She was speechless.

“I have to admit,” Slaanesh said, blushing ever-so-slightly. “I’m a fan.”

____________________________________________________

“RAAGH!”

Fluttershy’s claw smashed into the facade of a spire-laden complex like a two-ton boulder, tearing through it with ease and leaving only a pile of dust and rubble and a gaping hole as any reminder of the graceful wall that once stood.

Applejack leaped into action, shifting her leg into its molar-axe form as she scampered down Fluttershy’s tree trunk-like limbs, through the breach and into the prison building. She nearly stumbled over the prone form of a pair of incapacitated guards, no doubt knocked out along with the wall. Wasting no time, Applejack immediately began sniffing the air with the affinity of a bloodhound, searching for a single distinct smell amidst all the dust, decay and effluvium of the prison complex.

She didn’t need to search for long. The familiar slaughterhouse-stench of a fellow nurglite hung in the air, almost palpable to her enhanced senses. Curiously, she also picked up the sound of some kind of singing coming from the same direction down the hall.

“Now mankind will pay, on this very day. Every man on Earth will curse his birth…”

Descending a flight of spiralled stairs, a cell area was sloped toward the street. A large crack in the outside wall of one of the cells let in a sliver of light.

“Anypony down here?” Applejack called. “Come out and I’ll let ya go!”

She saw a knife slide along the floor from around the corner ahead, and a young man step out with his hands beside his head. Applejack tapped her axe on the floor as the distance closed. She stood aside, letting him pass while holding his breath among her spore cloud.

He was taking too long for her taste. She made a lunge at him, chattering four rows of plaque-encrusted fangs. She let him leg it.

“Applejack!” Apple Bloom ran for the bars, but snapped back on her chain. Behind her, pinned to the wall, was a bloated, dripping corpse.

Braeburn’s eyes could barely be seen, blotted out by folds of overstretched blubber and bile-dripping flesh, and purity seals pinned across his body. He looked like an overinflated pony-shaped balloon, ready to burst.

Applejack spat on the bars. Once out of that, she licked them, working quickly with acidic spittle. She got though after a couple snapped off, and started chewing through Apple Bloom’s chain.

“No, no!” the filly cried. “Get Braeburn! He’s gonna pop!”

The fat corpse shrieked in agreement.

Applejack tore the pins out of her cousin, casting their rapidly-rusting ribbons to the floor. After ripping out the rebar impaling him to the wall, Braeburn splashed to the ground. His swollen belly exploded, washing the floor in a gush of yellowed pus and bile. Applejack helped him back to his hooves. His own skin was a tattered, necrotic sheet laid over some beast of spongified bone and muscle.

His leg bulged, sprouting bony spikes as he roared, “Lemme at ‘em! I’ll kill every last one of you!”

He threw Applejack off and charged through the ruined bars like a mad phantom, tearing into the first man who was making his way down the stair. In a single bite, he was chewing on his larynx.

“Braeburn, we’ve gotta get outta here!” Applejack shouted while breaking Apple Bloom’s restraint.

Braeburn snapped to Applejack with a bloody rage in his eyes. “No! There’s no way we’re gettin’ out of here in one piece! We’re surrounded and outnumbered. Big Mac may not be here, but I’ll be damned if we don’t die together!”

“We’ve got a plan!” she yelled back. “Fluttershy and a whole herd ‘a Beastmen are out there, and they’re gonna help!”

Braeburn’s scowl eased up a little after hearing the scream of the creature in question. “Lower floors. Kivsin’s down there, too. Get those other three first. I’ll keep this way clear.”

In the time it took him to get that out, a soldier had thrust a sword into his side, to no effect. Braeburn snapped around, smashing his mace into his skull, pulping and tearing it off his shoulders.

Further down the hall, Applejack discovered the source of the droll singing which had given way to a harsh coughing.

Octavia cradled Vinyl, who was just beginning to support herself, gasping with a claw to her chest. Tears streamed from the grey mare as Vinyl looked at her with tired, bloodshot eyes. Octavia hugged her, only letting go when Applejack’s rotting stench began burning her nose.

Lyra got out of her meditative sleep the instant the cell door flew open. “About time. Applejack, we need you and Braeburn to cover our rear. Vinyl, Octavia and I are going for Kivsin.”

“‘Scuse me, but how do you already have a plan?” Applejack asked skeptically.

Lyra cast her a condescending smirk. “We always have to be ready. Always one step ahead. They destroyed all our stuff this time around, so we’re pretty bare.” She yanked Vinyl up to her gnarled feet, shaking her. “Vinyl, wakey-wakey, come on. You don’t have your chems, but we need you now.”

Vinyl slapped Lyra’s hands off. “I’m good… I’m good. I know what I gotta do.”

Octavia wiped away her tears, looking to Lyra and choking. “Is it time?”

Lyra nodded, and helped her up. “Come on.”

“You’re welcome!” Applejack shouted indignantly after Lyra, who ignored her. Vinyl, on the other hand, spun around and shot her two thumbs up.

“Thanks!”

______________________________________________________

“Spike, stop praying!” Twilight hissed.

The dragon quickly but reluctantly clenched his jaw shut. In this situation, his desire to ask the gods for protection was nothing short of overwhelming.

They were everywhere, beasts hideous and twisted, pouring over the damaged walls on chain-link ladders. The gauntest of them were busy cannibalizing their own fallen as much as the Imperials. Most were streaming past Spike, who kept very close to Twilight.

They both navigated the streets, Spike receiving the most threatening glares from the Beastmen, even after he’d followed Twilight’s suggestion to take off his armor and let his inhuman form be shown. He kept the silver-scaled lorica bound around his rectangular shield, making it all look like a simple metal slab he carried under-arm. With the creatures picking their own plunder, Spike could make the appearance that this was his. Spike’s uneasiness then struck him like a punch to the gut on seeing the monstrosity leaning against the walls.

It was a living avatar of death, damaged in numerous places, but crawling with mutated unicorns doing their best to repair it. Gone were the soft blue eyes which had held a kindness and, most recently, sadness like any other. Now, those sockets were hollow, a single floating cannonball-sized orb burning in each. Even Twilight hesitated before moving closer again.

“Wasting… time…” Fluttershy rumbled, shifting restlessly in place.

“Who’s she talking to?” Spike muttered.

“I don’t know— Wait.”

Twilight put a hoof back to Spike and they both stopped cold. Fluttershy was staring right at them, her eyes looking to be able to burn them alive on the spot if she so chose. Instead, her gaze grew a bit softer. “Guys?” She momentarily turned back the section she leaned against. “Yeah, here. Rarity’s been waiting for you guys.”

Spike began to notice an increasing multitude of hostile stares from the creatures, which certainly didn’t help his already-strong feeling of vulnerability from not even having his suit on. He nudged Twilight sharply. “Better not keep her waiting, then?”

Twilight nodded, and they both spread their wings at once and took to the air, flying above the streaming horde of beastmen in the streets. Once they reached Fluttershy, they caught Rarity just as the iron giant brought her head back to her.

“Who in Tartarus built your mane-line?” Rarity muttered distastefully. She ran a charged finger along a ruptured weld, melting the seam where the heavy plate met the rest of her scalp into a uniform surface. “The weld job here is absolutely dreadful. When we get out of here, dear, remind me to give you some professional treatment for a change. Maybe I could even braid in some eight-pointed stars with these chains...”

“Rarity?” Twilight spoke first. “What’s going on? Is everything okay?” She made a perfect four-point landing on the flagstones nearby, and folded her wings.

“Oh, you two have no idea what it took to get her to pull back from the battle,” Rarity said. “I swear, she’d run over the edge of a cliff if she saw a human on the other side.”

Fluttershy chuckled grimly.

Rarity finally spared a look at Twilight and Spike, regarding their sour, waiting stares. She put her hands up in defense. “I’m just as surprised as you are. All these beastmen just came from nowhere, and, well, now we have our cover! This is an omen of destiny!”

“And this is good?” Spike muttered darkly, and motioned an arm to the monsters freely ripping through Middenheim. “Siccing this on the whole city? Haven’t they had enough?”

Fluttershy was about to speak, but instead grunted painfully as the deep dent at the base of her neck was popped back into shape by a couple of the teeming, bestial helpers.

Rarity sighed, holding up a hand to call for silence. “First of all, I didn’t bring them here. Second, I’m not happy about what they’re doing. I’m happy because of how we can use it, and what it means in the long run. I already had a plan, but this just means I have to revise it.”

“But—”

“Spike, please,” Rarity interrupted. “Time is of the essence. Applejack is still getting the others. Big Macintosh and Kivsin are deeper in the building they’re held in, and, well... they don’t exactly have it secure.”

“What do you mean, ‘not secure’?” asked Twilight.

Rarity hesitated, looking quite sheepish. “Follow us.”

Fluttershy rolled her shoulders, shaking off the beast-ponies like a scarecrow come to life. “Get off. I feel good enough,” she muttered.

Rarity jumped down onto Fluttershy’s back as she turned down the street, ushering Twilight and Spike to follow. “She knows where the place is.” Rarity looked at the both of them, surprised neither had further questions. Twilight looked lost in thought, and Spike was tinkering with his armor shirt between his folded legs.

“So, any particular reason you’re… shirtless?”

The last latch Spike had been working with was undone, and he rolled it out. A red pouch, a tear-shaped diamond, a sword in its sheath, all bound in the makeshift package.

“One,” he started with a smirk. “not looking like a lone Reiksguard knight in a group of these things is a good way to not get killed. Two, all of this. I had more, but this is all I can carry.” He looked to Rarity with solemnity, and showed her the diamond. “Cadence gave me this when I said I wanted to leave. She trusts me to make the right decisions to make my own way. But I need to know that I—”

“That you can trust me?” Rarity mumbled with a hurt curiosity. “Why don’t you think you can?”

“Because I see a city burning, and I see you, standing among the wreckage, smiling. It makes me question that choice.”

“But we’re not taking part in looting or slaughter,” Rarity pointed out.

“I am,” came a throaty rumble from the juggernaut behind them.

Rarity cringed, and whispered, “We might want to keep this in a tighter circle.” She and Spike shuffled closer, keeping their voice low.

“She just needs an outlet, Spike. I promise, we’re only staying as long as absolutely necessary.”

Spike looked at her with a deadpan expression, then glanced at the besieged city all around them. “Absolutely necessary. Right.”

“Um, Rarity…” Twilight raised a hoof, her gaze shifting between her and the direction of the Royal Palace, though she never lingered long on the latter. “What if we… you know, actually helped the Empire fight off the Beastmen, instead? Wouldn’t they be grateful and at least be more open to hearing our case, then?”

Rarity tried to suppress a laugh, which only made it come out as a rude snort. “I’m sorry, but you can’t really expect them to just change their minds. Applejack stopped Fluttershy, and how was she rewarded? Hung in a cage over the Drakenwald. She might have rotted the cage away and fallen and cracked her skull open!”

Twilight’s ears flattened.

Rarity sat back. “But I suppose a little credit is due on the part of Shining Armor. He didn’t want to put her there, but in order to keep them appeased, I think he had no choice.

“You remember how those ponies who had the audacity to call themselves the Cutie Mark Crusaders treated us, yes?” she pressed. “Absolute mockery of Sweetie and her friends. Weren’t they working on Celestia’s behalf? You saw the young ones, Vinyl, and myself on that forced march. And they didn’t even let you have anything to drink at the prison when we arrived here. And you know exactly what that led to.”

Twilight grimaced at the memory, and her eyes fell to the ground.

“Pinkie Pie might have even volunteered; she doesn’t say no to anything that will give her a light-headed rush,” Rarity continued. “That is what this Empire’s done to our own kind. They cared so little, they let you break when it could have been so easily remedied.”

“Really?” Spike asked, and turned to Twilight with a frown. “They let you go crazy and nearly bite my claw off?”

“Yeah,” Twilight said reluctantly, rolling her jaw in anger. “You’re right, Rarity.” She took a sweeping look at the beastmen and their plundering. “Alright… We’re going to need a lot of things if we’re going to make it out there again.”

Rarity slapped her forehead, and stood up. “Oh, of course! I can’t believe I almost forgot that in all the excitement. Okay, Fluttershy will take you to the others. I’ll look for what we might need.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Spike nodded.

“Great! Ta-ta!” Rarity dissolved again and her cloud flew through a nearby window, shattering it into a thousand pieces.

____________________________________________________

“You’re even crazier without your drugs,” Lyra deadpanned. She flipped a headless man’s body over, one of several that she, Vinyl, and Octavia had intercepted going down one of the halls. There had been more, but they had unfortunately escaped. From his stiff hand she took a long-bladed dagger and the leather sheath he stored it in.

Vinyl let the blood in her cupped claws splash to the floor, and wiped her mouth of the drink. “Hey, I kid you not. I met him in the… Wait, do gods have flesh?”

“It doesn’t matter. You were just having a coma-dream and—”

“What was he like?” Octavia asked Vinyl eagerly, lifting her blood-streaked face from the stringy mass of a heart she’d looted from one of the dozen or so men and stallions around them. “Was he handsome? What’s his favorite instrument?”

Lyra grabbed them both by the scruff of their coats, lifting them off the floor and bashed their heads together. “Would you two focus?! We don’t have time for this! The fate of the world is in the balance and you’re busy snacking?!”

Vinyl slowly raised a chunk of meat and sank her many teeth into it. “You,” she started, blood dribbling from the corners of her mouth. “are really stronger than you look. And also, need to calm down. We’re getting to it.” She gently took Lyra’s hand off her shoulder, one finger at a time and landed on all-fours. “We’ve all been in jail for a few days, so we’re all tired and need to let off some steam. But if it means that much to you, fine. Let’s go.”

Lyra shakily released Octavia, the stress stammering her breath. “Finally! Thank you!”

They continued through the building, Vinyl and Octavia still prattling on about the DJ meeting Slaanesh itself.

There’s no way she’s that important. She’s just a drugged-out DJ.

Advancing deeper in the complex, the halls were completely empty, messily strewn with paraphernalia from a likely rushed evacuation.

Vinyl’s right claw shot up in a tight fist. “Hold up.” She sniffed. “Against the wall.”

Octavia and Lyra followed her lead, advancing steadily against the cold stone. “Finally getting your head into it?” Lyra whispered. “What’s up ahead?”

Vinyl took a calm, long breath. “Some people and a pony, I think. Their smell isn't very strong, so there might not be a lot of them.”

Octavia looked back to Lyra with indignation. “And I’ll have you know that we’ve had to sneak around like this from the Wastes to Mordheim, non-stop.”

Lyra was in no mood to argue the Suffering Olympics, especially after Vinyl started… singing? She even made her horn glow, brightening and dimming the hall like a lightning bug.

“From the depths of Hell in silence, cast their spells, explosive violence—”

“What are you doing?” asked Lyra.

“Psyching them out. Shh.”

Vinyl continued, and Lyra had to admit that it resonated well, as if it were sung by a wandering ghost. She pointed to one of the heavy-bolted doors.

Octavia stepped up, jaw clenching as her foreleg cracked and bent in on itself. Sinews of muscle condensed, splitting into hair-thin fibres. Bone merged together into an arching, single mass that held the strings taut.

“Beneath the starlight of the Heavens, young men, their blood stains the ground...”

Octavia sawed her mutated appendage against the bolts, the fibres singing an instrumental sigh as the metal was sliced away.

“As the hordes appear on the horizon...”

Lyra shot Vinyl a glare, to which she shrugged. The sorcerer’s hands ignited, tongues of amber light soon engulfing her whole form. She waved a hand, giving a burning whip form in its grip in waiting and Octavia stepped aside with her work done.

“The wind will whisper when the Dark Gods do COME!”

Like a cannon of air, Vinyl recoiled back, blasting the door wide open. Lyra and Octavia charged through with VInyl righting herself to join. The chamber beyond was dark, but Lyra lit the way, swiping her whip across a man’s chest, searing in an instantly cauterized gash and throwing him against a bookshelf. She quickly drew her commandeered dagger, sticking it up into the hand of another assailant. As he shot back, holding his bloody hand, Lyra made another jab into his throat.

________________________________________

Vinyl grinned viciously on spotting and leaping at her first target. Throwing her mouth open wide and gripping him in a bear-hug, she found purchase over his whole face, and with a wet crunch, tore the front half of his skull clean off, sending a warm spray of blood splashing over her face. In less than a second, she jumped from him, sinking her claws into another’s chest and tearing it open, shredding bone and muscle.

And then she saw it as they both came down. The world slowed as she saw the red muscle, its chambers pulsing to a steady beat. She gently scooped it out from between the lungs. Its bloody smell and the feeling of the living, beating thing was intoxicating.

She swallowed the bone-meat mixture still sloshing in her mouth. She brought the heart closer, her jaws slowly widening again, but paused when Octavia swooped by.

Her lover fought with great finesse, the blood spattering her ash-grey coat in single drops and slick lines, compared to Vinyl’s own messy smears. Her razor-sharp bow sliced through her victims with a scalpel’s precision. She was no butcher, but a sculptor. The heart was rightfully hers, Vinyl thought.

A large fist impacting Octavia’s face ruined the moment. Spit mixed with blood spurted from the Earth mare’s mouth as her cheek smushed inward like deforming clay. It happened so fast that Octavia didn’t even seem to notice until she was in mid-flight, sailing straight into Vinyl.

In a hard catch, Vinyl managed to stop Octavia’s sudden flight. Her half-lidded, unconscious stare made Vinyl’s teeth grind together.

She dropped her and leapt at the first living thing she saw, a man already grappling hand-to-hand with Lyra. Vinyl tackled his legs out from under him before he could free his sword arm from Lyra’s grip. Vinyl poised herself to take a bite out of his ankle, but her head was smashed against a bookshelf by a furious kick.

Her vision blurred in and out, with unfocused images of Lyra and her combatant having at each other flying across her eyes, blood trickling down the green-haired woman’s forehead. Lyra managed to push him back, and began levitating various pieces of furniture from about the room, and setting them alight.

Vinyl staggered upright as the man dodged or took the impacts of the blazing articles. Marks and minor burns appeared to be the least of his problems. Once the sorcerer was exhausted of ammunition, the man unfastened a black-bodied revolver from his belt, swung it up, and fired. Lyra’s leg buckled, and she fell to one knee with a startled cry. She threw up a shield as quick as an arm could be raised which took the second round, and shattered on the third.

Vinyl opened her mouth, wobbling on her claws, and took a deep breath. “Fuck this guy, man… Fuck YOU!!”

Her sonic blast struck true, hurling the man back into the pile of burning furniture behind him. He rolled off screaming, every part of his clothes caught alight. Lyra grimmaced as he watched his flesh melt and blacken, fusing to his clothes. His struggles gradually slowed, until there was a half-charred body on the ground. The flesh of his hand had charred into the handle of the pistol, still gripping it with a dead looseness.

“You couldn’t have kept your focus for five minutes?!” Lyra shouted, clutching her bloody ankle.

“Hey, I stepped in and finished it!”

“After gawking at some guy’s heart and wondering, ‘Hmm, should I or shouldn't I give this to my sweet, little ‘Tavia?’ in the middle of a blood bath!”

“I don’t sound like that!” Vinyl snapped back. “And it’s not ‘Tavia, it’s Tavi! TAH-VEE!”

“Both of you!” Octavia shouted. “Come here! I found Kivsin!”

Putting their spat on hold, they discovered Octavia cutting away at the bat pony’s restraints, occasionally spitting blood and a loose tooth to the floor. Hidden in a corner of the expansive chamber, he was rested on a raised wooden slab under thick leather straps. A dozen or so half-consumed candles put a good stink in the air, and several books were turned to sections with various titles of‘Redemption of the Sinners’ and ‘Dangers of Daemonancy’.

Kivsin himself was in ragged shape, wet with sweat and needing Octavia’s support just to stand. The skin where his limbs had been restrained were hairless and raw pink.

“Jeez, you look like hell,” Vinyl muttered.

“Heh…” the noctral grunted a laugh. “Trust me… I’ve been there and back.”

Octavia wrapped her tentacles around Kivsin’s head, and lovingly nuzzled his cheek. “Oh, you brave, brave stallion… you took all they had and still didn’t break, didn’t you?”

Despite the pain, Kivsin managed a toothy grin. “I’ve had worse. These men are amateurs compared to the Druchii.” He weakly lifted a foreleg, and returned Octavia’s embrace. “Thank you. So much.”

“Oh no, what is this?!” Octavia parted Kivsin’s mane, exposing a ring of burnt skin at the nape of his neck.

“That?” Kivsin shook his head, his face a dark grimace. “I don’t want to talk about that.”

“So!” Vinyl ground her teeth through the biggest forced grin she could manage. “We still need to find Big Mac, and I’m not sure only two of us at a time can manage that. Wanna take this somewhere else?”

“Yeah, clock’s ticking,” Lyra nodded.

“Are you okay to walk?” Octavia asked.

He managed to sit up on the table, grunting with the effort. “Not fast enough to keep up. Give me a minute and I’ll catch up.”

“Are you sure?”

“He said he needs a minute, Tavi!” Vinyl tugged her hoof almost forcefully, separating her from Kivsin. “Take your sweet-ass time, Kivsin! As much as you need!”

“We’re right down this way!” Octavia shouted as Vinyl practically dragged her through the door.

Lyra started after them, but cursed and nearly tripped forward as her wounded leg faltered. She gingerly wrapped her ankle in magic, offsetting the weight and shock of her steps with a simple, constant telekinetic push upward. She muttered aloud, “Not the time, or the place…”

________________________________________

Kivsin took his time alone to recuperate, working up his stiff muscles with a walk around the chamber. Some of the dismembered corpses he recognized from the myriad men who had been trying to ‘cleanse’ him. But there was nothing to cleanse.

Stupid fools, he thought with a smirk. Couldn’t even tell when somepony is legitimately unpossessed by a daemon.

It wasn’t long before he felt ready to go, and began making his way over to the door, passing by an odd pile of burning furniture. He glanced over, noticing a smeared outline where a body looked to have been.

Kivsin blinked.

Where a body looked to have been.

OH, SHI—

BANG!

A hellishly burning sting erupted square in his fetlock. He cried out in shock, falling face first to the floor. Before he could even begin to recover, something yanked him up by the mane, hard and rough. Kivsin looked up as far as his eyes could roll, and saw the grim, half-burned face of the witch-hunter, twisted into a vicious sneer. Kivsin suddenly felt something cold and hard press against his back.

“An diesem Tag, mit Sigmar als mein zeuge ...” the man intoned.

Kivsin snapped a wing up, swatting the hand away from his spine. Another shot rang out, merely grazing his side and flying off to ricochet off the stone wall with a loud crack. He twisted around as hard as he could against the grip on his mane, but the man recovered immediately, and drove his metal-tipped boot against his injured leg with a sickening crunch of bone.

Kivsin had barely reacted this time beyond a grunt; the original wound on his leg had taken him more by surprise than anything, and he was accustomed enough to pain to learn how to steel himself against multiple hits in the same place. Still, he was in a very bad position. He prepared to throw his weight forward for another attempt—

The drum of the revolver at his back clicked another round into place, sending a fresh chill down his spine. He expected the sting any moment, but for some reason, the witch hunter paused.

It was then that he heard the brisk clip-clop of hooves coming from the doorway.

_____________________________________________________

Twilight’s ears picked up the telltale sound of a gun hammer cocking back. She flinched, but only briefly, and rounded the corner with her horn already channeling a telekinetic shield against any bullets.

She froze upon seeing Kivsin on his knees, and more importantly, a badly-scarred man holding him up by the mane, staring at her with nothing less than an infernal hatred.

“Der Daemon wird fallen!” he spat out. “Dein Wille geschehe!”

Twilight didn’t understand the language, and assumed that the man was trying to tell her to stop by using Kivsin as a hostage. Her immediate reaction was to quickly prepare a precision teleport spell while trying to talk him down.

That hesitation cost her dearly.

BANG!

The burst of light and blood made Twilight jump. It was like watching the visage of death itself claiming him. Without even thinking, she lit her horn and fired a magic shot that didn’t reach the assailant until his pistol fired a second time into Kivsin’s back.

The hunter spun back with a patch of his coat’s shoulder smoldering, managing to keep his footing with a grin of triumph at Twilight, who was advancing on him furiously. “Your vessel is gone, monster, and he won’t be the last. You and your ‘friends’ are no more than the daemonkind now, and only deserve to be destroyed!”

He aimed the pistol at Twilight and fired. The pill-sized bullet spun, not getting any closer than an inch or so from her nose before it came to a screeching halt, wrapped in the lavender glow of a unicorn’s magic. It dropped to the blood-soaked bricks with a plink.

Twilight telekinetically forced the man to the ground, and tore the coat and shirt fabric from his shoulder. Growing ferally, she put a hoof over his mouth, and sank her fangs into the exposed flesh of his neck, going right down to the bone. The rich, coppery tang of blood flooded her senses, and she drank greedily, gulping down the sweet nectar until his skin was white as a sheet. All the while, the man didn’t even scream, but actually seemed to laugh for all of the seconds he was still alive.

Twilight threw the desiccated body across the chamber, and her focus only returned to take in the rest of the world by the sound of a particularly harsh gasp of pain.

“KIVSIN!!”

Twilight bolted for him, flipping him over on his back. On seeing the two pulped holes, one in his chest, the other weeping in his middle, Twilight was struck by the realization that she didn’t know how to treat bullet wounds.

“S-Spike! Spike!” she cried out.

“If you could stop teleporting through the floors, I’d be able to keep up better!” a voice slightly outside the room rang out.

Upon clearing the doorway, Spike forgot his annoyance on seeing the bloody body Twilight was holding. He rushed to kneel down beside her, immediately examining the twin injuries.

“What happened to him?” Spike asked in a low voice.

Twilight stammered as the words found their way out. “A gun… w-witch hunter. H- Kiv… the leg was cut through, too.”

Spike bit his lip and nodded. They made quick progress. Spike’s claws were too large to treat the wounds directly, so Twilight fished out the bullet that didn’t make an exit. Compresses were made from shreds of clothes.

“Okay, okay,” Spike assured himself with confidence. “Gently turn him back and he might ma—aaaagh!”

“Get away from him, you murderer!”

Spike wrestled against the tentacles which were trying to get well acquainted with his throat, and a set of white jaws trying to bite his shoulder. He threw his leathery wings open wide, and Octavia and Vinyl were launched to opposite ends of the chamber.

“Girls, stop!” Twilight pleaded. “Spike’s trying to help Kivsin!”

Neither seemed to hear her, but they halted any attempt to have at the dragon again at the bestial roar which echoed from the doorway. Macintosh forced his way through, making the doorway five inches wider in the process. Vinyl stood from her pouncing stance and sniggered, expecting a bloodbath any second.

Spike kept his shield and sword at more relaxed positions, but kept his grip on them tight. “Big Mac, you recognize me, right?” Spike took his helmet off, taking a glance at Octavia, who appeared to be looking elsewhere.

“Guys’ nights in Ponyville? Camping trip with AJ and Fluttershy?”

Macintosh began to laugh, loud and hoarse.

“Whats so funny?” Spike asked, bringing his shield to the front.

“You screamed like a baby when the roof of the tent was covered in Daddy Long Legs.”

“Both of you, please!” Twilight shouted.

Kivsin’s bandages were soaked through. His breath was steady, but he still forced them to work as needed.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was trying to help,” Octavia sputtered.

“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Kivsin muttered with a weak smile.

Macintosh loomed over the grey and purple mares, and said with a mere glance at the noctral, “He’s gonna die.”

Twilight glanced to him judgmentally. “H-how can you tell?”

“He’s lost too much blood,” Octavia sniffled. “He feels cold.”

Macintosh nodded. “Cut off his head ‘fore then. He’ll get safe passage.”

Kivsin gave a huff. “I’d been clinging to life for so long. Heh… But now that it’s happening, I’m not afraid.” He leaned upright and started untying his bandages. “Take it off! Take them off! Let the blood out.”

Without protest, they let the rags fall, let the leak of ichor run free. Kivsin pulled Twilight and Octavia closer with a hoof around each neck.

“You both. Thank you, so much. Twilight, you were only postponing the inevitable, but I couldn’t have had a better friend, making life after Tartarus seem possible.

“Friendship,” he chuckled, spattering blood with the last letter in the alien word. “Never knew what it felt like until you arrived at the docks back in Mordheim...”

Twilight choked on the air, hardly able to believe his willingness to let his injuries have their way. She lifted her head out of his weak grip. “Kivsin, I’m so sorry… I wasn’t fast enough...”

“All things happen for a reason,” Octavia mumbled with a hollow stare into the noctral’s wounds. “This has to have been pre-planned.”

Twilight shook her head. “It was an Imperial with a gun, Octavia—”

“It was planned!” the beclawed mare screamed. A crazed grin evicted her gloom, and she ran a hoof through Kivsin’s mane as if it would bring her some comfort. “He’s going to where he belongs, a special place in the Warp, saved for him!”

Twilight let Octavia have her episode, opting not to argue with the broken mare. Octavia was in a giggling fit for a whole minute before whispering into Kivsin’s ear. He responded with a wheezing laugh.

“I’m not going to be needing it anymore. Take it.”

Kivsin’s eyelids drooped as he found it more and more difficult to breathe. “I think it’s time.”

Macintosh pushed Twilight and Octavia aside and craned Kivsin’s head back. “Last words, anypony?”

“I can’t pretend to have known or appreciated you more than Twilight or Octavia do,” Spike spoke up. “But I wish we could have been friends, too.”

Vinyl hesitated, but soon enough threw her claws to the air. “And I’m sorry for... being such a plot-hole.”

Kivsin grinned at her admission. “Apology accepted.”

Macintosh waited for the silence to be interrupted again, glancing to Twilight who looked away, and Octavia, who was still possessed by her hopeful smile and giggle-sobbing.

The air was otherwise silent.

______________________________________________________

Shining Armor had taken up a new strategy since his encounter with WAAAGH! Grimgor; always lead from the front. Morale was the heart of an army. To know the leadership was on the ground with them, sharing the burden and danger, could make the difference between a conscript and a trooper.

Rifle chatter was ubiquitous. On the street, on rooftops, in windows, the fruits of industrialization were brought to bear in support of the close combat troops. Hellstorm rocketeers, the front of their uniforms sheathed in iron, fired their dumb-munitions to devastating effect, eviscerating minotaurs and erupting in geysers of fire and shrapnel, throwing shredded meat and limbs skyward.

Progress toward the walls was going at a good pace. The Beastmen were unable to effectively cope under the combined arms counter attack in the confined spaces of Middenheim’s streets.

A forest of polearms ground forward toward the city’s main prison, thousands of boots crunching over a street of mangled flesh. Shining’s Reiksguard formed the central spear tip of the formation, the formerly gleaming silver of their armor smeared red and brown in the onslaught.

A particularly fat, boil-pocked gor swung a wide-faced axe through the ranks, claiming four stallions in its arc. Its grotesque form ignored the splashes of bullets into its blubber.

Shining drew his pistol, getting a good opportunity on the slow-moving creature, and fired several rounds into its burlap sack-covered head. Blood spattered out the back of its skull, some rounds piercing its forehead. Shining grinned with satisfaction when it started to loll in place and paused its attack.

It turned a faceless look to Shining and trudge-charged his way.

Putting up a shimmering magical shield, the axe deflected into the ground from its overhead arc. Shining sucked in a breath, enflaming his horn and shot a precise magic beam through the Nurgle-fiend’s shoulder. Its axe-bearing arm sank, but still ripped the weapon free from the cobblestone.

A screaming rocket burst at its back, bringing out a gurgling roar. Shining leapt at its distraction, drawing his sword and plunging it into the beast’s stomach. The throbbing pulp of its entrails spilled out as the precarious sack of its belly was sliced open left to right. It desperately tried piling them back in, taking intermediate swipes at the imperial troops which began to surround it as its kin were beaten back.

Shining enveloped its head in a shield bubble and steadily shrank it. Blood started leaking through the threads of the potato sack, bone beginning to crack and poke through its threads. The creature’s claws stopped foraging for its guts. Shining released its shrunken head, and let the wet pile of flesh slop the the ground.

“Unicorns with me!” Shining bellowed. “Spike wall!”

In unison, they lowered their weapons and fifty horns lit up, streams of witchlight bricking together into a wide barrier, bristling with the ordered impalers.

The Chaos beasts, seemingly oblivious, continued to throw themselves at the wall. It wasn’t long until enough of them were stacked on the spikes that they couldn’t reach for more, but they were stuck. Their contorted faces squished against the shimmering barrier like glass.

“All else behind it, push!”

Hundreds of hands and hooves braced against the shield, and with a rumble of grunting, ground it forward, pushing down the street.

Shining knew once they passed the complex, the shield wouldn’t hold when exposed on another flank, but he had his plan set for it. Joachim's 20th regiment was supposed to be butchering their way to meet Shining at the intersection.

Just as the shield passed the corner of the Offices, it met resistance where a massive iron leg stepped into its path. The advance halted instantly. With the crackle of rifles nigh-silenced, the leg’s twin swung around the corner, gripping the building’s edge and cracking its facade.

Shining’s eyes widened.

“No…”

Fluttershy peered around the corner, ember-eyed and scanning the ranks which had immediately halted. Her jaw hung slightly ajar, then wrenched wide open as she bounded around and arced a spike-laden hoof down upon them.

Shining nearly screamed, “Up! Up! Up!”

The unicorns raised the shield just in time to intercept the titanic strike of the metal monster. Simultaneously as the beasts renewed their onslaught into the Imperial line, Fluttershy battered the shield with reckless abandon, each strike weaving a web of cracks and splinters.

Shining had dropped his support the shield, having drawn his sword to take the beasts’ renewed assault into the unprepared line. Putting a decade and a half of service to use, he took on the spawns as they came, taking the occasional second of respite to glance in dread at Fluttershy who, by the look of the shield, was just a couple of strikes from being able to lay into his forces.

Fluttershy clasped her claws together, raising them high over her head. Shining could only lament his inability, the impossibility of keeping something like her hidden or safe and away from this.

But Fluttershy paused. Her burning eyes locked on Shining. It only lasted a moment, and Shining swore he saw her claws starting to separate and relax before a white light momentarily blinded him.

In mid-roar, half of Fluttershy’s head was obscured in smoke as a streaking form shot into her, impacting her cheek with the sound of a massive church bell and throwing her into the neighboring building.

__________________________________________________

Luna was always a mare of Old, in more ways than one. She’d taken countless weeks relearning the laws of the land and changes that Equestria had undergone in her millennia of absence. Things had gotten so complicated. Universal health care, blackpowder firearms, whole new nations and their leaders to deal with.

Then there was all the manure she’d had to put up with in this world. Men and their xenophobia, Elves and their arrogance, Chaos for stealing them from home, Sylvanians trying to use her to resurrect Nightmare Moon.

It felt good to get back to basics for a change.

She launched back as Fluttershy’s claw slapped the side of her face. Globs of molten metal slopped off the giant’s jaw after Luna’s alpha-strike as she started righting herself. Not giving her the time, Luna got behind Fluttershy’s head and threw a furious buck, forcing Fluttershy’s head through the building’s side amidst a rain of rubble.

Is this it? Luna thought. Fluttershy was supporting herself against the building, hunched over, the dent in the back of her head visible through the mane. The princess hovered closer, quite disappointed. The hydras and quarry-eels that used to plague ancient Equestria could actually put up a fight.

Fluttershy swiped her claw in a great arc, and Luna felt the very blade tip lightly brush her neck as she jolted back.

“Ah, there’s the fight in you.”

The princess took higher, easily escaping Fluttershy’s reach. Such didn’t stop her. Fluttershy tore out a chunk of the nearest structure, grinding up the rubble in her claw before hurling it at Luna. Bits scattered in ramshackle buckshot. In a flash, Luna teleported to the end of the cloud and bolted for the beast, interrupting her preparation of another shot.

Fluttershy dropped the wad, raising a leg to block little effect. Luna’s hooves struck dead center in her palm, recoiling back into Fluttershy’s face.

Luna grinned. Fluttershy didn’t know how to fight an equal or greater, only use her own body as a weapon, throwing itself around like some barbarian with a club. Luna managed to turn her own body against her, something out of a filly’s imagination, making the monster punch itself in the face. For a split second, Luna felt the chill of a shadow pass over her. Glancing back, she snapped up a shield, blocking Fluttershy’s other claw. Both great palms curled around the bubble.

Fluttershy tried to pop the orb between her palms. Luna’s head felt compressed in a vise to maintaining the shield, between two iron walls. She raised her head up, expecting to look into some baleful snarl, but only found a maw of teeth biting down on her shield, and a thick, blood-slick tongue pulling her back into darkness.

With an echoing slam, there was pitch blackness. Fluttershy’s lip had shut, but her jaws had yet to crush the shield. But they were trying, hard as all hell. Luna could feel some rough surface grinding against the barrier, peeling away its layered magic.

It was getting weaker, and the strain in her head only growing worse. Every muscle in her legs burned. The taste of blood trickled along her tongue.

The shield shattered like glass, instantly drowned out when Fluttershy screamed. Luna made her break, catching sight of the very sky smiting Fluttershy. Snapping, furious ribbons of lightning locked the giant in place, twitching and chattering at the air.

Luna raised her forelegs over her head, collecting all the magic she could muster into a black sun easily matching her for size. In a shout of strength, she hurled the ball at Fluttershy.

Fluttershy caught it dead center in her chest, and was swallowed up in a blooming fireball. The very structures around her had their exposed facades crushed in, and blasting wind whipped everything not nailed down through the streets.

At last, there was a relative silence. Fluttershy was not to be seen through the wall-dense dust and smoke. Luna made out the sound of a single breath from the smoke which heralded no further. She finally could breathe, ease her racing heart, and take stock of her surroundings. The streets were free of bloodshed, at least for here. A few soldiers were catering to the dead, others were trying to achieve some catharsis, spitting and jeering at the slumping giant.

A large group of pegasi flew down from where the clouds had enacted their judgment. Their leader addressed the princes with a salute. “Your highness, it would seem the monster is silenced. Do you have any orders?”

“Disassemble it.” Luna said with a grimace. “Legs, talons, every rivet, nut, bolt; I want it limbless.”

“It’d be my pleasure, princess. And yourself?”

“If my ears don’t betray me, there’s still a battle to win. I will need a moment to myself, and will join Shining Armor’s forces. To your duties now.”

“Aye, princess.”

Luna began heading for the continued din of arms. That Fluttershy, she had to be dealt with one way or another. Luna grinned.

Let us see how she becomes a threat again without legs.

Just then, she heard a gust of wind coming from behind. She turned quickly enough to catch a glimpse of a huge slab of drywall flying straight at her.

______________________________________________________

Rainbow Dash ignored the calls for her alias. Rainbow Spring... she was already getting tired of that name. Casting a short glance to her flank, she internally damned the day the star was cut into her, and the daemon that Tzeentch put her at the mercy of.

She changed her mane and fur colors, and peeked over a pile of rubble. She had to have another look, unable to believe what she’d seen the first time.

Fluttershy had torn out a chunk of the building before her and hurled it at something. Rainbow couldn’t see the target. Fluttershy swiped at the pegasi around her, exposing the burned-out rim of a large hole in her chest. Ropes of muscle-cabling were melted through, sagging like wax and wetted by gushes of fire, pouring out from shattered piping.

It didn’t take long for Fluttershy’s struggle to slow. Her forelegs started going slack, to the point where she could barely lift them. She slumped against the Commission Office, futilely twisting and trying to bite at the pegasi who began packing drums of gunpowder in her joints.

Rainbow’s heart leapt and she altered her form to that of a hound, sniffing out the possibility of a fuse, a fire. She picked it up at the sound of a match being struck, and thought of what might scare them all off best.

She quickly climbed over the pile in mid-transformation with a star-bearing shield and an enormous broadsword glowing lambent with red, eldritch power, like a living flame. Immediately cries of ‘The Traitor!’, ‘It’s him!’, and ‘Sigmar, preserve us!’ filled the space between her ears and brass helmet. She gave her form another member, throwing open a pair of great black wings. Already, the pegasi were opening a panicked, screaming path for Rainbow’s bullet-ascent. She managed to tackle a pegasus with a matchbook and spent stick in their hoof. The force knocked the matches from him, and Rainbow hurled him into the sky.

Rainbow set down on Fluttershy’s shoulder and started bashing the sword and shield together, while shouting in a dark and booming voice: “I am Archaon! Slayer of the pretender, Valten! Scourge of the World! Middenheim will burn! Your souls will be a feast for the Gods!”

The air and streets cleared quickly, the screaming humans and ponies bolting for cover and crying out in fear and panic. Rainbow’s enhanced voice certainly carried far, if her burning throat was any indicator.

Taking advantage of the lull, Rainbow climbed down Fluttershy’s body, through a hole her giant friend had broken in the structure. A disconnected pipe nearly doused her in flame. It had already started a conflagration inside.

How do you even fix this?! she thought, changing into a metallic version of her pony form to better take the heat. She forced the burst pipe back to meet its severed twin. Immediately after the heavy clunk of its reconnection, something hit Rainbow’s shoulder, spun her around, and in a flash of purple, she was looking at the world behind herself, upside down.

“Spike, no! It’s Rainbow Dash!” Twilight cried.

Rainbow put her forced her head upright with little more than a sore nose while Spike was painfully flexing his claw like he’d punched a wall.

Twilight took Rainbow by the reverting hoof, taking her to the hole Fluttershy had taken herself from. Rainbow pulled back, stopping her. “Twilight, do you have any idea what’s going on?!”

“We’re leaving, Rainbow. There’s nothing for us here.”

“Woah, woah. You got to talk to Celestia, right? We need to get to safety and Fluttershy’s gotta get out of here!”

“We are gettin’ out,” Applejack said. She brought Apple Bloom in tow. “Rainbow, there just ain’t time to explain. I swear we will, once we’re long gone.”

There wasn’t time to argue, not with Twilight having called Fluttershy. Fluttershy took Applejack and Apple Bloom in her claws, letting them climb onto her back.

“You might want to get Scootaloo now,” Spike said. “Once Fluttershy jumps the walls, she’s going to leg it.”

________________________________________________________

“Pssssst! Sweetie, They’re gone!” Pinkie called. “Aaaand this might be our way out!”

Sweetie Belle ran across the street, where Pinkie Pie was crouched inside a wide-mouthed storm drain set in at the bottom of a wall section. The alley-thin space where it wallowed offered them both the cover of darkness.

“Smells like that’s been used for a lot more than rainwater,” Sweetie grumbled.

“Won’t have to put up with it for long!” Pinkie sat herself at the edge. “You wanna follow or sit in my lap?”

“What? I’m not going down there!”

“Seriously?” Pinkie snickered. “You’ve been in worse places. Besides, picture it as an extra-long waterslide!”

“It’s a sewer pipe,” Sweetie deadpanned.

Pinkie’s smile faltered. “Sweetie, Rarity is trusting me a lot with getting the both of us down the mountain, and wouldn’t ya know it, there’s a chute right here!”

“We couldn’t climb over the wall?”

“Somepony’ll see us!” Pinkie picked up the beat of boots on stone. It was getting closer. “We don’t have time! You wanna sit in my stomach instead so you don’t have to smell it?”

“No!” Sweetie nearly screamed. She started shivering, as if struck by a cold wind. “I-I’ll just… lap…”

Sweetie sat herself square between Pinkie’s thighs, and the larger mare held her securely. “Eyes and mouth shut during the ride,” Pinkie grinned toothily. “Keep hooves close at all times!”

Pushing off, Sweetie kept airtight, and Pinkie Pie squealed like a filly. The stink burned Sweetie’s nose, but thankfully it was over before too long. A face full of mud at the edge of the runoff pool greeted her. Pinkie sprang out of the pool with an apple core tangled in her mane, which one of her tongues yanked out and pulled down her throat.

“Woo! I wanna do that again! Wait, no. Gotta find the others!” Pinkie plucked Sweetie Belle, who was still spitting mud, from the murk and took off running. “You should’a loved it! If only the D—”

Pinkie stopped on a dime, leaving Sweetie to bounce with Pinkie’s tongue wrapped around her middle like a bungee cord.

“The D... The D-Do...”

Sweetie wiggled out of the slimy lasso and regarded Pinkie’s horrified expression and broken-record ticks.

Sweetie put a hoof against the mare’s leg. “Pinkie?”

Pinkie started, smearing a smile back onto her face. “I j-... Sorry. Let’s g-... go!”

Sweetie followed Pinkie at a trot, the mare seeming to have instantly lost all her energy, and listened to the forest for the sound of an escape being made. It should be unmistakable, the sound of Fluttershy stomping around, but it was difficult to focus on that over Pinkie’s loud eating. It sickened Sweetie to hear Pinkie’s open-mouth gnashing and lip smacking as she broke up and scarfed down fallen tree branches and other detritus.

“Don’t you think finding the others is a little more important than lunch?” Sweetie asked.

Pinkie finished swallowing a mouthful of leaves. “Right. You’re right,” she sniffed. “I just needed a little comfort food, but yeah, it’s a little soon.”

“Comfort food? For what?”

Pinkie craned her head back, revealing a teary eye. “It’s nothing,” she squeaked. “Adult stuff…”

“Umm…”

“I’m okay… I’m okay…” Pinkie slowed down, her head sinking closer to the ground. “It’s okay. He wants to come back. But who made him go?”

She felt an odd sensation in her tail, peered back, finding it was twitching as if it alone was on a sugar rush. She heard a distant crumbling of rock, and a heavy, metallic grinding.

Sweeping up Sweetie Belle, Pinkie darted from the cliff. A cloud of dust and litter engulfed them both following a spectacular crash.

“Everyone in one piece?” Spike said.

“Aargh! My leg hurts like Tartarus!” Rainbow hissed through gritted teeth.

Applejack yanked several arrows out of her back. “Two, maybe three, actually.”

“Pinkie!” Rarity jumped off Fluttershy’s back and helped Pinkie off the ground, wrapping her in a hug. “Thank goodness, you got out alright! Is Sweetie Belle okay?”

Pinkie nodded fervently. “Yeah! She’s riiiii-” Reeling her tongues in, the three she kept exposed terminated, bundled in a well-tied knot with nothing between them. Pinkie stared at this oddity, her smile growing a bit wider with a glance at an unamused Rarity. “iiiiii-’ll sniff her out!”

Face to the ground, Pinkie could only pick up Sweetie’s scent within mere meters of where they were had Fluttershy touched down.

“Where’s my sister, Pinkie Pie?” Rarity asked flatly.

“I know I was holding her when you showed up! I yanked her out of the way before Fluttershy could smashed her-!”

Pinkie gagged on those words with a gout of multi-hued flame bursting from her lips in a long-winded belch. She looked to Rarity, who had one hand tightly holding the other’s wrist, which was growing into a gauntlet-shaped spiked fist.

Pinkie immediately sat up, prodding different spots of her engorged gut in search of unintended morsels. “I swear this was an accident!” she claimed, hastily opening her abdomen and rolling the shaking, smoke-spitting filly from its confines. “You told me to keep it under control, and I did! I did! Maybe I fell on her when Fluttershy landed, maybe it was an instinct because I’m soft on the inside and it would cushion the fall—”

“Just… flipping… stop.” Rarity’s fist slowly shrank, and she started wiping Sweetie’s face off. She wordlessly led Sweetie to Fluttershy, muttering something about cleaning her up.

Pinkie followed close behind. “You know I’m really sorry about that, right—”

Rarity put a finger against Pinkie’s lips, looking to, with all her strength, keep her head from exploding. She seemed to be wearing two different faces on top of each other. “Shhhh... I’m sure you are. I’m just flustered,“ A buzz of warp lightning danced across her mane, “because this is, what, the third, fourth time you’ve eaten her? I’m not sure where this came from,” She ran a finger along Pinkie’s body-wide mouth. “But do you really need it? You can eat just fine with the mouth you talk with. Sew yourself up, and try to keep yourself full on anything else but us.”

“Cross my heart and hope to fly, stick a cupcake in my eye!” Pinkie sang, with the motions to authenticate the ritual.

Helping Pinkie climb to Fluttershy’s back, Rarity smiled. “As good a promise as any.”

Fluttershy hastily treated her claw, glancing at the parallel gashes in the cliff face she'd scraped out to control her fall. Rarity had directed her to the north end of the city before the jump, so after taking stock of her passengers, she got to her claws and took off in an untargeted stampede.

Applejack and Apple Bloom held securely to links of the giant’s mane, the elder looking to her weeping sister, then back at the increasingly distant cliff. She hoped with all her heart Braeburn and Big Macintosh were alright.

__________________________________________________________

Braeburn heard the distant roll of thunder. Two of his cousins were gone.

“I swear, Scratch…”

"I told you it needed to grow on them. You’ve been smothering them!”

Macintosh successfully clawed his way through the tree Vinyl was perched in the branches of. As it started to fall, she merely teleported into the foliage of the next tree over, and Macintosh started his relentless lumberjacking again.

“Smothering?!” Braeburn scoffed. “I was tryin’ to help her, dammit! Our family was finally gonna be together again!”

Vinyl blinked. And then she snorted loudly, pointing an accusing hoof in his direction. “Hey, did your parents ever tell you, ‘don’t pick the scab, or you’ll make it worse’?”

Braeburn rolled his eyes. “What in sam hill does that have to do with anything? And it’s supposed to get worse!”

“Well, don’t you think that Applejackie-Bloom should figure that out on their own instead of being brow-beaten into scratching it?” she pressed. “In case you forgot, you had ten years to get used to this, while they only got here, like, in the last few months! Ever try playing a two-hour set on Friday night at a club you know warp-all about, with instruments you didn’t even know existed until the night before? It ain’t fun, Burnie.”

“We still didn’t have to separate. I could’a just given ‘em space!”

“Well, now there’ll be miles of space between you guys!” Vinyl cheered. “Everyone wins!”

Braeburn projectile-vomited at Vinyl, who simply leaned back and let the blob of slime pass overhead. “Which also gives you two more time,” she grinned, motioning to Macintosh who wasn’t listening in the slightest. “Two cousins out in the woods, on a road trip! Fun, right?”

“If they don’t make it ‘cause ‘a you, I’ll have your hide!”

“Oh! If you do, make sure you do what Tavi did with Kivsin’s! It looks sooo cute!”

“Thank you,” Octavia smiled, huddled in her noctral-skin coat with the hide of the head acting as a hood. Trails of blood were still caked into her fur.

Lyra was withdrawn, leaning against a boulder and just watching the four. She made motions with her hand, pretending to put a pistol to her head, cock it, and pull the trigger. With the next cycle, she aimed at Braeburn. A burst of flame shot from her pointer finger, putting a good sear into the side of his face.

“Oh, sorry, Braeburn! Finger slipped! But hey, listen. If it were up to me, you’d be with Applejack right now, but hearing Vinyl describe her vision more…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s starting to sound legitimate.”

Vinyl’s tree began to lean, and she teleported again with Macintosh angrily following suit. Braeburn rubbed the burned area, making sure the damage wasn’t too severe. He angrily muttered something sounding like ‘damn tzeen’. “What, you’re taking her side?”

“No, I’m not on her ‘side’. I’m looking at what the situation is now, which she may have very well screwed up for worse. There’s no point in crying about what could have been. Learn from what happened and use it in the future.” She pinched her brows. “If Vinyl’s right, we have to move. The Brass Keep might be the safest bet—”

“No!” Macintosh roared, tearing out the last splinters of support the tree he’d assaulted had. Amidst it’s fall, he lumbered toward Lyra. “You go to the Keep. We’re gonna find my sisters!”

“Blessed be to that!” Braeburn shouted.

“What? No!” Vinyl protested from the next standing tree. “We’ve gotta raise alarms, put together a warband. We have to tell the guys at the Keep that Archaon’s gonna get back in the game!”

“Shut up! You’re the one who started this! Macintosh ‘n I are gonna find them. You three, scram!” Braeburn trotted right past Lyra with Macintosh in tow.

“Braeburn, come on!” Lyra pleaded.

“Come with us or go with them, but we ain’t stoppin’.”

“You don’t know what you’re missing!” Vinyl shouted in exasperation. “We’re making history!”

“Worm fodder’s more like it!” Braeburn nudged Macintosh with a grin. “Poor things’ll die ‘a food poisoning...”

Vinyl jumped down from her perch, muttering, “Thick as a brick wall, those two, but hey!” She reared on her hind legs and put a claw over Lyra’s shoulder. “Can’t stop the will of Gods, can you? ... Uh, Lyra?”

Lyra ran a hand through her oily, matted hair, and sighed. “Let’s just go before I change my mind. Go scrape Octavia off the ground.”

Author's Note

Yeah, took quite a while to get this one out. Recently took up an addiction with Reddit... That place is an abyss of curiosity.

Chapter 29: On the Road Again

”Oh, mighty Sigmar, savior of the Empire, give me strength. For though I’ve dedicated my life to eradicating it, it feeds, it grows, devouring all. There must be a final answer to halt its advance, but the tide of war seems endless. The brutal, unthinking bloodlust of the Greenskins, and the blind ambitions of the Undead. But all this is nothing before what is to come. It whispers and roars in the dark. It is against us. It is unstoppable… I… am unstoppable. I see it now, the beast that will devour the world.”

~Last recorded words of Sanlow Kempfer of the Ulgu College of Magic

The air didn’t quite agree with Luna. It was filled with smoke and the stink of raw meat baking in the sun, a rotting reek that would lay low the most robust constitution. But as she soared, looking down at the people, she knew that the citizens of Middenheim were hardened. They had faced the doom once before, stood at the end of days and faced down the immortal armies of wicked gods and hordes of slavering barbarian superhumans. Two provinces had fallen before the Adversary—the Everchosen of Chaos—marched on the White Wolf’s domain, and Ulric’s hounds still chased him off. Luna couldn’t help but be impressed by their tenacity, even in the face of such a surprise attack at present.

Do these fiends truly believe they can vanquish us here? Surely they jest.

Luna flew with great speed toward the nearest noise of a fray. All along her flight she beheld the aftermath of Shining Armor’s astute leadership—streets paved with the corpses of mutants and monsters, with civilians and militia stragglers already piling the monstrous bodies together into vicious funeral pyres. The fallen warriors were collected away from them.

A whirling column of autumnal colours burned high over the roofs of an intersection in the distance, bringing Luna’s attention back to the battle. A chorus of agonized shrieks echoed forth from the site, along with what sounded vaguely like the cackling laughter of a pyromaniac.

Ah, the Bright Wizards, she thought. How annihilative, their works to control the animal of flame.

No fortification, no bunker could protect from such ravenous waves, meaning that the exposed beastmen had little chance against the scorching pillar now roaring through the streets like a violent tornado, but with the scouring efficiency of a needle through a threader. The last, she knew, came from the many unicorn mages in support of the deadly human pyromancers, who could contain and help direct the usually unstable magic with their own fine-tuned control. Such was but one example of the progress made toward the cultural integration of the Equestrians. All sides had much to offer.

The pegasi were in a winning battle against their deformed counterparts in the flying melee. The winged ponies battled the monsters across rooftops or the air, with pairs of brawlers falling to the ground with conjoined screams and filling the air with bloodied feathers like morbid confetti. Like the creatures, the pegasi would often make weapons of themselves, wearing bladed hoof gauntlets or sharp, jointed armor along the forward edges of their wings.

It reminded her of the darker times of Equestria, of the founding of Canterlot which she and Celestia had led, the purge of the mountain of savage beasts, and the overthrow of the cold-blooded Draconian cave-dwellers who had glutted themselves off mining the luxuries of the crystal bounties in the underground caverns. The winter that year had been especially unforgiving to the nomadic ponies they shepherded, for plague and foraging losses threatened to undo them. By sending them away to face doom, caring naught for the refugees in their blind greed, the Draconians deserved to have their names devoured by time, and a grander history written in their place.

She’d be damned to Tartarus to entertain Tirek in tea parties for a century before she dared miss this.

On the glow of her magic, six onyx-black sabres materialized in as many inky-black clouds around Luna, and she spread them wide in the air like twin dragon claws. Her eyes sparked, then glowed white with cold fury.

“FLEE, YE MANGY CURS! FLEE FOR YOUR MISERABLE LIVES!”

Luna plunged headlong into the aerial scrap, sending the blades whistling towards a group of the monsters attempting to gain altitude to crash down on the pegasi. She kept her path true, with sharp and quick eyesight guiding her mind’s grip for each weapon like a bladed shadow-kraken as they created a rain of beheaded and eviscerated beastmen that fell behind her in a gory contrail.

Another shot her a panicked look, just in time for Luna to impale the creature from chest to withers in a single thrust of her horn, taking the full impact to her neck with barely even a wince.

“BEGONE!” she yelled in a voice like thunder, then sent a burst of magic through her horn which exploded the body off and away in a visceral vortex. Not a drop of blood stained the icon of her power.

The gruesome execution did not go unnoticed from either side. The near-frantic shouting of orders from the pegasi was now joined by jubilant cries of renewed conviction.

“It’s Her Majesty!”

“Princess Luna is here!”

“Vanquish! They do not deserve Her stars’ light!”

Luna smiled. This almost… almost… felt like home again.

A pair of mutants arced into view, one brandishing vicious claws and a mouth full of needle-like fangs, the other having barbed iron hooks grafted to their hooves. It had a flat golden tooth in his mouth, and Luna inwardly sighed, wondering if this stallion had previously come from wealth before succumbing to his madness.

A pair of bladed, black chakrams materialized into being before her. Years of patient practice and honed reflexes took hold. Taking only the briefest of moments to judge the distance, Luna pulsed her horn but once, flinging the disks forward.

Two razor-sharp magical blades found two misshapen beastmen. Both of the latter shrieked in pain, leaking tainted blood from vicious cuts into the streets below. And yet they were still flying.

Without hesitation, Luna partially folded her wings and dove downward, leveling off at a point where she could more easily engage. She spread her sabers wide, then turned to intercept the wounded fiends like a descending angel of judgment. The distance rapidly vanished until—

It was then that Luna noticed there was only one of them in sight.

Something hard slammed into her haunches with a crunch of steel, nearly forcing her off-balance.

The gold-toothed stallion had his grafted claws sunk into the segmented plates. The magic disk was deeply embedded in his lower jaw, bisecting it to the throat in a gout of blood with his feral roar.

Luna immediately corkscrewed to throw the stallion off, but he held fast, and started rippingaway at the first plate. Changing tactics, Luna dove downwards towards the buildings, held herself upside down, and slammed the monster between her mailed bulk and a tiled roof. A long skid of pulping meat, blood and shards of clay followed him until he finally fell off the edge of the house, tumbling to the road in a silent heap.

Don’t become complacent, Luna thought. Make sure it’s dead.

A large formation of freed-up pegasi was gathering behind Luna in her advance, supporting those yet to know of the aid.

The Beast-pegasi were in retreat, their remaining number scattering like crows with some getting picked off by a lucky musket shot from the defenders.

“Save the ammunition!” Luna bellowed, and instantly the guns ceased. “Lieutenants, to me!”

In quick order four such stallions came before her, each in the colour and heraldry of their respective forces.

“Names and command?” she asked.

“Verdant Storm, Tenth Air Muskets, Your Majesty!”

“Lemuel, Third Mixed C.Q.!”

“Cinder Smoke, Air Lances!”

“Lieutenant Sallow, Fifth Surveyors!”

Luna glanced between them for but a moment. “The Tenth will cut off the creatures at their ladders; shoot them as they climb. C.Q. regiment, scour the walls for the creatures’ survivors, the whole circumference. Cinder, support the ground advance. The Surveyors will be covered by the Tenth. Rip the ladders from the walls once their weight is lifted. Dismissed!”

The officers took off to their troops, barking orders for reformation and tasking.

“Your Highness!” A carrier pegasus approached, snapping a sharp salute. “A request from Princess Celestia; she desires your presence in the palace immediately. She understands your desire to take action for the common defense, but what she would like to review she feels is of dire importance.”

Luna’s sabres popped into nebulous clouds and dissipated. “I’ll be there. In the meantime, return to your post and await me. I will have my own messages that will need a courier.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________

Ditto worriedly watched Karl Franz’s pacing at one end of the the table in the council hall. Each heel-turn made him flinch as if he’d suddenly lambast him for some failure. Soon enough, though, Franz leaned against the table and pinched his brows.

“Your Highness,” Ditto started, “I understand that my Queen said we could be anywhere, but it would be an overestimation of our capabilities to think we’re everywhere.”

“I know. I don’t overestimate you,” Franz replied. “You can’t just have informants milling about the woods, hoping to stumble upon something, even a besieging force of this size. But why? Why would the Everchosen be leading nothing more than the Beastmen and disappear once he makes himself known?”

“It may have been a ruse,” Celestia said from the far end of the table. She sat still as a statue, her hooves pressed before her lips in contemplation. “His intentions are too grandiose to limit himself to such a small thrust with no daemons or northern warriors. It must have been trickery to scare off the soldiers to salvage Fluttershy.”

“But even after that, Fluttershy jumped the walls,” Shining Armor added. “They weren’t planning on finishing the job.”

Franz let out an aggravated huff. “Sigmar’s blood, is it too much to ask to keep her penned in one place?” he said, more to himself than to the others. “Maybe I should have ordered her purification, after all—”

The bronze-inlaid doors, moulded to figures of millennia past, flew open before Luna as she strode in, levitating her beaked helmet at her side. Her covering was down to the padding which usually went under her armor.

She addressed everyone with the sharp raise of a hoof. “Hail, all. I have just arrived from the frontlines, and I am pleased to report that our honorless, craven foes are in a rout like farm fowls to the sight of a wolf!”

The room was silent, all eyes staring at Luna. She fixed her neck padding uncomfortably. “Is… there a problem? Is there something on me?”

Shining Armor coughed awkwardly. “No, no.”

Luna shrugged. “Well then, Shining Armor, I heard this as I drew near and meant to ask you about it. After the bout between Fluttershy and myself, the entire battle seemed to have moved on. It didn’t take too long. How did you manage it?”

Shining’s eyes were vein-railed, patches of his fur singed, and his mane disheveled. He barely suppressed a yawn.

“After first seeing Fluttershy in the streets again, I started thinking. If she was roused to help the Beastmen, that means Applejack failed to protect her. And if Applejack had either died, or joined them, who’s to say they didn’t also get to Rarity, or Rainbow Dash, or Twilight in all the confusion? So I got furious, rushed the destruction spells, and, well…” He circled his singed face with a hoof. “You know there’s a reason we don’t rush destruction spells.”

“Is Miss Sparkle still in the city?”

“I’m not sure,” Celestia said. “I tried to clear some things up with her, and she... “ Celestia raised a hoof to her cheek. “Took it harshly.”

Franz raised his head a fraction. “What did you tell her?”

“The truth I thought she needed to hear. We had arranged for her quarters to be in Altdorf just fine, but she didn’t believe me when I tried to tell her where she’d come from.”

“You—” Shining recoiled in wide-eyed disbelief. He collected himself rapidly, and his tone became bitingly harsh. “Your Highness,” he seethed, resting his hooves on the table. He appeared to be on the verge of delirious laughter. “In the continuation of my research into combat magic, I’ve found that the Celestial Wizards have a saying: ‘Knowledge is power. Hide it well.’

“I’d always despised withholding information like the state of a country, or what happened to a young filly’s father when he was conscripted, went to war, and didn’t come back. That’s the way of tyrants. But when the information itself is toxic, and the recipients are potentially volatile, I think I would have made an exception.”

Franz sat down and drummed his fingers on the table. “A runner must check on her quarters. If she isn’t there, we must assume the worst.”

“You’re naive as a child, Celestia. I thought you were better than this,” Chrysalis’ voice hissed from Ditto’s throat. His pupils were thin as daggers.

Luna frowned, staring daggers at Ditto. “Do we have the honor of having the Queen of Changelings among us, or do you need to be reminded to hold your tongue?”

“The former,” the commandeered Ditto replied without flinching. “Celestia, you’ve had over a thousand years experience ruling Equestria. I’ve had infiltrators listen to your speeches on occasion. I cannot, for the life of me, conceive of why you would drop such a bombshell on that mare’s already fractured perception.”

Celestia’s expression darkened. “I didn’t want there to be any more secrets. What would you have me do? What if I didn’t tell her, and she just kept living in blissful ignorance, building up more experiences and memories with Shining, Cadence, or Spike? And then somepony, at some point, would speak. Then all which came before she would see as a lie.” She regarded Shining Armor somberly. “And if she ever outlived you, and it was revealed afterward, there would be no making amends.”

Shining’s eyes sank to the table, and he gave a contemplative sigh.

“It was still a mistake to do it so soon,” Franz said. “With all the risk it entails, couldn’t it have at least waited until Ostland and Hochland were resettled? Until we had more machines for the provincial armies?”

“The Terror will always adapt,” Ditto said. “Whatever new trinkets you devise, they’ll think of a way. Ten years or ten thousand, they’ll match firepower with armor, shields with a yet sharper blade, and ingenuity with the creativity of mad beings not restricted by the laws of physics. Their forces evolve, even now. There is no secret their gods do not know, and as they’ve gained the converted minds of geniuses and madmen and ponies alike, they may assimilate the very same weapons.”

“Then we’ll simply meet them,” Luna said, her voice unwavering. “The Empire has withstood the terrors for two thousand five hundred years, rebuilt whole cities from ruins. And for every inch of ground they take from us, we shall bleed them in recompense tenfold. And we still retain a great advantage over them—intelligence. Our alliance still stands?”

‘Ditto’ nodded. “Of course. Intelligence for harvestable bodies for love energy. I haven’t forgotten.”

“Then we’ll always remain one step ahead,” Shining said confidently. “The Inquisition has noticed a sudden rise in traitors caught which came immediately after our agreement; a surge of anonymous tips.” He emphasized the words with air quotes. “Particularly, a rise in busts of Slaaneshi cults, which you’ve probably been kidnapping members from. One of these cults was plotting an assassination on one of my top generals.” He chuckled. “I never did thank you for that.”

Ditto’s mouth curled up in a thin smile. “Then there may be hope for us after all.”

“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. The dust from this latest debacle has yet to settle.” Franz rose and made his way for the door. “I’ll get a runner to check Sparkle’s quarters. If she isn’t there, I am going to declare a state of emergency throughout the entire province. We can’t afford to lose track of her at a time like this.”

The meeting abruptly adjourned, and Luna insisted that Shining see himself to the medical wing to treat his injuries and get some badly needed rest. Ditto was left back in control of his body and slinked away under the guise of a palace aide, unable to hide his uneasy face.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Can I speak with you for a moment, Luna?”

The night princess nearly paused in her steps, not so much at the question but the tone it was couched in.

Luckily, the greater hall outside the conference chambers had at least one balcony overlooking Middenheim proper, and with a curt yet understanding nod Luna turned gracefully to the left and stepped out onto the flagstones. The whisper of the high wind carried up from Middenheim’s plateau greeted her immediately; along with the persistent odor of smoke and ashes. However, Luna found that she didn’t quite mind the latter anymore when she knew part of it was her own doing.

She looked back and up at the intimidating height of the castle, and laughed internally as to what could possibly have possessed the monsters to attack such a bastion.

All of a sudden, however, the wind stopped, as if time itself was frozen. Luna jolted in surprise. No matter how she turned her ears, she couldn’t even detect the slightest whistle of air from outside the translucent golden bubble—

Wait… bubble?

Luna’s eyes expected an unobstructed view of Middenheim from above, but now it was like looking through a lense, and one you could only notice if the light hit it just right. Her gaze moved upward, tracing the faint outline of the dome-shaped partition all around the perimeter of the balcony on which she stood.

“Luna?”

With no competing sounds, the voice from behind her rang as clear as a bell. Luna turned, and beheld Celestia, Princess of the Sun, her sister, staring straight at her with an intensity of equal parts apprehension and… confusion?

“‘Tia?” Luna replied, slowly and carefully. She was still trying to wrap her mind around the shield which enveloped the entire balcony. She knew this spell. It was one that allowed warding of an area against nearly all sound short of the mighty Wolf’s Head Bombard’s roar of fury and death. Casting it successfully without allowing any leaks—not even wind—to pass through required the precision and power that only highly-trained unicorns, and perhaps some elves, could muster.

She knew this couldn’t be because of something on her face. “What is it you wanted to speak to me about, sister?”

Celestia flinched the instant the last word left her mouth, a brief crack in the cold, uncomfortable stare she was still leveling at her. She didn’t respond.

Luna tried again. “‘Tia, please… what troubles you so? Is it what happened with Twilight Sparkle? Are you worrying about her, or nursing feelings of guilt?”

Her sister showed no reaction, simply keeping up the laser-point focus on Luna. Any mortal pony would have to be possessed of a legendary willpower to not shrink away from that wall of intimidation, but Luna was determined not to back down. She stepped forward, and decided to change tactics.

“Are you afeared of the storm that lies ahead, dear sister?”

Another flinch.

“I tell you now, I have just returned from the field of battle right below our hooves, and I have witnessed incredible acts of courage and harmony among our ponies and the humans both. Our enemies fall like the worthless mongrels they are, no match before our joined blades and steeled hearts united in purpose. So it shall be for the Northmen, for the Everchosen, and for Chaos entire, dear sister,” she declared, straightening her posture. “Do not forget that I will stand by your side, no matter what comes, no matter how great the struggle. Harmony yet lives on within us.” She raised a hoof to her chest. “We will have a future, ‘Tia.”

She closed the last few feet from Celestia and nuzzled under her chin comfortingly with one hoof gently hung around her neck. “We must not despair,” she said softly, “for that would be our doom.”

Luna was smiling inwardly. She hoped her sister’s worries were that simple, because then they were something she actually knew how to fight. Something she could meet with passion and poise, to chase away like a malignant nightmare and have it begone.

“It’s you…”

Luna paused mid-cuddle, and lifted her head confusedly at the quiet statement. She never got the chance to ask, though, as Celestia wrapped her free front hoof over her withers and pulled her in close and tight as though she was a lifeboat in the middle of a roiling ocean.

“S-Sister? What…”

“The… The moons,” Celestia stammered out, her eyes smarting with joyful tears. She let go and pointed to the dustily visible orbs which stared down like the mismatched eyes of an astral onlooker. “Don’t you see, Luna? When Mannslieb and Morrslieb were out together before, you turned into the Nightmare.”

Luna stiffened. Her ears perked up sharply as a hound’s, and her eyes widened with sudden realization. “I—”

“But even with both of them up at once now, you’re still here! I thought she might have been playing some kind of cruel trick, and I had to see for myself…”

A smile of relief such as Luna had never seen in centuries began to spread over her sister’s face. Luna watched, barely even blinking, as the carefully-layered masks and defenses her sister maintained every day fell apart.

“You called me ‘sister’...” Celestia continued. “But without spite, or resentment. You… truly cared. Nightmare couldn’t possibly have shown that kind of love… not even to hide herself.” She looked at Luna then, long and hard. Her expression made it seem like an enormous weight had just been lifted from her shoulders. “It’s really… it’s really you…” Fresh tears rose to Celestia’s eyes, and finally her already-flimsy composure began to break down.

All thoughts of the haunting, cat-eyed visage in Luna’s thoughts fled her focus at once. All that mattered right now was her sister. She returned the desperate embrace with all she had, extending both her wings to wrap the shaking alicorn in a feathery blanket.

“Tia… I’m here.”

It was all she needed to say.

Celestia leaned into her chest, sobbing uncontrollably.

“She’s gone... she’s finally gone…”

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

Fluttershy bore her friends with little hindrance, and ran for fully a day until they met the Sea of Claws at the Empire’s northern coast. It was raining, a downpour which softened the clay-ridged beachhead, turned the sand to slush, and made everything beyond a few hundred feet ahead a grey blur. It didn’t seem to bother Fluttershy too much, as she didn’t react to the exposure beyond a short sneer at the sky when it began.

Fluttershy laid with a wing extended to the ground in a giant metal lean-to which the others took refuge under. Each ‘feather’ was easily the breadth of a small boat’s oar. Applejack stayed out in the rain, using it as a shower to wash and scrape off the fungal growths and crusty mold caking her skin. She then coaxed Apple Bloom to come and get cleaned up as best as possible.

Sweetie Belle, Scootaloo, and Rainbow Dash finally had the opportunity to collapse of exhaustion. Where Sweetie rested against Rainbow’s shoulder, the entire left side of the pegasus had turned to stretches of Flamer-flesh, sagging off in smoking folds and idly swishing tentacle-vines like she was half lava flow. She blew puffs of smoke with each snore.

Twilight noticed Rarity’s gaze hadn’t left the sea for some time, absently digging her talons into the sand, and nudged her. “Are you getting worried about them?”

“A bit,” she said, then pressed a finger to her chin. “He’s been out there for a long time.”

“You mean ‘they’?” Twilight replied.

“Hm?”

“You know Pinkie Pie went with Spike, right? ‘They’ve been out there a long time.”

“Oh, um, right. Thank you.”

Twilight smiled knowingly as Rarity returned to her absent-minded view. “You want to talk about it?”

“Talk about what?”

“Well, other than the wistful staring into the distance, I… Not sure how to describe this. I can see something’s really bothering you.” Twilight squinted and leaned closer, to Rarity’s discomfort. “It’s like you're slowly on fire… but purple.”

Rarity’s face soured, and she groaned and sat back, resting her head against Fluttershy with a dull thunk. She knew what Twilight was talking about. Auras. All who sat under the makeshift awning emitted some different color, depending on how they felt. She and Twilight seemed to be the only ones who could see it.

Rarity didn’t know what the different colors meant, except when it came to Fluttershy, who turned the aether a blood-red, angrily-churning mist as it passed through her.

“It doesn’t feel so long ago that he was just a toddler,” Rarity started. “He’s always been such a gentle-drake. He was really worried about my mental state in Middenheim.” She curled her knees up to her chest, and blew out a lengthy sigh.

“I just don’t know. Sometimes when I look at him, I think about that little toddler he used to be, just for a second too long. Uurgh... It feels like I’m falling for a five-year old.”

Twilight suppressed the urge to laugh. “Maybe it’s all those times you were just humoring his crush coming back to bite you.”

Rarity gave Twilight a shove, smiling thinly. “Oh, shush.”

Returning to scan the sea, she could make out Pinkie Pie’s face breaking the water’s surface, which was soon joined by a scaly purple head.

Rarity quietly gasped watching him. The slimy waters gave Spike’s scales a glassy reflectiveness, with the light reflecting off his muscles. The more of him that left the water, Rarity couldn’t help but feel a sense of gigantism about him, features sculpted over many years to create a powerful being whose aura glowed gold to accent his proud stride. In each claw Spike held two fish, and another stuck through on the spines of his tail.

Pinkie Pie waddled up the shore with a fat belly bouncing under her like a water balloon, and ribbons of seaweed making dark-green highlights in her mane. In spite of the weight, she easily kept up with Spike, and even snached the catches out of his claws and gulped them down herself.

“As you can see, our little excursion was a complete failure.” Spike smiled as she crouched under Fluttershy’s wing, sat beside an amused Rarity, and showed a pair of empty claws. He swept his tail forward with the fish still stuck on it, and planted his chin on his fist. “They’re just not biting today, are they, Pinkie Pie?”

Pinkie shook her head as her bulbous stomach lurched into her throat. She bowed her head and threw up a deluge of seawater and a dozen or so large blue and silver-scaled fish, many of which were still twisting and flipping about.

“Nope, not a one,” she gasped.

Rarity made a face at the display. “I think I’ll rinse mine back in the water. I don’t think anypony knows what… fluids you put ou-oua-ah-ACHOO!”

Her shoulders’ wyrdstone crystals shot out like exploding glass. They shattered against Fluttershy’s body with sparking pops, lighting up the shadows and sending everyone ducking. Rarity groaned aloud, pinching her nose. “Sorry, everypony… Oh, Spike, your arm!”

Spike brushed off some shards which were shallowly embedded in his forearm and the back of the claw. “It’s alright, I think. Doesn’t look like any got past the scales. Smarts, though… Pinkie Pie, do you mind cutting up the catch?”

Pinkie was flattened to the ground with chattering teeth while a smoking line of slightly off-color fur ran along her spine. “Sure… Why don’t you get the fire started? Don’t want anypony catching a cold in this weather, ya know?”

“Hah!” Applejack blurted out before she caught herself. She kept smiling, returning to straightening out the pouting Apple Bloom’s mane, and muttered, “A cold… heh.”

Spike blew a fiery breath to ignite the wood. A small table had been fashioned out of bits of scrap metal found stuck to Fluttershy’s barbs and spines. Pinkie bit off the fishes’ heads in quick order, sparing them a slow death out of water, then flayed them with great swiftness of her claws and set three on the slab.

Rainbow Dash coughed at the rush of smoke from the fire’s inception, which stirred her from sleep. She shook herself a little, waking the two fillies up, and her smouldering flamer-flesh partial transformation regressed to normality. The others let her dwell in her grogginess. They’d all had some unpleasant experience catching her taking an on-the-job siesta back at home. Rainbow stared into the fire for a minute or two, letting the warmth wash over her.

“So... now what?” she yawned.

“I think we’re in a good position,” Spike replied. “Fluttershy’s footprints will lead anyone searching for us to the beach, but the tide will wash her prints away every day. They won’t know how close or far behind they are. And with what Pinkie and I caught, it should keep us stocked for a good while.”

Twilight picked a fish up and sank her fangs into it. Her expression and the shape of the wide-mouthed vertebrate both wrinkled at the same rate. She turned and spat into the sand. “Ich… its blood tastes like fish-oil medicine. I think I’ll take my chances hunting in the woods.”

“Ohoho! More for us, then!” Pinkie chirped as she snatched away Twilight’s dried out meal and scarfed it down.

Rainbow glanced between the four before her. “And you really think we can just waltz into the north, take the Elements, and then zap ourselves back to normal?”

Rarity shrugged. “It’s worth a try. We play the part, hope to high heaven they don’t know what the Elements are, and voila, we’re back. Maybe even undo the evil wrought on the northmen as well.”

Rainbow snorted. “That sounds like the biggest day-X machine I’ve ever heard of.”

“Deus ex Machina,” Twilight corrected.

Rainbow waved a forehoof. “Whatever. If the Elements are all it’ll take, then I say we go kick Artichoke’s lights out and get him to hand them over!”

Rarity waved her hand in a so-and-so manner. “Eeeh, provided we even know where he is and get him alone...” Rarity projected an image of an elaborate spired castle, a bastion of thick walls, turreted towers, and little soldiers milling about the defenses. “Archao—”

“Don’t say his name!” Rainbow Dash snapped.

Rarity slapped a hand over her mouth in reflex. Then blinked. “Wait, why not?”

“There might be some spell or something on his name that lets him know where anypony who says it is! I read about it once in Daring Do and the Rod of Stars.”

Rarity gawked in confusion. “That’s not… the stress of maintaining that kind of net over all—”

“Daring nearly got caught by the evil king of Armistan in fifteen minutes.”

“Well then, you-know-who,” she rolled her eyes, “could be in the tallest tower of the most heavily defended fortress in the world for all we know. Not even Fluttershy could rush that.”

Fluttershy turned her head to look back with an amused grin. “Is that a challenge?”

Rarity immediately dispelled her projection. “No, no! Just brainstorming.”

“He was in a private tent right among his soldiers back in Equestria,” Twilight broke in. “A lot of Northman cultures are nomadic, like the Hung or Kurgan, so they might not have castles, but mobile yurts. At the very least, we know he doesn’t have some kind of floating citadel like Cloudsdale. And even if he does have a fortress, well… that just lets us know where he is all the better. There can’t be that many mega-fortresses in the north.”

“You’re starting to talk my language now, Twi,” Rainbow laughed. “But still, are you really sure about this? This is gonna be one hay of a Hail Merry pass. Is this really worth ditching your brother and Cadence?”

Twilight shook her head, but the hesitation before she spoke and wistful staring at the ground said more. “I’m not ‘ditching’ them. I don’t have anything against them; they were duped like I was. Cadence has her own job to do with the Crystal Ponies, but maybe I can try and bring Shining Armor around.”

“How’re you gonna contact him?” Rainbow glanced at Rarity. “Didn’t find any papers? Quills?”

Rarity shrugged again. “I didn’t imagine we would be writing letters, so no. Perhaps if we come across a dwelling we can ‘procure’ some.”

Spike hummed in agreeance after busying himself tending the fire, then noticed Pinkie Pie looming over his shoulder. Strands of syrup-saliva dribbled through her teeth in an uncomfortably close white, yellow, and orange grin. Her eyes seemed utterly fixed on the sizzling fish.

“Do you want the first one?” He guessed.

“M’hm. it looks really... w-wait!”

Everyone stared at the candy-mare’s sudden shout. Pinkie was shaking, her eyes darting between her friends. Her speech came out in a blurb. “I need something to put on it. It has to be right!”

Rainbow blinked. “What? What are you tal—”

Pinkie squirmed as if there were ants biting her flanks. “I’ll be back!” She shot off into the rain, nearly bowling over Applejack and Apple Bloom.

The memory had to be perfect, as if it were the last meal of her life. Pinkie had to commit her Departed to memory in taste if anything, to commemorate him, until the day they’d be reunited. The fish wasn’t enough. It needed to be flavored, spiced. The last time she’d dressed the Doctor up and had him for an ultimate meal, that was just a sloppy warmup.

Pinkie begged her nose not to fail her, to sniff out berries, wild mint, anything at all to put just a little uniqueness into the meal, and she’d savor it forever. But the rain was churning the air, disrupting her senses.

She didn’t keep track of how long she was away, and once she thought on it, considered turning back. The cold of the rain was biting to her bones. They’d be going along the coast for a long time, so there would be more chances at fishing and finding a suitable topping.

But the forest ended before she made a decision, opening to a flat field. Large rocks were everywhere, looking alien for nature, but almost organized and slightly sunken among the grassless mud. Pinkie raised a tongue to the air to test the wind. It was blowing from inland, and all of the boulders’ colored faces pointed the same way. Pinkie recognized fat veins of raw materials in each rock; iron, coal, and aluminum, to name a few.

It was a rock farm. Pinkie smiled as memories of home trickled into her mind.

There had to be a house nearby, then, and soon Pinkie spotted it through the fog. A lonely one-story domicile, out of place among the openness of the field as if it had fallen from the sky in one piece with no rhyme or reason. A couple of windows were glowing yellow with light. There was a fenced-off area beside it, hopefully a garden.

Pinkie moved swiftly, taking no chances despite not immediately seeing any occupants, and stuck to the cover of the larger boulders while closing the distance. She hopped the fence and took inventory of the enclosure. Carrots, cabbages, and onions were planted dominantly with smaller spaces allotted to low-growing fruits.

Closer, her nose was of much better use, and she quickly found a rank-and-file congregation of stickly-branched apple trees, and but a single lemon tree. With deft stretches of her tentacle-tongues, Pinkie picked three of the yellow treasures and gobbled down several apples to tide her over until she got back to her friends.

A distant wet slapping of muddy hooves made her start. Scanning the fog, she spotted the figure of a pony in a raincoat making a dash across the field toward the house. Pinkie dropped the lemons, vaulted over the fence, and took after them like a hound. They were no match in speed, and Pinkie tackled them into a skid in the mud. Wrapping a couple of tongues around their head to block their muffled feminine voice from attracting help, Pinkie dragged them to the side of the house, out of view of the nearest window where another pony’s shadow passed by. Pinkie restricted the mare in a tight bear-hug.

“I don’t wanna hurt you!” Pinkie grunted to the mare. “Please stop moving so much!”

They wiggled a foreleg free and punched Pinkie in the chest. She was stronger than Pinkie would have ever thought, and was starting to break her grip.

Pinkie immediately reeled her silencing tongues in, sucking the mare into her mouth, down to the shoulders. She wrapped several more tongues around the mare to hold her steady, tilted her head back, and pushed them down her throat with her claws, eliciting a muffled shriek. In a few more gulps and forceful downward yanks, the victim’s hind hooves disappeared from the outside world. Pinkie’s esophagus pulsed rhythmically to work the mare into her stomach, ending in a soggy splash and a round bump in her middle.

In waiting for the mare to stop fighting, Pinkie remembered how good it actually felt as she was still shaking with adrenaline. The catch, the flavor, the feeling of an entire pony kicking and thrashing inside her body. Her chest ached wonderfully, the pain flaring up with each heartbeat.

Her stomach jostled and bulged for a couple of minutes before they finally resigned to its confines. She quieted a burp with a hoof against her mouth.

“I told you to stop fighting, but ya didn’t listen, and look where that got you! I didn’t want any trouble. Can you even hear me? Hello?”

Pinkie shook herself around, splashing the mare about her insides.

“Yes! Yes! I can hear you!” the mare replied, her voice muffled and fearful. “Please, stop!”

Pinkie sighed and settled herself back. “Good. Listen, I don’t wanna have to keep you in my tummy too long, so I’m gonna need you to cooperate, m’kay? Just gimme a minute or two, and I’ll let you out.”

There was a bit of wiggling before the prisoner responded, “...Okay.”

It wasn’t long into Pinkie’s pondering before she got distracted by the unique flavors her stomach was starting to absorb from the mare. there was a lot of banana, on account of their raincoat, as well as a sweet, bready taste. Pinkie Pie struggled to put her claw on it.

Pound cake? Coffee cake? No, no, definitely—

The sound of a door opening around the corner broke her musing. A few knocks of hooves on hardwood came out, then a bell rang.

“Marble!” a voice called. “Come on in; breakfast is ready! ...Marble?!”

Pinkie felt her prisoner start kicking again, and screaming. “Blinkie! Get the gun! Get the gu—!”

Pinkie frantically pushed down on her gut, smothering the walls against the mare’s face, despite her screams already being severely dampened by the thickness of her flesh. Pinkie pressed her back against the house, stiff as a board, and held her breath.

“You know how Marble is about the chickens,” Another mare inside the house said. “She’ll come in when she’s ready.”

“I just don’t want her to catch her death of cold out there.”

The door closed again, and Pinkie loosened her grip to let her captive breathe.

“Marble?” Pinkie muttered. “Blinkie?”

She felt the subtle, sporadic movements within her, down to her captive’s very breathing. She was sobbing, no doubt in despair about her failed alarm.

“Hey, your name’s Marble?” Pinkie asked. “Marble Pie?”

The mare’s gasps stilled instantly.

“Marble?” Pinkie asked again and gently squeezed her gurgling belly. “Please. It- It’s me... Pinkamena. I might look like a candied frankenpony, but it’s me!”

Pinkie’s entire torso convulsed, forcing the pony-sized lump back up her throat. She set them in the rain to wash off the thick coating of stomach acids. Pinkie kept a tongue wrapped around one of the mare’s hind legs in case doubt took over.

Marble adjusted her strapped-on hat, and Pinkie Pie squirmed in place as if her gaze itself were painful. She grew quite self-conscious as Marble glared at her body; the swirling eyes, licorice-red mane, candy cane-striped coat, and identical crustaceous claws ending the forelegs.

“I remember that look from when I threw our first party in the silo back home; our first home,” Pinkie said with a thin smile, and lightly tapped her claws together. She regarded Marble’s small gasp with a wide, candy corn-filled grin.

Marble stepped a little closer, shakily raising a hoof to Pinkie’s face. Pinkie rested her cheek in it and giggled. “I don’t bite, sis. Much.”

“Oh my…” Marble whispered. She didn’t resist as Pinkie swept her up, swinging her sister left and right and squealing gaily.

Pinkie suddenly paused as her stomach rumbled like something bubbling up from the depths of a slimy ocean. She dropped Marble, and ran only a short distance before throwing her head down and spilling sick into the ground.

“Pinkie, what’s wrong?” Marble asked.

“I ate you alive!” Pinkie gasped and then swallowed heavily. “I could’a digested you and not even known who you were! And the worst part is, you were delicious—hurgh!” Pinkie gagged again, and the purge renewed itself.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________

“And that’s basically how he got away,” Rarity concluded, and took a bite of the last bits of meat on her fish. “Pinkie’s words, not mine.”

As she expected, she was looking into five dumbfounded faces. The sixth was behind her, blowing a gust of hot air which whipped her mane with each breath. Fluttershy had gotten lonely and turned to meet her friends, extending her wings to form a dome over them. While there was more space, it was dark, save the light of the fire and the burning orbs in Fluttershy’s eyes. Rarity was hiding her uneasiness. She felt like some toy being watched by Fluttershy, feeling the weight of her gaze.

“He blew up his screwdriver in Pinkie’s face and it cut open her body?” Rainbow asked with a scrunched face, and thinking of dissected frogs. “Eeuch... That’d explain the stitches.”

“Maybe it burst like a pulsar?” said Twilight, trying to make sense of it. “The energy could be channeled in specific directions and then it cut in a beam?”

“You know none of us know what a pulsar is,” Rarity scoffed.

Spike raised a claw. “I do. Lived with her. It’s kind of like a star whose energy only goes in two directions.”

“Okay, but seriously,” Rainbow Dash said, “You guys know the Doc could have killed Pinkie with that stunt?”

“He was just done, I suppose. He’s calculating,” Rarity said. “Jumped ship the instant he saw his chance and cast everything else to the wind.”

Spike looked between Twilight and Rarity. “It makes me wonder if he really cared about you guys.”

“He cared,” Fluttershy said, her face actually softening to mere agitation. “Whenever I’d get mad or sad, he’d try to cheer me up. He was always there when I needed somepony to talk to. He was my friend.”

“He has a funny way of showing friendship by blowing up Pinkie Pie and vanishing without so much as a goodbye,” Rarity replied.

There was choler in Fluttershy’s voice. “Pinkie Pie’s the one who scared him off.”

“Guuuuyyys!”

Fluttershy lifted her head, allowing enough of an outside view for her friends to see Pinkie Pie bursting from the treeline with Applejack and Apple Bloom lagging.

The sisters had gone for a walk after cleaning themselves up. Applejack had been especially giddy that after getting the unnatural muck off her hooves, which entailed scraping them raw, her touch lost its lethality. Following Pinkie, her form was much easier on the eyes. The blonde fungal stalks still hung from the cracks in her partially-exposed skull, but she almost looked to be flesh again, sporting vestiges of orange fur and dry, grey skin.

Pinkie Pie was a blur, jumping to the crown of fluttershy’s head in a single bound and shouting, “I got a surprise for you guys!”

Fluttershy snapped a claw up to grab Pinkie from her head, but the mare had already jumped down. Pinkie ran circles around her friends in a pink tornado and didn’t give them a second to respond.

“Let’s go! Let’s go! Let’s go! Follow me!”

She rocketed into the woods again and Applejack groaned in exasperation as she and her sister had just caught up, and made to turn around. Fluttershy swept them both up and put them with the others on her back.

It was just a couple few minutes run before Pinkie stopped Fluttershy at the edge of the forest clearing. She assured her friends she knew the inhabitants of the home.

And Rarity didn’t believe her.

She sat cross-legged, and her body of light departed her body of substance. She followed Pinkie towards the small house on the farm. Rarity’s anxiety became confusion when Pinkie started talking to an ash-grey mare who was waiting for her. Rarity couldn’t see any resemblance between them when it was brought to light that they were sisters. Rarity’s memory of Pinkie’s old bouncy curls and mile-per-minute speech was a perfect contrast to the smaller mare’s tightly bound mane-bun and slow articulation. Rarity returned to her body once Pinkie made to come back.

“She’s coming back,” Rarity said, slowly rising from once motor control returned.

“So what was she doing?” Twilight asked.

“It’s her family! Three of her sisters on the farm.”

“Oh! She told us about them!” Scootaloo exclaimed, getting confident smiles from the Crusaders. “They were all dull and boring all the time, but she eventually threw them their very first party when Rainbow did her first rainboom, and got her cutie mark!”

“But then she said that’s how Equestria was founded,” Sweetie Belle added. “Sooo... I dunno what to think about that.”

Rainbow Dash raised a brow. “Wow. I’m more awesome than I thought! I fixed their family without even trying! Up top, Scoots!”

Their hoof-clop heralded Pinkie’s return. “Okay, Fluttershy, uh, would you mind going around and coming up the path? Gotta keep the field tidy, you know?”

She shrugged. “Fine.”

Pinkie trotted in place and squealed. “Thanks! Everypony else, come on!”

Rarity cast up a magical shield against the rain as they took down a thin row-path across the field while Fluttershy orbited along the treeline.

Pinkie eagerly knocked at the door, and Marble opened it. Behind her, two more mares made quiet gasps. One was pale purple, looking up with mud-brown eyes behind a straight-cut grey mane. The other wore a somewhat dusty blue-green frock, banded around the barrel by a wide black belt. She seemed the least perturbed by the guests, her otherwise disinterested eyes had merely opened a little wider.

Pinkie shot past Marble and swept up her other siblings, planting a kiss on each of their cheeks as if stamping them as her own.

“Girls!” she squealed, smiling fit to split. “Everypony, these are my sisters, Marble, Blinkie, and Maud! And girls, these are my bestest friends in the whole wide world: Twilight, Rarity, Rainbow Dash, Spike, and Applejack!”

“Twilight?” Marble repeated. “You mean... ‘Twilight Sparkle?’ She gave a quick scan toward the purple, bat-winged alicorn, and gasped. “You… you’re the Elements of Harmony, aren’t you?!”

Applejack raised her head high, and crossed her legs with a smile. “Guilty as charged.”

Blinkie giggled and wiggled out of Pinkie’s grip. “Oh goodness, I’ll be right back! Please, everypony, come in! Come in! Out of this weather!”

Spike was first to couch under the doorway, introducing himself to Marble after Pinkie finally set her free. She could only react to a bonafide dragon in her house with a trembling smile and a ‘Luna, preserve me’ under her breath. Rarity and Maud were quickly engaged in a conversation on the earth mare’s wardrobe.

“Me and Apple Bloom’ll stay out here,” Applejack said somberly. “Ain’t sure you’d want us in a closed space.”

“Wait,” Twilight said, coming back to her. “What if I tried this…”

The violet glow of Twilight’s magic encased the Apples. Twilight squinted in focus, settling it to be as transparent as possible in the form of a full-body envelope.

“Can you move?” Twilight asked.

Applejack turned around in place, not appearing hindered by it at all.

“Fits like a glove!” Applebloom chirped happily.

Twilight bowed and motioned into the house like an usher. “Then after you. The quarantine shield I just put over you both should stop any spores or germs from escaping.”

“Woohoo! Alright!” “Wow, thanks, Twi!” The apples sounded off together, trotting in after their friends.

It was then that Blinkie returned with a thick book under one leg. “You’re all the Princesses’ saints! The Lectio Divina says you disappeared in the Fall, but by the gods, you’re alive!”

Rarity’s laugh came out as if she were already hoarse. “Saints? Surely you jest. The Princesses aren’t gods.”

The Pies instantly fell silent. They glanced between each other uneasily, but before any of them could reply, the entire house began to shudder to a heavy beating noise like tremendous stones smashing into the earth nearby rattling several wall fixtures off their mounts.

“Oh, no. Please watch your step,” Rarity said to herself, looking to the ceiling.

“Is that another one of your friends, Pinkie?” Blinkie asked worriedly, to which Pinkie beamed.

“Oh, yeah! That’s Fluttershy! You guys are gonna love her!”

Blinkie ran to the kitchen and caught the teakettle as it juddered off the counter’s edge. With minimal spillage, she exhaled in relief and looked up, finding that the view through the window was replaced by a giant black pit staring right through her with a burning ball for a pupil.

“Hello,” Fluttershy rumbled.

Blinkie was nearly petrified. She slowly backed up, clutching the kettle, right into Pinkie Pie who whispered in her ear, “She doesn’t like it when others are afraid of her. Don’t be shy.”

Pinkie stretched a tongue over to the window and undid the latches, then pushed Blinkie forward again. Blinkie set the kettle on the counter and shakily opened the window. A dozen thoughts were rushing through her head; how Fluttershy was a little bigger than their own house, how easy it might be for her to destroy it—

Blinkie forced herself to focus on the giant’s glowing eye. “Hi,” she said, managing to keep most of the hesitation from her voice.

“What’s your name?”

“Blinkie Pie.”

Fluttershy moved away a little and lined herself up with the window. “Is there some place I can get out of the rain?”

“Um… The barn might have plenty of space? Biggest building on our property.”

“Thanks.”

Fluttershy stomped off then and there. Blinkie watched her titanic legs stamp craters in the mud. Once Fluttershy had passed, she leaned against the counter, trembling and gasping for air.

Pinkie Pie supported her smiling all the while. “That’s gotta be the best anypony new’s reacted to her! You did awesome!”

Blinkie shot her a desperate look. “And how… does everypony else do with her?”

“Screaming, running, shooting her with cannons. But compared to that, you’re great!”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Princesses had deemed it too dangerous for Cadence to stay in the Empire with Middenheim attacked twice with Fluttershy at the fore, and confused reports of the Everchosen himself having led the attack, perching himself on Fluttershy’s shoulder to proclaim his unholy war renewed.

The attack was defeated, though, and without a sign of him since he first arrived. Preparations were made for Cadence to leave for Marienburg the next day. She had a heartful departure from Shining Armor, and had recently crossed the border from Middenland to the Republic of the Wasteland.

Cadence’s procession was well guarded by four columns of forty of the Phoenix Guard. Wrapped in shimmering gold scale and their faces wreathed in fiery brass wings on their helmets, the Crystal Pony detachments of the Guard had the advantage in the sunlight, where their crystalline forms became blinding to so much as look at.

To the rear of the group was the baggage train, carried on the backs of unthinking, long-faced horses. Among the soldiers’ luggage was a treasure trove of parting gifts and trade goods from the towns Cadence had visited.

There was a great emptiness in the carriage. Spike had usually ridden with her as the last wall of muscle and flame in the unlikely event the Guard should fail. As such, the carriage had to be specially built to accommodate his stature. Now she was looking across at an empty bench, and listening to the squeaks and rattles of the coach instead of the dragon’s imaginative stories which he could make up as quick as he could speak. Cadence hoped he made it through the beastman attack in one piece.

She pulled away the veil of a window to look outside at the Guard. Aside from the common regalia, each type of pony had their own equipment custom made. The Earth stallions were encased in heavy armor which made them look more like equine-shaped machines. They sported bladed edges along their legs, spiked guards at every joint, and all bore either unicorn horn-like conical spikes or tulwar-shaped, bullish horns atop each helmet. Their superior strength allowed them to carry all that weight while still maintaining plenty of mobility in combat. The unicorns were superbly trained, each carrying a heavy chakram over their back—a giant circular throwing weapon with rims serrated like the blade of a saw. As backups, they carried a short sword on each foreleg, so that ten unicorns could produce twenty telekinetically-controlled blades at once.

Flanking the encirclement were hedgerows with sinisterly-reaching branches, looking ready to swipe at them, should they suddenly grow brains. The vegetation made it nearly impossible to see beyond ten meters anywhere from the road.

Cadence had heard stories of bandits in the Empire, who honed career thieving to an art, but she had yet to see if such rumors held up.

The carriage slowed to a halt, and Cadence internally cursed that she may have just jinxed it.

A familiar stallion, captain Bolide, casually trotted up after a minute and leaned by the window. The crystal pony’s coat was akin to a dark-purple jade, bearing a single nick in the bridge of his snout. He spoke in Eltharin, the native tongue of Ulthuan.

“Your Highness, we’ve found a tripwire set up; some trap a blind man is evidently not supposed to see. We’ll disable it and keep a wider perimeter.”

His body language was very loose for such news. To Cadence, his undisturbed demeanor and use of Elven language suggested he was trying not to tip off any potential hidden onlookers.

“Good eye, captain,” she replied archly in the same way, affecting an easy smile. “Let’s get moving again as quickly as possible.”

Bolide nodded and turned away with a fake laugh, addressing his troops in an almost conversational tone, as though making orders for a campsite. “Column one, keep rearguard over the train. Two, three, and four, dissolve. Find your corresponding number in the other columns for ten groups of three and fan out twenty paces. Flush them out.”

The formation immediately began to take the new shape. Cadence sat back, took a deep breath, and wondered. How difficult must it be for the Empire to have to patrol every inch of its roads? How many unfortunates fell victim to career criminals?

After less than a minute, a great commotion sprang up all around, accented with guttural shouts and clangs of steel.

Bolide shouted over the noise, “Circle the carriage! Alternate; tight ring!”

The Guard moved swiftly, forming a dense formation around the carriage which left no possibility for the enemy to flank. The unicorns telekinetically spun up their discs, and one launched his into the brush. It shrieked on impact with a thin tree trunk, cleaving through with no loss in momentum and vanished into the greenery. He drew it back a second later, stained red with blood.

The forest immediately sprang to life with roars and battle shouts as dozens of dark elves burst through the hedgerows in black and purple armor and leather padding, some dual-wielding hooked or double-bent swords.

Corsairs, Cadence thought grimly. You’re out of your league, Druchii.

The sunlight produced a dazzling display as it reflected off her guards’ bodies, glaring into the eyes of the attackers and making some of their strikes miss the mark or attempt to block a halberd thrust at the wrong angle. Cadence watched a raider get easily overpowered by an earthen juggernaut, tackled to the ground to have his chest stamped flat under his hooves with a gout of blood spurting from his lips.

The assailants’ luck shattered even further when they tried to encircle Cadence’s carriage through sheer numbers, and the party’s rearguard thundered out of the undergrowth and plowed straight into their flanks. Half a dozen corsairs died instantly under the ruthless charge, and still more were simply thrown to the side as the defenders’ momentum carried through.

The cruelly-sharp swords of the High Elves’ dark cousins were little help against their opponents, as even when they tried to slip a blade past their armor they merely rang uselessly against the crystal ponies’ diamond-hard skin. Pained screams and shouts of dismay mingled with Druchii battle cries, punctuated by the shrill shrieking of unicorn chakrams tearing bloody paths through their ranks.

Cadence thought the attack was futile as the circle was reinforced, and so exited the carriage while preparing her strongest shield spell.

She glanced around at the fruitless bloodshed and wondered. Druchii were smarter than to throw lightly-armored pirates at the elites of Ulthuan. They should have withdrawn the instant they realized their weapons were useless.

It was at that moment that she saw a new figure emerge from the bushes. And Cadence’s mind went reeling in disbelief.

He was tall, slim, armored in deep crimson plates and an under-robe of mail. He carried a tremendous sword which looked to be too large for his gaunt arms, but he brought it to the ready deftly as his looks betrayed his strength. He strode with no rush, in calculated steps, silent and hollow-eyed behind a grinning grille-mouthed skull mask.

It all happened at once. Calmly, as if reaping a harvest of wheat, he brought the weapon sweeping down on the one of the earth stallions. The wicked blade shattered both his forelegs with contemptuous ease, a burst of emerald shards trailing the blade on its follow-through. The steel sang as it vibrated like a tuning fork, harmonizing with the stallion’s scream of pain and teardrop rain of the shards of his limbs.

Cadence immediately leapt into action. A pair of razor-sharp shuriken panged uselessly off her crystalline exterior as she slammed the carriage door shut behind her. Her horn flashed with magic, and a glistening blue umbrella bloomed around the guards’ formation, forming a transparent partition between them and the enemy. The raiders immediately halted their attack upon noticing the descending curtain.

The Princess carefully watched the pale, panting faces of the corsairs, their cursing at the shield, and the unmoving, silent patience of the broadsword-wielding Executioner. The latter brought his weapon to a resting position, the blade tip down in the soil with his hands resting on the pommel. It was as though this was all some kind of game, and he was just waiting his turn.

Cadence’s eyes flashed about desperately. Something was wrong. The wounded stallion had been safely brought back behind the formation, a wall of alicorn magic separated the parties from one another, but—

“Incoming!”

Her head snapped in the the direction of the alarm. One of the raiders made it under the shield before it closed, leaping into the formation and taking the full brunt of three halberds sticking into him without even slowing down.

He was different from the others. Buck naked and heavily tattooed with runes of the Druchii, he was pale as a spirit and nothing but skin and bones. Only one marking was easily legible on his upper arm: an image of a bloody hand gripping a spiked iron crown with dual chevrons down a small face plate.

Kaela Mensha Khaine.

The jumper flashed Cadence a blood-soaked smile before the large, burning barrel harnessed to his back exploded.

The air departed, sucking the breath out of her as it bloomed away from a thundering fireball—condensed neatly into the tight quarters of the shimmering blue shield. The pressure sent shockwaves of pain through the princess, straining the bonds of her form. The Guard was thrown back, several getting swallowed up in the merciless flames. One smashed into Cadence, toppling them both into the dusty dirt. The carriage launched onto its front wheels, listed, and crashed onto the Princess.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

“Okay…” Spike tapped a pencil against his chin, staring alongside Rarity and Twilight at a map of the Old World.

Maud had kept a copy after her obtaining a degree in geology from the University of Salzenmund. The sheet was heavily marked and weathered from years of age and note-taking. Most of the notes seemed to involve the mineral makeup and locations of particularly large boulders or abandoned mines.

“We can head for Wilhelmskoog, get a boat, and sail across the Sea of Claws, cut through Norsca, and make the final jump to the wastes. Or the all-land route through Kislev, Troll territory, then it’s across the mountains.”

“And both ways we’ll freeze our flanks off,” Rarity murmured. She idly tapped a finger on the squat-legged wooden table in thought. “I think I remember Fluttershy being able to survive underwater. She probably won’t need a boat; not that we could find one big enough, anyway.”

“But nopony can walk a straight line without sensory input,” Twilight cut in. “She won’t be able to see or hear down there. She could end up veering off into open ocean, or walking in gigantic circles.”

“What if I guided her myself? I could probably give my soul some visibility and keep her on track.”

“I doubt any of us have experience navigating on the water, though. And I never made it a point to learn.” Spike shook his head in resignation. “The fastest way, which I think is most dangerous, would be going through Kislev, Troll country, then the eastern Norscan mountains. It’s dominated by dwarfs and griffons, so we might need to double-time it through there. Then it’s across the Frozen Sea. Not sure if it’ll support Fluttershy’s weight or not, though.”

Rarity grunted in frustration, and pinched her brow. It was always one thing or another with Fluttershy. She might be able to smash entire legions of undead like it was nothing, and chip any trees they might be hiding behind into sawdust, but forget so much as getting her through a door.

She couldn’t help but feel sorry for the poor mare, though, what with not even being able to get inside when it rained or even put back whatever she knocked down without leaving a claw mark the size of a bear.

“Why couldn’t she be Big Macintosh’s size and not two stories tall?” she groaned.

“Yeah, that’d be a whole lot easier,” Spike nodded. “That reminds me—where did Rainbow Dash say she was going to take her again?”

“Back to the coast to help her blow off steam,” Twilight replied. “If there isn’t anything for her to smash, I’m not sure how Rainbow Dash could help.”

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Pinkie Pie never did understand why Rainbow Dash said that her sister Maud never sounded happy and always spoke in some dull monotone. Maud had practically been bursting at the seams with excitement ever since she found them. She was just really, really good at not exploding from it all, that was it. Not even Pinkie could hold everything in sometimes.

“Looks like you’ve all gotten the hang of this,” Maud said from her spot on Pinkie’s back.

The rain had passed maybe hour ago, so Pinkie had taken her sister up into the trees on her back to watch her friends. Rainbow Dash had gone outside to experiment with fanciful forms. And she was really good at it, too! From minotaur, to elephant, to flying spaghetti monster, it didn’t look like anything Dash could imagine was out of her reach. Except maybe cupcakes. Pinkie Pie doubted she could become one of those. A shame, too… she kinda wondered what that would tas—

Pinkie shook herself like a maraca to clear out the bad thoughts. This caused the tree branch she was straddling like a coiled snake to bob up and down in protest, sending a few wet leaves fluttering to the ground.

“Mm hmm!” She nodded at Maud’s assessment. “All these weird poky limbs I’ve got now were a bit of a doozy to handle for a while, but… oh, you’re comfy, right?”

“Snug as a bug,” Maud replied calmly. Pinkie’s tentacles were wrapped over her back legs and torso, holding her in place like an organic seatbelt, yet allowing her shining expression of happiness to peek out just to the side of Pinkie’s head.

“Maybe she could turn into a rock.”

Pinkie giggled at the thought of Rainbow Dash as a nice big geode full of shiny, shiny quartz. “Mayyy-be… She does like to nap a lot, and she wouldn’t have to move if— Oh! Oh! She’s trying something else!”

Pinkie stared at Rainbow’s protean, shifting form, a palette of swirling colors like gallons of different paints being mixed together. “Hmmm…” she muttered, narrowing her eyes to a squint. A massive, metallic form began to take shape from the mass. “Hmmmm…”

A sudden gurgle in Pinkie’s gut distracted her. The funny feeling spread out from her stomach throughout her body, tingling softly in her limbs. She shivered on the branch, watching a bushel of leaves swish at its end.

Reaching over with her tongues, she broke off the branch and practically inhaled it and its foliage. Her body rumbled in acceptance of its momentary appeasement.

“Oooooh!” she exclaimed, seeing Rainbow’s transformative state collapsing on itself. She then pulled a pair of candy-cane sunglasses from nowhere and slipped them over her boggly eyes. “This is gonna be guuuuud!”

Rainbow practically exploded from the shifting primordial mass at once, slamming four legs as shiny as chrome half a foot deep into the wet sand around her. She towered almost as high as Pinkie’s tree (which was thankfully a safe distance off), bristling with steel spikes all over her back like a bed of giant nails. She lifted her head high, the motion causing a consistent churning of metal on metal, and leveled two cerise-red eyes the size of cannonballs at Fluttershy with a defiant smirk.

“All systems… GO!” Rainbow proclaimed, raising a foreleg into the air in a triumphant pose.

And then Fluttershy slammed straight into her like a hundred-ton steel avalanche.

The tremendous force of the crash echoed outward in a deafening shockwave. Caught off-guard, Rainbow was immediately forced into a crouch, her armored hind legs gouging deep trenches into the turf.

Fluttershy’s booming laugh was almost as loud as the screech from the bodies of the two iron titans locking together. She gained greater leverage over Rainbow and toppled her backward. Rainbow crashed down hard, throwing up a geyser of sand into the air.

“Gaah! What the hay, Fluttershy?!”

Her friend giggled, looming over Rainbow triumphantly. “We’re here to have fun, right? I thought you were all about surprises.”

Rainbow rolled her eyes with a reluctant smirk. “Yeah, got me there. Just let me…”

Rainbow rocked herself like a turtle, grunting and trying to twist her legs around. After a bout of fruitless effort, she looked cringingly to Fluttershy.

“Help me up?”

Fluttershy’s laugh roared out, terribly loud and hoarse, augmented by the fluttering bellows-lungs behind the sizable hole in her chest.

She rolled Rainbow onto her side, and she got up from there.

“Got enough outta that show?” Rainbow sneered playfully.

Fluttershy nodded, still sputtering out the last playful sniggers.

“Right. First, let’s see what you got.” Rainbow reared up on her hind legs, the limbs locking and shifting for easy counterbalance. She raised her balled-up claws before her face in a guard. “Gimme a punch.”

Fluttershy copied the stance, grinning, and raised a fist. Rainbow shot a claw forth, grabbing hers by the wrist. She made a mock punch wit the other, stopping just before Fluttershy’s muzzle.

”Don’t wind up. It gives too much warning.”

Rainbow released her grip, and Fluttershy followed through in a hammer blow, creating a starburst of sparks between her fist and Rainbow’s cheek. Rainbow caught her own fall, propping up on one leg and manually rolling her jaw with the other.

“What’s wrong, Rainbow Dash?” Fluttershy jeered. “You said to give no warning!”

Fluttershy stopped smiling when Rainbow made a pained groan. “Oh, you’re really hurt? I thought you could take that like I could.”

“I don’t even know,” Rainbow grunted.

Fluttershy lowered her head to get a better look at the possible injury. In that moment, Rainbow Dash lunged headfirst into Fluttershy’s chest, hugging her by the middle and laughing as she slammed her friend down into the surf.

“This is great,” Maud said. “I never would have imagined I’d see anything like this in real life.”

“Me neither. I never told the others, but out of all the things Fluttershy could have turned into, I think this is totally the most awesome.”

The spar between the giants was like two dancers of opposite styles trying to meet in the same tune. Rainbow struck rapidly, keeping Fluttershy on the backfoot, and favoring precision and knowing where to block and jab. Fluttershy on the other hand used her whole body as a weapon, shoulder tackling and making broad sweeping attacks to bring the full momentum of her tonnage to smash aside Rainbow’s blows.

“It’s so surreal,” Maud said. “Like thinking I would ever see you again.”

Pinkie nuzzled at Maud’s cheek. “Hey, you think after this, we could make rock candy necklaces afterward, like old times?”

Maud looked back at Pinkie. The faintest hint of a smile curled the edges of her mouth. “Sure.”

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Those were the only two ways. Norsca, or Troll country. The oversea route was clearly out, as even if Fluttershy could follow them properly underwater, they would have no way of knowing if she’d walk into a trench and get stuck, or if the immense depth pressure would finally be too much for even her immense body to handle. Bailing her out in the former case would take an enormous effort, and the latter was simply too big of a risk.

Spike and Twilight continued to pore over the map for any alternatives, up to and including the outlandish, such as Rainbow turning into a full-grown dragon and flying them all the way to the North.

Rarity, however, had a better idea knocking around in her head.

“Spike, what do you think about me using magic to find another way?”

Spike turned her a curious look. “What do you mean by that?”

The sorcerer twiddled her skeletal thumbs. “I mean, I could perhaps… If I were to use the Warp to see further than this piece of paper can tell us, then...” she left the rest hanging.

Spike sat back, sighing as he stared half-heartedly at Rarity for nearly a minute. He had the look about him of someone who knew exactly what was happening. “Do you know what creatures live in the Empyrean?”

Rarity counted on her fingers, “The Chaos gods, their daemons, uhh...”

“That’s just in the Realm of Chaos, which is only part of the Warp. Enslavers, Spectres, Furies, and Khymeras literally made of the stuff of nightmares—as a start—inhabit the rest. And where there’s one, there’s usually hundreds more just waiting around the next corner. And I say ‘corner’ very metaphorically, because even the terrain—if there even is any—could just decide it doesn’t like you and disappear right out from under your feet.” He regarded her gravely. “What’s the longest time you’ve been outside your body?”

“Um… Fifteen minutes?”

Spike sucked on his teeth. “I could end it right there, but… Have you ever tried to see the Warp before?”

“No,” Rarity sighed. Her face scrunched hard and she folded her legs upon the sofa.

Twilight rolled up the map, looking at her worriedly. “You’re actually going to try?”

“I’d have to start at some point. I’ll just take a peek—”

Spike’s claw landed heavy on her shoulder with a firm grip. “Trust nothing. Nothing you see, nothing that approaches you. Sorcerers’ souls have a strong presence in the Warp, so there will be entities after yours. Got it?”

The sudden cold look Spike gave Rarity sent a chill up her spine. She nodded in assent, and Spike pulled back. Twilight was wringing her hooves.

“Are you wondering if you could come with me, Twilight?” Rarity asked.

“Um, yeah. Just also thinking whether or not I’d be able to control myself because, well… I’m a daemon, sitting next to a sorcerer's soul, as Spike just said.”

Rarity suddenly became very aware of the display of vampiric dentistry in Twilight’s awkward frown. “The only times you’ve lost control were when you were blood-starved,” she pointed out. “Other than that, you haven’t gone crazy at the drop of a hat. And don’t you worry, Spike. Just a peek around.”

Spike sat back, working a claw over his mouth in contemplation. “Go on.”

Spike and Twilight went outside. Best for Rarity to keep a calm concentration without waiting, expecting onlookers.

Rarity sat up straight and controlled her breath. The feeling of a million tiny pinpricks buzzed in her brain as usual in her more complex conjurings. Her flesh grew cold, and she took her first shallow steps into the empyrean. Her soul slipped out of its corporeal vessel and took the subconscious pipeline. What felt like midway through, gravity reversed, and she was falling into a blackness, unceremoniously crashing on her back among a million brushing sensations.

Her head pounded, and she arched her bluntly shocked back off the ground, mouthing a silent scream. A nauseating rush of vertigo persisted as she leaned herself up.

She looked around, taking in a vast grassy plain, glistening with early-morning dew as gently as nighttime stars under the purple and red-brushed dawning sky. The wind pressed her with warm waves, carrying the scent of the plain, some distant wildflowers in bloom. In the distance was a series of jiggling dots, which upon closer inspection revealed themselves to be some sort of grizzly-looking six-legged buffalo, dipping their heads down to the grass.

Rarity held her position as calmly as possible until the sick feeling in her being finally abated. Replacing it, however, was a powerful thirst, as though she’d just run several miles. The rough, sandpapery sensation in her dry mouth proved to be immensely distracting, but she didn’t let her focus slip for even a second. Keeping her aura one of placid calm was imperative to not let her body of light flare up as a beacon for hungry warp-beasts.

She was rewarded for her patience by the faint sound of running water, coming from beyond the pine needle-strewn treeline of a very thick wood not too far away.

Heading for the trees, Rarity kept double-taking on the innocent-looking bison creatures. Spike’s warning still echoed through her mind.

Trust nothing.

Still, if it was an illusion, it was a beautiful one. She let her hands brush against the tall grass as she walked. How majestic must the real Empyrean be if all this was to simply be comprehensible to her smaller mind?

She looked up from the glistening plain, finding, many miles away, a great, snow-capped mountain. Its summit billowed a leaning column of smoke and ran rivulets of lava down its black slopes.

Rarity paused. That was certainly a change worthy of note. Questioning the illusion probably meant breaking it, though, and so she turned her focus back on the forest.

Eerily, she found nothing living under the branches, and absolutely no sounds—not even insects—came forth from within. It was as though nature itself had declared the area a ghost town… or it was like a new construction still devoid of tenants.

It wasn’t long before she came upon the stream and its shimmering clear waters. Immediately she stopped, carefully scanning the banks of the water for anything suspicious. Everything seemed okay. The plants here looked little different from each other, just another old growth forest as one might find in abundance on the northern border of the Empire.

Everything looks benign enough… but…

Rarity bent down, rubbing a single bony finger against the wet sandbank, and tentatively touched it to her lips.

Two seconds. Five. Ten.

Nothing.

She sighed out in relief. At least she could try a sip; better that than deal with this thirst that left her throat scratchy and consumed her concentration. Rarity knelt fully on the bank of the stream, scooped up a cold handful, and slurped a bit into her mouth—

A hellish chemical burn coursed across her tongue, striking her throat like a hot branding iron. She screamed and shot to her feet, throwing down the sticky wad of molten slag the water had become.

It was then she saw that the calm stream had changed into a rushing river of ash and red-brown mud. A multitude of corpses of men and stallions clogged its width, being swallowed up and resurfacing at the whim of the surging rapids.

Rarity hacked her own blood into the mess, each cough setting her chest pounding. Her voice was lost. Whipping fire blinded her in a multi-hued cacophony of color, giving way to a barrenness of a plain coated in ash and littered bones of humans and the tusks and skulls of beastmen—or daemons. Fat flakes of flame rained from the lightning-stabbed, blackened sky among buffeting gusts of wind.

Things, as far as Rarity could see through her teary, stinging eyes, things were killing each other with every kind of weapon conceivable. The noise; a million voices screaming impossible pitches, the screeching grind of metal and thunder. Her ears didn’t ring, didn’t give the relief of deafness from the cacophony.

One of the creatures charged Rarity, a cloven-hooved being with no skin but bloody red muscle and a flaming two-handed axe in its claws. Its yellow, serpentine eyes gleamed with murderous intent.

Bloodletter! Rarity’s dazed mind screamed in terror. One of Khorne’s own servants, and among the most deadly purveyors of carnage and death. A will that knew only bloodshed.

The daemon shrieked in a beastial frenzy, leaping with its cruel weapon held high over its head. Rarity raised a hand in a futile attempt to block.

But the strike never came, as the thing was suddenly vaporized by a blinding blast of white lightning, followed by a tremendous, near-deafening thunderclap that left Rarity’s ears ringing. Nothing but ashes remained of the bloodletter, so fine they flittered away like dust on the wind.

Terrified of the mad battlefield, Rarity tried to crawl away along the porous, rocky ground. She didn’t make it far before something seized the back of her neck in a crushing vise grip, jerking her into the air.

“Just in time,” chuckled a feminine voice. A great skeletal hand spun Rarity around as if some being she couldn’t see were examining her.

“Wow. It’s so small,” another, softer voice giggled.

The hand twisted Rarity about, again, and again. She stared, but saw nothing but an obscured, off-white blur. The ‘head’ of the thing seemed to shake as she watched. “Look at you… so weak. This is not your place, or your time. Go back, before you ruin this.”

The claw tightened its grip, and Rarity’s neck snapped under the force.

___________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Applejack circled one of the Pies’ apple trees appraisingly. She scanned up and down the trunk, knocked at the roots, and picked up the freshest-looking apple that had fallen off. She took a bite, chewed thoroughly, and the wad of chyme fell out through a hole in her neck.

“Golden Russets ain’t supposed to be this soft,” she said, turning to Blinkie who was up a ladder against the neighboring tree, picking and dropping the fruit into a wicker basket.

“Really?” Blinkie asked.

“Sure as the sun is bright. Take it from a veteran apple farmer. Looky here.” Applejack stood before a criss-crossing of roots between the trees. “Them roots are already startin’ to strangle each other. Spread ‘em out more and they’ll get all the nutrients they’ll need without invadin’ each other’s space.”

The Pie sister stepped down, regarding the trees skeptically. “Well, we don’t exactly have that much space in this patch… already put up the fence and all, y’know.”

“Hmm… I’m sure you could plant ‘em past the fence. Anything that can threaten your trees’ll think no problem of it. Vampire fruit bats, apple maggots, they just go right up.”

Blinkie hummed thoughtfully. “It’s either going to be backbreaking work, or really expensive to move four or five full-grown trees, roots and all, though.”

“Yeah, that’s true...” Applejack scratched at her chin, and caught a glimpse of the Pie family’s barn. A smile slowly spread over her crust-caked face. “Unless…”

Fluttershy dug her claws deep into the ground on either side of the last tree, and tore it straight out like pulling up a weed. The awesome feat barely seemed to faze the metal powerhouse. She hauled the huge tree well over the fence, and placed it roots-down in a pre-prepared hole she’d dug out with her claws. Compared to digging trenches around Middenheim, this was a cinch.

“Ya know, this is the first time I’ve seen ‘er smile in a long, long time,” Applejack remarked.

Blinkie, who up to this point had been staring fish-mouthed at the whole scene, finally shook her head. “Jeez… I’d hate to see what happens when she’s having a bad day.”

Applejack nodded sagely. “You really don’t wanna know.” Raising a hoof, she waved to her friend. “Thank ya kindly, Fluttershy!”

The giant chuckled good-naturedly. Doing something constructive for her friends seemed to liven up her mood considerably. Before she could respond, Rainbow Dash climbed out of the tangle of iron chains that formed her mane.

“Finally!” she breathed out in exaggerated impatience. Rainbow leaned down from Fluttershy’s forehead, peering upside-down into her eyes. “Now let’s get a move on to the beach. We’re gonna have some fun, you and I!”

“Oh… Oh!” Fluttershy beamed in comprehension. “I almost forgot. Are you… um… sure you can really turn into… that?”

“What, are you kidding? If I can turn into Arky-con and get his voice down in one go, that won’t be a problem.” Rainbow sniggered. “You shoulda seen the looks on their faces back in Middenheim. Priceless!”

“Really...?” Fluttershy queried, drawing the word out in interest. She began stomping away towards the property’s main path, listening intently “What’d you say to them, exactly?”

“Oh, I was all like, ”Cower before me, humans!” And I’m waving the sword around, like, “The Storm of Chaos has arrived! Your end is…””

As their voices faded into the distance, Applejack and Blinkie took the time to review Fluttershy’s handiwork. The soil was packed down well enough; a few more rainy days and it would be worn flat. Blinkie found herself walking into one of Fluttershy’s large claw prints.

“So if that’s one of the first times, she must be a hoofful the rest of the time,” she noted.

“Oh!” Applejack threw a hoof to the air in an exasperated laugh. “Yeah. It’s hard keepin’ on her good side, since she gets angry at darn-near anything. She’ll even get mad if she thinks you think she’s already mad. So, you’d be right; she’s already mad!”

Blinkie chuckled. “And then what about Pinkamena? Marble told me about their run-in where she ate her whole? Does that… happen often?”

“Oh, about that. She’ll usually keep herself full on anything, whole world’s a great big buffet ta her; wood, dirt, rocks, leaves… people...“

Silence hung between them for several seconds. Applejack absently kicked a rock aside.

“But, ya know, she tries not to let it get to that point, ‘specially after Rarity started gettin’ involved in her diet fer… I really don’t know why. But sometimes I do wonder, after she’s stuffed herself silly, and its gone in an hour, ‘where does it all go?’”

Applejack took one last glance at Fluttershy before she disappeared into the treeline. She seemed oblivious, barely missing stepping on a slouching man.

She did a double-take. Wait…

A figure stood just on the edge of the treeline, facing in their direction. Applejack couldn’t quite make him out over the distance.

“Hey, were y’all expecting somepony?” she asked uneasily.

“No. We don’t get many visitors,” Blinkie replied. “Do you see somepony?”

Applejack pointed him out. “Right out there. Clear as day. He’s just standin’ there. Don’t think he’s friendly.”

Blinkie squinted in the same direction. Her face turned grim. “I’ll get our rifle.”

Applejack headed up to the stranger while Blinkie went to the house. The closer Applejack got, the stranger he looked. He only had one eye, dessicated arms, and ragged, muddy clothes.

“Hey! Who are you, and what’re ya doi’n… here…”

His jaw dropped slackly, letting a small swarm of writhing black roaches spill out onto the ground. His cracked lips curled into a smile. “Hello, child.”

Applejack craned her head back, refusing to break eye contact with the rotten man. “Blinkie! Ya almost found it?!”

A reply came back faintly from the house. “Got it!”

“I don’t want her to think you mad,” he groaned. “She cannot see me. Besides,” He casually swiped his hand at the nearest tree. The limb passed straight through the trunk like an incorporeal specter.

“I cannot harm her.”

Before Applejack could respond to the display, Blinkie returned at a brisk trot, carrying a short but thick-looking rifle attached to her right foreleg.

Applejack blinked. She was used to seeing guns that the humans used by now, but this one didn’t have a buttstock. The trigger mechanism, rather than sitting on the bottom of the rifle at hand level as she remembered, instead sat on top of the metal frame, with a leather strap wrapped around it and feeding back into the wooden body of the gun, making it look more like a crossbow.

“Right, where is he?” Blinkie asked, scanning the woods. She was standing no more than ten feet from the phantasmal zombie.

Applejack did another double-take. The figure raised a rotting, four-fingered hand, waving it at the Pie sister in a greeting gesture. Its head turned towards Applejack, smirking to display rows of misshapen black teeth.

She stammered out, “I, uh… scared him off! Yep! Took one look at me and high-tailed it faster than a snake spottin’ a mongoose!”

Blinkie made a thoughtful ‘hmmm’. She raised her gun-bearing foreleg toward the woods, then tilted her head slightly to sight down the barrel. Moments later, Blinkie turned her fetlock in a sharp downward twist.

The rifle fired with a crackling peal, causing several small birds to leap from the trees in fright. Blinkie turned her fetlock back, which apparently re-cocked the weapon, and then repeated the action three times more.

“There. That should keep him scared off.” She turned back to Applejack with the faintest hint of a smirk. “There’s still a lot I’ve got to do before the sun goes down. Mind keeping an eye out if he comes back?”

Applejack glanced at the zombie-thing whose teeth were grinning through a lipless mouth. “Um… Sure.” She double-taked again, glancing at the still-smoking firearm strapped to Blinkie’s leg. “So all ya have to do is turn your hoof? How do ya stop it from goin’ off when you bend down to pick a carrot or something?”

“Heh…” Blinkie gave her a thoughtful look. “You much for long explanations?”

The zombie frowned. “Stall all you like, but your friend can’t wait.”

Applejack ignored him.

“Ok.” Blinkie lifted her foreleg, pointing out a thick leather strap wrapped around the bottom half below the joint. “See this?” she said, then bent the leg at a downward angle. The strap followed her motion, stretching just as easily as a rubber band.

“There’s a switch on the frame—” Blinkie sat down, then used her free foreleg to point out a small slider on the side “—that acts like a catch. Like this, the strap can extend all the way. With the switch off, though, it goes rigid, and I couldn’t bend this leg even if I tried.

“That’s just what helps with aim and recoil, though. The firing mechanism—” she pointed to her fetlock, which was wrapped with a separate strip of leather “—I can just turn on and off with another switch, which covers the gap between the hammer and cartridge with a sheet of brass. Pretty crude, but a decent safety.”

She grimaced for a moment, then chuckled knowingly. “I got tired of all the awkward metal clinks, though, so I opened the thing up and just tied a bit of an old cloth rag to it. Works like a charm, now.”

“Huh.“ Applejack nodded approvingly. “Seems real simple, actually. This come from that Empire place that makes all them fancy cannons? ‘Null’-somethin’?”

“Nah, it’s local,” Blinkie shrugged. “A human gunsmith in Wilhelmskoog was looking for a challenge, so we commissioned him for it. What they’re doing over in Nuln probably led to this, though…” She trailed off, looking at Applejack curiously. “Why? Are you looking to get one, too?”

Applejack couldn’t help but laugh darkly at that. “It’s a nice idea, but…” She glanced down to the crusty fungal growths on her forelegs that still wept a thin trail of fluid. “Ah don’t think mah body would agree with it.”

“Repent your words, my child,” the ghostly zombie chuckled good-naturedly. “You need no device save your own gifts.”

Shut up, Applejack seethed inwardly.

Blinkie, oblivious to the rotting apparition, made a half-turn and glanced back at Applejack. “Well, I’d better get back to work. If he comes around again, let me know, alright?”

The farm pony nodded. “Sure thing, sugarcube.”

Applejack slowly walked along the forest’s edge, watching Blinkie walk into the distance. She then barged up to the zombie who, inexplicably, was now sporting a long white beard, smoking a polished wooden pipe, and his arm was reattached.

“Finally, she’s gone,” he coughed. “She’s disgusting. If she keeps up working like that, she’ll have at least another fifty-seven years in her.”

“Who… are you?”

“Of course, how rude not to say it sooner. Nurgh-leth.” He plucked the pipe from his blistered lips and waved it about fancifully. “Lord of Flies, Plague Lord, the Great Lich, and Father of All; et cetera, et cetera.”

“Nurgh-leth? So yer related to that Nurgle guy, ain’t ya?”

The zombie shrugged and replaced his pipe. “You’re not wrong.”

“I’ll have you know you ain’t in friendly company.” Applejack’s nostrils flared, and she pointed back at the house. “We’ve got a—”

“A dragon, an alicorn, a giant juggernaut, a shapeshifter, an anorexic sorcerer, three fillies, and a binge-eating candy-creature,” he interrupted, ignoring Applejack’s sneer. “I told you I mean no harm. I come to warn you of the sorcerer’s health.”

“Yeah, thanks to the likes ‘a you, she’s a walking sandbag! I can imagine it’d feel crummy!”

“No, no. She’s dealing with magic she doesn’t yet understand, and it will destroy her if you don’t listen.”

He drew a fungus-encrusted cane from nowhere, glistening with secretions and crystalline salt deposits, and headed toward the house.

Applejack paused. He knew so much. Did he even know if she’d follow him?

By the time he was halfway there, she started trotting after.

“I’m pretty sure yer lying,” Applejack deadpanned. She ducked under the sill while Nurgh-leth was conspicuously peeping in.

“Am I now?” he said, stepping aside and pointed the cane to the window. “Take a look for yourself.”

Applejack grunted and leaned over the sill, just in time for the glass to explode in the wake of an eldritch screaming originating from inside. Applejack stumbled back and ducked out of view again.

Nurgh-leth’s dry laughter came like that of a victim of consumption, getting a good look at Applejack’s glass-sliced face. She shot him a vicious glare.

“I know how you can help her.”

Applejack snorted. “Help ‘er? All you wanna do, all I can do, is hurt ponies.”

“Just spit in the tea.”

Applejack cocked her head sideways. “...Pardon?”

The zombie articulated clearly, maggots falling from his jaws. “Spit in the tea. She’ll recoil at first, but down a cup if you do it without her looking. It will soothe her.”

Applejack stifled a laugh, but before she could rebut, the undead went on. “I’ve done much the same for the Glott brothers.” He regarded her confused, yet interested look.

“Fine triplets they are. Their mother would have miscarried them if not for her pleading my aid to undo a miserable little hag’s curse on her. Three healthy and hearty men they grew up to be, all a labor of love that I give freely to those who simply ask.”

“Well... I didn’t ask fer my lot,” Applejack frowned.

“I know, I know.” he nodded solemnly. “Ah, Feyotr and Braeburn, always my most zealous sons.”

“Hey! Braeburn ain’t no son a’ yer’s.”

“Well, I don’t take them. They give themselves to me. They find unity, brotherhood, and their good works proclaim my glory.”

“Glory?!” Applejack’s gaze turned venomous. “Get out of here.”

“Applejack, my child. I only want your happiness.” He reached a bony hand towards her, palm upraised. “You think Braeburn and Macintosh suffer by their flesh, but they only suffer without you, without Apple Bloom—”

“Get out!”

Applejack swung an axe-headed hoof into Nurgh-leth’s head, disintegrating it into a cloud of ancient dust. Swarming insects gushed from its deflated skin, consuming the remains of the body in mere seconds, and then frantically burrowed into the ground.

Applejack grinned at the rout of the bugs. “N’ stay gone.”

“Phew, what stinks?” whispered a voice from the window.

Applejack sprang back up to the sill. “Ya rang?”

Spike started in the middle of retrieving a tea kettle. “Oh, Applejack. I, uh, didn’t know you were there. Were you here the whole time?”

Applejack put on a crooked smile. “What makes you say that?”

“Your face is full of broken glass,” he deadpanned.

“Oh! Um…” the farm pony sighed. “Alright, fine, I was watching. I’m just worried about Rares, that’s all.”

Spike sighed, glancing back inside with a solemn expression. “Yeah… she’s not doing too well, as you can probably imagine. She went literally ice cold in seconds. Plus, there’s no wood in the fireplace, and no time to pile some in. And…” He paused, cringing. “Ah, damn, the pot’s gone cold.”

Spike set the pot down, then rubbed his claws together and puffed a breath of verdant flames onto them. Even with his talons glowing with heat, Spike didn’t even flinch. He grasped the heavy metal pot, letting the heat carry through to boil the liquid within.

Applejack absently pulled a shard of glass out of her chest, then stabbed it into her neck to join another three pieces until she could find a place to dispose of them. “If yer in a hurry, I won’t keep ya. Give Rarity my best.”

Spike nodded quickly, then turned to withdraw into the house. “I will.”

Applejack mused on his haste, how he was always willing claw and foot to help Rarity back in Ponyville. She glanced on the kitchen counter just inside, where small spots of fungal growths were rapidly sprouting. They all formed a ring around where the teapot had been.

She blinked uneasily.

Some a’ that couldn’t have gotten in the pot, could it?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________

Night had fallen, and Pinkie Pie was remorseful that everyone was so separated across the property during dinner and afterward. Fluttershy was given shelter in the Pie sisters’ barn with Twilight to keep her company in their sleepless nights. Spike was dutifully occupied tending to Rarity, with her sputtering gibberish and inability to sit still even for a moment. Applejack and Apple Bloom couldn’t even enter the house, and the three mortal sisters simply had apprehensions of Sweetie Belle’s fiery disposition. In the end it was only Rainbow Dash, Scootaloo, and the Pies around the table.

Rainbow Dash took up most of the conversation, ever the glory hound, with stories of her exploits from Ponyville and answers to all the questions the Pies had about her captivity in Cloudsdale. They were particularly interested in the city itself.

Rainbow Dash felt it a bit cringe-worthy that they referred to it as a ‘holy’ city. It was Rainbow’s old home, and she took pride in it, no doubt, but it had certainly become a theocracy. That its citizens lived as if it were one city-sized church made Rainbow sick. As far into listening to current events in Equestria she went, she knew Celestia and Luna to be completely secular in how the population looked up to her.

But now, the church was the State.

The Pie sisters took turns relating their transition into Imperial society, finding a home, sending Maud to complete her education, and how her skills helped improve resource output. The arms factories in Norden paid heftily and ate up all the coal and iron they grew, which spurred digging the farm out of debt.

The mood took a turn for the worse when Pinkie Pie asked where their parents were. Their mother had succumbed to illness three years prior, and their ‘Papa’ had been conscripted into the army. Since the Adversary’s last invasion, Nordland was desperate for troops to stem the tide of the chaos Ostland had fallen to. Pinkie practiced the greatest restraint in not devouring the whole table to drown her grief, but offered to polish off any refuse and scraps after dinner.

The Pies would end up missing two plates and several pieces of silverware.

Rarity had soon after either fallen asleep or passed out. Spike and Pinkie couldn’t tell. Spike departed to try to put together a new window to replace the broken one, and Pinkie Pie assumed a watch over Rarity.

Pinkie laid with Rarity on the couch, the candy-mare sprawled with her head on Rarity’s lap. Her friend was damp in sweat and cold as the unused side of a pillow. Her lips silently uttered words Pinkie couldn't read with sporadic twitches and scrunching her face in terror or a scowl. Rarity seemed well under control, at least for the time being, and if she got distressed, Pinkie would be right beside her.

She shut her eyes to at least sleep off the boredom of the night, and not look at what she could see her mother as having been.

“Pinkie… Pie.”

Pinkie launched upright, catching Rarity’s barely-open eyes. “Oh! You’re awake!”

“Put your head back. Put your head back,” Rarity moaned.

“Oh… um, okay.”

Rarity cradled Pinkie’s head against her chest for the abundant body heat and sleepily scanned over the pink and white-striped body connected to it with a hand stroking the length of her neck.

“I’m kind of jealous, Pinkie. If I were marked by Slaanesh, my mind could flow free. Oh, what I could create with such a blessing.”

Pinkie wasn’t listening. She rumbled a steady purr, and one of her legs kicked like a dog as Rarity’s hand moved its massage to her middle, and plucked at the stitches criss-crossing up the center.

“And this... this bottomless pit you’ve got here. Eat as much as you like and never gain a pound. Oh, you torment me.”

Rarity retrieved her hand, and wiped a buildup of frost off her shoulder. She shivered. “Could I… go inside?”

“You’re already inside,” Pinkie said groggily. “Ceiling's right up there.”

Rarity rested her hand on Pinkie’s belly. “No. In here.”

Pinkie’s gut made a low groan at the request. She felt a tension along the stitches as her middle strained to open up. “O-Oh, I… I don’t think I’m done with dinner yet, and besides, I Pinkie Promised I wouldn’t eat—”

“I’ll call it off, just for tonight, eh?” Rarity murmured, her eyes flickering different shades of blue and green. “I’m just so cold.”

Pinkie swallowed excess drool that was already building up. “Really? B-but for how long? I don’t wanna make a mess of you.”

“Why do you think you couldn't absorb Twilight before?”

Pinkie shrugged.

“Because she doesn’t truly have ‘flesh’ anymore. Her origins are quite peculiar.” Rarity sharpened one of her fingers and pricked her palm and let fall a trickle of sand. “And me? Heh... Skin and blood left me some time ago.”

Pinkie sat up. Her stomach was already growling impatiently in anticipation for dessert. “Um… You’re really, really sure about this?”

“If what happened to Twilight is anything to go by.” Rarity wiggled her toes. “Feet first?”

Pinkie immediately scurried off the couch and raised Rarity’s sharp talons up. “So just tell me if you start feeling itchy, because that means I’m starting to melt you down, okay?”

Getting only a grunt of affirmation in return, Pinkie let her mouth hang open for several black tongues to sweep forward. She kept up a smile to assure her wincing friend that everything was alright as they coiled around her legs and torso, and pinned her arms securely to her sides. Pinkie hesitated for a few seconds with a twofold purpose, letting her tongues lick up the imaginary taste of vanilla ice cream and white chocolate from her friend’s body, and to wet her down for smoother passage.

Pinkie Pie carefully moved forward, sliding Rarity’s feet and legs down her gullet, slurping up to her haunches before her jawbone popped loose, her mouth was forced to stretch out further, and the friction demanded more effort.

Her first swallow made Rarity squeak as she was drawn down, bringing Pinkie’s lips around her abdomen. Pinkie moaned at the feeling of Rarity’s talons scratching the bottom of her stomach, and how she shifted her long legs in her throat to get a feel for her devourer’s insides.

Pinkie’s stomach growled loudly at the stimulation. She could feel it constricting on Rarity’s legs, desperate to be filled with something as delectable as the white sorcerer.

Pinkie hoisted Rarity off the couch, balancing the alabaster mare with her head tilted back to align her esophagus. Pinkie pulled down with her tongues and swallowed again, closing her lips around Rarity’s chest, and another convulsion left only Rarity’s head in open air.

“Oh… oh my,” Rarity murmured as black tentacles wrapped over her face.

In another gulp, Pinkie closed her lips around the crown of her head.

Oh, yes, Pinkie sang in her head, overwhelmed by the myriad sensations of her entire body writhing with activity to ingest the sorcerer.

Pinkie hummed blissfully and raised one claw to the sinking lumps in her neck, and the other to her belly which stretched out generously to accommodate the size of the meal.

Mine. All mine.

When she felt the last of her friend get squeezed into her gut, she let her tongues hang out in a long sigh of satisfaction. licking her lips, and sat back with her plump, fuzzy belly splayed out on the floor. A chorus of glottal groans from within signaled the overactive digestive sack was already beginning its work.

Pinkie gave Rarity a while to get acquainted with her surroundings, and sucked on bits of loose white and blue hair left in her mouth to bask in the afterglow of the fun. It felt as if she had just tanked two-dozen cartons of ice cream and a whole bottle of blueberry syrup. And it was wonderful.

“Oh, thank you, Rarity. You’re one of the tastiest ponies I’ve ever had. You comfy?”

“It smells. Whatever this slop is is chunky, and I think there’s something sharp sticking me in the bottom.”

Pinkie’s ears fell against her head. “Oh… really? I mean, I told you my tummy wasn’t done with dinner.”

“But… You’re plenty warm, and soft. I swear, you must metabolise like a fire to wood.”

Pinkie squirmed in ecstasy at Rarity rubbing her belly from the inside. She slowly climbed back onto the couch so as not to jostle her guest, the effort particularly hard with the extra weight that made her gut sag like a bag full of rocks.

Stretching her legs, she said, “You’re really heavy for being so skinny. Anyway, mi estómago es tu casa. Lemme know if you need anything.”

Pinkie relaxed her head on the armrest and watched the squirming mound in her middle for a few minutes. It shook and made squishy, bubbly noises as Rarity must have been adjusting herself. The magician’s hands and talons pushed outward intermittently, the flavors of her body mixing well with the partially digested fruits and vegetables from dinner. Pinkie giggled at the ticklish prodding, and when the organ made a strong convulsion in response to the stimulus, some air was forced out in the form of a harsh burp.

Pinkie pondered who could be the next meal to try. Rainbow Dash? It would take some persuading, or make it a condition if she won some bet with her. Pinkie unconsciously licked her lips imagining what the pegasus might taste like. But she cringed a bit at the memory of sampling the concentrated, raw rainbow juice at the Rainbow Factory back in Equestria.

Ick. Spicy.

Applejack? Certainly not; that would be quite literally eating rotten meat. She lingered on the thought of Spike; what a feast he’d make, but the odds of getting him willingly were slim to none, and she really didn’t want to find out what dragonfire would do to her insides.

After a while, her paunch shrank and settled into a lumpy dome, vaguely showing the figure of Rarity under a thick sheet of gurgling, pulsing flesh. The movement inside soon diminished greatly, and Pinkie gently rubbed at Rarity’s back.

Looks like she finally found a good position. Get yourself nestled in.

Her gut’s slow shifting and rocking ended Rarity’s movement all together, and Pinkie chuckled to herself, realising she would have to explain her late-night snack to Spike once he came back. She figured she’d cross that bridge when she got to it, and shut her eyes to follow Rarity’s example.

She felt her cheeks getting wet, and reached a hoof up to wipe the tears from her eyes. She giggled inanely, and wondered why she would possibly be crying. She had a full stomach, helping a friend as her sleeping bag, and even though she knew she’d have to leave her sisters again, she was already making plans to come back once the whole mess was over.

Pinkie wiped her eyes again, rested her claws on her chest and sniffled.

“Huh… weird.”

__________________________________________________________________________________________________________

That ocean, that roiling sea of thoughts and souls. So beautiful, so dangerous. Rarity could remember it so vividly. The grass, the noise, the fire. It all swirled around in a splashing soup of memories. Those monsters. She could almost feel their claws crushing her neck, their nails drawing rivulets of blood. She could still remember vividly the touch of one muscled-thing, so searing hot it may as well have been a flaming blade from Khorne’s own forge. It roared, deep and bellowing like every beast of nature in one.

Get away!

Rarity stirred, finding nothing but pitch blackness before her, and the feeling that one of her legs was rigidly extended. She drew it back, making a wet sucking sound against some elastic surface which fit around it like a tight sock.

A terrible chemical bitterness on her tongue reminded her vaguely of a green and purple, scaly thing telling her something. ‘It’ll warm you up,’ it told her. ‘I’m right here.’ Whatever she was fed, it tasted awful, like milk set out in the sun, a week past the expiration date, and it still lingered.

She felt partially submerged in some sticky liquid up to her elbows and, lifting her head, she felt the wet slapping of her mane against her neck, and a pitter-patter like a faucet that was left slightly open.

Whatever force was gently rubbing at her back, she didn’t want it to leave. A dozen more sensations were running across her body, like a multitude of warm ropes, wrapped in all the right places. A deep, double-beat thumping echoed over her head, synchronized with quiet rushed of air, seemed like it was to a beat; an organic, mechanical order that gave her a feeling of calm security.

She raised an arm from the heavy liquid and lit her hand in a sapphire-blue glow.

A headless black serpentine thing was coiled around her arm, its length scaleless and glossy in the light, and tapering thicker as its form led under a pool of frothy ooze. Similar tentacles were all over her, crawling across her body like greasy limbs, rubbing her over with the slime like brushes basting a roast for the oven. Rippled walls of pink rubber gurgled and throbbed in a living cage, sweating a mixture of runny fluids, and massaged them into her fur to coat her completely. The slime ran down the walls into the pool, or dripped from the roof in thin strands.

Rarity thought little of it. Thinking hurt. Though it all did feel nice.

“Here,” a voice said. It sounded distant, just on the edge of her hearing.

Another one sounded a ‘thank you’ much louder and closer. The chamber vibrated slightly with its words. “Sorry for waking you up so late. I really needed this,” it said.

“Just try to get as much sleep as you can. We’re leaving at daybreak.”

“I know… She’s fine! Would you stop worrying? I felt her kick just a minute ago. She’s gonna be alright with auntie Pinkie Pie taking care of her! Go on back.”

After some time of only the sound of a heartbeat and watery dripping to keep Rarity company, she put out the light. The chamber shifted and made a low growl, followed by a warm, seasoned smell filling her nostrils. Rarity relit her hand. A fish was sliding down the pink wall. It was rigid, the eyes shriveled and scales browned. One of the tentacles peeled itself off Rarity and blindly felt around for the morsel, and dragged it under the liquid once touched, where it immediately began to fizz.

The body sighed, and a slow shifting of gravity indicated it was on the move. The chamber swayed easily, making the oddly sweet-smelling soup slosh around like amber wine in a bowl.

The body spoke softly, as if it weren't even trying to hear itself. “What would Rarity say? ‘Don’t give up hope’?”

It grunted, and seemed to come to rest as a more firm and flat surface pushed the flesh up at Rarity’s back.

“He’s looking for you, Pinkie Pie,” it said. “Yeah.”

Rarity nestled her head in the soft flesh and closed her eyes to race an oncoming migraine to sleep. She let the sound of the body’s workings and enveloping warmth occupy her mind. Little by little, all sensation faded away.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Fluttershy was never much of a talker and, for once, Twilight was thankful for it. She didn’t know how to keep the giant’s thoughts on ice, but Fluttershy was relatively calm. For now.

Fluttershy barely fit the width of the barn, with little room to move without knocking tools over or scratching support beams. Twilight was on the upper level, laying across some hay bales and attempting to emulate Rarity’s visionary magic.

The way the sorcerer made a looking-glass of her own arms was intriguing, but in practice it was clearly easier said than done. The most Twilight had managed to yet conjure was an incoherently churning cloud of warp-stuff which whispered in gibberish and flashed indecipherable images. She swore at one point she made out a strange pink and white… cat…? with a middle that looked like some kind of rectangular pastry.

She occasionally took a glance down at the idle giant who only seemed to be brooding on some stubbornly repeating thought. Eventually, she spoke as if she knew Twilight was watching her.

“I miss my cannon,” Fluttershy finally said. “It’s still got the grooves.”

“Do you need any help?” Twilight asked. “Maybe I could take a look and see what’s wrong.”

Fluttershy hummed thoughtfully, which came out as a throaty grumble. “I’d really appreciate that, actually. It’s just… not the same without it.”

Twilight dissipated her warp cloud, and teleported before Fluttershy. “Here, show me.”

Fluttershy laid her claw next to Twilight. The alicorn studied it, noting the sectional grooves in the palm. She put a bit of telekinetic force on one plate, and slid it back. Fluttershy immediately drew her claw back, hissing loudly.

“Don’t force it!”

“I didn’t!” Twilight said, and backed up a few steps. “I think I heard something.”

Fluttershy flexed her claw a couple of times and put it forward again. Twilight put her ear to the palm. She slid the same plate back slowly. There was the smooth echo of ball bearings rolling, and then a small click.

Fluttershy’s claw twitched, and the giant grunted. “That feels weird.”

“Well, here. There’s some blockage, I think.” Twilight felt around the gap between the rest of the palm and the sliding plate with a tendril of magic, finding an out of place obstruction. “Okay, this might hurt.”

Fluttershy cringed.

Twilight gave no time for Fluttershy to worry or have second thoughts, and yanked at the object. Fluttershy clenched her jaw to avoid screaming, and Twilight teleported out of the way just as her finger blades slammed inward.

Twilight set down a hunk of deformed silver and smiled. “There! Looks like you stepped on that in the field.”

Fluttershy opened and closed the ring several times. The bore was rifled, and must have led all the way through her leg. A horrific sulphurous stench came from it like a poisonous air vent.

“Perfect,” Fluttershy grinned.

The barn doors creaked open, and the iron giant lifted her head.

“Hey, girls,” came a masculine voice.

Fluttershy gave a short, plaintive groan, which came out like a rain of nails on sheet metal. “We’re a little busy in here, Spike. What do you want?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to talk to Twilight.”

The alicorn in question turned to the door. “Sure, Spike, but why so serious all of a sudden? Is it about Rarity?”

He leaned against a nearby support for the barn, staring at her long and hard. “Not really. I mean… I’m worried about her, too. But that’s just it. Look what happened to her just by glancing into the Warp,” he pointed out. “Have you girls actually fought any daemons, yet? The real, twisted kind?”

Only the not-so-distant rumbles and clanks of Fluttershy shifting position answered him for nearly a minute. Finally, Twilight replied, “Not really… We’ve dealt with plenty of orks and skaven in Mordheim, and some Khornate warriors and undead on the way out, plus…” she gulped uneasily.

“Middenheim,” Spike finished for her. Twilight nodded glumly, looking at the floor. Fluttershy made no sound, instead simply looking off to the side with a faint smirk on her face that neither of them caught.

“How do you react when warp-phenomena is happening around you? Like Rarity casting spells? Any twinges or weird sensations?”

She shook her head. “Mostly it’s just blood. I can’t really go too long without getting some, or… well, you saw what happened. But no, I don’t really feel that much beyond intermittent fluxes in the thaumic field around me with active channeling going on, even with really complex prestidi...gitation… w-why are you smiling?”

Spike’s face immediately fell, and he waved a claw dismissively. “Oh, nothing, just... nostalgia, that’s all.”

Twilight blinked, but shrugged slightly and kept going. “And I was able to stand right next to Celestia just a few days ago without even getting distracted. So regular magic use or the presence of enormous ley energy sources doesn’t seem to affect me.”

The omission of the eponymous ‘Princess’ prefix did not escape Spike’s notice, but he didn’t press. “I’m just worried about what might happen down the road. We’re heading straight into Chaos territory, you know. There won’t just be marauders and chaos warriors; there’ll be sorcerers by the dozen conjuring up any number of daemons and warp-spawn, and the line between reality and the empyrean will be at its thinnest on this plane. And if you’re really a daemon…” His face looked haunted. “I really, really don’t want to lose you again, Twilight.”

“I’ll kill them,” Fluttershy snapped, lurching her head forward. “Anypony who tries. Nopony messes with my friends.”

Spike frowned. “That’s a sledgehammer fix—”

“That’s worked pretty well so far.”

Twilight put a hoof on Spike’s shoulder to distract him from Fluttershy’s smug grin. “We’re not going to be separated again. You want to know why?”

Spike reluctantly surrendered his heated staring contest with Fluttershy and took a breath to calm himself. “Why?”

Because you have no idea how it feels to have missed… well, this!” Twilight gestured to the whole of him. “Just, you growing up. I must have missed fifteen years of you becoming such a noble dragon, and I don’t want to miss the rest.”

Spike blushed slightly, and crossed his arms. “You know, some of this isn’t really mine.”

“I know.” Twilight’s fragile smile fell. She held Spike’s claw, briefly studying his broad palm. “What Celestia must have done to you…” She paused, and muttered under her breath, “Shining…”

“Come again?” Spike asked and leaned in closer.

Twilight let go. “Spike, I know it’s late, but, would you mind taking a letter?”

The dragon blinked in surprise. Slowly, his face spread out in a broad smile. “I… I thought you’d never ask, Twilight.”

Chapter 30: Paradigm Shift

"I no longer have the right to pray to Sigmar, but by the demons who guard the gates to the realm of chaos, i pray for your salvation. Rest now, for all eternity. You have escaped the painful struggle of war."
-Mordrek, cursed Champion of Chaos, to a dying Knight

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

To gaze upon the beautiful, snow-encrusted lands of the Realm of the Ice Queen is to also gaze upon a bloodied plain of snow, violence, and barren tundra that stretches as far as the eye can see. This inhospitable land is Kislev, a kingdom that has been the first barrier between the lands of the Far North, and the fertile lands of the Far South. To live in this land is to know bloodshed and misery without end, a land that only breeds the most hardiest of warriors to combat the threats that are constantly posed against the world.

The Kislevite people are these same warriors, a race of wolf-tough and self-reliant people that are often seen by their more "Southernly" neighbors as nothing more than barbarians. But such lack of foresight into the minds of a Kislevite is ill-founded, as due to living at the very borders of madness and corruption, the people of Kislev value bravery, duty, and determination above all other traits. For living at the edges of the Mortal World and the Realm of Chaos, the Kislevites had to give it their all, lest they and their kingdom finally fall under the cruel yoke of the Dark Gods.

Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo glided on the mountain winds, their natural affinity for weather holding back the icy sting of the air. Still, they would rather be back with the others, but this was why they were singled out as the most capable for scouting their surroundings.

Rainbow Dash yawned, more from the tedium of scanning the snow-capped peaks than actual exhaustion. “Nothing… Nothing… and-ohmygosh, Scoots, look! Nothing!”

Scootaloo gave a plaintive sigh. “Yeah. Think we should head back?”

“You read my mind.”

“Pretty easy since you’re thinking so loudly.”

Rainbow Dash snorted, and grabbed Scootaloo in a headlock. “Raagh! Get outta my head, then! You wanna take the fun route back?”

Scootaloo squirmed out of Dash’s hold. “How do you know about another route? This is the first time we’re…”

Rainbow Dash smirked, then held her forelegs to either side and stopped flapping her wings. Diving backward, she threw her wings open mere feet above the ground and swooped through the undulating and narrow chasms of the terrain.

Scootaloo shot after her, wings buzzing. She pushed herself to keep up, zipping around corners with the agility of a hummingbird, sometimes only catching glimpses of Rainbow’s tail as she rounded a rock spire or crag ahead.

“You still back there?!” Rainbow shouted.

“Tight on your tail!”

“Yeah! Let’s put that practice to work— woah!”

Scootaloo’s strained to a halt before smashing into Rainbow Dash. before them was the yawning mouth of a cave.

“Check it out,” Rainbow cooed. “Maybe we can stay here tonight. Let’s scope it out.”

They found nothing of particular interest at first. It looked like Fluttershy could easily fit inside. The deeper they went, the darker it became. Before Scootaloo could comment on the the darkness, a bright flash of illumination made the cave clear as day. Scootaloo looked back to find Rainbow Dash having morphed herself a unicorn’s horn.

“Behold, the new princess of awesomeness!” Dash proclaimed, posing for an imaginary paparazzi.

“Well, your highness,” Scootaloo said, giving a mock bow. “Would you grace me by lighting the way?”

Rainbow gingerly scratched her chin. “Hmm… I shall.”

Not much further, Scootaloo noticed a reflective piece of metal on the floor and picked it up.

"You know, I have no idea how this works," Rainbow said, curiously poking her horn. "Just thought 'light' and fwoosh."

“Hey, look at this. It looks like a bit,” Scootaloo said in confusion. True enough, she showed Rainbow a tarnished gold coin. The front was stamped with a bear’s skull wearing a three-pointed helmet, almost like a trident. On the back was the thin and imposing face of a woman, regally adorned with a bejeweled crown almost as big as her own head.

Rainbow squinted. “That’s… huh. I actually haven’t seen much of this stuff around before now.”

They found more of it, littered around the floor the deeper they went, scattered helter-skelter. Rainbow Dash stopped once she saw a human skull half-buried in a pile of gold.

___________________________________________________________

In any other circumstances, Rarity would have been dead a long time ago. The wind chill was surely deep in the negative degrees, and if not for the generosity of Pinkie Pie’s sisters, they wouldn’t have the supplies that only Fluttershy was strong enough to carry, nor would Pinkie herself have the heavy coat she was bundled up in. Due to her unnatural size, it looked more like a tarp than a garment.

But the frailties of mortal flesh and blood were nearly forgotten to Rarity, having been stripped away for ever-changing, incorporeal will and energy. Hunger and thirst were lost on her, but she sometimes indulged her senses with picked berries or part of a catch the others made.

She had practiced with her power extensively since leaving the Pie sisters’ abode in Nordland, getting a feel for the aether as it passed through her, saturating her body with its energy. She felt the breath of the world in the Winds of Magic. Its ancient power was there since the beginning of time, and would live on beyond the death of the universe. It gave rock farms like the Pies’ feasibility, allowed mortals to grow iron as a farmer does wheat.

The Warp was not a destroyer, but a creator. The Primordial Creator.

“Making and unmaking,” Rarity whispered to no one. Her lips barely even moved to her musings. “Like the tide on the beach, it’s merely clearing the slate for new creations; creative destruction.”

She played with her mane, twirling her bony fingers in its length and tugging it just to keep her hands busy. Her mind was split in two, one half reading the ebb and flow of the aether to keep her body in check, the other listening to Spike telling a story around the fire. Rarity leaned with her back against Fluttershy, who shielded her and the others from the biting wind. The iron giant’s body radiated a tremendous amount of heat, making her an oasis of warmth in the ice and snow.

The fire danced like it knew it was the center of attention, an actor for its audience of daemons and cursed fleshlings under the sunset. Its light reached only so far, however, illuminating those nearby in golden light and ominous shadow before falling off, leaving everything beyond their circle in a shadow-world of the vague shapes of the mountains and clouds. It reminded Spike of a tale.

“It’s an old one from Ulthuan. There were three beings who lived in a cave: an elf, a man, and a dwarf, cut off from the light of the world with only a single fire burning in a circle as their sole source of light,” Spike began, his voice deep and full. “They ate lichen that grew on the walls, and drank cool water from underground streams. They lived, but what they had was not living.

“Day after day, they stared into the flickering embers, believing this was all the light in the world. The light made dancing shapes and patterns on the walls which delighted them. In their own way, they were happy without ever wondering what lay beyond the circle of light.”

Spike paused, pretending to have difficulty remembering, and let his friends picture the scene with their own fire burning in the middle of their circle.

“One day, a mighty storm blew over the mountains, but they were so deep in the cave, only a mere breath of it got to them. The fire danced in the wind, and they laughed to see new patterns on the walls. Once it died down, they went back to contemplating the fire as they had always done.

“Soon after, the elf got up and walked away from the fire. The man and dwarf bade him come back, but he refused. He wanted to know more about the wind. He crossed cliffs and chasms and countless perils, until he finally saw the faint haze of the cave’s exit ahead.

“He climbed out onto the side of the mountain, looked up, and beheld the sun. Its brilliant light blinded him and he fell to his knees, overcome by its beauty and warmth. He feared he’d burned his eyes out, but in a little while he adjusted. He’d come out high on the mountain, the world spread out before him in all its glory; glittering blue seas and endless fields of wildflowers and golden corn. He wept at the sight, distraught that he had wasted so many years in darkness, oblivious to the glory of the world that had been there all along.

“He knew he had to tell his friends, and made the trek back to where they still sat, still contently amused by the shadows. The elf saw the dank cave for the prison it truly was, but the others had no interest in his fanciful tales of a burning eye in the sky and laughed him off as mad, returning to stare into the fire, for it was the only reality they knew.”

Pinkie Pie sniffled and wiped her watering eyes. “Please tell me it has a happy ending…”

The dragon adjusted himself to sit cross-legged. Rarity noticed a certain flicker in his aura.

“Well, the elf knew he had to save them from this un-life and he wouldn’t take no for an answer, so he chose to bring the light to them. He climbed back out into the world of light and began to dig. He dug until he’d widened the cave mouth. He dug for a hundred years, and then a hundred more until he’d dug away the very peak of the mountain. Then he dug downward until he broke through the cave where his fellows sat.

“They were amazed at what he saw, the light they had been missing all their lives, and the golden joy that could be theirs if only they were brave enough to take the elf’s hand and follow him.”

Spike reached out and grabbed that invisible hand.

“They climbed out with the elf and saw the truth and beauty of the world around them. They looked back at the lightless cave and were horrified at how limited their understanding of the world was. They heaped praise on him for showing them the way to the light and honored him greatly, for the world and all its bounty was theirs to explore forever more.”

Pinkie Pie squealed in glee and hugged the nearest thing she could reach. Twilight gasped as the mare almost squeezed the very life from her.

“They made it! They got out!” Pinkie eeked, heedless of Twilight’s protests.

“That’s lovely, Spike,” Rarity said, reaching over and touching his knee.

Her words were genuine, but she wanted to know the truth. Making contact with his bare scales, she read into him for the truth of the story. Only the man had followed the elf. The dwarf was horrified by the blazing eye in the sky and retreated further into the cave with the fire to live in perpetual twilight.

"Thanks." Spike held Rarity's hand in return, and looked to the others. "You girls would love Ulthuan. The people might not be that friendly, but the cities are beautiful high spires of marble and gold, and centers of culture, just like Canterlot.“

Twilight raised her hoof after having resigned to Pinkie’s nuzzling clutches.

“And the grand library in the city of Lothern has the largest collection of ocean lore in the Old World,” he continued, giving Twilight a wink. “Which isn’t surprising, since Lothern straddles both sides of the only strait leading into and out of the Inner Sea. More ships pass through there than anywhere else.”

“I’d love to go there sometime.” Twilight smiled.

Spike smiled and glanced at Fluttershy. “Once you guys are back to normal, I’ll show you everything.”

Applejack took her gaze from the brilliant star-speckled sky. A thick coating of fungus covered her body like a bear’s winter coat having grown in. For Apple Bloom, on the other hand, if not for the fire, the undead filly would be frozen solid. The Pie sisters had offered to give them each a coat or at least a scarf as well, but their plague-ridden bodies would probably end up rotting them through, so they had demurred. As it was, Applejack made sure to stay as close to her sister as possible.

“Y’all think we oughta set up here, or keep moving an’ hope to find more solid ground?” she asked.

“Oh, no need to keep going,” Rarity said, getting up with a stagger on her backward-bent legs. “Okay, just let me…”

She held out her hands and let the winds blow through her. She felt the energy running through the crystalline structure of the snow, rattling and bouncing like beads in a maraca. Heat, waiting to become so. She just needed to agitate it in one spot, and the effect would propagate.

The flapping of wings distracted Rarity. Rainbow Dash and Scootaloo landed by the fire, shaking and panting with terror.

“Move! Dragon! Skulls! Oatmeal!” she gasped out.

Fluttershy slammed her fist on the ground. “Rainbow, calm down,” she growled.

“Oatmeal?” Applejack asked. “You feeling okay?”

Rainbow Dash swallowed heavily and took a moment to control her breath. “That’s what happens when I go to work hungry, but it’s not the point. Everypony, we gotta get outta here; Scootaloo and I found a dragon cave and it is nothing like the dragons in Equestria!”

Spike jerked up ramrod straight. “You’re sure it’s a dragon cave?” he asked levelly.

“We didn’t see the dragon, but unless bears recently got a taste for crowns and gold and junk and started leaving giant scales and skulls lying around, then I’d say it’s a dragon!”

Spike was first to rise. He secured his belt and greatsword, and spoke in cold, clipped tones. “We’re getting out of here. We keep going east.”

The possibility of a dragon attack brought them to follow and pack up without question. Fluttershy let her friends climb onto her back, and set off quickly.

Spike had told them of the dragons of this new world. They thought even less than their Equestrian counterparts. They were completely animalistic, and highly territorial.

“Maybe it's still in its cave,” Scootaloo said. “I don’t think I heard anything inside.”

Rainbow Dash was warily scanning the sky. “Yeah, maybe.”

Fluttershy took calculated steps to negotiate the terrain, but lost her footing on a slope whose true steepness was hidden by the snow. Fluttershy slid down with a hideously loud screech of metal on rock, digging her claws into the face to slow herself. At the bottom, she glanced up at eight parallel scars in the rock face before moving again with greater haste.

“Damn, damn, damn!” Spike seethed as he watched the gashes. The scars were widening, branching out in cracks until the slope section collapsed into the blackness of a hollow interior. A cloud of dust blew out like a volcanic vent.

A moment later, a serpentine shadow-form crawled out of the hole and perched just above it. Its eyes were virtually a luminescent yellow, glaring through razor-thin slitted pupils.

Fluttershy stopped cold, planted herself firmly, and looked back at the creature.

“Fluttershy, keep movin’, Applejack called out. “We can get more distance ‘tween us and him!”

Fluttershy, who had stared down great wyrms as a mere pegasus, growled menacingly at the dragon as it predatorily descended the slope toward her. Her eyes illuminated it like dull headlights in the darkness, a slender body of silver and blue scales and wide, webbed wings.

She and the dragon circled each other, the former leaning to let her friends hide on the far side of her body.

“Fluttershy, don’t do this,” Rarity said, her voice low. “We can just go and show it we don’t mean trouble.”

“The last thing you do is turn your back on an animal poised to fight,” Fluttershy muttered back in a grim tone.

“But this is just posturing! It’s not going to back down—”

“Shut up!”

Fluttershy continued staring down the dragon, her eyes glowing brighter with each passing second.

“W...What’s she doing?” Applebloom asked shakily. Her head was forcibly curled against Applejack’s chest.

Rarity peered over Fluttershy’s back, watching her friend slowly close the distance. The dragon had all but laid itself down, its eyes laser-focused on Fluttershy’s. She gingerly ran her claw across its face, then scratched under its angled jawline, and its tail swished back and forth.

“That’s right… you know we don’t mean you any harm,” Fluttershy whispered. “You’re going back in your cave now, okay? You’re going to forget we were even here—”

The dragon suddenly shrieked and jumped back. Startled, Fluttershy glanced at her finger to find blood on its sharp edge.

“Get off! Get off!” Fluttershy bucked to shake her friends off, just as the dragon’s chest heaved and it roared out a torrent of flame.

The others could only take cover as Fluttershy was engulfed in the firestorm. Scootaloo covered her ears at the tremendous noise, and breath was stolen from them all in the radiant heat.

Fluttershy charged through the angrily licking fire, her body glowing red. The dragon leapt back, beating its wings, and was quickly out of Fluttershy’s reach. Without missing a beat, she raised her foreleg, and the palm of her claw opened up to reveal the deep bore of her hidden cannon.

BLAM!

The warp-powered shot screamed out from the barrel with a thunderous roar, but merely sailed past her target’s sinuous neck and arced off into the sky. She tried firing again, but there was only a pulse of pain through her leg.

”Everypony, around me!” Rarity yelled at the top of her lungs.

Spike, Rainbow and Applejack were the first to respond, the latter two taking hold of Scootaloo and Apple Bloom and rushing them behind a spiral outcropping of rock. Twilight stayed out just long enough to magically lift Pinkie Pie, who had rolled off in the confusion and become trapped in a runaway snowball barrelling down the slope, and all but hurl her behind the rocks, shattering her icy prison in the process.

It wasn’t a moment too soon. The dragon swooped down low, breathed deeply with the sound of a giant bellows, and pierced the night with a hellish torrent of fire.

Just as the rest of the party made it to cover in some way, Rarity hastily put up a shimmering shield around her, Sweetie Belle and the others huddled behind the spire. The young ones screamed as the pulsing, hungry flames coated the barrier, the extreme heat radiating down and stinging them to the muscle. Rarity nearly screamed from the strain, as it was taking every ounce of power she could put forward to hold back the furnace-heat.

Before the beast could pull up, Fluttershy’s second hellcannon shot boomed out and struck it in the shoulder, solid enough to detonate. The screaming explosion of Warp energy threw the dragon off balance, causing its flaming breath to terminate in a roar of indignation as it struggled to level off.

It was a second too late. The dragon hit the frozen ground at a rough angle, and its claws bit deeply into the rocks, leaving twin furrows behind as the beast scrambled to take off again.

Rarity dissipated her shield. Her knees buckled, and she slumped into Applejack’s support behind the smoking, red-glowing spire. With her hoof held right under Rarity’s nose, Applejack’s putrid smell kept her from outright passing out.

“Sis! Sis!” A terror-stricken Sweetie Belle put both hooves on Rarity’s shoulders, holding her steady. “Are you—”

“Twilight!” Spike shouted over the boom of the dragon’s fall. He drew his Hoeth greatsword and leaped into the air in one swift motion. “The wings! Cut its wings!”

Rainbow Dash was way ahead of him, but appeared to be following her own plan. She had launched after the hulking form of the dragon as soon as it had terminated its strafing run, and even now had gotten behind its ear flap without being noticed in the chill night wind.

”DISTRACTIOOON!!” she screamed right into its ear, then bit the leathery cover with a mouthful of fangs and flew off in the form of a mosquito as the dragon brought a claw to slap the side of its head. She grew back to full size and zipped around it, darting back and forth, avoiding its grabbing, swatting claws.

Even so, the dragon had by now more than regained enough control to bank hard to the right, coming around for another pass. The fury in its eyes could almost be seen through the blinding gusts of snow it was kicking up.

Fury that turned to sudden surprise as Spike’s armored form pierced through the gloom, flying straight toward its head.

With no time to register this new threat, the dragon simply opened its toothed maw wide and met his charge. Spike swerved out of the way of the deadly bite at the last possible second, rolled over in midair, and stuck his sword straight up.

The great elven blade brutally ripped through the webbing of the dragon’s right wing from front to back in a bloody arc. Suddenly robbed of much of its aerial control, the dragon barely had time to scream before it listed right, and turned into a nosedive.

Twilight took aim, her horn surging with dark energy, but the spin of the dragon’s descent left little opening to shoot a weak spot. As it slammed into the snowy mountainside, a wall of white powder blasted out, ruining what little visibility there was left. Twilight fired blind into the cloud, hearing no shriek but an explosion of rock being thrown skyward.

The hail of debris forced Spike to land, and he warily walked wide among the smoke-snow cloud, listening to the beast’s groans and hisses.

In but an airy swoop, the shoulder of a wing shot from the fog and struck him square in the chest. The massive blow was mostly absorbed by the lamellar chestplate and his own toughened scales, but it still caused him to grunt mightily as he was hurled back into a snowy pile.

Spike scrambled to free himself, breathing flame onto the snow to melt it faster as the serpent rapidly approached him through the fog, jaws widening to reveal rows of yellowed, blood-caked fangs.

Seeing the advancing wyrm triggered something primal in Spike then, causing him to act without thinking and breathe a mighty cone of greenish flames in the dragon’s direction. It was pure draconic instinct; deter and threaten competition with shock and awe.

And it worked. For just a split second, the dragon flinched and paused, and a flicker of surprise passed over its eyes as it seemed to realize the nature of the creature it was facing. That didn’t stop it for long, however, and soon it was advancing again, ready to crush Spike in its cruel jaws.

It was then that a hundred ton avalanche of iron barreled out of the snow-choked night and crashed into the great wyrm’s side.

Screaming with rage, Fluttershy grappled the beast with both claws. In the span of a second, they were a screeching, tangled cyclone of wrestling limbs.

Spike looked on in dismay as the two titans clawed and bit at each other savagely, meeting blow for blow until one gained purchase on the other. Coiled around Fluttershy’s middle, the dragon dug its claw into the side of Fluttershy’s metallic face and carved out deep scars before the juggernaut thrust her claw at its neck.

With a dull crack, the dragon spasmed, spurting blood from a grievous wound over five handspans wide. Its roars turned to gurgles, then finally ceased as it went limp.

Fluttershy wrenched its claw out of her lower jaw and let the beast fall. She stared at the body for nearly a minute, huffing in exertion.

And then she lifted her head towards the sky, and screamed.

Fluttershy maneuvered herself into the hole in the slope and onto the cave floor. The others followed her in. The fading outside light was replaced by luminescent crystals embedded in the walls.

An uncountable bounty in gold and coins shimmered as a carpet, marbled with gemstones and pieces of mortal armor and skulls from Northmen and Kislevites alike mounted on stalagmites.

Rainbow dash whistled in appreciation. “Wow, sweet pad.”

“This don’t feel right,” Applejack said, shaking her head. “Just up and taki’n its home.”

“It’s not like we’re gonna steal anything we don’t need,” Rainbow responded. “The northmen are probably so crazy they’ll only take payment in teeth or rocks, or something.”

Unnoticed, Pinkie Pie paused from scooping coins down her throat, and hastily swallowed her current mouthful.

Fluttershy scooped up a clawful of treasure, letting it run through her fingers like liquid gold. “Rarity, could you use this to patch me up?”

Rarity picked up a coin. She bent, flattened, and tested it for malleability. “I believe so. Come, lie down.”

As Fluttershy set herself end to end, Rarity saw the true scale of the task: Leaking piping, exposed inner workings, and the left side of her head was all but torn open. Fluttershy needed a total renovation.

“Okay, er… I’m going to need help. Spike!”

Rarity went around Fluttershy to where she could sense Spike’s presence. He was furthest from the juggernaut than anyone else, studying the bone-littered armor sets collected by the cave’s previous owner. Rarity stopped cold when she saw his aura burning a deep blue. His movements were half-hearted, as he lazily picked up a helmet or a broken axe and barely turned it over once before replacing it.

“Spike?” Rarity said, and slowly approached him.

Spike hastily put one of the helmets back, and wiped his eyes. “Gods’ blood… Can Fluttershy hear us from here?”

“I don’t think so. Evidently she didn’t hear you just say that.”

“Hey, Fluttershy, can you hear me?” Spike said quietly.

Fluttershy didn’t react, but coughed harshly and spat something neither Spike or Rarity could see into her claw.

“She’s not getting any better, Rarity.” Spike’s face turned grave. “She could have controlled the dragon, handled it like any other angry animal after she tackled it. That’s what she used to do, isn’t it? But she killed it! It could have lived.”

Rarity considered the flashes of crimson she could see over Spike as he spoke. Anger, but also uncertainty. She nodded in understanding, and moved to take a seat atop a pile of Kislevite gold coins. “You have to give her credit for at least trying, Spike. She did try to calm it down at first.”

“Right,” he droned. “And she just happened to forget that her claws aren’t meant for scratching chins.”

Rarity raised an eyebrow. “I think we should be grateful she turned out like this and not completely lost. You saw her after she killed the dragon, Spike. Fluttershy was not enjoying herself at all.”

Spike threw his hands in the air. “And what, do you want to give her a medal? A ‘not as bad as you could have been’ award? There were thousands of dragons in Equestria; who knows how many are left in this whole world? One thousand? A couple hundred? This could’ve been the only dragon cave for two hundred miles!”

“And the only way we’re going is north,” Rarity pointed out. “What were the odds we would stumble upon a dragon’s lair?”

She stood and picked up a horned helmet which had the star of Chaos set in brass on its forehead. “The further north we go, these are the kinds of people the dragons would be living amongst. How many would be as secluded and to-themselves as this one was?”

Spike’s expression turned to a thoughtful grimace. “Not many.”

Rarity nodded. “I remember you telling me of Galrauch, that sacrifice he made for his master. If there are dragons in the far north, they probably didn’t get the choice. Living with the influence of Chaos picking at their brains and bodies for decades, centuries. Dragons in the north would be monsters who have had their true selves destroyed. I swear, finding this cave must be a one in a billion fluke, and you know Fluttershy wouldn’t go around looking for trouble, especially with us around.”

Rarity swiped her hand toward the ground, and psychically cut a clear line in the rock floor. “So I say, come tomorrow when Fluttershy crosses this line, not another innocent dragon will die by her claw.”

Rarity gave Spike the helmet, and he looked to the iron giant.

“Hey, Fluttershy, catch!”

Despite the damages, Fluttershy’s reflexes weren’t dulled. She caught the helmet and studied it for a moment.

“What do you think of it?” Spike asked.

“This is from one of those chaos men, isn’t it?”

“Yeah?”

Fluttershy ground the helmet like wet paper between her fingers and threw it back, where it landed and bounced in a crumpled, unrecognizable heap.

“It’s crummy,” Fluttershy rumbled. “That dragon did a good job killing everyone that came by. I wish we never found it so it could keep doing this—”

Fluttershy turned over in another coughing fit.

“Good enough?” Rarity said, turning to Spike with a wry smile.

“For now. I’m guessing you need help fixing her?”

“If it wouldn’t be too much trouble.”

Spike rolled his eyes, considering. “Alright.”

Rarity hopped up on her toes to peck Spike on the cheek.

“Oh, you’re the greatest,” she cooed.

The night was spent in labor between Spike melting down large quantities of the treasure and Rarity and Twilight forming and using it to salve Fluttershy’s wounds. Her form assimilated the foreign metals eagerly. Even as morning light shone through the hole in the ceiling and Spike had resigned to rest hours before, Rarity and Twilight put the finishing touches on a thick mark of the Blood God which Fluttershy fit into the last of the gap in her chest.

______________________________________________________________

Chrysalis didn’t like the smell of humans. Their oily, musky odor, punctuated by the stench of sweat. But they were a fascinating species. Their culture, architecture, militaries, all piqued her interest. Between their tender scenes of domestic life, monumental architecture and fortress cities, and and their eagerness to industrialize with Equestrian technology, they were certainly good at adapting.

The train she traveled with now had no such grace. All but one, at least. He was her favorite, emanating a pure love she hadn’t tasted for over a decade. On the route, she double, then triple checked that there were drones tasked with finding his family. A couple more couldn’t hurt to feed the hive. This one was like a treat, keeping her spirits up as they crossed from Middenland to the blasted barren stretch of rocky plains before the Middle Mountains. As queen, she felt it was justified to have a little sweetmeat like him to herself. More were coming, after all.

“Home, sweet home,” she trilled dryly.

The massifs reared up as if they were the wall at the world’s end. Like a gaping maw in the broad face was a sculpted cave, hexagonal in shape, and stained with rivulets of a glossy, black substance.

Chrysalis tugged on the chain, bidding her favorite to hurry. “It’s almost over. For both of us.”

He’d grown an unkempt scruff on his face, his shock of brown hair matted and slick. Chrysalis never made it a point to get to know his name. They wouldn’t be in the waking presence of each other for much longer, anyway. He didn’t respond to the queen, and had to jog to keep speed with her longer stride.

She and her favorite were far ahead of the rest of the guarded train, and as they approached the mouth of the cave, a lookout changeling chirped with a smile and flitted closer, glaring hungrily at the man. Chrysalis held the palm at it, and it backed off obediently.

“Patience. We’re here.”

Chrysalis looked back at her favorite. She could taste his fear as he looked around, and she did too, the deeper they went. He may have been fearful, perhaps in awe, but to Chrysalis, the hive was lackluster. Throbbing bioluminescent orbs caked the walls, glowing with varying intensity. The air smelled like home, the scent of the biomass processing pools deeper in the mountain, and the whole rest of the hive blowing back up the natural ventilation shafts. To her favorite, it must have smelled gag-worthy.

The worker drones themselves were miserable little things. Mutations and malnutrition had permeated them all. Many of their chirps sounded like the clacking of wet coconut-halves.

“Have you ever heard of the Skaven?” Chrysalis asked him. “We took this place from them. We’ve been in the dark for a long time. You’re helping a good cause.”

He didn’t respond beyond continuing to gasp for breath.

“Right. Water, food; you humans need those, don’t you?”

She dropped the chain into the hoof of a changeling who heard her telepathic call.

“Get this one some clean water, and plug him in,” she said.

The man had looked up at the mention of water for a moment before the changeling yanked on his chain with a gurgling click of its mandibles.

Chrysalis didn't watch him get handled away. There was no time for sentiment, and there was much to do.

Her throne room was simple; she wasn’t consciously looking at it much to care for appearances, nor was there anyone to marvel at what would have been majestic architecture if she had any reason to try.

She sat on an undecorated, stone throne, and looked out at blank rock walls, caked only with glowing lumen hearts.

What am I queen of? she thought. Mutants, the starving. And going from feeding off toxic maniacs to prison refuse and the lustful is an upgrade.

She chuckled mirthlessly. This was the bottom, right? The only place left to go was up. With all of the prison transfers, the hive would at least have a reliable food supply that wouldn’t be a ‘pick your poison’ ordeal. From there, once a foundation of logistics was built, they could expand. The Middle Mountains were virtually unowned. Only one barrier stood in the way.

The Brass Keep, she said under her breath.

An ancient Chaos stronghold in the center of the mountain range. It was the only thing which kept Imperial citizens from colonizing the mountains on threat of certain plunder. To take it would give Chrysalis and her Changelings unchallenged dominion over the entire range.

She sifted through the knowledge of the hivemind for geographic information. From a number of field agents, memories of maps and faraway glances of the Keep flashed into her mind. Thirty miles east, built into a valley-side. No doubt there would be underground catacombs built deep into the mountainside, a great obstacle.

That was, of course, assuming Changelings weren’t already well-accustomed to underground fighting.

The element of surprise would only last so long, though, before the tunnels would be surrounded within the fortress. There needed to be an outside attack, with the means to get to the enemy on those high walls.

Mortars, cannons, and a lot of soldiers.

Chrysalis sent the list of preparations to the hivemind for thinking-over. She had a new brood of drones to design, still. And then she needed to request help from Franz to take the Keep, and decide how exactly to do the taking.

She got up and started to pace. She thought about Ditto, whether to telepathically use his body to talk to Franz again. She thought not; better to have her representative speak by his own mind. he was a good speaker. She paused and scratched the back of her head, but grunted in frustration as she couldn’t reach the itch under her chitinous plating.

Mind.

Chrysalis remembered the old Ditto, his wit and jovial mannerisms. Despite his name, he could be quite a naysmith, making it his job to disagree and explain deficiencies or alternatives. It made him an acquired taste among his friends, to be sure, but Chrysalis couldn’t help but miss that kind of spirit in her court. Especially given the silent, all-embracing society she ruled over now.

She thought of her people before their fall. Vibrant emotions, enlightened culture, sentience, and openness to the world. Could they ever return to that?

She shook her head free of the thought. That would be masquerading as ghosts, a race and a nation that went up in flames. Ditto, as he stood now, was a phantom of the old. She couldn’t resurrect the dead, but she could try to bring their successors security. The Brass Keep was the next step.

A wash of pleasantness cascaded down her jagged horn, buzzing in her muscles as if in response to a gentle massage. Her favorite was finally in his pod. Energy and vitality filled her being, she drank deep of this sustenance, and smiled.

“Franz, you owe me,” Chrysalis said to the dark, empty chamber.

_______________________________________________________________

In her early days of ruling the Crystal Empire, Cadence found it difficult to integrate into their culture. They still followed ancient gods that had been forgotten since their thousand-year disappearance. Cadence attended the important ceremonies out of deference for the ancient city and its ponies. But fighting through the warp itself, the hell-pit the Shadow King hid the Crystal Empire in in the first place, her perception was shattered.

“Princess Cadenza, the King is ready for you now.”

Cadence finished her prayer for Asuryan’s protection, and to keep the hand of Khaine from her shoulder. She stood up. The echo of her glassy hooves and creaking of her cot echoed in the near-bare space she was given.

She didn’t know what to think of her situation. She was a prisoner of war, a hundred miles from friendly territory in Graennae, the hub of the Dark Elves’ colonies on the other side of Norsca. However, her treatment didn’t speak to the legendary cruelty the Druchii were capable of.

She passed the narrow doorway of the dark chamber, into the sickly green light of wyrdstone crystal fixtures in the walls. Two silent Executioners accompanied the palace aide, who held out an embroidered pillow upon which rested a gold and silver headpiece.

“Your crown,” he said. “We found it among your items.”

Cadence put it on without acknowledging him, and he led her through the palace’s halls.

Cadence figured something must be terribly wrong in Graennae for her to be treated with such respect. The king must need her for something, needed to get on her good side, but such attempts only steeled her heart more to such pretending generosities.

Much of the palace was like a massive cathedral of polished black crystal. To any foreigner, they would think it must have taken a hundred years and millions of manhours to sculpt such architecture. Cadence, however, felt the dark magic within each geode, flowing through the superstructure and holding it together with the will of its singular architect and mason.

Hanging from high fixtures, banners of Druchii heraldry and carved glass mosaics told miniature stories and histories of battles fought, honors disgraced and avenged, and a revolution in the making.

Cadence didn’t have the chance to look at the last one more clearly, as she was led to a spiral staircase. The aide stood aside.

“Just upstairs,” the aide said, motioning to the steps.

So little security, Cadence thought. Or at least, that’s what I’m meant to think.

Cadence glanced at the aide’s stoic, pale expression before going up. She didn’t know what to feel. Fear for herself and the Phoenix Guard who had accompanied her, or anger for the king thinking she could be won over with modest treatment. As she reached the open door at the top, she felt little but contempt for the being she knew to be beyond.

The air felt much cooler the moment she walked in, augmented by a light breeze which fluttered the drapes to the floor’s balcony. The room itself was surprisingly not a dark crystal chasm like the rest of the castle. A large gyroscopic globe on wheels sat in the corner, and baubles and miscellany from around the world lined glossy hardwood bookshelves.

King Sombra sat on the far side of a mahogany desk, watching her with intent, but little else Cadence could immediately identify. The light around him seemed unnaturally dim, as if his very form absorbed the glow of the smokeless green-burning braziers behind him.

“Princess Cadenza. Please, sit.” he said evenly. “I won’t waste time with chit-chat, as I’m sure you have many questions. Ask away.”

Cadence felt something in his deep voice, which rumbled like distant thunder. No harshness or malice, but a waver. Even his dark red eyes were without the telltale sickly green and purple smoke of dark magic. He may have swallowed his pride, she thought. Even so, Sombra sat tall, refusing to fall any further.

“What have you done with my soldiers?” Cadence said before she even touched her seat.

“Were there forty of them?”

“Yes.”

“All alive, then. Though, one with quite grievous wounds I've done some to rectify. They’ve been given the free space in the garrison barracks. Their weapons, properly appropriated to avoid any incidences.”

Cadence internally cringed at the thought of what he might have done to 'help' the wounded guards-pony.

She turned her head slightly. “The barracks?”

“You were expecting a prison, or perhaps torture chamber?” Sombra chuckled. “It would be unbecoming for what I have planned.”

Cadence snorted as Sombra set three scrolls between them. He sighed.

“Everybody wants to rule the world, hmm?” He glanced up at Cadence, half-expecting her to understand. “Between the Norscans, Skaven, Northmen, and no doubt the wrath of the Witch King to come for me, then perhaps you as well, we have no choice.”

Cadence raised a brow and looked to the rolled-out scrolls. A Mutual defence pact, sphere-of-influence acknowledgement, free flow of arms and goods, and more.

“What do you mean, that the Witch King would come for you?” Cadence asked. “That banner…”

The faintest hint of a smile showed itself on Sombra’s face. “Oh, you saw that one? Well, I cannot call myself a king without a kingdom.”

“And you’re just walking out with the colonies?” Cadence asked in disbelief.

“The colonies are walking out,” Sombra corrected. “When he sent me to keep tabs on his back yard, he broke one of the most important tenets of a cutthroat state like Naggaroth, which is to never give anypony autonomy. I found Graennae nearing ruin, its villages and towns beset, crops and stores burned or looted by the Norscans, its defenses on its last limbs.”

“And what, you swooped in and saved the day?”

“Back an animal into a corner and it will fight like a daemon for survival. That’s how the colonists lasted this long. I was sent with reinforcements and fresh meat dumped out of Naggaroth to be forgotten here. I made the most of my time, improving frontier defenses, blocking natural choke points with crystal walls, impervious to mortal arms.

“Even for all I was doing, they don’t think other races are worthy to even speak to them, let alone rule them, so you can imagine how I was received, and had to pay their political games. The ‘reforms’ were quite unpleasant for many.

“The discontent was already there. Malekith dumped people here to breed like insects and send back taxes that would be used to fight wars elsewhere.” Sombra put a hoof to his chest. “But after order was reestablished, I convinced them that I was here for them, that I was also flung here to be fed upon by his power. They just needed that nudge to secede.”

“And now, after stabbing your benefactor in the back, assaulting my train, and forcing me here, you want to pretend we’re having some form of rational, even negotiation?”

Sombra shrugged. “I know you would never think that I wanted to negotiate. You would probably think that my letter was laced with poison or the diplomat was carrying some blade that could break your exterior. You think I’m the Evil Emperor—”

“You are,” Cadence interrupted.

“I was.” Sombra fought the impulse to bare his teeth at the indignity of being cut off. “Having your body blown apart and scattered to the far reaches of the arctic by your replacement tends to makes one think.”

“So, what do you think?”

“That I have been going about it wrong. And that now is the time to be making allies, not enemies. The Winds of Magic are blowing strong from the north, as if their twisted gods are breathing through the very veil between the Warp and Materium. My dabbling in dark magic has made me more aware of this power than most; I feel it. The north is readying for another incursion, and common defence of our lands would be as good for morale as for an actual bulwark.”

“And why should I trust you?” Cadence asked pointedly.

Sombra smiled slightly, showing a little of his carnivorous teeth. “I’m not asking for your trust. Only your help.”

Cadence picked up one of the documents, reading its title: Treaty of Non-Aggression between the Graennean Kingdom and the Norscan Colonies of the Highborn.

Her brow creased into a thin line. This was dangerous work. Even if she did sign such documents, even if Sombra could somehow get his subjects to stomach the idea of working with their much-hated kin, she wasn’t sure she could do the same with the High Elves. Maybe the border colonies took a more liberal outlook than most when it came to dealing with other races, but...

Cadence glanced up from the paper. “I’ll need to read these first before I agree to anything.”

“Very well.” Sombra nodded. He idly rolled a red gem around the desk top.

_________________________________________________________________

To any mortal commander of warriors, they understand three things an army needs: to be bred, fed, and led. Undead warriors only needed the last

The dead were perfect soldiers. Unflinching, utterly loyal, no need for food, water, or rest. They were a tireless machine that could only get stronger as the enemy weakened.

Nightmare Moon hadn’t felt so powerful since the day Luna let her in. Her new host was weaker, but still strong, and his flesh was malleable so she could make him fit her stature.

The power of the undead flowed free in Sylvania; the Nightmare could feel it with every step. The dead awoke at her will. She picked only the best bodies she could find, putting zombies and peasant corpses back to rest. She had resurrected enough long-dead knights and elite warriors until she had a sizable entourage in motley uniforms from around the Old World. Kislevites, Northmen, Imperials, even a handful of Bretonnians, all had at one point fought on Sylvanian soil. Years of dormancy would have certainly dulled their reflexes, but their endurance would more than make up for it.

Former chaos warriors stood tall and thick through the shoulders with their oversized axes and swords, and thick tower shields. Other skeletons were in rusted and punctured armor with insignias of knightly orders, the Reiksguard, Knights Panther, even the Winged Lancers.

While Nightmare Moon could see their bite, she wouldn’t accept their filth while making acquaintance with the Vampire Counts. At the nearest stream, she willed the skeletal warriors to clean their gear and bones.

The Nightmare watched them from the shore in quiet amusement. Those who were once mortal enemies, now bathing side by side. It seemed like only in the sterile serenity of death could their forms be put to more productive ends.

When she sensed the approach of foreign necromantic magic, however, her good mood was ruined.

Riding up from the path, six figures were seated on armored skeletal mounts whose eyes and breath was green fire, pouring endlessly from grinning equine skulls. The riders were in crimson plate, sharp to the edges, and with faces pale and tight as a corpse shortly after the setting-in of rigor mortis.

The Nightmare’s warriors hastily took up their weapons, the chaos warriors presenting a solid shield wall before their patron.

“Necromancer,” the apparent leader of the riders bellowed from the far shore. “You ply your craft in the shadow of Sylvania! With the will of the true master of the Empire in my blade, I say, state your purpose!”

Nightmare Moon smiled, and her warriors parted at an unspoken order to stand at ease. “My business is to answer an invitation from your lord, Manfred von Carstein.” In a pulse of dark magic, she teleported before the riders, standing well taller than their skinless mounts. “Your lord seeks an audience with the Empress of the Nightmare Forces. It might be to your benefit for him to see you personally delivering the subject of his interest.”

The knightly leader steadied his suddenly fidgety mount in the Nightmare’s presence. Nightmare Moon toyed with his mount, slipping her will into its form to fight with his necromantic magic. He himself showed no fear, and in a few moments got his horse under control. With a few side glances to his party, he motioned his fellows to set off.

“It will be a two day ride,” he said.

“Fine with me.”

_________________________________________________________________

Ditto’s news from Chrysalis opened up many possibilities. To take the Brass Keep would be a tremendous boon to the morale of the Empire’s people. It would be the scouring of a stain on the land, laid there thousands of years prior. It would also be one of the first times the Empire had gone on the offensive in a long, long time.

And with the Steed of Apocalypse on the loose, a blow to chaos forces in the Empire’s borders was desperately needed.

But if it was going to be done, it was going to be done right. Karl Franz had personally chosen the man to lead the ground assault, general Brochuss, a hardy Hochlander whose will and hatred of the Adversary has given him new purpose after the razing of his home province. This was a man who would prosecute the foe without hesitation or mercy.

There was also the matter of planning. Being unmolested for millennia, what was founded as an outpost may well have become a mega-fortress by now. The numbers of men, food, supplies, ordnance and munitions needed to assault such a position would demand a tremendous supply chain—unless it could simply be carried with them.

“Your highness, the boarding ramp is ready.”

Karl Franz clapped the book he was reading shut, shelved it, and put on his greatcoat.

“Have you ever been in Cloudsdale before, boy?” he asked. The aide looked to be no more than eighteen years of age. He flinched at the question.

“N-No, my lord. First time.”

Franz smiled and slapped him on the shoulder. “Then here’s to new experiences. I hear it’s like walking on mattresses.”

Chapter 31: Amen and Attack

”This Changeling is very different, not like those bugs back home. This Changeling has terrorized Cloudsdale for years. There is no form it cannot replicate, from the smallest insect to the largest daemon. I’ve seen it, too. It impersonated Clear Skies here while she and I were on patrol, and I had the only gun. They fought right in front of me, beth saying they were the real Clear Skies. Forget the bedtime stories of looking your friend in the eyes and just being able to ‘tell’ it’s them. They’re bullshit. You’ve got a fifty-fifty chance, and Clear Skies got lucky. How do I know I got the Changeling? It turned into a raptor and buggered off when I hit it. For all you know, I could be the Changeling, and your real drill sergeant is long dead, or it is standing among us right now. Make peace with this possibility, and keep a suspicious mind about everypony you meet. Clear Skies, will you demonstrate the course?”

~ Timespan Wyrdmake, Cloudsdale Militia captain, to a squad of trainees

----------------------------------------------------------

Note: italicized text is usually thoughts, ‘text’ is telepathic communication, and “text” is spoken dialogue in another language.

Asav adjusted his fur cloak. The damn thing was too big on him, a gift from his father which was otherwise welcome for its thickness against the frigid mountain air. It was his first time into these parts of the mountains, a two-day trip from the town in the river delta, having sent their men to make the journey.

Around him was a procession of at least a hundred of his fellow tribesmen on horseback, each animal’s breath turning to mist. Many of the mounts carried saddlebags laden with gold ingots and coins, and figurines carved from wood, or stone.

Patterns of reptilian scales and teeth the size of spear heads were painted on them in various places; across their breast, over one arm or the other. Asav himself had only his right hand painted, and intentionally overgrown fingernails filed to sharpened points. The odd materials used in the paint, of which the priest never disclosed, certainly made his hand feel scaly.

The snort of a nearing horse made him glance back. Kulam was catching up to ride alongside him. Kulam was a large man, thick through the shoulders, and had his hair done up in a warrior’s topknot. His horse was barded with the embalmed skins of men from the Ursfjorders who had attempted a raid on the village the previous year.

Kulam and many others went up the mountain a few days after to sacrifice the prisoners, but Asav stayed behind to help nurse the wounded. When they came back, they said it was an omen when Jinam showed a momentary interest in Kulam. Asav had written it off as, “Of course. You were giving him blood sacrifices, and Kulam still reeked of blood from the battle.”

The shaman had responded, “That means the greatest blood of our foes is on his hands. He may have a future in the service of Kharn’eth.”

Kulam since held his head a little higher around town. He called it recognition. Asav called it big-headedness.

Don’t say it. Don’t say it, Asav thought as the hoofsteps drew beside him.

“Are you afraid, little brother?”

Little… Damn him.

Asav cooled his choler and sighed. “I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t anxious,”

“It’s understandable. Just do as I do and you’ll be fine.”

The chief overtook them both. A grey wolf’s pelt clung to his shoulders, the beast’s face locked in a snarling visage. Human skulls and severed hands rattled with the canter of his large steed. Horns of ivory curved up from his helmet, meeting tips at the temples of a skull suspended over his head. Asav imagined it must have been a particularly worthy foe.

The dogs trailing the chief began growling and barking as the throng crested a hill. The gaping maw of a cave was in sight. The dogs took off running toward it, ignoring the whistles and hollers of their masters.

The chief looked back at the first two he saw, Asav and Kulam, and motioned them forward. “Follow them,” he grunted.

The brothers nodded and cracked their horses’ harnesses after the hounds. Asav could feel his heart rate already picking up. Something had to be wrong.

They followed around the far side of the mountain spire, and their horses reeled at the titanic serpentine form half-buried in the snow. A huge, leathery wing hung at a limp angle over the carcass, torn almost clean through in a straight line. Its sinuous neck was twisted at an impossible angle, with the head turned almost fully towards the sky, mouth lolling open. Dried blood painted the dead creature’s scales like runes of power to Khorne.

Kulam was the first to steady his horse. With a look of disbelief, he dug in his spurs, and headed straight for the corpse. Asav went back a ways, shouting at the top of his lungs:

“Dead! Jinam is dead!”

Asav looked back when Kulam shouted in despair with his hands covering his face. To see his brother suddenly unmade, Asav’s mind was swirling.

Kulam wept on his knees before the gaping wound that had laid the beast low. He was only shaken from it when the hounds’ snarling turned to howling and yelping, vying for attention. Some of them were posed, snouts pointed eastward.

They’d picked up a scent.

________________________________________________________

Fort Schippel had never been as busy as it was now. In the years following its destruction in the Storm of Chaos, the site was rebuilt by the Hochland provisional government as a stamp of order on the lawless land the region had become in the Northmen’s wake. It now stood at a rail terminus, a steel web that ran throughout the Empire’s north.

Equine technology and Imperial ingenuity and resources gave rise to the four-tiered castle, the outermost sections arranged in a five-pointed star. Its walls were plated in steel, dotted by cannon ports and pillars of towered turrets offering each indent overlapping areas of fire.

Day by day, trains disgorged tons of supplies and thousands of soldiers onto steam-fogged platforms. The implementation of steam locomotives brought never-before-known connectivity to the provinces. Regiments of Nordland orange, artillery crews of Wissenland white and grey, and Ostland black, white, and red gathered in one place. On the last day, the staging ground was a mosaic of banners and color, battalion blocks in waiting or flowing forward and funneling onto ramps of sky-stuff, all lying in a shadow. The shadow of Cloudsdale.

From below, one would think the sky was taunting the ground-dwellers with a downpour that never came. Slivers of sunlight poked through to touch the fort and ground upon which the Empire’s forces were massed to embark. Boarding ramps stretched two hundred yards to the ground, with many cautious words from the pegasi for the ground-dwellers to watch their step.

In the highest tower of Fort Schippel, General Albert Brochuss, accompanied by his retinue of advisers and menials awaited their ramp being extended from Cloudsdale’s underbelly.

Brochuss wore the green and orange livery of Hochland’s state. His uniform hugged tightly, the brass-colored abdominal plate engraved with the province’s great white cross. His head was darkly tanned and clean-shaven, save a thin, sharply pointed moustache.

Two stallions secured the white, poofy platform to the parapet, and a yellow pegasus with a fiery-colored mane trotted down with a smart smile.

“Albert Brochuss? The Bull of Littered Bones, and Guardian of the Weiss Hills?”

He nodded. “I see my reputation precedes me.”

“Aye.” The mare held out her hoof. “Governor-General Spitfire. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Brochuss raised his hand in reflex, but paused, glancing at the appendage in uncertainty.

Spitfire chuckled. “Sorry. Fist-bump.”

He huffed, but obliged the gesture, forming a fist and touching it to her extended foreleg.

“Let me be the first to welcome you to Cloudsdale,” Spitfire said, motioning him up. “You might want to take your first steps slowly.”

He reluctantly raised his boot over the first step of the platform. Despite having seen with his own eyes soldiers marching up from below, all logic and sense in him said not to do it.

It’s a cloud! You’ll fall straight through!

His boot sank deep into the ramp before it felt solid enough to bear his weight, like walking on rubber or a very thick carpet. He adjusted quickly and matched Spitfire’s trot, the assistants making their own pace.

Brochuss had seen some of the more arcane devices of the Empire’s Colleges of Magic in his years. The Luminark of Hysh, the Celestial Hurricanum, up to the floating battle tower of Witchfate Tor, displayed the prowess of wizards to harness the arcane. Cloudsdale clearly dwarfed it all.

A city… An entire city in the sky.

“How does any of this work?” he asked, trying to keep as straight a face as possible.

Spitfire’s lips twitched up in a knowing smile. “I know. It really boggles the mind, especially for newcomers. Cloudsdale’s a lot more like a skyship than it is a cloud, really. It takes a lot of work putting something this huge together that moves where we want it to.”

"I can see why so many revere this place. To shape the very sky is near to the divine.”

The governor nodded. “I hear that a lot, but when you think about it, it’s not that hard. Just get thousands of pegasi together, and you’ve got an unlimited supply of building material and water in the clouds to work with. And the buildings don’t need any foundation or to even take most of the limits of gravity into account. All you need then is steady wings and imagination.”

The bottom-most cloud layer exposed Brochuss and Spitfire to biting-cold internal wind currents, which was thankfully short-lived.

He didn’t realize he’d stopped, and was gazing up into the sky. Built impossibly into the heavens, pillared structures lazily drifted singularly or in amalgamated groups. The largest of the structures were fixed into the skyscraping mountain of clouds, their forms gently shifting as if they were made of liquid marble.

“We are honored to receive Emperor Karl Franz here in Cloudsdale,” Spitfire said, changing the subject. “Rumor is that he has some… personal business of his own here as well, you know.”

Despite Brochuss’ staunchly professional expression, he couldn’t help but glance at his pegasus companion beside him. “Oh?” he asked, as though discussing the rain. “Any leads?”

___________________________________________________

Gilda breathed deeply as she approached the gate of a wide courtyard behind the collonaded facade of city hall.

She never would have thought she would be back in Cloudsdale again after having completed Junior Speedsters training when she was young. Much of the city was familiar, the architecture, the park she used to pass by on her way to training. And she felt the atmosphere was much improved from the soft all-about-friendship vibe she’d gotten while growing up and visiting.

Beside her was Gunter. Particularly tall for a griffon, and strong-built, he had been a member of the Warhawks for only a year out of Wolfenburg. He quickly proved his worth in a number of scraps the Warhawks’ leadership had gotten tangled up in in negotiations, and in the Battle of the Mire where the mercenaries lent aerial support to Imperial forces against the undead forces of Sylvania. When meeting with most any other client or ‘troublesome’ individual, Gunter was Gilda’s right claw, an intimidating presence to add a silent threat to any conversation, even if he were across the room.

But today, the client was quite the V.I.P.

“Notepad?” Gunter asked.

Gilda groped a jacket pocket, feeling the rectangular object within. “Check.”

“Quill?”

The fiery-colored feather she took out had its origin on the scalp of one of her lieutenants, yanked off of him in an abruptly ended argument. “Check.”

Gunter glanced ahead. Before the gate standing at attention, were two pegasi resplendent in gleaming steel plate.

“Papers?”

Gilda made a face at the mention of the bureaucracy, and kept the small scroll ready. “As always,” she said with finality.

Arriving, Gilda handed one soldier her documentation. While they were looking it over, she tried to spot her client in the courtyard. There was little obstruction, the largest structures being a couple of skeletal pavilions. Surely someone of their size couldn't’ possibly be hidden in it.

She looked up when a shadow flickered over her for a split second, and spotted a body with wide-spread wings, but the sun’s glare was too great to fully make them out.

“You see him up there?” she asked Gunter.

“Yeh,” he muttered. “Barely.”

“Miss Bronzebeak,” one of the soldiers said. “Is your partner here necessary to your meeting?”

Gilda asked, “Does moral support count? He’s highly trusted in my organization—”

“No.” he said flatly. “Unless he is relevant to the task for which you are requested, he cannot enter with you.”

Gunter chuckled deeply. “You said yourself, Gilda and I are friends. Why are friends not trusted to work together?” He moved a claw toward the pegasus’ shoulder—

The stallion flipped down his halberd, smacking Gunter’s claw away with the flat of the blade. The polearm’s spike was mere inches from his chest.

“Stand back from the Emperor’s guard!”

Gunter jumped back in reflex, nearly going airborne. The guard returned to his at-ease posture as if nothing had happened.

“If he is not needed for the job at hand, he cannot be allowed in.”

“Alright,” Gilda said. She quickly sidestepped to get between the guard and her friend. “Gunter, what were you thinking? They’re Reiksguard.”

“I’ve never seen one before. For all I know they could have been Alcatani.” Gunter clicked his beak with a sour look at the trooper. “But fine. I’ll just have to settle for a second row seat.”

Gunter went to the side of the gate and planted his forehead against a bar. “Beautiful view. Ten of ten. Best of luck, Boss.”

Gilda snorted in amusement and passed through the gate. “Thanks. I’ll see if I can get his autograph for ya.”

She licked her thumb and ran it through the shock of feathers on her forehead. “Professional. Remember Nuln,” she whispered to herself.

Making her way to the center of the courtyard, the shadow passed over again. A massive griffon, easily twice the height of a man, touched down, flurrying the cloudy yard with the beating of his great wings.

Gilda unconsciously ruffled her wings and thought, Whoa. He’s kinda hot.

She scanned over his tiger-striped lower half and broad, brown and white-feathered upper body. His curved beak was covered in nicks and scratches, giving it a more serrated look; more sharpened than dulled from use.

"Open skies, how I missed thee…" he cawed.

In mid-stretch, Deathclaw met Gilda’s stare. Gilda flinched mid-step, but kept walking closer, not daring to show any weakness, or break from Deathclaw’s golden eyes.

Karl Franz jumped down from the throne-saddle on the large griffon’s back, wearing a red and blue diamond-patterned doublet, and black breeches. He took off his leather cap, and followed Deathclaw’s glare.

“Ah, Miss Bronzebeak. You’re early,” Franz said with a smile. He wiped his soaked face, swiping aside clumps of dripping hair. “Apologies for the appearance; I think I hit a stray raincloud coming down.”

Deathclaw glanced at Franz and deeply crooned, "He knows her?"

Gilda knelt before the Emperor. “Your highness, it’s a pleasure to meet you again.”

“Rise. Let us shed the formalities for the time being. This is quite exciting!”

Gilda grinned at Franz’s easiness, and shook his hand.

“This means a lot for my troops, too,” she said. “Deathclaw’s a legend in the World’s Edge Mountains. And that croon he just made—he’s surprised you know me.”

Franz nodded. “He was still at home when you and I met in Nuln. You’ll probably need a moment to get acquainted. Excuse me while I find a towel.”

Franz made a sharp whistle, getting Deathclaw’s snap attention, and made a circling motion with a finger at the ground. “Stay.”

Gilda cleared her throat. Franz was getting further away, and she didn’t know how long Deathclaw would be watching him go off. She felt a small sting of ire at how Franz ordered Deathclaw like a pet, but shook it off as a product of the language barrier between them.

"So, you know the Master?" Deathclaw said suddenly.

"Oh, yeah. We met in Nuln during this tech fair, where the Empire was showing off their new steam tanks. We hit it off, and he said he’d consider me being a translator between you and him. Honestly, I didn’t really think anything would come of it. I mean, why me and not any other griffon living in the Empire?"

Deathclaw sat in place and idly scratched his beak in recollection. "The Master made some attempts. But the liaisons, the way they carried themselves... Bah. Glorified hatchlings, who show puzzlement at the mention of trolls, or giants, or the star-bearing men from the north." He snorted derisively. "They were far from being ready, let alone worthy to be our bridge."

Deathclaw jabbed talon at Gilda. "But you… The uniform, the Ork tooth necklace. You have seen war, and there is strength in your bones."

Gilda beamed, blushing under her feathers. "Oh, thanks! That means alot coming from you. Say, you mind telling me about yourself? We can take a spin around the yard."

"I’d enjoy that. It’s a good way to come down from a flight."

The first couple of minutes was spent just taking in the cityscape. What must have been kilometers away was the weather factory, surrounded by a morass of weather systems. Snow, rain, lightning, and rainbows. The latter was sustained in the impossible hurricane, as if no tumult could disturb it; a staunch beacon of hope and pride for Cloudsdale’s citizens, and a powerful symbol for all those who looked up to the Holy City.

Deathclaw breathed deeply, savoring the clean breeze. "Perhaps it is merely culture shock, but I would love it if the Master moved his residence here. Such a place where the races—and their champions—come together, and I only stand out for my sheer stature. It’s rather refreshing. Ho, but that isn’t what you asked for. Where else to start but the beginning?

"From a hatchling I have known him. I’ve spent decades by his side. For the first few years I was allowed in his family’s nest, huge nest, made of rock instead of wood. After each season-cycle, his family had this tradition of lighting a sugar-coated pile of wet flour on fire, then blowing it out and eating it. Have you ever witnessed such a thing?"

Gilda suppressed a chuckle. How little real contact had he actually had? "I think it’s called a ‘birthday’. They celebrate each season-cycle, or year, that they’re alive. The wet flour’s called a 'cake'. Speaking of, I used to make a mean scone back in New Griffonstone. But don’t let the name fool you. It’s just as much a dump as ‘old’ Griffonstone."

"A ‘mean’ scone?" The mighty griffon gave her a curious side glance. "Somehow I doubt that you meant ‘average’."

"Oh, it’s just an expression," Gilda amended quickly.

"Right, well. The final year I was allowed in the nest, the Master’s mood seemed... off. He was still smiling, but I just felt something was wrong. He took me to the stables and said that word, that noise, ‘stay’, which, I think, means ‘wait’, so I did. He came back with a piece of that cake, put it down and said ‘sorry, boy’ before rushing back. After that, his parents wouldn’t let me back in the nest, but I already couldn’t fit through most of the doors by that year.

"The years went by and I saw less and less of him. For months at a time, the only human I would have contact with would be the territory-keeper each day. After seventeen years of this, he returned wearing that black armor, and the other humans began calling him ‘Highness’ and ‘Emperor’ instead of Franz or Karl. Since his return, much of our time together was spent killing. Greenskins, the star-men, and more. I supposed he was the alpha of his flock now, as all followed he and I, and hung on his every word. Now, the Master had something to defend.

"We’ve had more close calls than I can count. I’ve seen him injured or incapacitated, and the foe was so eager for his blood. I don’t know of the disputes between the Master’s flock and his enemies; however, if he feels it is worth dying for, it must be of utmost importance. I won’t let the enemy have the satisfaction of taking him from me, or his men-flock."

Gilda gave a good-natured laugh, and nodded. "We’ve got a lot of stories about you back in the World’s Edge Mountains, you know. Poems of the ‘great griffon, Uzkul Thur, who carries the imperial spirit above the filth and flames of the world’."

Deathclaw didn’t respond. Gilda was about to take his silence for disinterest when he pivoted his head slightly in her direction, a spark of curiosity in his eyes. "Poems, you say? Like what?"

A sudden thrill of star-struck excitement threatened to undo her composure, but she managed to conceal it behind her clearing throat.

"From the howl of war and chaos did rise,

the Lord of the Wind with wrathful cries.

The claw of death, evil's winged bane,

to bring all heaven beneath his reign."

"Funnily enough," Gilda continued, "’Uzkul Thur’ is Khazalid or Dwarf-talk for ‘death claw’, or… no, wait, ‘thur’ is hand. It’s still very close, though. It means something, I’m sure."

The great griffon rumbled, a low, almost warbling sound. A laugh. “You flatter me. Though the Master is truly the one who deserves it. I— Ah, there he is, now!”

Gilda and Deathclaw had gone the full path around the yard, ending up roughly right where they started when Deathclaw spotted Franz returning with a dry face and a towel wrapped over one arm.

“Ah, he hasn’t tried to scare you off yet. A good sign,” the Emperor remarked. “So, what is he saying?”

“He told me a quick bio, and I think he’s cool with it,” Gilda said.

“‘Cool with it’?” Franz said in puzzlement.

Deathclaw pressed his forehead against Franz’s chest, making a deep trill of consent.

“Ten bloody years and there are still more phrases,” the Emperor muttered, and started scratching Deathclaw’s neck. “This gets the message across, I think. Let’s take this to the shade of the Hall.”

____________________________________________________

Cloudsdale spilled into the central valley of the Middle Mountains, its shape liquid to the terrain, and filled whole tracts of the central valley like a slow-motion avalanche.

Built into the massifs, the obsidian-black walls of the Brass Keep spanned the width of the valley, sloping up to the peaks to either side. Sprawling on the outside, mounds and blocks of ramshackle housing clung and ran down from the walls like refuse thrown over. Behind the fortifications, and reaching slightly higher, appeared to be the top of the high citadel.

As the great walls had come into view of Cloudsdale’s forward sections, the fortress’s walls produced signal fires. A few ranging shots were exchanged between the artillery, but neither yet made a move. The two fastnesses of land and sky sat at opposite ends of the valley, one white, one dark, and as different as night and day.

One of the observation towers had been expanded into a stratagem room. The Emperor, Governor of Cloudsdale, General Brochuss, and a Master Engineer occupied the space, ringed around a broad table.

Ten-thousand men and stallions were to be committed to the battle to come. Miniature flags rested at various points on the wide map, an overhead view of the valley drawn up by aerial scouts. Regimental banners marked troop deployment zones and phases of assault.

Equestrian banners were closest to the front. A charge from the 21st Heavy Cavalry, supported from the sky by Cloudsdale’s rifle skirmishers would occupy the defenders. Behind them were three figures of steam tanks, the Alter Kamerad, Stormcast Eternal, and Iron Cross.

“By the Unberogen,” muttered Brochuss, surveying the fortress walls through a telescope.

Karl Franz hummed in agreeance, reclining in his seat at the table after having gotten an eyeful of the architecture. “There does seem to be only one way to go, doesn’t there? My good Frayser, what does it look like to you?”

The engineer raised the extra lenses of his telescopic glasses and began punching keys on the mechanical calculator at his hip. “If we have the materials, we can build a tower high enough.” The device spat out a punch card which Frayser read over. “I’d make ramp level one hundred twenty feet, give three to compensate. It looks like they have artillery on and in the walls, gunports.”

“How are we on counter-battery fire?” asked Franz.

Spitfire traced a line across the width of the valley, about a hundred yards short of the fortress walls. “This is the extent of our direct fire support. Beyond that, we can only lend area bombardment.”

“Then can you lend the Militia?” Frayser walked over and drew a number of pegasus figures from their box, and placed them at four locations on the walls. “The largest guns are here. With an overwhelming strike, their crews could be killed. I imagine they would have to be of exceptional skill to operate them, irreplaceable.”

“No, no.” With a click, Brochuss collapsed his telescope. “No offence to you or your warriors, Governor, but Pegasi aren’t much for strength, and the crew of those larger guns are dwarfs. Have you ever fought the Dum Dawi?”

Spitfire rested her cheek on her hoof. “Haven’t had the honor of making their acquaintance yet.”

“Their size betrays their strength; a line of them could halt a charge from greenskin warboars.” Brochuss rolled one of the pegasus markers around on its base. We could use the Warhawks instead. Their performance review showed some limited armor piercing capabilities of their talons. Plus, they’re mercenaries. Let’s have them work for their pay.”

Karl Franz waved a hand. “Ultimately, that may not be necessary. We’ll have support from the inside.”

“Do you mean the sappers, lord?” Heinrich asked.

The Emperor smiled mysteriously. “No, but don’t mind it. Our friends will show their hands. We just need to get to the walls. How long would it take to build the tower?”

Heinrich chuckled. “With unicorn magic… I’d say a couple of days?” He looked at the one non-human member of the group.

Spitfire grinned. “Don’t forget us, either. Flying haulers and builders means your engineers will barely even need scaffolding. And with your own unicorns and earth ponies to help with the heavy lifting, I’ll bet you a bottle of our best Tempus Asti that we can get it done in around thirty-six hours. If not less.”

“Tempus Asti?” Franz asked. “You mean ‘Create Time’?”

“Bingo! Heh, shoulda known you’d have High Gothic figured out,” Spitfire laughed. “Yeah. Think really strong wine cut very carefully with essence of distilled rainbows. They gave it the name ‘cause somepony claims they had a religious experience or something after drinking it,” she gestured grandly in the air with her hooves, “and suddenly figured that ‘Yea, a God am I! The vagaries of space and time retreat before my all-seeing gaze!’. When really, it’s just an exceptionally spicy drink. Those ponies are crazy.”

An uneasy silence fell between the three men. Finally, Chief Engineer Frayser punctured it with a barking laugh. “I’ll take that bet,” he said. “Oh, I can see it now. Gunports and platforms for cannons just above the embarkation level, and some sharpshooters on the roof of the tower. It could well defend itself, too.”

“So we could well tear out this parasite in an afternoon,” Brochuss mused. “What a day that will be.”

__________________________________________________________

Equestrian technology. Blast it all. No, this was Estalian. Damn Miragliano.

The air outside the Alter Kamerad was rank with smoke, magic burns, and the offal stench of the slums not a half kilometer ahead. It was a little better than the sweltering heat inside the tank.

Brochuss peered through his telescope to the front. The Equestrians were holding firmly against the horde of cultists and fleshlings in the brutal melee, hopefully long enough for the armored fist to arrive.

High above, globular clouds barked at the cultists. Wisps of weapons discharge and shadows of rifle barrels made the threat they posed known. It was not uncommon to see an arrow fly into a cloud and for a pegasus to fall out of it.

One hundred yards to either side, the Iron Cross and Stormcast Eternal trundled with matched speed. The Kamerad still had some of the shine from its preparations, but was truly an old warhorse, refitted and parts replaced to give it new life. Fitted with a rotating pillbox turret, its versatility could not be understated. As for the Iron Cross, the crew was green, and the vehicle itself virgin. Sigils and banners hung along its hull, celebrating the first of the new generation of Conqueror tanks to be made since the death of their inventor.

Just behind them, the sons of Hochland kept pace in formation at battle-march pace. Eager hands held their newest six-shot revolving rifles, ready to spit the seeds of Hochland’s vengeance against the Adversary.

The Hochlanders always had an affinity for firearms. Some say the men loved their rifles even more than their own wives, for how much care and embellishment they lavished upon them. It was not uncommon at all to see several pieces fitted with an emblem of a twin-tailed comet adorning either side of the frame, or in the case of the less prosperous soldiers, inscriptions ranging from dates of memorable kills to litanies and prayers to their warrior-god to guide their bullets true.

Since the Storm of Chaos, then the arrival of the griffons and the importation of their weapons, Hochland was among the first to modernize its army with griffonian revolver rifles. The inventors had made a masterpiece that allowed an avian’s eagle-like vision to track a target over a mile away, and still maintain reliability even through harsh weather as long as they were well-maintained. One man was quickly quoted as claiming that he could “Load on Festag for war and still have a bullet left for the tax collector”.

The shadow of the monolithic siege tower shrouded over much of the formation as it loomed on the left flank. The off-ramp bristled with boarding hooks above an icon of the Imperial Cross. Horses and Equestrian stallions alike were at the front and rear, keeping it mobile. Many were from the penal battalions, while most were fanatical to the church, either giving their bodies to the labor as penance for their souls, or leading motivational prayers.

They were allowed to mount a banner on the tower’s midsection, in full view of the enemy. Streaked in blood like messily applied fingerpaint, it read, ’Repent, for today you die!’

“Tongues of fire on Gloomfangs flaring,

News of foe-men near declaring,

To heroic deeds of daring,

call you, Hochland men.”

Brochuss looked back to the singer, a youth in the ranks, clutching his polearm. His breath staggered, and Brochuss could see the fear in his eyes.

The man next to him joined, and the song soon spread quickly among the ranks.

“Groans of wounded peasants dying,

Wails of wives and children flying.

For the distant succour crying,

call you, Hochland men.”

“Lord!” The sweat-soaked chief engineer shouted from the belly of the tank “Should the troops be singing? They might not hear orders.”

“Let it be,” Brochuss said. “This is their hour of reckoning.” He drew one of his pistols and raised it high, joining the thousand-strong chorus.

“This our answer, crowds downpouring,

swift as winter torrents roaring.

Not in vain, the voice imploring,

calls on Hochland men!”

The Stormcast’s whistle shrieked, which raised a cheer among the troops. Regimental banners were raised to identification height, many proudly displaying a golden shield on a white cross and red background, Hochland’s provincial flag.

“Loud the marshal pipes are sounding!

Every manly heart is bounding!

As our trusty chief surrounding,

march we Hochland men!”

Then, the arrows began to fall.

“Shields!”

The order came from across the battle line. Unicorns embedded in the formations made their presence known by generating sheets of shimmering warp-stuff over the troops. Arrows and crossbow bolts bounced off the barriers as each stallion protected his section. The power needed to maintain the shields against the barrage of sharpened heads meant their area of coverage was limited. Despite efforts to economize space, those unlucky enough to be in the section gaps were left vulnerable.

Where the casualties were few made the loss oddly more unnerving. Under such a hail, men would have been struck in scores, no time to watch or feel for every one, but now an individual man’s screams marked him out for turning heads. One could hear their age, or youth.

Brochuss breathed in the familiar smell of blood and burning earth as the Kamerad’s whistle blew an ascending pitch, signaling the forward regiments of the beginning ‘phase two’.

A section of equestrians parted before the tank and the screaming mass of cultists began to pour through. At the same time, the Kamerad’s main gun fired point blank, and the mob vanished from view behind a cloud of scalding steam. The vehicle momentarily lurched to a halt from the blast before surging forward again.

Plugging the gap among the Equestrians, the Kamerad ground forth and the Hochlanders melded into the frontline, firing between their allies.

Brochuss’s pistol barked at the cultists against the Kamerad’s sides, those desperately prying at its armor with swords or their bare hands, sandwiched between the tank and the crush of bodies behind them.

Then, he spotted a fat, foetid figure climbing a mound of bodies, carrying a tall staff topped with the icon of the Plague God.

“Invaders!” the rotten man roared in outrage. His voice carried well over the field, filled with grief. “The Keep has been silent! A thousand years of peace from us! Was this not enough?!”

Without blinking, Brochuss aimed his second sidearm and fired several times, striking the man-thing twice, getting no reaction but his continued cry.

“No good deed goes unpunished! No evil unrewarded! Let this be the choir of justice! Of death!” He swung his staff over his head seven times, the icon fuming foul gases and emitting pale emerald wychlight. “Sing, brother Joseph! Sing, brother Rosenbon! Sing for your father, brothers! SIIIING!”

He slammed his staff to the mound.

___________________________________________________________

Chrysalis shared Ditto’s eyes as the latter spied through a telescope at the progress of the Imperial soldiers. The steam tanks were pressing in boldly, and the defensive line of cultists outside the slum looked to be on the brink of breaking.

’Good, good,’ she mused. ’Tell the Emperor we are in position and ready to strike when he is.’

’Very well, my Queen.’

’And stay safe. You’ve heard of the doppelganger daemon, yes?’

’In briefing with Governor-General Spitfire, yes. Don’t worry, your highness, I’ll keep to myself.’

’Good. Farewell.’ Chrysalis blinked as her senses came rushing back. She was back in darkness, the sapping tunnel.

Two parallel columns of drones passed in opposite directions, one line bearing nothing, the other with loads of soil cradled on their backs, between vestigial wings.

Chrysalis walked along the tunnel to its end, which bulbed out into a small cavern. Hundreds of larger changelings were waiting, each born into a heavier carapace and two triplet clusters of small eyes. A low thrum of wings and murmurs reverberated from them at the queen’s approach.

Upon a thought, Chrysalis ordered the worker drones back down the tunnels. This was far enough. She could smell the tainted shit-stink of hateful emotions right over her head; this was an excellent spot to catch the adversary unawares.

A wave of magical energy washed over her, a cold grasp that brought an onset of shivers.

This power was foreign, from the surface.

Bits of the ceiling began to crack and crumble, bleeding dark green foam, and exposing human corpses that must have been buried shallowly long ago. One of them spasmed as its body was engulfed in emerald light. Its head wrenched out of the soil, empty eye sockets and grinning, lipless mouth gurgling up sick mist.

It fell into the cavern with a dull thump. Chrysalis’ brood quickly formed a circle around its body, chirping in idle curiosity as the man-thing staggered up, then awkwardly stumbled toward the closest changeling with arms lazily outstretched. The insect merely held a hoof out against the withered-thing’s chest while it started gnawing at its armored body with splintered, rotten teeth.

A knot of curiosity and apprehension tightened in Chrysalis’ guts. Dark magic, animating bodies dead so long as to be unrecognizable. And with the Keep having sat unmolested in the same spot for centuries, there could be thousands.

She grabbed the creature up by its tattered shirt. The infernal power sustaining it burned like a flame within its skull, disdainful and hungry. Chrysalis drew two bone sabres, thrusting one into its abdomen. The creature didn’t react and continued trying to claw at her arm, moaning, and retching up dirt. Her blade came out dusty, and she pierced it again through the chest. Still the creature didn’t even seem to notice.

“Come on, how do you die?!”

With a thought, backed by force of magic, Chrysalis broke its head away from the shoulders with a gruesome popping of bone. Finally, the body became still.

’The head. The brain,’ Chrysalis relayed to her soldier drones. ’Sever that or the spine, and they fall.’

Her brood chattered in affirmation.

What in the world is going on on the surface? She thought of the undead’s attempt to bite her subjects, and how vulnerable the soft-skinned humans must be. This is why exoskeletons are superior, she thought to herself.

More of the ceiling crumbled in, and Chrysalis figured their cover wouldn’t hold any longer. She reestablished a link with Ditto.

’Ditto, have you found the Emperor yet?’

’Not yet. The staging area is quite a distance away.’

’Find somewhere to become a pegasus and fly! Our cover is falling; we’re going in moments.’

’Oh dear… oh my. Right. With all speed, my queen!’

Chrysalis cut the link, and not a moment too soon. Another three undead men emerged from the crumbling ceiling, and were immediately met with a flash of Chrysalis’ horn and a shimmering green forcefield pushing counter to their advance. The zombies clawed futilely at the barrier, even as they were crushed between it and the massive weight of the disturbed earth pressing on them from behind.

’As one, prepare to charge!’

Hundreds of pairs of wings buzzed idly, and the drones crouched into a ready poise. The chamber was instantly filled by a flurry of blinding dust.

A second layer of emerald green overglow coruscated around Chrysalis’ horn. Then a third. Her face scrunched up in concentration, but her lips were tinged with a smile; she was ready for this moment.

Chrysalis let out an almost otherworldly scream, and released the energy in a single, violent pulse. With a great, rumbling roar, her spell eviscerated the soil above and at a forty-five degree angle all the way to the surface in a massive explosion of spitting earth.

Beyond the newly-made tunnel exit, the cloudy Hochland sky beckoned.

’Go.’

The hundreds of Changelings present leapt forward, and as one, let forth a piercing screech, intelligible only through their own telepathy.

’FOR THE QUEEN!’

Like a black geyser, the Changelings shot out of the cavern, arcing high and diving on the masses of unprepared inner-defenders like a horde of army ants.

Chrysalis buzzed out and took in a picture of the Keep through her drones' eyes. As anticipated, the sinkhole was surrounded. Traitorous soldiers, cultists, and bipedal flesh-things she could not call human reeled away from the swarms of large black insects pouring up from the ground. And still many stood their ground, jamming daggers in eye sockets and finding gaps in their exoskeletons even as they were tackled to the ground and had their throats bitten out with defiant, blood-foaming snarls.

Chrysalis had mere seconds to act. Surprise would only last so long.

’To the walls! Destroy the guns!’

The drones followed her up the ramparts, crashing into their scrambling ranks. Weapons and munitions were dropped by nerveless hands in their panic-driven haste. Once Chrysalis gained solid footing on the wall, she drew all her sabres, and started a slaughter.

With nowhere to run, the defenders were cut down with each broad swipe of her blades. The drones pushed men off the walls, biting and punching with fang and heavy hoof, smashing headlong into ill-equipped archers and crossbowmen.

It didn’t take long to reach the first of the artillery, a behemoth of a hellcannon on thick wheels, tended to by a crew of heavy-set chaos dwarfs. The weapon’s bulk required its own rotating platform.

The first dwarf’s axe took the bite from one of Chrysalis’ sabres. Her second and third arms stuck him through, tearing his belly open before raising him up and throwing him over the wall.

The dwarf behind him managed to take up a his blunderbuss, growling through his teeth, “Stupid bug!”

The barrel belched fire, and buckshot peppered her exoskeleton. The concentrated, short-range punch knocked the wind out of the queen and stalled her bearing down on him—for only a second. She swiped two sabres across him, tearing open his face and chest in ribbons of meat and sodded bone.

With the rest of the crew entangled with her other changelings and covered on either end of the wall by her drones, she effortlessly cut the catches that connected the weapon to its securing chains.

The oven-like device at its rear slammed itself shut and the whole weapon rumbled with an odd life unto itself. The countless faces bulging out of the length of its barrel twisted and moaned, the monstrous skull on the bore creaked its fanged maw open wider.

It fired like barely-contained thunder. With nothing to stabilize it, the massive recoil catapulted the weapon back and off the wall, flipping itself end-over-end in a smoking arc.

Chrysalis briefly watched the shot arc out, and land in nothing like she saw through Ditto. The imperial spearhead was shattered, swamped in the undead creatures. Flares of panicked unicorn magic lit up the field like a morbid fireworks celebration. Formations were broken, companies mixed and sundered, set upon by an enemy with a fathomless hunger. The collective moan of the unnumbered horde reverberated through the queen’s chitin.

’Tanu, keep targeting the artillery. The Empire’s forces are soon to break.’

’By your will, my queen, but may I ask where you are going?’

’The humans need to speed things up. They'll need a catalyst.’

Chrysalis hated to think it, but hopefully none in the Empire’s ranks would recognize her as anything but a monster of the adversary gone rogue. She lept from the wall, her droning wings carrying her over the outer slums.

________________________________________________________

“Form a line! Rifles on a line!”

Brochuss pistol-whipped a split-jawed zombie that had a man by the arm, the burnished steel hilt striking hard enough to pulp the aged and cracked skullbone like a ripe egg. The zombie dropped like a puppet with its strings cut.

Amidst the killing field, similar executions were taking place as the beleaguered Hochlanders struggled to keep at least two soldiers back-to-back in one place. Taking the hint from their sergeants, many men simply waded in to club the shambling creatures over the head or spine with the butts of their rifles. Loud bangs and pops echoed throughout the street-turned-charnel-house as bullets were fired into the heads of nearly every "dead" zombie, the Imperials not daring to take chances.

Still, those isolated were dragged down by the undead, at the mercy of long-nailed claws and insatiable mouths.

Wiping his gun handle clean with one sleeve, Brochuss reached down to help the fallen trooper up, carefully avoiding the stricken arm. Miraculously, however, whatever padding he wore in his sleeve had apparently stopped his foe from digging too deeply into the flesh.

“Where’s your weapon, soldier?” he asked crisply.

The man picked up his rifle with trembling hands. “H-h- right here, sir.”

“Good. Find your superior, or any, and tell him he has the general’s orders on his lips. Form a firing line in front of the reserves.”

“Rifle line before the reserve. Yessir, aye! Captain Dunlain!”

The trooper took off running through the chaos, shouting as he went. Brochuss himself went in the other direction, doing the same.

“Fall back! To the reserves!”

A trumpet began to sound. The General recognized the rushed song as his order having been heard.

Drawing a sword in one hand, pistol in the other, Brochuss gave one broad stroke at the neck of a zombie shambling at him, snapping through its shriveled neck.

He knew this enemy, stupid but unable to fear or run. The shock and awe of cannons and flame would not deter them. Every single one of the monsters had to die. Brochuss momentarily relished the thought.

He held his sword to the air, hoping the sun’s glint off its bloody blade would catch the troopers’ eyes.

“Back! Rifles, form a line!”

The rifle line was already quickly taking form some one-hundred yards behind the front line.

“Pikes in skirmish formation!”

He picked up an abandoned halberd and jammed it vertically into the ground. Reaching the reserve, the 39th Signal Company’s leadership was at the front. A team of four unicorns were arrayed around the bugler and drummer.

The team saluted him, and Brochuss quickly identified the section leader. “An unexpected obstacle,” he said just as the leader opened his mouth, and pointed to each of the unicorns with orders.

“Signal the artillery to resume fire, high explosive, four-hundred yards creeping back ten yards per minute. You, call the thunderers to our position. You two, amplify these men’s instruments. I want them heard across the valley.”

The combat musicians readied their horns at the general’s mention as their brass began to glow with the same colored aura as the stallions’ horns. Brochuss’ words were immediately translated to trumpeting sound. Across the line, men and ponies shouldered their weapons with the order to the reserves to make ready. The formations quickly took shape as ranks of pikes and halberdiers knelt in front of the riflemen in a loose formation, weapons braced up like chevaux de frise.

As the last of the survivors slipped behind the line, the undead masses were in full view. Slouching, groaning, a slow-motion wave of men and equines, many of them those who were freshly perished in the ambush.

“That pike there is our marker!” Brochuss barked. “Fire at will at first order. Mark your targets, and aim for the head. Steadiness of Ahalt be with you! Ready!”

The riflemen raised their weapons.

“Present!”

Brochuss watched the horde with strained patience. This unclean sorcery, and behind them the bastion of blasphemy so close to his home. He would not suffer their presence any longer.

An oblivious shambler knocked the halberd down.

“FIRE!”

The line ripped open, chattering like a string of firecrackers. Heads popped among the undead in gushes of cartilage and greymatter, while some were merely pierced through the neck or face. Bodies were dropping, but not quickly enough.

The zombies stumbled straight into the ranks of polearms. The undead, pinned at point-blank range, were easy targets for the rifles.

“Bugler, order the reserves up in mixed formation, and advance,” Brochuss said.

You haven’t stopped us yet, bastards.

As the bugler started his section, a piercing scream drowned him out.

A tall, onyx-black creature touched down among the adversary. It cut across them with terrible ease, ripping open fountains of blood with four viciously-curved sabre-limbs. He wouldn’t complain that the creature was doing his work for him, but this was only the easy part.

Brochuss looked up at the looming siege tower, having been halted in the dead’s rising.

Where were those ‘infiltrators’ the Emperor spoke of? How would he even know they were here?

As if on cue, a fireball erupted from one of the Keep’s towers, hurling dust and shattered masonwork skyward. Like sand to the surf, the turret came crumbling down.

“Incoming!”

A section of soldiers hastily parted as a roughly equine-shaped creature smashed into the dirt among their formation. Brochuss stood over the thrashing thing, its thick, black armor plating cracked and profusely bleeding. Its pained shrieks stung his ears. Brochuss pointed his pistol at its head, took a momentary glance into the cluster of three eyes on one side of its face, and pulled the trigger.

With a pop of green fluid, the creature went silent and motionless.

“It’s about Gods-damned time.”

__________________________________________________________

Chrysalis felt the life of another drone quickly fading away, even as its consciousness was reabsorbed into the hivemind. The warrior was dying, of no more use anyway, but its last memory flashed across her mind for a split second. A bullet to the head from the human general.

She grimaced, but only let it trouble her a moment. At least they were making progress.

Chrysalis felt the thumps against her carapace as bullets smacked and rattled her form. The Imperial troops were advancing closer, some redirecting rifle fire in her direction.

She picked up a gangly cultist by the throat. “Doom comes!” she shrieked. “Doom comes!”

A particularly piercing howl made even Chrysalis’ ears ring, and the fire from the Imperials eased up. A very large armored griffon touched down among the howling mobs. Across its chest spanned a battle plate displaying a calligraphic KF embossed in gold. On touchdown, it pierced through whole men’s bodies with its claws. Chrysalis recognized the pitch black and gold armor of the Emperor adorning the man on its back.

Franz strained at the reins to pull Deathclaw’s threatening gaze from Chrysalis, shouting, “Away! Away! Friend!”

A loud sniffling whine drew Chrysalis’ attention to the gates. Several monstrous things were plodding forth, bearing tremendous pincers or swiping tentacles for arms. The tallest among them cast a shadow on all others. thick armor plates securely protecting its body. The craftsmanship, displaying blasphemous icons, was too well made for a creature of its intelligence.

The Keep’s denizens must have prepared it, waiting for a reason to unleash it.

With eager twirls in its long-fingered hands, it lugged what was no less than a tree trunk, impaled through with countless metal spikes in a cruel, massive club. Two twisted faces glaring from the same head locked on the changeling queen.

The reluctant cultists began to laugh. “Doom comes! Doom comes for you!”

Chrysalis snapped the neck of the cultist in one claw, and dropped the limp body to the cobblestones below.

"Doom has been my closest friend for over a decade," she seethed, gripping her sabres tighter. Chrysalis swept her blades in a full arc, then settled into a gory dance of death as she was charged on all sides.

________________________________________________________________

“Drop it!”

Deathclaw leapt skyward with clawfuls of screaming cultists. In mere seconds they were a great height in the air and Deathclaw threw them further skyward, leaving their fate to be decided by gravity.

“There! The trolls!” Franz aimed Deathclaw straight for where Chrysalis had engaged the mutant trolls, and the twin-faced giant was picking up the pace, eager to get stuck in.

The undead were ground down under the Imperial steamroller, chopping and blasting bodies to ribbons. Skulls split, shields shattered, the sons of Man closed the distance to the keep yard by yard.

Deathclaw dove on a troll, his talons piercing the thick hide of its back as it grappled with the changeling queen and bit into its collar. Franz lunged forward in his saddle, brought Ghal Maraz in an overhead arc, and struck the monster’s cranium. The beast’s arms shot skyward in an awkward reflex and it fell twitching.

Franz and Chrysalis met glances momentarily. An instant of simple understanding passed between them as sure as any telepathy.

You’d better know what you’re doing.

I do.

Another troll vomited a gush of corrosive bile onto Chrysalis’ back. Hissing in pain, she whipped two swords around and severed the monster’s arm which had been raised to defend its face.

Deathclaw went airborne again, both he and Franz looking for a weak spot on the giant which was barreling at Chrysalis with club raised.

“Sideswipe, for the head!”

Chrysalis finished off the troll with a sabre shoved into its mouth, sticking out the base of its skull. In time to notice a shadow bearing down, she took a high jump back with a burst of wing-power. She wasn’t fast enough to avoid the tremendous hand that grabbed everything below her waist.

The giant momentarily turned its head at Deathclaw’s screech. The griffon sank his claws into the giant’s arm, shredding gashes in its flesh as Franz smashed Ghal Maraz into its jawline.

With an indignant roar, the beast released Chrysalis and stumbled.

Deathclaw clambered up the giant’s arm, and bit into an eye of its regressive face. Screaming, it raised a hand at Deathclaw only for Franz to smash it aside with a crunch of oversized bone. The griffon flapped away with the optic nerve snapping, and the glistening yellow orb popping in his beak.

Franz eased Deathclaw to circle the field. The siege tower was at the wall. Any moment, its ramp would drop. The cultist outer garrison was broken and rushing back into the slums.

“Land now. Final push.”

The soldiers cleared space for their Emperor as the giant griffon touched down. Franz spun Ghal Maraz around once, and pointed it to the Keep.

“On now! They are broken!”

The Cross’s whistle blew, and the tank fired its main cannon. The shell arced up and burst above the scrambling cultists, showering them in scything shrapnel.

“On now! For the giant!” Franz called, pushing Deathclaw into a running start. “Bring it the death of a thousand blades! This darkness is nigh banished!”

Deathclaw screeched as he took off again, leaping high above the jubilant soldiers.

Franz glanced about with trained eyes, but couldn't spot Chrysalis near the slums. He assumed she’d melted back into the chaos.

But he had bigger problems to worry about at the moment. The giant had found its club, and was now sweeping it in wide, vicious arcs across the advancing imperials. Some were batted into the air like weightless mice, and others ground under the boulder head. Sparks and pops of bullets striking its armor only seemed to make it angrier.

Franz kept Deathclaw straight, utilizing the giant’s attention on the ground troops to have Deathclaw sail between its legs. Franz delivered a heavy blow to its kneecap, and Deathclaw sank his talons into the calf in a clean snap.

Franz took a quick glance back at the giant collapsing to one knee, and its tremendous hand swinging at him.

The world became a blur after it struck Deathclaw. Losing all sense of orientation, the only thing Franz could make sense of next was the smell of earth, and pain wracking his body.

Franz staggered to his feet. His suit was covered and jammed with hay. It felt like the world was still spinning. He leaned with a hand against a cold, iron surface.

The hammer… Where is it?

Gaining his bearings, he looked about at the sagging amalgamates of the slums. Sheet metal and chipping plaster walls were scrawled over with blasphemous icons. The gutters ran with a trickle of some filthy green-grey fluid.

Franz-double took, catching a pair of eyes from one of the darkened windows, but they were gone now.

He drew a pistol from his belt, a snubnose six-shooter.

He spotted the golden glint of Ghal Maraz a little ways up the street. Though he was reduced to a bit of a hobble, the particularly strong pain in one of his legs was manageable.

He took up the hammer and looked to the sky. Where could Deathclaw be, and where was here?

“Why?”

Franz’s pistol-hand jerked up, taking aim at the source of the voice. A young man, probably still in his teens, was hesitantly emerging from one of the houses. His skin was marked with countless scars, and he spoke softly through lips sewn together with alternating patterns of string, giving a little slack to talk.

“Stay there,” Franz ordered, motioning his pistol threateningly.

The boy held his place, still staring intently.

“What have we done to you?” he mumbled, staring intently with blood-filled eyes. “The Keep has been silent. Our lords do not strike your lands.”

Franz took a quick glance around. Nobody sneaking up… yet. He took into a quick walk toward the sound of cannon fire, and the boy followed.

“Tell me why you will attack people who have not made war on you. The founders of the Keep are long dead, and we are not stupid. We know your armies are strong. We know no help will come.”

Franz spotted another one of the denizens stepping out from an alley with both hands in his pockets. The Emperor picked up his pace in passing him.

“Hm?” The boy probed. “You still fear dissenting opinion? That we can worship other gods and still live? Or perhaps you’re playing a game with the lives of our people and yours?

‘Let us kill some mutants, some people who had no choice in how the world would strike them, and say it is God’s will!’ Who are you with all this dress and pomp? An officer? The general of this army of murderers? Speak!”

The boy grabbed the Emperor by the pauldron, and Franz whipped around with pistol in hand. A loud crack split the eerie calm of the street as the forty-five caliber bullet ripped through his stalker’s chest.

The boy stumbled back, clutching at the wound, gasping but he did not scream. Franz slung Ghal Maraz under one arm and whistled loud, breaking into a run.

All around him, the people began to emerge in force from the ruined dwellings, bearing the sigils and mutations of the Ruinous Powers.

A heavy thorn ricocheted off Franz’s helmet while two others stuck into the soil, each almost half a foot long.

Ahead, they were already out and in arms, with scythes, swords, and toothy, barbed tentacles arrayed against him.

“Oh, praise be,” One of their foetid number chuckled. Pushing to the front, a man of inhuman proportion waddled forth. In the ragged, faded colors of Averland uniform, he looked to be a former officer. “Do my eyes deceive me, or has the Emperor himself come to lead this campaign?”

A murmur of curiosity rose from the growing ring of denizens.

The traitorous officer gugled up a froth and screamed, drawing his rusted-out sword.

“Take him! Deliver him to our lords!”

Franz quickly holstered his pistol in the face of the cautiously closing groups. He took a wide swing with the hammer, shattering a number of polearms in a flurry of splinters. His backswing struck one of the cultist’s hands, cracking them into a hideous angle.

A scythe hooked him by his armored torso, and yanked him into a mass of grabbing hands. Franz could hardly see through the shadows of the writhing group, feeling himself being pulled in every direction and eager, decayed fingers prying at his grip on Ghal Maraz.

“Give him to Hugh!” one shouted. “He’ll hold him best till we get there!”

“Take his hammer!” cried another. “He broke my Edmund’s hands!”

A piercing shriek ended their quibbling, and a thrumming of gunfire caused them to scatter, dropping Franz as blood began to spatter on his armor.

Getting up, he smiled at the more than two dozen griffons lining the rooftops, firing into the crowd.

The former Averlander was struck several times, but stormed toward Karl Franz, heedless of the shots. With a gurgling roar, he brought his weapon down in a heavy overhead arc.

Despite the uncared-for appearance of his sword, it held strong as the blade met Ghal Maraz’s handle. Franz guided it toward the hammerhead’s back-hook, dragging it into the officer’s thigh.

With a crack of bone, the Averlander fell to one knee. With his free hand he grabbed Franz’s arm, which immediately pounded with pain. The Averlander grinned viciously—

And then he was set upon by several angry, chain-mailed griffons.

The largest of them sank his talons into the Averlander’s eyes and mouth. He tightened his grip crushingly before his face, along with shards of collagen and bone, was ripped from his skull.

Franz held his aching arm tightly, noticing a trickle of blood running down the glove and many small holes in the vambrace.

“Imperator, we’re here for your extraction,” the lead said. Carved into the side of his helmet was a small message, ‘property of Gunter - do not touch’.

“I’d certainly hope so. Can you lift me to the roofs?”

“Da, da. Turn around.”

The griffon held Franz under the arms and started to ascend. Just then, one rallied denizen grabbed Franz by the leg, another at his foot.

Gunter grunted at the added weight, and frantically flapped his wings to compensate. Raising his head, he barked, “Shoot the bastards, you bat-eyed hatchlings!”

Accompanying the shifting rifle chatter, two more griffons joined the effort, grabbing Gunter by the shoulders and flapping with all their might to get clear of the street.

Franz fiddled with his holstered pistol, barely reaching it in his position. He fired three times into the gathering morass, and he’d apparently struck home as the grip on his legs loosened, and he was pulled free, sans one solid gromril boot.

That’s going to take a fortune to replace, he thought inanely.

Franz emptied his pistol as he was brought to the roof, among a large squadron of the Warhawks.

In spite of the uniform Gilda had worn in their meeting, the Warhawks didn’t appear to have any common dress in the field. The griffons were dressed and armored in gear from around the world, from a Bretonnian knight’s helmet with the lower face cut out for a beak, scimitars from Araby, padded gambesons to heavy plate armor. Many heads turned to catch a glimpse of the human emperor.

“My thanks,” Franz said as Gunter dropped him on a section of flat roofing. “And doubly so if you can find an apothecary.”

Gunter nodded and ran off across the rooftops.

Franz stripped off his vambrace and glove. Several small thorns were stuck in across his forearm. After a few moments of attempting to pluck them out himself, a Griffon with an image of a snake wrapped around a grinding mortar sewn into his shoulder guard approached.

“Here, sir, sit down,” he said sharply.

Complying and watching the medic remove the needed paraphernalia, Frans asked, “And who do I owe for the care?”

“Gruff Junior, sir,” the griffon relied, pausing but a moment at the higher authority’s question. “Arm out.”

Gruff precisely plucked each thorn out, one by one, his precise talons moving deftly. From a waterbag, he wetted a rag and washed out the blood, with a second, dried the arm, and with the last, coated Franz’s arm with a foul-smelling oily salve.

“Give that five minutes, and the bleeding should stop.” Gruff said with the finality of his task. “How does it feel?”

Franz flexed his arm. “Like it’s fallen asleep. Too bad, that’s my good swinging arm. Speaking of, have you seen Deathclaw?”

“Yessir. He came and got us from the reserves to look for you. We split in two groups, and he and the others are somewhere thataway,” Gruff pointed in a generally eastward way.

“Right.” Franz stood again, picking up Ghal Maraz in the opposite hand and eyeing the opened-up siege tower. “The walls our ours, but the battle is not yet won.”

“Uh, your highness, you just said your swinging arm fell asleep. You might not be—”

“I said my good arm feels that way.” Franz hefted the warhammer onto his shoulder. “I’ve still got another.”

Author's Note

An Imperial standard year lasts 400 days, split up into 12 months of 32 or 33 days. Weeks last 8 days. They include :
Wellentag (Work day)
Aubentag (Levy day)
Marktag (Market day)
Backertag (Bake day)
Bezahltag (Tax day)
Konistag (King day)
Angestag (Start week)
Festag (Holiday)

Chapter 32: A Walk in The Garden

“You’re a long way from home, witch hunter.”

“Show yourself, von Carstein.”

“I am here, mortal, and I bring your end. The dark is my realm, the grave my throne! Yet you have much to fear, for I am the true and rightful ruler of the Empire. Thine brave corpses will make a fine addition to my army.”

~Mannfred von Carstein, ambushing an Imperial scouting party at the swamps of Hel Fenn

-------------------------------------------------------------

Fireworks lit the night sky with brilliant traceries, casting their brief but spectacular glows on the Imperial camp. The Brass Keep burned long into the night, and pyres of the denizens’ corpses smoldered between its slums and the encampment. The roar of the fires complemented the song and celebration of the soldiers as they rattled swords against shields, cheered, and reveled in the Keep’s firelight.

At the center stood the Emperor’s tent, a canvas castle bearing a grinning skull and crossed swords on jet-black siding, looming in a looming watch over the soldiers.

“What?!”

Karl Franz’s tent shook from Chrysalis’ outburst. He hastily righted a fallen candelabrum, as it spilled hot wax over the table and threatened to set the papers alight.

The Queen’s disguise faltered, random spots on her body burst into green flames, bulging out in the form of her black carapace before she willed them back under control.

“Too many good men have died taking the Keep,” Franz said coolly, turning from the wax-stained treaty. “After all this, it would be inconceivable to tell the army we’re just going to walk away empty-handed.”

“That’s the whole premise we agreed on! My subjects were driven to the brink of extinction, and we’re just now clawing our way back! This land is ours!”

Franz leaned forward, planting his hands on the table between them. “I’m fully willing to make concessions. Your people can live among the settlers as long as they’re cloaked, you can expand your tunnels under the range, even control mining operations as they’d be in your underground. Essentially what will need to happen is cohabitation.”

Chrysalis wrenched her claws from the table, tearing out splinters in the process and forcing them back into the form of the petite hands of a female Inquisitor. “You should have brought this up sooner, Franz. You can’t just change the terms. You could just tell them the land is too corrupt, and they’ll grow a second head if they stay too long.”

Franz wrung his hands tensely. “That flies in the face of the words of my wizards. They tell me the influence of Chaos is disappearing by the hour since we started burning the Keep. Keeping Imperial secrets is one thing, but I can’t lie so brazenly when everyone already knows the facts.”

A cold silence stretched out between them. Franz was momentarily surprised; he’d expected the Queen to scream or rant in rage at hitting a dead end, but instead, Chrysalis just looked desperate, almost defeated. Her eyes were screwed shut, fingers white knuckled into fists.

“Think about it, Chrysalis,” he continued. “You really have nothing to lose, here, and much to gain. Your subjects do not ‘eat’, so farmland is not an issue. But there will be families coming here, people who will try to make a living, be bound by community, and have love for one another.” He dragged the last phrase out slowly, pointedly. “You’ll be right under their feet.

“But what if you were to take it all? If you brought the hives to the surface and some explorer finds your spires out there, you and your race would be exposed. There’d be, without a doubt, a call for another attack on the range. I wouldn’t back it, but the Electors are the local authority. Count Ludenhof will see this place as part of Hochland, and since the last Incursion, he’s been fast to act on reports of intruders.”

Chrysalis ground her teeth together in frustration. Without offering any retort, she slumped back into her chair, burying her face in her hands with a ragged sigh.

“I’m so sick of hiding our very existence. I just wanted my subjects to see the light again,” she muttered sullenly.

Franz put his heavy hand on Chrysalis’ shoulder. “I hadn’t considered it until recently, but... have you ever heard of Albion?”

Chrysalis peered up between her fingers at him, her face blank. “No.”

“Then that is where you should try next.”

“And why is that?”

“The recorded histories are scarce, but they read of magical stones made by giants that keep the influence of chaos at bay. As far as we know, there are no beastmen, no Skaven-”

The light jingling of a bell outside the tent interrupted him.

“Come,” Franz said, standing up sharply.

The canvas flaps fluttered open, letting in a silver-armored knight of the Reiksguard with a stamped envelope in his hand. “Milord, a courier came with a message from Sylvania.”

Franz’s features hardened at that. Who are those parasites to think he can address the Emperor directly? “Open it. Who is it from?”

The knight ripped open the blood-red seal binding the scroll, and unfolded the parchment. “Mannfred and Vlad von Carstein, and a… Nightmare Moon.”

Chrysalis stood up in a flash. She didn’t even try to mask her look of rage. “Her? In Sylvania? What are her and the Carsteins doing?”

Franz took the message, his brow creasing warily at the names. Mannfred had died in the Battle of Hel Fenn four hundred years ago. Vlad, a hundred years before that. And Nightmare Moon… had apparently disappeared to parts unknown, according to the Princesses. If she was confident enough to reveal her existence and affiliations now…

“Absolve me of my ignorance, your highness, but who is Nightmare Moon?”

“Don’t mind it for now,” Franz said, taking the letter. “I’ll organize a briefing and inform the Order. And thank you. Dismissed.”

The knight was barely out of the tent before Chrysalis asked, “What does it say? What do they want?”

Karl Franz skimmed past the list of titles and pleasantries, long since used to the routine. He stopped midway through, eyes locked on a single paragraph. And then he just stared, long and hard. The crackling of fire and distant cheers from the encampment rang in the silence.

“Franz?” Chrysalis tried again.

The Emperor slowly lowered the parchment, his gauntleted hands tensed hard enough to crinkle the sides. He looked at the Queen gravely. “Reintegration.”

__________________________________________________

Moonlight shone through the steam columns of the Darklands, giving the sky a greenish tint to its sunset purple. Cracks in the earth wept rivulets of glowing lava, and ponds of contaminated waters steamed thickly like the birthing grounds of the clouds in the sky.

“You need to look the part.”

That was what Rarity had said, insisting to Spike to let her change his wardrobe. He reluctantly agreed, seeing the necessity to abandon the High Elven aesthetic with as far north into unfriendly territory as they were. After about two weeks, it was nearly done.

Using a feather plucked from her elbow, she brushed off metal shavings from the helmet. The old elongated shape had to go. It reminded her of the aliens of Chaurus Attacks, a B-movie that Rainbow Dash had convinced her to see years ago. She remembered with some amusement that she had been grossly offended by the ugly, scuttling, slimy insectoid creatures that were supposedly an otherworldly equivalent of rats. But now that she had plenty of time and experience with all the Dark Gods’ ideas of servants and beasts, she saw how silly she was to be afraid of a few chitinous bugs. She could even see some appeal, in fact.

A pile of links from Fluttershy’s chain-mane was neatly coiled next to her. She procured the metal with her consent. Oddly, the giant’s mane still grew as if it were organic, and to leave little trace of where they went, fallen links were simply fed to Pinkie Pie, leaving her to wonder if there was anything the mare couldn’t eat, now.

The blackness of the iron, when melded with the helmet’s silver and steel, made the perfect shadow effect under the eye holes. It gave them weariness of experience, but under heavy-set brows, ferocity still burned behind them.

As far as Rarity knew, Spike was the only truly sapient dragon in this world, one-of-a-kind and irreplaceable. She wanted a dragon lord look for him in the style of the various chaos champions, but grander. Less of a “walking brass heap” look; after all, Spike had flat-out ordered that he would under no circumstances wear the eight-pointed star anywhere on his armor or his form.

She reached over for another link of chain, but only grabbed stone. The links were gone. A slur of obnoxiously loud slurping and gulping told her where. Rarity set the helmet down, and stood from the rock she reclined on.

As she surmised, Pinkie Pie was sucking up the links like oversized spaghetti. Only when the last link vanished past her lips did she look up at an unamused Rarity.

Through a full mouth, she tried her best to speak. “Oh, were you using those?”

Rarity pinched her brows and nodded. “Mhmm.”

Pinkie put a claw on her middle, which was already showing bumps of the chains coiling in her stomach. “I thought Fluttershy had shed another one. Do you… want them b—”

“No, no,” Rarity sighed. “They’re going to be discolored, weakened, broken. Just… no.”

Pinkie swallowed quickly as Rarity passed her by, intent on asking the iron giant for more material. As the candy mare trotted alongside Rarity, her gut rattled with its contents.

“So, are we still on for…” Pinkie raised her brows. “tonight?”

Rarity felt a chill of embarrassment at the thought. Explaining why she’d willingly let Pinkie Pie eat her alive the first time was relatively easy; delirium, of course. However, then she had to explain why she started feeding herself to Pinkie Pie regularly.

Was it therapeutic? The warm acids dissolving away the dirt and grime of the day, the smell which, despite being strong, brought a certain relaxation, along with the muscular massage of the organ trying fruitlessly to break her down. Rarity wondered how many of Pinkie’s unwilling victims must have been become sedated in such an environment before being broken down to sustain her.

Rarity actually had a theory for why Pinkie absorbed anything but, so far, herself, and Twilight Sparkle. It was a matter of matter. If Pinkie had, at any point, become daemonkind, she would need some physical anchor for her immaterial form to hold onto to manifest. So, by consuming anything within claw’s reach on a regular basis, she absorbed solid matter to maintain physical form. In Rarity’s case, Pinkie must have been absorbing her ambient magic instead.

“Of course,” she said curtly.

They climbed over a rocky outcropping, between a pair of massive stone pillars. Such pillars ringed the depression the others were camped in, sunken below and free of the gloom of the sulphur steam.

Twilight and Spike were at the center of the bowl, each orbiting each other in predatory stances. Fluttershy, with the others spectating atop her torso, rested nearby. Rainbow Dash spoke of placing bets, but with what, no one knew.

Spike charged first, his claws braced. Twilight side-stepped at the last second to see him rush past like a bull, but Spike gained purchase, wrapping one arm around her neck, the other claw in her face, forcing her muzzle skyward. They were instantly locked in a vicious dance, Spike twisting Twilight left and right to try to force her to lose footing.

“Fluttershy, dear! If I may?” Rarity said, drawing the attention of the mechanized pony. Fluttershy already held a scowl at being distracted from watching the bout. “It appears the lock you gave me was misappropriated,” Rarity continued, scratching Pinkie Pie’s meekly-smiling head. “May I make use of another?”

Fluttershy shot a hard glare at Pinkie Pie. “Give you enough time and you’d just eat the whole world without a second thought, wouldn’t you?”

Pinkie's ears pinned against her head. “Sorry.”

Fluttershy rolled her eyes and snapped off another line of chain, dropping it in a heavy heap. “You’re not getting another one,” she said.

Rarity nodded and picked up the chains, smiling warmly in response to her generosity’s end. “Thank you, dear. I’ll make the most of this.”

_________________________________________________________

As night fell, tents rose. Twilight cast orbs of magical light around the depression.

Rarity peeked over a boulder at the rim, spying on the assembly of the campsite. Ducking behind the boulder again, Rarity came face to face with her finished work. A shimmering body of blue magic animated the suit. With flicks of her hand, it turned its head, spread its arms, giving her a final look before the product was delivered.

It carried a shield on its arm. Spike had made a point to Rarity that the phoenix engraved on its face was to remain. The avian was still there, wings of flame widespread. In its claws, it gripped a bundle of arrows in one and an equine skull, talons through its eye sockets, in the other.

The helmet was made in the shape of a greater dragon’s skull, a number of slits giving room for the fins on his head. The torso was composed of a musculata chestplate with jagged spikes jutting from the shoulders. On each layer of the segmented abdomen, chaotic symbols and runes were etched in, many of which Rarity was still teaching Spike the meaning of.

Into the darkness, came a light. A torch of the gods,

A dragon of two minds.

The Lizard King, the Daemon-Eater

A fallen, golden drake.

“Don’t look at me like that,” she said anxiously.

Faceless, the body of light didn’t respond. Rarity waved a hand, and its head turned backward. She took a breath to collect her thoughts, turned it forward again, and began her descent.

The magic puppet strode behind Rarity. As she passed each of her friends and they saw the walking suit, she motioned for them to keep their silence as her sights were on Spike.

Twilight and Spike were piling stones as supports for a tentpole, the former picking up the wooden rod in question.

“Right, so just put hold it all in place and I’ll shimmy it in,” Spike said. He glanced at Twilight in her silence. She wore a face of surprise and was looking past him.

Rarity beamed as the dragon turned around and his eyes widened at the puppet. She stepped aside and let them meet one on one. The puppet drew the Hoeth greatsword, and held it before Spike with head bowed in supplication. In the tips of the crossguard shimmered with embedded warpstones broken from her own shoulders.

“Happy birthday,” Rarity said.

“What?”

Pinkie Pie poked out from behind Rarity, holding up a calendar with one particular day of the month highlighted. Tapping it with her claw, she silently mouthed, Never forget. before vanishing again.

Twilight tackled him from behind, hugging him round his neck and nearly knocking him the the ground. “Aaah! Our first birthday together in over a decade!”

As Rarity joined in, Spike shouted, “Girls, girls! Falling over!”

They all came toppling down in a laughing pile. The puppet disintegrated with Rarity’s breaking of focus and the armor clattered into a pile. Spike held both of them close and kissed rarity on the cheek.

“Thank you, guys! How could I have forgotten?”

“It’s pretty easy when we don’t have a calendar,” Rarity said.

PInkie Pie loomed over the three of them with a noisemaker in her lips.

Fweeeep!

_____________________________________________________________

Between working on the armor, Rarity had delved into more conscious attempts at divination. At first, glimpses of the future came in fits and bursts. In her dreams, she would see a flash of events that would happen a day later, or while spaced-out, suddenly swat an insect out of the air she didn’t even know was there.

Spike threw a clawful of shredded paper upward. It exploded into a confetti shower against the tent ceiling. Each bit of parchment had a letter written on it, and only one had the letter ‘A’.

Rarity’s eyes darted from one scrap to another, seeing the next one in her mind before her eyes did. Like a frog snatching an insect, she grabbed a scrap from the paper haze and showed Spike a letter A.

“Enhanced reflexes,” the dragon declared in disbelief.

Rarity snorted and, with a gesture, brought all of the scraps back into Spike’s claw.

“Alright then,” she said. She sat erect, eyes closed. Spike let her sit in silence for nearly a minute, wondering if this was going somewhere.

Rarity held her thumb and pointer fingers less than an inch in front of Spike’s snout.

“Do it,” she said.

Spike tossed the paper once more. Without moving her hand, Rarity pinched a scrap that fluttered between her fingers. Smirking, she turned it over, the A on its face.

“You’re really getting the hang of it,” Spike conceded. “What else have you seen with that mind’s eye, like, what we might see in the far north?”

Rarity mulled it over as she gathered the scraps. She might just burn them later. They were made from a paper that had been smeared nearly illegible.

“I’m quite far from being able to just turn it on or off,” she said. “But I did see something in a dream last night. There was a mountain of metal, stretching to the ends of the horizon, and a neat staircase leading up. Each step must have been fifty feet high. On the other side was a sea of the most beautiful roses, tended to by loving caretakers.”

Spike snickered. “So, poison plants and angry caretakers. Sounds like an excellent place to spend a weekend.”

Rarity barely smiled, seeing the aura around Spike burning black.

“You’re worried about something,” she muttered.

Spike’s sighed. “We’ve got a lot ahead of us. We ran out of food days ago, so we’re back to hunting, and we’ve got to keep everyone in one piece. And… and…”

“Yes?” Rarity prodded.

“What if the Elements aren’t even there?” Spike snapped. “We don’t know if Archaon even has them. We’ll be walking into his front door and then, ‘Oh, sorry! The Elements are still in Canterlot, or scattered around the world, or even pawned off and each of them is in the hands of Gods-know-who!’”

Rarity pursed her lips in thought. “Didn’t we save the Crystal Empire with as much a chance of the Heart being anywhere in the tundra?” she remarked. “Oh, we were lucky it was still in the palace, but Sombra could have taken it with him when he was banished, or it could have been buried under a hundred feet of ice and snow. What I mean is, it's not as if we haven’t done this before.”

“You’re right,“ Spike sighed. “It’s just the stress.”

“And I’ve got just the thing!” chirped Pinkie Pie who poked into the tent, holding a stone bowl full of what looked like squirming leeches held in her tongues. “I figured you two might want some treats as you wind things down, so I got you come taffy!”

Spike took the bowl reluctantly as Pinkie thrust it against his chest. “I’m almost afraid to ask where you got these.”

Pinkie gasped, “Oooohh. You better tell him now, Rarity, cus it’s only gonna get more awkward later.”

Pinkie started to back out and paused. “And Spike, I’d always be willing to keep you and Rarity in my tummy for a night, if you’re interested!”

“Yeah, I’m sure sitting in another pony’s guts for eight hours is a wonderful experience,” Spike joked in visible disgust.

“Ah, well,” Pinkie resigned. “If you ever change your mind, I’ve always got room for a second midnight snack.” Before vanishing, Pinkie stole a lick at Spike’s chin.

Spike groaned in disgust and quickly wiped his chin. “How do you ever find peace with her? And what did she want you to tell me?”

Rarity was biting her lips tightly. “Really, she’s not that bad. She tends to get quiet on a full stomach. As for those… Just remember, they are taffy, but.”

Spike almost dropped the bowl in his haste to put it down. “These aren’t chopped up bits of her stomach tentacles, are they?”

Rarity sucked in a needles breath and held it, thinking long and hard about her next word. “...Yes?”

Spike slapped a claw over his eyes. “Oh, by the gods. You eat pieces of her? She lets you eat pieces of her?!”

“They seem to grow back quickly,” Rarity amended hastily. “And she looks to enjoy it.”

“Because her senses are warped!” Spike exclaimed. “Even if it’s not meat, you’re still eating Pinkie Pie. You have her trying to control her eating, and I can tolerate you giving yourself to her because she won’t hurt you, but please, practice what you preach. This is cannibalism on your part. You’re better than that.”

Spike spat a wad of fire into the bowl, instantly setting it alight. The tentacles writhed as they melted into a pool of boiling, black sugar.

“Okay?” asked Spike with a look of fear and concern.

Rarity nodded. “Al… alright.”

_____________________________________________________________

Despite the rough terrain that Fluttershy walked over, her midsection had stayed surprisingly stable. Twilight attributed it to some kind of gyroscopic stabilization deep in the machinery of her body.

Spike paced the breadth of Fluttershy’s back, the others watching intently. He wore his newly refurbished armor suit. Despite the heavy-set appearance, his movements were as fluid and quick as if it were a second skin. Rarity sat at the base of the iron giant’s neck, her hands aglow and ready to do her part.

“You’ve come a long way,” he said. We’ve assessed our strengths and weaknesses, and trained around them. Now, I think it’s time for you to learn Ulthuan’s Six Axioms of Battle.” He smiled at the murmur of interest from his friends. “Rarity, if you please.”

Arms spread wide, Rarity conjured up a shimmering list of text. Spike pointed to each article.

“One, ‘Don’t be there.’ The enemy cannot kill what is not present. Two, ‘Don’t be seen’. The enemy cannot kill what he doesn’t know is present. Three, ‘Don’t be engaged’. The enemy cannot kill what he cannot reach-”

Rainbow Dash raised her hoof.

Spike pointed to her. “Yes, Rainbow?”

“What’s the point of learning how to fight if you actively avoid fighting? Seems like a waste of the effort.”

“Because,” Sweetie Belle started, “If you can get what you want done and not have to risk getting hurt, that’s even better.”

“Excellent,” said Spike. “That gets right to the heart of it: goals. Is our objective fight every ornery animal we come across, or survival?”

“Survival,” they all responded.

“That’s right. Violence is the last option when all else has been exhausted. If you can be accomplishing your objectives while the enemy is elsewhere, then that’s not something to complain about.

Going on. The last three are self-explanatory, and this is where the fighting starts.”

Rainbow Dash sat up a little straighter.

Spike continued. “Don’t be hit, don’t be cut, and last, don’t die. Again, if possible.”

Applejack smirked, and lowered her half-raised hoof.

“GUYS!”

The shriek carried the grip of ice as it washed over them. Fluttershy halted in her tracks, her head swiveling backward. Pinkie Pie bounded over the rocky outcroppings in the distance, catching up like a pink lightning bolt.

“Ah swear, if she tried to eat another giant scorpion…” growled Applejack.

Behind Pinkie, a multitude of snarling hounds and men on horseback surged over the ridge, bellowing curses and raucous battlecries calling for bloody vengeance.

Faster than Spike could register movement, Pinkie Pie clutched to him, crushing like a vise.

“RUNRUNRUN!” She screamed.

Spike peeled Pinkie off as the sight lent Fluttershy wings, albeit hesitantly in the face of the opportunity to shed men’s blood.

“Everyone hunker down!” Spike ordered, rushing to retrieve his shield from one of the storage bags. “Twilight, Rainbow, with me!”

___________________________________________________________

Rarity stood atop Fluttershy's back while the others grabbed onto the many protruding parts of her body. Spikes, barbs, and knots of chains became anchors to take advantage of the giant’s size and speed.

She kept perfect balance with Fluttershy’s rolling motions, ignoring Applejack’s call to hold onto something. The wind whipped Rarity’s mane like a frenzy of purple smoke, and with the merest lean to either side, she avoided splinters of rock kicked up in Fluttershy’s sprint that would have taken her head off.

Her mind was warm, a bubbling, intensifying heat, surging and powerful. “Small world,” she said as Fluttershy skidded to a halt before a river of liquid earth.

“Oh, come on!” Fluttershy cried. She dipped her claws into the lava, her face twisting in pain as her metallic hide singed. She began to wade the river.

Everyone clustered onto her back, warily watching the fiery waters get closer as Fluttershy waded deeper.

The sound of magic bolts and furious shouts drew nearer. Spike’s practiced screening strategy wasn’t working quite as intended. The horsemen hurled heavy javelins at their winged harassers. Even as a score of them were burned in emerald flame, or blasted apart by exploding magic bolts, they charged on toward the river with no sign of stopping.

Spike dipped too low and a horseman with a weighted net hurled it, ensnaring his wings. The dragon tumbled into the magma river, shouting and fighting with the net as he vanished under the current.

As Fluttershy ascended the far slope, her legs and underbelly glowed, reeking of burning iron. She hobbled with softened joints, dropping her passengers with the knowledge they were on the safe side.

A hooded horseman goaded his horse to the front of the Nnorscan formation. His body was covered in deep piercings rattling with arcane fetishes and thick furs. He raised his hand, as if reaching for some fleeing insect just out of his grasp. As his horse charged over the river bank, his hand lit with furious energy. The lava river hardened before him, becoming a rigid bridge of gleaming obsidian which his kith followed him over, cheering on his effort.

Fluttershy threw herself between them and her friends, bouncing off a hail of javelins and throwing axes. Her movements were rendered lethargic, stamping flat a paltry few before they rode around her.

Pinkie Pie dodged a lance that was aimed for her face. Her tongues lashed out, grabbing his horse by the legs and and yanking them down. The rider tumbled across the ground and Pinkie was upon him before he could stand. Her claw impaled through his back, jutting through his chest with a spray of blood and shattered bone fragments. She barely had time to savor the smell of freshly spilled blood before she was stunned by a pain as if Sigmar’s hammer had struck her in the back of the head.

The ring of tinnitus deafened her to the roar of battle. She blinked stars from her eyes, feeling an intense warmth building in her skull.

To either side, Rarity desperately unleashed the warp bound within in shrieking arcs of lightning that stripped flesh from bone, and exploded the opposing horses into fine red mist. Leaping hound bit into her shoulder, dragging her to the ground and shattering bone in fizzles of dying magic, and her jaw locked open in an unheard scream.

Applejack struck home with each swing of her molar axe, crushing armor like the wild jaws of a giant. It was not long however before she was overwhelmed, blades piercing her with little effect, but but an armored brute was nearing, lugging a massive, two-handed axe.

A lava monster emerged from the river, covered in armor heated to a glowing orange and bits of burning rope coming off like spectral energy. Liquid earth slopped off his body as he charged, flinging his arms and wings, throwing lava onto the norscans in lethal sprays. His claw gripped a man’s entire head, flesh boiling off his skull as he fruitlessly struggled to pry him off.

Pinkie’s head throbbed with the most exquisite pain, and she smiled as she was yanked up by her mane. She stared into the furious eyes of a warrior wracked by hatred and grief. Her lips barely moved as she formed the words, and felt the press of warm steel against her throat.

“You look lonely. Don’t worry, I’ll keep you company.”

Her body-maw ripped open in a swath of teeth and whipping tentacles, not unlike a warp beast merely wearing the skin of a pony. She yanked the attacker directly into her open stomach. Her senses aching in pleasure as the warrior frantically swept a blade across the lining of her insides, stimulating the organ to crush down on the fighting meal. Bones snapped, flesh and armor dissolved in seconds, and two hundred pounds of meat and metal was absorbed into her system in the time it took her to stand. Throbbing veins swelled under her skin, blood thickened with sustenance as she sighted another next target.

She flew at the next norscan, poised to ensnare him like a living net. Braced against her, his spear ran her through. Pinkie Pie howled in ecstasy as the weapon ripped through her abdomen, sticking clear out her back. Momentum carried her down the polearm, breaking it with both weight and corrosive bile, and she fell upon him. Pinning his arms down, she widened her jaw enough to swallow him whole.

A monstrous roar drowned out all sound, commanding at least a momentary silence afterward. Fluttershy held Spike in one of her massive claws, and a burly brute of the Norscans in the other who held his hands in the air for attention. Rivulets of blood trickled down Spike’s jaw which stuck out puggishly, and he tried to restrain the fire in his heart with a stoic expression. The head of an oversized axe was dug deeply into his shield, an exact match of the second weapon belted at the Norscan’s waist. The man’s right arm was painted in a pattern of reptilian scales.

Fluttershy’s burning gaze didn’t leave the norscan chief, the claw she held him on twitched with an ache to crush him then and there. She set them both down and the Norscan grabbed Spike by the arm, holding it high to show his kith their matching pattern.

“Jinam vorshun!”

The Norscan sorcerer gingerly approached and rested hand on Spike’s shoulder, then motioned for the others to come.

Appplejack was dropped with only two legs attached to her body, and Rarity managed to coax a hound of its newly acquired chew toy.

Twilight touched down just beyond the congregation, her horn still smoking and ready to blast the men again.

“What are they doing?” she asked.

In little time, Spike was at the center of a crowd of at least one hundred men, every one of them with hands outstretched or laid across his body.

He inclined his head to Twilight. “That dragon Fluttershy killed. I think they believe I have something to do with him,” he said cooly. “Play along with it. See if any of them know Black Speech.”

Many of the Norscans stared at Twilight after Spike acknowledged her. She licked her lips, thinking of what to say. She stood up superior and with purpose in her step as she paced before the men.

“Which of you speak in the way of the Aether?” she asked.

The crowd parted for the sorcerer, understanding at least Twilight’s questioning tone. His braided, white beard hung long, starkly contrasting the serpentine, black tongue that slithered out as he spoke. “I am a Son of The Storm. Speak to me, and you deal with my people.”

“So, you are their leader?” Twilight asked.

He shook his head. “No, but an arcane conduit for the sea of souls. I guide my people through dark times, and I have seen storm clouds gather for this day.”

Twilight forced herself to grin arrogantly. “My brothers and sisters say that watching you ephemerals try to read the currents is most amusing. I am pleased to see you’ve survived all your attempts.”

“You are?”

“Oh yes.” Twilight stamped her hoof, shaking rocks loose with the force of impact. “Tell your people that you’ve interfered with… J-Jinam’s pilgrimage! The gods have marked out his soul for a grand purpose, and he must come face-to-face with the lord of the End Times! Your people’s reverence has been duly noted by my master, and Jinam will return to bless you, despite your ignorant meddling. Now, we will take of the dead what we will, you collect what remains and go! You’ve done enough damage to his associates.”

The sorcerer nodded hesitantly and relayed Twilight’s message. Four Norscan corpses were drained of blood, the ichor filling several containers the group had emptied in days prior. Pinkie Pie had her say, claiming those desiccated husks, and three more fresher bodies. On the dietary regimen Rarity had her take up, she broke a personal record, having the corpses of six men keep her fed for one day.

_______________________________________________________

The climate had given way to perpetual storms. Roiling clouds obscured almost all sunlight, arcs of lightning stabbed across the sky like daggers in the dark. The land and sky were tinted red, rock and sand crunching under Fluttershy’s stride. the air changed by the minute, from blizzarding cold to carrying hot sand that burned like the desert.

In the far distance, at first a massive mass appeared to be a simple rise in the terrain, then a mountain, but it seemed too clean, its top too flat, and too wide to be a plateau. It stretched across the horizon and beyond.

The monolithic wall of iron defied all architectural sense. Its sheer size should have crushed it under its own weight, the resources needed to build such an edifice unfeasible. But there it stood, as if willed into existence by some godlike maker.

Those with wings flew up step the massive sets of brass stairs, each step over a head taller than Fluttershy. Faces of horned giants whipped probing metal tongues at her and those she carried, to which, with deft gestures, Fluttershy tore from their mouths. Daemons chained to the walls for unknown aeons shouted curses and insane ramblings, which Twilight politely refused to translate for her friends when asked.

It seemed the stair was actively fighting to keep them from ascending. The angles of the steps twisted and altered, sometimes becoming perfectly flat, and Fluttershy would slide down a hundred meters before regaining traction.

Twilight, Rainbow Dash and Spike awaited her at the ‘top’, which was really the entrance to one of the vast tunnels through the wall which still soared high overhead. Fluttershy’s claws dug gouges in the steps as she hauled herself up. Exhaustion had no presence, her body having been elevated beyond the limits of flesh and bone.

The tunnel led on for nearly a mile, letting out to an unbroken sea of row after endless row of bloodied corpses lashed to stakes. Like bean plants, engorged roses bloomed from ruptured skin, their vines pregnant with fruits, and irrigation ditches which flowed with gore. Uncountable daemons tended the meadows with a care and concern that seemed totally out of place. The creatures vomited blood over the plants and bodies, voiding their bowels to fertilize the garden.

The far side steps were better made for human scale, and they stepped down into the gore-slicked mud. The roses bore the visages of horrified faces. The larger and older the bloom, the more detailed and anguished the expression.

“Rarity told me of a vision she had of this place,” Spike said. The smell of jasmine coming from the flowers brought back memories of Ponyville and the Canterlot Palace, but was spoiled by the coppery stench of blood.

“Is it anything like she described?” Twilight asked.

“A little.”

Despite the ruin Fluttershy caused, trampling the plants, the caretakers didn’t appear to pay her any particular attention. They rushed in her wake to rectify the damages.

Rarity pointed with the stump of her right shoulder before correcting her phantom-limb reflex and pointing with her good arm.

“Look there, a mile-fort!” she exclaimed.

“Ain’t nopony’s stopped us getti’n in,” Applejack said. “Think anypony’s even home?”

“One way to find out.”

The superstructure was built into the wall like a lobe, an encased town of high lookout towers and spiked, rippling walls. It was large enough to be a town, but no apparent alarm was raised at their approach.

Rarity sat atop Fluttershy’s head, lazily kicking and occasionally glancing at Spike and Twilight walking side by side. Spike’s stride had become awkwardly stiff, they’d stopped talking to each other, and slowly diverged paths. Spike’s claw wandered toward the hilt of his sword.

Her brow creased into a frown. Something’s wrong… there’s nothing after us yet, so they shouldn’t be that tense…

She looked back to the others. Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo were sneaking up on Pinkie Pie who was drooling over the fruits below. Sweetie’s mouths hissed multicolored smoke, and with a bellicose shout, loosed a gout of ethereal flame.

Rarity startled at the attack. Scootaloo jumped on Pinkie, sinking her teeth into the mare’s shoulder and knocking both of them into the bloody mud with Sweetie Belle quickly following them for another strike. Pinkie Pie cackled as her flesh seared black, smoking with the stench of burning sugar.

Applejack, Rainbow Dash, Rarity and Apple Bloom leapt to separate them. Pinkie Pie easily wrenched both fillies off, Scootaloo biting a sizeable chunk of sweet-meat out of one leg. Pinkie held each of them by the throat, the fillies choking and still twisting to attack in blind rage.

Pinkie ignored the shouts of outrage as she started stuffing them down her throat, greedily gulping them down like a starved animal, and speedily jumping to escape their sisters. She licked the charred, lipless ruin of her mouth, savoring the assault the fillies were still trying to put up in her stomach.

Fluttershy dashed to keep up with Spike and Twilight, both a blur of purple and green. Gouts of rushing flame and magic ignited the fields between their passes at one another.

Twilight looked at the product of a wicked conspiracy against her. He still thought she was a monster, irredeemable, a threat only to be destroyed.

Spike saw lies, betrayal, the mare who raised him from the egg leading him to his damnation. She was lost, and here was where it must end.

Flames of impossible colors coruscated across Spike’s sword, powered by the warpstone crystals embedded in the crossguard with shone wickedly. Rarity gifted him this reforged suite, flawless, beautiful. She was still on his side, she still loved him.

Their battle became a lethal joust, punctuated by starbursts of immaterial light with each contact. Spike’s sword bit flesh and sliced through Twilight’s wing like a torn sail, sending her spiralling to the ground in a scream of pain and hate.

Fluttershy grabbed Spike out of the air with impatient fury tightening her grip.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?!” she roared, her voice whipping over him like burning wind. “Twilight! Get up here!”

Twilight didn’t rise from the brush of flowers. A thin beam of magic shot at Fluttershy, harmlessly laying a trace of light across her chest and claw. For a moment, it only glowed and slightly itched.

Then it exploded.

___________________________________________________________

Egrimm van Horstmann laughed fiercely at the treachery unfolding beyond the walls. “Who knew Khorne had the capacity for a more passive instigation of violence.”

He risked a glance at the slaaneshi beside him. The warrior looked to be not a day over thirty, but Egrimm knew he was well over three hundred. Cold anger danced behind his brilliant blue eyes.

The warrior’s feet levitated solidly an inch above the metal floor as he willed that the world was not worthy to touch them. Robes of gold-coloured silk hung from his sculpted body, a flowing mane of golden locks lining a seraphic face of youthful vibrance.

His lips twitched with impatient anger. “My horse is down there, being ruined! What can you see, sorcerer? What’s happening to my horse?”

Egrimm rolled his eyes. Sigvald was always such a self-centered bastard. He raised the bejeweled Skull of Katam. Its burning grin gazed on the rolling melee. “She is being burned and battered by her allies. A terrible desire has been brought to the surface, a hunger to swallow the world.” He released the skull and it levitated beside him. “She is binging on the fruits now, and will be immobilized in but a moment.”

Sigvald slammed a fist on the redoubt. “Idiot!”

The loud creak of the fort gates opening heralded a large formation of horsemen riding out into the fields.

“Finally,” Sigvald growled. He motioned to one of his silent menials. “Go tell the commander his little gem has arrived, and have Hrongeth deliver my horse to the mess. I have a special order I want Gustave to fill.”

_________________________________________________________

Sylvania hadn’t been exactly what Nightmare Moon had expected. The midnight aristocracy of vampires had been relatively accepting, and with access to the libraries of Castle Drakenhof, she was able to brush up on necromancy. One thousand years without practice, and the most she’d been able to raise were a few hundred dead from her travels to the province. However, with the Nightmare Forces returning to their empress day by day, she could feel the familiar power returning.

She had been invited to this land by Mannfred, supposedly the ruler of Sylvania, but found another vampire on the throne, this Vlad, a figure with a warm, predatory charm. When the Nightmare finally met Mannfred, he was very cross -- though not with her.

The throne room was the perfect theater of gothic darkness where the lords of the province came for court and council. It was here that Vlad revealed his change of plans for the direction of the province, much to Mannfred’s rage.

“ENOUGH!”

The declaration echoed through the throne room in a way that reminded Nightmare Moon of the Royal Canterlot Voice, a power that would have sent mortals to their knees. Every vampire present flinched, and living servants began departing after their duties as inconspicuously as possible.

Vlad’s living facade faded, his handsome face wrinkling into a noseless, feral snarl. He marched down the steps, passing a seething Mannfred with no further acknowledgement.

“Why are none of us in the Emperor’s Palace, right now?” Vlad asked, and a moment passed without an answer. “No one knows? Or are you afraid to admit it? We have underestimated the mortals!”

He was met with a chorus of rejection and proclamations of vampiric superiority over the blood-bags.

“It sickens me to say it, but we cannot deny this reality. For four hundred years they have not seen us march in full force, and my family and I awake in an unfamiliar time to see the Empire stronger than ever before. Do you not see? Do you not feel the very ground tremble like thunder at the technology they now wield? And with the help of the Equestrians, in a mere decade they have wrested dominion over the very heavens! Change is coming, and oh, does irony twist the knife now, with the Empire so readily embracing cooperation with those without so much as a trace of humanity. What fury might they muster now against their enemies? And even before all this, you all know what they were capable of by standing together as one.”

Mannfred lowered his head at the memory of Hel Fenn, the full might of the Empire bearing down on a single rogue province that nearly wiped out the greatest land of vampires in the world. And most recently at the Mire where a probing speartip of undead forces was shattered mere miles from the border, attacked from the ground and air by men and griffon mercenaries.

“We are superior to mere mortals,” Vlad continued, “but even a lion can succumb to the bites of a numberless horde of ants. We should not have to hide from them anymore!”

“Nor should we bend our knee!” roared Mannfred.

“Are you deaf?! There will come a time when the Empire will be on its knees, and we will be its saviours. They will beg of us to protect them.” Vlad turned to Nightmare Moon, claw outstretched. “Surely, an ancient like yourself appreciates the need to bide one’s time.”

The Nightmare nodded, and sauntered to his side. “In a way, yes. For one thousand years I had waited for my chance at vengeance, and I was not given the luxury of being dead during my stay on Equestria’s moon--”

A derisive laugh cut across her speech, their face lost in the audience. “The moon! That will truly be the day! What delusional beast have you brought to us, Vlad von C--”

Nightmare Moon rounded with a baleful snarl, and shouted, “INTERRUPT ME AGAIN, IMPUDENT CREATURE, AND YE SHALL FEEL ITS COLD EMBRACE THYSELF!” The Royal Canterlot Voice reverberated mightily through the chamber, silencing any further protest down to dull hisses from the assembled vampires.

“So, any of you, tell me about patience, or how playing nice would take too long. And since impatience seems to be clouding everyone’s judgement, I assume no one here is more than a couple hundred years old. Much can happen in enough time. Internal decay or some great calamity will befall any nation, and they will be brought low.”

“And what else would we do?” Vlad asked. “Do we keep sending army after army, bashing our heads against them until we break? We all know I am the most powerful of the vampires, and I stood atop the walls of Altdorf! Who in our history can claim to have come closer?

“See our friend Mundvard, how he prospers controlling the mortals of Marienburg by his word and not his sword. His success should speak to us; force of arms and a grand display have been our hubris.”

Vlad rested his hands on Mannfred’s shoulders, glaring him straight in the eyes. “Do not be blind to the reality we have awoken to. I swear to you, my son. We will have our ascendance!”

Nightmare Moon waited outside the high walls of Castle Drakenhof when she heard that the necromancer she had commissioned for was arriving imminently.

A carriage of bone and compacted earth was rolling down the trail, withered horses driven by a grinning skeleton. Nightmare Moon stopped halfway down the stairs as an attendant opened the side door.

Her smile vanished instantly.

The man who stepped out looked like no more than a party-goer on Nightmare Night. A pointed, wide-brimmed hat sat atop an old, silver-haired head. He was covered in a tattered black cloak, and carried a winged, gnarled staff topped with a crow’s skull that whisper-babbled incoherent sentences to the air.

This was the master necromancer her request had been answered by?

With a curt nod of the head and bend at the knees, he saluted her. “So you are the Nightmare, I presume? You’re every bit what I expected you’d look like.”

“I am,” she said, still in disbelief. “And who are you that has answered my call?”

The necromancer released his staff, which continued to balance on its pinpoint tip.

“Heinrich Kemmler, the Lichemaster.”

Nightmare Moon felt somewhat eased at that. In her studies, Kemmler’s name had come up a number of times in recent history. Despoiler of La Maisontaal Abbey, and bringer of the Time of Woes, when the Wood Elves of Athel Loren were dealt a hard blow by his invasion.

The nightmare snickered and started back up the stairs. “Well, well. The honor is truly mine. Come, Once situated, we can discuss my plans. I’m sure we have much to learn from one another.”

Kemmler took a few steps after her, then glanced back to his carriage. A terrible, restless energy silently quaked within, a hunger for violence and bloodshed. Its impatience wordlessly spoke to him, a million voices screaming form the Warp, but stifled to the merest whisper.

Lord of Undeath! Lord of Undeath! Lord of Undeath! Lord of Undeath!

Kemmler shook his head and continued following the Nightmare toward Castle Drakenhof.

“So much to learn.”

Chapter 33: Suneater

“Fools! Seek refuge in Faith or in Madness, for there is nowhere left to hide. The reign of Chaos has begun.”

~Egrimm van Horstmann, former Grand Master of the Imperial Colleges of Magic’s Order of Light

-----------------------------------

Spike and Twilight were carried on a silver palanquin, walking under its own unnatural power on metal arms and cloven hooves. Shrouded under rattling mailed curtains in a parody of royalty deposed, they were bound in heavy chains, and muzzles locked their jaws.

Twilight looked at Spike, remorseful for what happened in the field, and hoped he knew how she felt. What possessed her to lash out like that, she had no idea. Spike could not see her, his head bound to stare skyward, gasping through a tight muzzle.

Through the fort, a myriad of figures watched the palanquin’s march, wondering who was so important. Warriors from across the Old World and far north were gathered here, pausing their drills and practice. Northmen, traitors and cultists from the southlands, and pilgrims came to their holy land of the North.

Twilight looked up when Spike started grunting, twitching his head with what small movement he could make. She followed his sight.

For a moment, Twilight saw something beautiful. A titanic cathedral of gleaming stained glass windows in a riot of colors, polished-white architecture, and skyscraping spires.

Twilight almost smiled in amusement, imagining some calm scene of church-goers from Norsca and the Wastes. This was buried under a swelling dread. She felt His anger, His impatience, His satisfaction.

Archaon was waiting.

____________________________________________________

How did this even happen? Rainbow Dash thought.

Get in, play the part, find the Elements. That was the plan. Twilight and Spike going beserk from nowhere, Pinkie Pie devouring Scootaloo and Sweetie Belle right before their eyes? It all just happened too fast even for her, and none of it was remotely cool unlike some of the unexpected fights they kept getting into. Then, a formation of horsemen careened headlong into the lot of them, grabbing them up in sacks and lassos. One thing after another.

Fluttershy rampaged like a mare possessed after Twilight’s strike on her, breaking into the fort in pursuit of their captors by the time she recovered. She was alone, however, and was quickly surrounded by the monsters and warriors of Chaos who brought her low, like Norse longships battling a great sea kraken with hook and harpoon.

Play the part, Rainbow thought, wriggling her wings under their binds.

She resisted her very conscience, telling her to turn into something huge to fight and free her friend before she was dragged away. Rainbow clamped her eyes shut until a loud clang and stifling of noise signaled that some great doors had shut.

“Bow before the Three-Eyed King.”

Rainbow beheld a warrior of brutalist form, even compared to those around him, who were in personalized and decorated armor reflecting their patron gods, or the pantheon.

Great ivory horns curved skyward from a gleaming brass helmet, staring down at the creatures before him with luminescent eyes. Armor black as night crunched as he descended a staircase of bone.

The entire building was a disgusting parody of a cathedral. Buttresses made of spinal columns corkscrewed into the steeple. Each length hung with tinsel of twitching hands.

A serpent-daemon slithered down behind Archaon, the tap-tap-tap of its wooden staff, carried by three hands, beating a song without melody. One of its mismatched eyes, swollen fit to burst, glared at Rainbow Dash.

It spoke, though it’s mouth didn’t move. Those gnarled jaws could never form mortal words.

“Kneel.”

Rainbow suppressed her gag reflex just looking at it, and complied.

“The wayward mare returns to her master,” Archaon said.

Rainbow risked a look at the warrior, who brought Twilight to stand. The living palanquin rested flat. Why did he allow Spike’s muzzle to be removed and not hers? Something symbolic, perhaps. A sign of domination.

“Do you know why I sent no one after you?” he asked, brushing the blood-caked mane from her stoic face. “Because I believe in destiny, that all things spiral toward that center, no matter how long it takes, or how hard you try to swim against it. Though clearly, it took you quite a long time.”

Archaon took a glance at Spike. “A winged Kroxigor. You will fit nicely in my army.”

A bead of sweat rolled down Rainbow’s cheek. We’re still pretending, right?

“I am not a Lizardman,” Spike snarled, remaining on one knee with head bowed. “But I will be a weapon at your disposal.”

Archaon chuckled. “I approve of this.” He rounded on his attendants. “Ingethel, gather the subcommanders for a briefing in the citadel at sundown. We’re accelerating our deployment.”

“By your word,” the daemon hissed and slithered away.

“The reptile will follow me, and…” Archaon took a quick glance at the lineup, then to the soldiers who brought them in. “There are supposed to be six of them. Where is the pink one?”

________________________________________________________

The mess building of Fort 17 was designed to accommodate hundreds at a time, to feed a garrison strong enough to hold its section of the Bastion Stair, despite the impossibility that the mountain-wall could come under attack. With the arrival of Slaanesh’s champion, Sigvald, it had been converted to work under a single master.

A small army of cooks worked the kitchens with ingredients ranging from the crimson fruits in the fields beyond the walls, to pieces of slaves to appease the champions’ fondness of human flesh.

To those unfamiliar with the cooks of the Decadent Host, the kitchens would appear to be a panic of frantic underlings, appliances in disheveled piles and spillage of pots making the floor slick with mess. However, the kitchen was in a practiced factory of work. Moppers made swift passes, keeping the floors tolerably messy. Every delivery left on an immaculate platter, each meal masterfully made, for everything had to be perfect.

“Idiot!” Gustave le Grande smashed a plate on the floor before one of the cooks as eh was about to send it out. “Ze core of this is medium-rare, not well done!” He flicked the cook on the forehead, cutting a wound with a talon to mark his imperfection. “Make it again!”

The cook bowed quickly and ran off to his station. Gustave strode along the aisle, glancing back and forth to scan the work of his underlings. The Decadent Host was the living display of the perfect army under the greatest of men. They would not be sustained on the gruel suffered by lesser soldiery.

Gustave himself rarely worked among them, for his cuisine took a special skill, and no mere mortal was worthy to taste it. His skill, his creations would only be enjoyed by kings, by gods..

“Gustave!”

Hrongeth strode through the back entrance, his armor a clashing riot of colors and polished to a mirror shine. He was an old warrior, his face a geography of scars, mapping one hundred and twenty years of battles and glories won, but walked with a brazen arrogance about him.

“Word from the Magnificent One!”

“Blessed is he!” chorused every worker in earshot.

A pair of slaves rolled a gurney in, covered in a slowly rising and falling sheet. Thick, oozing tentacles dragged along the floor from underneath the cover.

“Oh, a special request?” Gustave inquired, curiously circling the gurney. “Come, speak! What is his word?”

“He wants you to make this into a steed worthy of Him!”

Hrongeth tore the cover away.

A grotesque candy-creature convulsed, at the torchlight. Its body bloated with throbbing lobes and tumors. Its middle was nailed open to the stretcher like a dissected subject, somehow still alive. Everything below its ribcage appeared to be a single, massive cavity, the taffy lining black and hardened by fire.

“Sacre bleu!” Gustave exclaimed. He eagerly studied the wretch, listened to the desperate breath under the crushing weight of its mutated blubber.

“Animate confections,” he muttered. “I thought it was only possible with meat-puppets.” Gustave pushed the gurney-bearers aside. “I must begin immediately!”

“A messenger will be by soon with details. Be careful,” warned Hrongeth, his voice a little less jovial. “It’s a big eater.”

“I will, et merci! And what are you all gawking at?! Back to work!”

Workers flew back to their stations as Gustave rolled the creature to the lower floors of the mess hall.

It groaned out his name several times. Gustave ignored it as it must have simply heard Hrongeth call his name.

“Pin… kie… Pie.” it then gurgled.

Gustave glanced down at its melted face. It glared back with its one working eye

“Ahm… Pink-eeee,” It repeated.

Gustave rolled his jaw. This thing? Pinkie Pie? “How about you prove such a thing, oui? What was my dish, going to the National Dessert Contest?”

“Eee… clair.”

“And who ate the combination piece right in front of Celestia?”

“Me… No regrets…”

“My, my, Mademoiselle Pie, you’ve taken quite the fall from grace, which for you might be about four inches.” Gustave chuckled. “And here I thought I would never see you again, but I should have known Death wouldn’t take someone like you. You probably talked him to his breaking point and he sent you back.”

Pinkie weakly shared his smile.

Gustave pushed the gurney through the doors to one of the specialized store rooms. Preserved corpses of men, ponies, and worse hung upside down near the ceiling. Piles of barrels and crates of preservatives, salt, and spices towered high in the corners. At the center, the latest victim was strapped nude to an angled slab. A host of jointed metal arms loomed over him, each appendage ending in a scalpel’s blade, needle point, or drill. Sweating, and gasping through a gag, he unblinkingly watched Gustave.

“Joe!” Gustave barked.

The stallion sleeping on a pile of flour sacks jolted awake. “I’m up! I’m up! Aw, jeez,” he yawned. “Everything’s been set up and I’ve been waiting for you for the better part of…” He glanced at an hourglass perched on the nearest barrel. “Two hours! What have you been doing up there?”

“Supervising the incompetents. Put this preparation on hold immediately! We have a special request from the Gilded One.”

Joe leapt to his hooves, his exhaustion forgotten. “Ooh, it’s been a while! I’m gonna guess it’s on that roller.”

“Oui. Tell me, have you ever dreamt of walking, talking, living desserts?”

Joe scratched his chin, then shivered. “Once, as far as I can remember, and it wasn’t a good one.”

“Perhaps it was more of a vision, than just a dream!”

Gustave shoved the gurney to Joe, revealing the mutation-ridden creature.

“Oh, King-Queen above... “

Gustave felt the eagerness swell in his breast. Tears welled in Joe’s eyes, and his breath staggered.

“This will be our greatest work,” Gustave said, sinking his claws into Pinkie’s cancerous flesh. “Now hurry! We must begin while inspiration is still hot!”

Joe rushed to unstrap the naked man. Numbed with a powerful drug cocktail prior, he slumped over Joe’s back like a ragdoll.

“I know just what to bring,” Joe beamed as he took off to return the slave. “Don’t start without me!”

The instant the doors slammed shut, Gustave rolled Pinkie Pie behind the operating table, and spun the tool apparatus backwards. Pinkie whined in fear of the mechanical spider of surgical tools she couldn’t look away from as she could barely feel her own neck.

“Fear not, mon cheri,” Gustave cooed, a wickedly ecstatic smile smearing his face. “You are among friends here, and we will make you beautiful!”

Gustave took a scalpel and needle arm in each claw, and the blade descended.

_____________________________________________________

Rarity was the first to be brought out of the stable, not by the brute force of the warriors, but asked by a single man to follow him.

She heard him talking, but did not listen as she trailed him, walking on auto-pilot. Her mind was still a whirlwind of anger, hope, and other nauseating feelings. The image of Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo being pulled out of Pinkie Pie’s stomach was still burned in her mind. One, a crushed ball of daemon-flesh, the other, a half-digested ruin.

“Rarity!”

Her head jerked up, and she glared at Egrimm van Horstmann’s grimace which vanished soon after he finally had her attention. He looked to be Imperial, by his accent and face. A silver moustache with curled ends graced his lip.

Rarity noticed the soft, fuzzy carpet under her talons, and metallic eyeballs following her from the walls.

Horstmann rolled his eyes and muttered under his breath as he opened one of many doors. “The traumatized ones never listen.”

Rarity expected the room to be filled with the arcane nightmares of Chaos, like shrunken heads, and tentacled furniture. In truth, it was surprisingly austere. Expensive silken robes of various patterns hung on a rack, ornately carved wooden seats with velvety cushions beckoned her to relax her aching legs. Aside from a few hanging charms and glyphs inscribed on the walls, the only looming fetish of the Dark Gods was the mark of Tzeentch engraved over a desk buried in books and scrolls.

“Please, sit,” Horstmann motioned to the seats. After that, as far as Rarity cared, he could have buggered off to parts unknown.

She sank into the nearest armchair with a moan of relief, stretching and cracking her talons. For the first time in what felt like ages, she felt the need for sleep coming on.

“You and your friends were picked up among the Dread Blooms,” Horstmann explained. “Nasty plants. Come too close and the smell fills one’s mind with murderous thoughts. Eat them, and they warp the body.”

The warm scent of jasmine tickled Rarity’s senses. Horstmann returned with a silver tray levitating onto the short table before her.

“But, once separated from the vine, they turn inert in about a month and the leaves make a good tea. I wonder, how were you not influenced by the smell?”

Rarity’s eyes fell to the floor. “Smell… Um, I don’t have to breathe.”

“Truly?” At the flick of a finger, Horstmann floated over a shard of crystal glass under Rarity’s nose. It didn’t fog.

He grunted. “Tell your compatriots their effects, next you meet them.”

Rarity attempted to reach for a cup, and slapped herself in the face in the process. She still held her severed arm, and it had extended, as her mind ordered. In frustration, she simply levitated a cup into her other hand.

Rarity took a sip. It was reminiscent of Acai. “May I ask why you’re being so kind?”

“Mostly the Everchosen’s orders,” Horstmann explained. “You’re all important to him, for reasons he has yet to reveal to many of us. But I trust his judgement, and I’m always willing to see another wayward soul brought under the Raven’s wing. And before you ask, yes, your sister lives.”

Rarity’s hand shook at that, nearly spilling her cup. “How do you know we’re related?”

“She can still talk, though not much. My apprentices are doing what they can to restore her.” Egrimm leaned back with a grin, twisting the end of his beard. “Those stupid doctors in the south with their saws and scalpels. Can you imagine how much better everyone would be if they let the arcane arts into medicine? Even those pus balls of Nurgle might be of use.”

Rarity’s lips curled in the merest of smiles. “I’ve often thought about that.”

“Good, good.” Horstmann reached into the sleeve of his robe and presented a black box, no larger than a mouse. “I’ve been meaning to incorporate these gems into my research. Have a look.”

Rarity took the box, and her eyes widened at its contents.

A single purple crystal shimmered back at her. It was all too familiar.

The Elements, she thought.

“It’s a beautiful thing, no?” Horstmann asked.

“It is.”

Once securely in hand, the gem flashed a blindingly. Horstmann shielded his eyes.

“It has an affinity for you!” he exclaimed. “You just might be able to help me. I have five others much like it.”

Rarity looked at Horstmann with a grin of anticipation. “They’re all tied to me and my friends. We’ll make them work.”

___________________________________________________________

Three hours into work, Pinkie Pie had to be sedated. Gustave and Joe had worked on live and conscious canvases many times before, and had been accustomed to working quickly. Keeping the specimen alive for as long into preparation as possible was critical. Once death gripped them, they had mere minutes before rigor mortis made the meat tough.

But now they had time, and killing the subject was to be avoided. Four days after the canvas was rolled in, their creation was ready to be awoken.

Joe read aloud from the checklist of Sigvald’s demands, and items of their own input while Gustave helped Pinkie Pie groggily roll off the operating table.

“He wants you combat effective, so we sharpened your claws, stacked on red gummy strips for more muscle mass, and, in addition to replacing your stomach lining, we put the taffy through the puller. Hrongeth says you’re a ‘big eater’ and that you ate two of his men, but we didn’t have anything to go by. So, care to give us a ballpark on how much you eat?

“I dunno,” Pinkie sleepily muttered, licking her repaired lips. “Like, twice my weight in a day? And I don’t remember eating anypony recently. It’s pretty memorable.”

Joe and Gustave exchanged looks. “Regardless if you remember it, that’s a frigging weapon inside you.”

Joe flipped to the front page of his list.

Height start: 6’4”

Height end: 7’3”

Weight start: 1,538lb

Weight end: 2,296lb

He rubbed a hoof to his temple. “Oh jeez, another troll-gut to feed.”

“Nah, guys,” Pinkie smiled. “You don’t have to worry about me. I can get by on anything, wood, rocks—”

“Non, non,” Gustave grunted with Pinkie leaning heavily on him. “Sigvald has his eyes on you. He won’t have those he wants eating off the ground.” He shivered and sighed. “We’ll have to make the time to cook for you too.”

Pinkie looked between them, the exhausted air about them, bags under the eyes. They pulled long hours just for her. “I really appreciate all you did for me,” Pinkie said, mustering the strength to stand on her own. “I should pay you guys back somehow.”

Joe chuckled somewhat brokenly, pacing and biting his lip. “We just don’t have the time. We have assistants, but between supervising the regulars, and the Mirror Guard, our performance is gonna drop, and once he sees his food isn’t perfect anymore, he’ll probably throw us to the spawns! I've been with him for eleven years! I can’t go out like that! Why are you laughing?“

“Because,” Pinkie covered her mouth to stifle a snort. “I just figured out how I’ll repay you. Rarity and I would help each other out some nights. She’d have somewhere comfy to meditate, and I… Well, I wouldn’t have to deal with hunger pains all night. Maybe you can rest there too?”

Before Gustave could mention their lack of time again, Pinkie wrapped a foreleg around him, hugging him close. “I mean, think about it. You guys are Sigvald’s top cooks. If you take time out to rest instead of running yourselves ragged, who are the soldiers to complain? His needs come first, and you don’t wanna make a bad dish.”

Pinkie slapped her stomach, sending ripples not through fat, but jellified bones. “You can stay right here!”

Gustave wriggled free, chortling at her suggestion. Pinkie’s smile dimmed for a fraction of a second.

She took a breath to explain and, less than five minutes and one Pinkie Promise later, she had lunch. Sensing their nervousness, she didn't indulge, making quick gulps to get them packed away as soon as possible. It must have been in the back of their minds that she might betray them and bite down with half their bodies still beyond her jaws.

Looking down, she expected to see the rotund gut they filled out. She found no such thing. Instead, she was slim and, surprisingly, toned. Occasionally, a hoof or claw-shaped imprint would press outward, then sink back into discrete form, the only indication that there was anything inside. She knew there was a word for this, on the tip of her tongues; something from the old comics. Ham-something.... Hammerspace. That was it.

A couple of flashes of yellow light inside told her that Joe had applied the ward spells to stave off her digestive acids.

Pinkie Pie had promised to go for a ‘stress test’ which they described as amounting to simply getting a feel for the new body outside.

A new body. For the first time, Pinkie felt odd about that. Like this wasn't her's, but some suit she was controlling. The oddity was forgotten, and she giggled at the thought of a tiny version of herself pulling levers in the brain of a candy-Pinkie suit.

For cover, she took one of the spare, clean body bags. While cutting it into a wider tarp, she addressed her passengers.

“If everypony is comfy, I’d like to welcome you to Pinkamena’s Mobile Inn and Suites, totally trademarking that by the way. I’ll be your host today, and hopefully this experience will be enjoyable for all of us.”

Joe chuckled at her formality.

“Please take note of the only exit above, and that regurgitation can be provided should any passenger wish to disembark. Please keep from making any harsh movements as heavy or sudden agitation may cause the suite to suddenly become quite… hostile. This is beyond management's control.”

“Right…” Gustave muttered, suddenly a little more mindful of the slithering feelers populating her gut.

Pinkie snappishly donned the makeshift cloak. The cowl barely managed to get past her poofy mane, enough to darken her face. “Thank you for your cooperation, and enjoy your stay.”

Navigating the halls, she overheard her food’s idle chatter. Joe took up most of it, sleepily congratulating them both on a job well done. Gustave was less enthusiastic, and Pinkie wondered why he seemed reluctant to be eaten by a mare he hadn’t seen in over a decade.

Within minutes of leaving their talk ending, Pinkie felt the soft vibrations of Joe’s snoring. Shortly after, Gustave’s breathing became soft, and he gave errant twitches in slumber.

“Finally,” Pinkie whispered, both at her passenger’ peace, and finding the back exit to the mess hall. It was a long way up. About halfway, she glanced back. There must have been a hundred and fifty steps behind her and she hadn’t even broken a sweat.

Turning back up, the steps had vanished ahead. Impossibly quickly, the way up became a tunnel of oozing, pulsating meat, rippling light the throat of some massive creature. Pinkie immediately lost her footing and collapsed, digging her claws into the sticky, soft floor. The confusion came on too quickly. Was the building alive? Did Joe know about this?

Tentacles as thick as barrels sprouted from the very walls, reaching up and up to the door, which broke and widened into a massive fanged maw. Piercing screaming heralded two giant fillies being crammed into the iron mouth. Thunderous groans of hunger sounded far below.

Pinkie shut her eyes and buried her face in the floor, awaiting the inevitable, to get pushed down by the monster’s quarry.

It never came. The instant she blinded herself, it all stopped. She took a cursory glance around. All concrete and steel.

She reached the exit in the time it took to blink, slamming the door behind her hard enough to crack the frame.

What was that? she thought frantically, chest heaving.

She trotted across the square before the exit as quick as inconspicuousness would allow, weaving through the crowds of misfits and freaks.

She had to find the others.

__________________________________________________________________________

On the fourth day, Twilight could feel herself slipping. Four days without the opportunity to feed.

Coming to the Bastion Stair, which was evidently the metal wall’s name, the supply of wildlife rapidly dwindled as forests and suitable mountains gave way to ashen plains. Twilight had experimented with her options. Applejack was rancid, Rarity had no blood to speak of anymore, and Rainbow Dash was simply adamant in her refusal. Pinkie Pie had actually offered to be bitten once, but her blood couldn’t be called that, more like a slurry of sugar-water so saturated there were still solid crystals within it.

That morning, one of the guards dropped a sealed blood bag in her trough, which she seized immediately. Maybe her pronounced fangs gave it away. The taste was fresh, sweet, and energizing, and oddly familiar.

Halfway through the bag, Rainbow Dash had gotten into an argument with one of the guards, a slaaneshi who had taken an invasive liking to her figure and belligerent attitude since his posting.

By the end of it, fists were flying.

Rainbow copied Fluttershy’s form, then shrank herself a bit as the transformation threatened to tear the roof off the stable. In quick order, she had all five guards pinned under her claws, slowly squeezing the breath out of them.

“Go to whoever your boss is and tell them we’re only allowing ourselves to be kept here,” she snarled. “We don’t need any looking after, and you,” she pressed a bladed finger against the slaaneshi’s chest. Even the slight pressure drew blood. “You’re making me want to break out of this place just to show you what’s what!”

Rainbow let them stand up and shooed them to the doors. “Go on! Tell ‘em we don’t need you!”

The slaaneshi was last to leave, giving Rainbow Dash a smirk and a cat-like growl before slipping out.

Rainbow assumed normal form and got back in her stall. “Seriously, I was practically cutting him open and he still doesn’t get it?”

Applejack laughed, sitting down now that the show was over. “He probably gets what danger he was in. He was just into it.”

Rainbow groaned and planted her face against the wall. “If I wake up one day and he’s mounting me, I’m ending him.”

“Hear, hear.” Applejack agreed.

The doors on the other end of the stable flew open, and a ponyoid form covered by a tarp stumbled in. It sobbed and belched in a sickening combination.

Pinkie Pie tore away the tarp and, ignoring the glad and questioning voices of her friends, fell through the door of Rarity’s stall.

The sorcerer had been silent and meditating since she returned on the third day. The moment before Pinkie landed in her lap, she jolted to consciousness.

Pinkie choked out gibberish, wetting Rarity’s torso with tears and syrupy drool. Rarity ignored the mess and consoled Pinkie as best she could.

Rarity was also struck by the turn around in Pinkie’s appearance. Last she’d seen the candy mare, she’d been mutating before her eyes after packing herself full of Dread Blooms in a frenzy. Now, she looked to have been remade by culinary masters. A bouncing mane of cloudlike cotton candy framed a soft-cheeked and subtly rosy face. Her very body was fragrant and her coat sheened with alternating shades of pink.

“Rarity, what happened?” Pinkie coughed. “I keep- I keep seeing them. Sweetie and Scootaloo… Did I- did I- Please tell me I didn’t eat them!”

Rarity gasped at such remorse. She wiped Pinkie’s eyes and explained Sweetie and Scootaloo’s condition, and the effects of the Dread Blooms. The Elements were theirs for the taking. That cheered Pinkie up a little.

Rainbow Dash was at the stall door with fading anger. Hearing Rarity’s answer, she simply snorted and went back to her stall again. There would be time to get Pinkie’s side of the story later.

The stable entrance slammed open with a shout of “Where is it?!”

Rarity gulped and brought Pinkie to a kneeling position, telekinetically cleaning up her face.

“Pinkamena, dear, I forgive you, and right now you need to be strong. The man up there thinks he owns you, and you need to play along. She smiled with Pinkie’s nods. “Remember, the Elements are in our grasp!”

Pinkie nodded and entered the central aisle, and felt her sorrow melting away on sight of him.

He was really pretty. Golden armor perfectly mimicked the chiseled musculature exposed at his joints, round and studded like crab chitin. Six warriors flanked him, each wearing similar armor and shields, all polished to a mirror shine.

One of them carried a jeweled saddle.

He smiled. “Can you talk?”

“Yes.”

“Come. Do you know me?”

“You’re Sigvald.”

Before him, Pinkie obeyed his orders. “Teeth. Claw. Turn.” and so it went. Pinkie felt good that Gustave and Joe might be spared. She had yet to hear a complaint.

“Were the chefs with you, coming here?" asked Sigvald.

“Yeah,” Pinkie said sheepishly. “I can get them if you want, and maybe you can give your compliments?”

“Not now,” the prince said, rounding on the other ‘ponies’. “The Everchosen demands your presence. You will demonstrate these ‘Elements’ to him.” He turned to his adjutant. “Saddle her.”

While the others were filed out, Pinkie reluctantly accepted the saddle. Sigvald vaulted onto her back, a weight she hardly noticed.

“Mirror,” ordered Sigvald.

One of the warriors was in position in a heartbeat with his shield held up to them both. While Sigvald preened, Pinkie Pie beheld her new self for the first time. She gingerly touched her face and tapped the sharklike pearly whites in her mouth.

Before the reins bit was crammed in her mouth, she felt Joe and Gustave being kneaded deep within. The sensation had sunken into background noise until now.

You guys earned this, she thought. Then, she was chewing on wood.

______________________________________________________________________

The martial square covered a square kilometer. Transparent tiles covered rows of skulls from enemies of the Blood God, forced to look up into the boots of the warriors who slew them, gathering for more wars against their masters.

Spike strode toward the center with the Elements. The Swords of Chaos, Archaon’s elite corps, covered three sides of the perimeter in their hundreds. A giant was posted at the entrance, and two to either side of the Archaon’s stand.

He distributed the jewels to their owners. Rainbow Dash’s lightning bolt, Twilight’s star. Spike placed the bare butterfly gem in Fluttershy’s palm. She wouldn’t be able to wear the necklace anyway.

Rarity was last. Taking her gem, she held Spike’s claw tightly. She wanted to say thank you, to kiss him and celebrate.

It was finally over. Normality, harmony, among the Warriors of Chaos.

Spike smiled briefly, and took position behind the lineup.

Spike’s time with Archaon had been mentally, and physically taxing. Interrogation, skill assessments, it was all relatively… civilized. Lieutenants, officers, logistics; the ‘government of an army’ one of his mentors put it. Archaon had an acumen for administration and order, rather than the underlings just following the bloodiest sword.

Catching him without his helmet on explained it. He was of mixed blood, Imperial and Northman. Something about, ‘The north and south will meet in the Everchosen’s blood.’

Once Spike returned to his place, Archaon signaled for the demonstration to proceed.

An array of targets were set up on the unoccupied section of wall, fifty meters before the group, letting out into the orchards beyond.

Hopes soared as the Elements seemed to recognize their bearers, altering the size of their golden frames to accommodate mares’ statures. Even the Element of Kindness sprouted long chains, allowing Fluttershy to tie it round her tree-trunk-thick neck.

The Elements glowed and hummed as the bearers called on their power, crescendoing to blinding light and shrieks. Rarity smiled ear to ear as iridescent trails reached from gem to gem, uniting in satisfying pops of eldritch sparks. Her eyes followed the end of her rainbow reaching to Fluttershy’s element.

Rarity’s smile vanished.

Fluttershy’s element did not react. The machine-pony shook it in confusion, growling pleas for it to wake up.

Rarity’s rainbow sputtered, unable to find its partner. In a wail of loss, it slammed back into the Element of Generosity, cascading through its sister elements in a shock-wave that blew their wearers to the ground.

Twilight hit the dust hard, crashing on her shoulder. She swam in and out of consciousness, but slowly rose to her hooves, nursing a headache. The others were more slow to come back to, with pained groans.

Blinking stars from her eyes, Twilight spotted one of the Swords’ warriors already approaching.

She paled. They’ll take them.

Fluttershy was audibly mumbling, staring into her element. “I’m not bad… I’m still me. We’re trying to save the world. I… Did I… When did I stop being kind? I’m trying to keep myself together!”

Red tears gathered behind her eyes, and the Element of Kindness fell from her claws.

“Spike,” Twilight telekinetically catching the falling gem. Its weight flared her headache. “Can you fix this?”

Spike glanced askance at her.

“There’s got to be someone who can fix these, right?” she growled.

Desperately, Spike tried to think. The Elements didn't work because... because of Fluttershy. She forsook Kindness for hatred. He swore under his breath.

“Is there a problem?” the warrior demanded, his hand drifting to his side where his axe hung menacingly.

Damn it.

What now? What’s Twilight trying to do? She knows I can’t fix them, I’m not even attuned! The only thing I have that might do anything is…

Then he had it.

“Girls... let me take a look,” Spike said smoothly, taking the Element of Kindness in claw.

Fluttershy was still fuming, teeth gritted in impotent rage as Twilight presented the Element to Spike. Applejack, Rainbow and Pinkie Pie looked confused at first, but followed suit. When he finished his circuit with Rarity, however, her hand briefly grazed his claw, and her eyes flashed in recognition.

“They’re just dirty, is all,” Twilight quickly blurted, blocking the warrior's view of the Spike's work. “They don’t work if they’re too filthy, bends the light incorrectly. Spike’s just cleaning them.”

“You’re a shit liar. Step aside.”

The warrior pushed her aside, just in time to see all six Elements disintegrating into the wind with a blast of emerald dragonfire.

Spike looked up at him, smoke curling up from his mouth, and grinned maliciously.

“Oops.”

“Treachery!”

His axe flew to his hand as if by magic, and he turned to face Applejack’s sudden charge as her hoof shifted. Steel foiled bone, and his shield dented against Spike’s punch.

Before the warrior could even think about counterattacking, a violet lance of magic from Twilight struck him, punching a bloodless, smoking hole right through his forehead. The warrior dropped with a crash of metal.

Archaon stood from the stands, simply looking on as the noose tightened. Twilight met his gaze briefly, and could almost imagine the punishment to come.

Broken from her panic by the sudden commotion, Fluttershy fired her claw’s hellcannon into one of the giants, washing it in an explosion of warpfire. Despite little outward damage, the creature drunkenly stumbled to a halt, confused and whimpering. It looked down at the Swords of Chaos, its allies. It began crushing them, screaming in terror.

Time for the failsafe.

Fluttershy grounded her claws and shouted, “Get on!”

She scanned the chaos lines, spotting many twirling hooks and harpoons. She’d learned from her mistake. Staying too long in one place let the northmen bring her down.

Keep moving, she thought.

“We’re up!” Spike exclaimed from her back.

The first step she took, the sky raged. Clouds turned to vortexes, and lightning surged like veins in furious skin. She ignored it and bolted for the perimeter, bowling over the Swords.

A few soldiers’ hooks found their marks, latching into Fluttershy’s joints. She didn’t allow them to regain their footing and simply dragged them across the square. Twilight and Rarity shot off the more tenacious handlers with lightning and magic blasts, leaving a trail of broken chains and tumbling warriors behind them.

Rarity felt the Winds of Magic howl, swirling up to the sky. She looked up to the eye of a storm, rapidly building up a fiery ball of lightning. She turned to warn Fluttershy.

However, lightning moved faster than sound.

Fluttershy lost control of her body mere meters before the gate. Coruscating lightning, reaching from the roaring sky, sent her limbs slack and gears squealing in protest. The twin thunderclap of her fall and the lightning heralded the scarring of the field. Tiled skulls, torn from the ground with her skidding, rolled and clattered wide across the square.

The Swords surrounded the fallen beast in quick order, finding her passengers pinned under her body.

Rainbow Dash was a blur of warpstuff, desperately trying to take form with Fluttershy’s claw on top of her. She looked up with oxygen-starved eyes as two warriors stood over her.

“It’s choking,” one said.

The other, wearing a burnished iron helmet with steel-tipped horns, simply chuckled, and punched her in the face.

In the wake of Fluttershy’s fall, Pinkie Pie was rolled over like a tube of toothpaste, coughing up Joe and Gustave with a sluice of clingy saliva.

Joe glanced around at the warriors looming over them.

“This isn’t a dream, is it?”

Pinkie groaned, “Nuh-uh.”

______________________________________________________________________________

Was he not merciful?

Archaon sighed at the sight of the heap across the square. He didn’t have long to ponder as the earth shook beneath his feet.

“ARCHAON!”

Archaon about-faced to meet the roar. Wreathed in lightning, Kholek Suneater stood a head taller than the surrounding structures. Clad in black iron and wielding a titanic warhammer that had served under the previous Everchosen and struck down the gates of cities in a single blow, the dragon ogre was the avatar of destruction. His hammer smoked from its most recent strike. Just that bit of suffering inflicted made him grin for a moment.

Four shaggoths, none even reaching his shoulders, fumed at his side, impatient for violence.

“When do we make war on the southlanders?! I grow weary of your waiting games! You dabble in all these strategies and bureaucracy, but I have a pact to fulfill!”

Archaon raised a palm to the mountain god and said cooly, “Hail, Sun Eater, and Star Crusher. Your concerns align with mine, and you will wait—” Archaon intentionally paused a fraction on the word, letting Kholek’s choler spike, “—no longer. Tomorrow, we march south.”

The dragon ogres howled in jubilation, stomping clawed feet and bashing massive maces and battleaxes to the ground. Kholek himself reared up on his hind legs, waving Star Crusher over his head, bellowing a roar that every soul for miles did hear._____________________________________________________Balthasar Gelt was never a humble man, but he did not brag… much. In the wizarding world, bragging was a sure-fire way of getting one’s projects sabotaged by jealous or angry colleagues looking to one-up, or shut up the competition.

But now, no one could deny he had every right.

From Erengrad on the Sea of Claws, to Fort Jakova at the World’s Edge, Gelt oversaw the building of a mountain range. Such an idea was the brainchild of a mysterious woman who passed the idea on with a scroll.

At first, the idea seemed almost childish. Just build a giant wall. But to infuse it with holy magic, that made it viable.

Extensive testing of the magical wards had been undertaken, and the coronation day came, at Erengrad. In the middle of festivities, of drink and congratulations, the gateway exploded. Enough masonwork to rebuild the Imperial Palace was destroyed, just long enough for a panic to start.

Gelt remained calm, and laughed as the stones slowed to a halt mid-flight, and gingerly floated back down, rebuilding the gate seamlessly. He revealed the name of the wall then, the Auric Bastion.

The rest of the evening, the ‘demolition’ would be known as Gelt’s stunt.

The night went on with smaller exhibitions of projects the Colleges were developing. Liquid fire-throwers in heavy tanks on an infantryman’s back, armored fists imbued with charged crystals that shattered target dummies in a single blow, and even a sort of powered harness a man could wear that would let them lift heavy loads or walk for hours without tiring.

By now they already had simple power containers, harnessing the power of magic, and rechargeable by any magic wielder. If the Imperial Census was true, that over twenty percent of the pony population were unicorns, the Empire could be on the verge of near-infinite energy. And that meant that the wizards needed to constantly empower the Bastion’s defenses could feasibly be cycled out for these near-miracle ‘batteries’.

The final event was a parade of the defenders of this section of the Bastion. Mostly Ostlanders in black and white livery, scarce in the way of modern weapons characteristic of the less prosperous province, but no less proud in their stalwart defense of the Empire’s frontier. The rest were Nordlanders of the 4th Marine Regiment, brandishing heavy halberds and wide-brimmed feathered hats.

The end of the procession was marked by a Celestial Hurricanum stopping before the onlookers. Gelt stood atop it, and offered it as a gift from the Celestial Order, to the Royal Sisters.

______________________________________________________________

The town of Schonfeld was on the Imperial side of the Bastion, and had recently had a surge of real estate sales as a result of the defenses being raised. Most buyers were Kislevite nobility, for it might actually be safe from the constant attacks from Chaos and Greenskins they would otherwise face.

Celestia and Luna made their stay in the mayoral palace, as humble a place as the mayor, as the palace was built in the same style as the rest of the town.The only thing giving it a unique presence was the shallow hill its foundations were built upon.

Under cool moonlight, Celestia slept in one of the guestrooms while Luna’s ‘day’ was just getting started with the rising moon. She fancied taking to the local tavern whose doors never closed, and stick to the anonymity of the shadows while sampling some drink.

Before the mirror, she quietly fixed her mane in common buns. She had acquired a taste for the modern style after witnessing some of the locals boasting the same.

Luna squared her shoulders, and took a deep breath—and then nearly coughed when the sudden foggy smell of incense invaded her nostrils. She wrinkled her brow at it. Someone must have been burning some powerful stuff.

Glancing to see if Celestia was bothered, she noticed the stream of vapor coming in through the window, and flowing with unnatural intent toward her sister.

“Tia!”

The stomp of hooves and flash of magic woke the sun princess with alarm. Luna contained the churning smoke in a shimmering bubble. It coalesced into a needle-point, and popped into the shapes of five distinctly colored gemstones, a horned helmet, and a massive golden chain. The latter’s unexpected size and weight shattered the containment field, and cracked the wooden floor on impact.

The helmet was instantly crushed under the chain. Scraps of meat flopped out, which suggested that the better part of a head was still inside.

Celestia backpedaled off the bed, quickly coming to a standing position. She stared, her face inscrutable, at the floating items.

“Tia!” Luna exclaimed. “Those— Those are the Elements of Harmony!”

Celestia just stared.

Luna walked closer, manipulating the larger of the five gems to face her. “This is Magic; I would know it anywhere!” she almost babbled excitedly. “And Loyalty, Honesty, Ki…”

She trailed off, glancing at Celestia. “Tia?”

“I know, Luna,” the Princess of the Sun replied, her expression grave. She stepped forward, rotating the helmet around. The eight-pointed star was emblazoned in brass across the face.

“If Spike managed this… then Chaos must have taken the Elements from Equestria after all,” she said. Her eyes fell on the enlarged golden chain of the Element of Kindness. “They’re all there. Twilight is in the far north, perhaps even the Wastes.”

Luna’s face fell. “The Arch-Traitor,” she whispered.

Celestia said nothing. Her eyes slowly fluttered closed, and a single tear rolled down to mar her pristine white cheek.

Chapter 34: Beginning of the End Times

"You may call us heathens, savages or even brutes, but we are closest to the gods. We see their work in all things. And we do not create new, seemly gods to conform with our hopes for the world."

—Alakreiz, Kurgan Marauder
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The army was moving, a sea of marching columns, and yurts drawn by horses, slaves, and slaver-mawed beasts of burden. Over each mobile tent was a banner of a warhost or southland cult. Among them were the Lordless Hordes, the Great Vanguard, the Red Reavers, and Archaon’s own Swords of Chaos.

The North Pole was a week’s march away.

The grind of the yurt’s rollers was a distant sound, sending slight vibrations through the leather walls, an omnipresent hum. Ingethel slithered around the central plinth where Rainbow Dash was bound, unconscious. A collection of goremages chanted deeply in calling to the ruinous powers. In preparation, they passed around the heart of Feid, a less than stellar acolyte whose corpse lay discarded in the corner. Each cultist took a bite of the still warm meat, and Ingethel scarfed down the last of it.

“We are ready to proceed,” wheezed Arungir, watching Ingethel circle with eyes sewn shut.

“This one is a stubborn soul,” Ingethel said. “Many of your throng will not survive.”

“When has that dissuaded us before?”

The closest thing to a grin creased Ingethel’s face. “Then let us begin.”

The chanting grew louder as one of the cultists approached Rainbow Dash with a recurved dagger. Arungir drew a similar blade from her sleeve and approached Ingethel. Ingethel barely flinched as her throat was slit. Rainbow Dash awoke with a choked out cough of blood as her heart was pierced.

_____________________________________________________

Rainbow Dash screamed and shot into the air, holding a hoof over her thundering heart. She took an instant to get her bearings.

Grass, tall and lush, a sea of wildflowers bowing in waves to the wind. A blue sky. She looked behind herself at a low rumble of thunder. A volcano in the distance, throwing up gouts of ash and smoke. Rainbow remembered this. Rarity described it all; the Warp, the forest, the acid-water, all a trap. She landed and moved in the opposite direction.

“Wait.”

Rainbow froze at the familiar voice. Ingethel stared at her with those unblinking, piss-yellow eyes.

“That way is death.”

“You!”

By the time Rainbow tackled Ingethel, she was transforming into a creature twice her original size. Rainbow dug a claw under Ingethel’s jaw, bleeding out a trail of black, oily fluid.

“You’d better start talking,” snarled Rainbow Dash. “Where am I?”

Ingethel coughed out something like laughter. “You cannot kill me here. I am daemonkind. Besides, both our time is limited. The fate of the mortal world hangs in the balance.

“Where is here?!”

“The borderlands between the realms of Kharneth and She-who-Thirsts. I say again, we do not have too much time.”

Rainbow rolled her eyes. “And why should I follow you for anything?”

“Whether I tell the truth or lie and you do not believe, you will die. You cannot hope to navigate the Warp on your own; not how you’re perceiving it.”

Rainbow Dash considered that for a moment and reluctantly let Ingethel go. Returning to normal form, she paced, angrily exclaiming a series of curt, four-letter words.

Ingethel rose to full height, over a meter taller than Rainbow Dash. “You are impetuous, so prone to acting without thinking. But here, you must learn better.”

“Learn what?”

“The Truth.”

Rainbow Dash snorted. “The truth.”

“Who else can you trust here?” asked Ingethel, waving an arm to the wide world.

“Not you.”

“Exactly.” Ingethel held a claw out to Rainbow Dash. “The devil you know, or the devils yet to come? They will come for you, and will not be patient enough to speak.”

Rainbow bit her tongue, and took Ingethel’s claw.

The world dropped away. In under a second, they were atop the rim of the volcano. The mountain raged silently, rivers of liquid earth cascaded down its sides. Ash surrounded them, and in the time it took for Rainbow Dash to worry about it, she found that she could breathe just fine.

“Am… Am I dead?”

“On the brink. You nearly perished in the metal giant’s fall. I have followers keeping you alive, so I can offer you the choice of the truth or oblivion. Archaon wants you and your friends.”

“What’s he doing to them?” growled Rainbow.

“Each of them will be shown the error of their ways. That is all I can say of it. Look there.”

The ash dissipated from them, and in the plains, three massive opposing armies were forming up, legions so vast they stretched to the horizon. Each marched under flowing banners of their nations, empires that had long since passed. Despite the impossible distance, Rainbow Dash made them out clearly. Men, elves, and dwarfs.

Along the volcano’s slope, squat, fat toads the size of men sat in levitating stone thrones, conversing in worried tones. Rainbow Dash couldn’t make out their strange language.

“Those are the Old Ones, the very makers of this world. Their attempts to get their creations to stop fighting one another have proven fruitless.”

“A bunch of lizard-people created them?” asked Rainbow.

“Indeed. Just about every race in the world. Greenskin, Ogre, and more.”

As warhorns sounded the charge, the Old Ones clapped their hands and disappeared in electrified blazes.

“The hearts of mortals were, and are, vain and vengeful. At that moment, it was as if the four corners of the world had come to destroy each other.”

Ingethel shook her staff a little, making two days of battle pass in under a minute. The changing of the clouds seemed to go unnoticed by the warriors, as they were consumed by battle-lust. A vaguely humanoid shape began taking form in the sky.

Rainbow Dash’s eyes hurt to look at it. “What is that?”

“The birth of a god.”

It suffered as it was born. Blood welled from every pore, and it screamed in both pain and anger at nothing. It staggered drunkenly with half-formed legs that soon became thickly muscled and armored as its blood-sweat hardened. It lashed out without eyes, mistakenly destroying whole worlds in its pocket dimension with every swipe of its claws. Only when its eyes formed, sickly grey-yellow beads, could it see the battle in the mortal world. But it had ended just as it could see.

It fell backward in weakness, and a throne caught it, a throne of brass and skulls. It watched through the veil of reality at tiny things in their camps, praying to whatever gods they worshiped, or the Old Ones, for the strength to win. For all sides, there seemed to be no victory in sight. Corpses were piled knee-deep in a lake of the dead. Countless, fat carrion birds swirled like swarms of flies, their feathers slicked in blood.

The god-thing, though it knew the men weren’t praying to it, thought it might oblige. It held out a hand, and let red ichor drip into the materium.

Blood began to rain on the camps, huge drops that painted men’s heads red with the splash.

In the middle of the night, the battle resumed. No banners were carried, no pre-combat oaths taken. The warriors simply took up their arms in the red rain and dashed for the field.

What resulted, Rainbow Dash could not call battle, but a massacre. Soldiers threw themselves at each other without formation or discipline. Every warrior was his own army, fighting by his own rage and hatred for the enemy. Humanity drank most deeply of this power, butchering dwarf and elf with reckless abandon. The dwarfs and elves fought to the last despite having any direction to retreat.

Men howled themselves hoarse at their victory. Barely one hundred of them were left. The skulls of the fallen rained over the god-thing, each like a mere grain of sand. It grinned at the strength of men.

“So what is this about?” Rainbow asked, sickened by the sight.

“What do you think? Do you not remember what your friend Rarity told you? She, at least, begins to understand.”

“She said there’s other sides to Chaos.”

“There are no ‘sides’ to it. Only how you perceive it. Remember Fluttershy, how she has changed.”

“Your god turned her into a berserker,” Rainbow accused, pointing at the god-thing’s fading image. The world vaporized into clouds of stardust. Rainbow felt ill as nonsense gravity pulled her in every direction.

“Because the Gods are generous; so many gifts to give, but so few willing to accept them,” hissed Ingethel, “Kharneth has heaped power on her, and before you even came here, she felt its benefits. Your dragon-man spoke of her, how she protects you with that strength, and only lashes out when provoked.”

Some semblance of reality asserted itself, dropping Rainbow Dash up to her haunches in a thick layer of snow.

A halo a kilometer across hung in the sky. Churning warp energy was focused in its center, crackling with the un-space of another dimension, but stable. An arctic township was directly under it, milling with primitive men, elves, and dwarfs alike, observing the Old Ones using such technology. Their masters dissolved into streams of liquid light as they flew up to the device, whisked away to parts unknown.

Wiggling out of the snow, Rainbow found Ingethel staring up at the vortex.

“This was how the Old Ones traveled to and from this world,” Ingethel said somberly. “Great gates that let them freely travel the stars.”

“And what does this have to do with this ‘truth with a capital T’ you were talking about?”

“This is when and where gods and mortals first met. Behold, the coming of Chaos.”

The warp gate decided to take that moment to explode. Roaring clouds of un-space expanded across the sky, and mountain-sized chunks of the disc were suspended in it, ignorant of gravity. Millions of eyes in impossible colors glared down from the growing maelstrom.

“This device thinned the border between dimensions, just enough that slivers of the Gods’ power could cross it, and finally meet their progenitors. Mortals had created gods, but felt no joy.”

Blood began to rain on the township, sending mortals fleeing indoors, and Old Ones back to ground. Some were trapped where they stood, unable to look away as their bodies were stained red.

From the growing puddles, humanoid things staggered out, unfamiliar with physical forms.

They emerged as red-skinned warriors, chanting praises of might. Pink and purple women strode alongside, bearing works of art that would have made the blind weep for joy, and shrieking in adulation at seeing the mortal plane. Pink and blue morphing flesh-balls clumsily bounced and amboled about, carrying stacks of books and scrolls, and putrid, zombie-like creatures with their entrails spilled across the ground bore potions, alembics, and promises of health and life. They screamed praise to the gods, and jubilation that the day of communion had finally come.

The mortals attacked the creatures that approached the frozen people, and quick behind them, the Old Ones joined, casting bolts of lightning that vaporized the warp-spawns.

The shards of the Gods retreated, at least until the sky boomed further. The Gods were scorned by mortals, after thousands of years separated, rejected. Slaanesh’s concubines writhed in pain, becoming bull-headed and ugly, and sprouting crustacean’s claws where there had once been dainty hands. Wrath took over Khorne’s prideful warriors, burning their skin away with rage until they were completely alien. Betrayal enraged Tzeentch’s scribes, setting their manner haywire, lashing out at one another as much as the mortals. The potions Nurgle’s mites carried soured instantly, bursting into waddling puss balls that glomped and bit at their attackers.

“This was supposed to be a time of celebration,” Ingethel said sullenly, waving her staff and dispelling the world as an apocalypse rained on the town.

“Jeez. Were you here when it happened?”

Ingethel’s agape maw shut briefly. Her needle teeth cut and gouged her own mouth, though she ignored the wounds. “I would not be born for another six thousand years. However, I did accept their gifts when I was bound in mortal life, as did so many others, but less so.”

“The Norscans?” inquired Rainbow Dash.

Ingethel nodded. “Now you begin to understand.”

Rainbow Dash went blind as her eyes filled with snow again. She hoped this wouldn't become a ‘thing’.

Rainbow Dash found herself in the middle of a norse village. Rune-carved cairn stones stood before every home, and the central lane leading up to what appeared to be the chieftain's hall was deserted. Rainbow could occasionally make out a terrified face in the windows, looking in the direction of one hut in particular.

Ingethel was at its door, motioning Rainbow Dash to follow as she slithered in.

It was not at all what the pegasus had imagined. Trinkets and decor of Imperial design filled the house.

A woman wept on her blood-stained bed. Her husband rushed to her with a wet cloth and began wiping off her bloody hand. Turning to face him, her swollen belly was revealed.

“What are we going to do, Olios?” she sobbed. “She’s going to kill them.”

“There isn’t anything magic can’t solve,” he said. “You put that brilliant brain of yours to work and you’ll find a cure within the week. That was just a miserable, lonely little hag with what, a rusty knife and some gibberish of a curse? She was jealous of us, I say.”

“But I can feel it. It’s so strong...”

Her wounded hand clenched around the rag, and started to shake.

“Ethra. Ethra!” Olios caught her as she fell into convulsions.

“She never could find a cure, but the Gods were listening. Nurgh’leth would cure her, and she would bear three sons.”

“H-how do I know this isn’t some kind of sob-story?”

Ingethel grimaced. “One of your friends will meet them in time. Ask for their names; Otto, Ethrac, and Ghurek.”

Ingethel hung over Rainbow Dash, her needle-filled maw breathing a meat-rotten reek in the pegasus’ face.

“You and your friends have jeopardized such a chance at communion between the gods and the rest of the world. Sending the Elements of Harmony away has been your worst mistake.”

“Yeah, right,” sneered Rainbow Dash. “We saved the world. The princesses can use all six on their own, and they’ll break the hold your gods have on—”

“Have you not been paying attention?!” fumed the daemon. Her rat-tails of hair stood on end. “Each god was born of an aspect of mortal minds; hate, joy, jealousy. The Gods are wrathful because mortals have rejected themselves. That is the true disharmony in the world.”

Just like that, it clicked. Rainbow’s eyes widened.

“Bear in mind that the Gods can save you from the brink of death you lay on. Now see the darkness of the future you will bring, should you fail to bring the true balance. In the future, there is only war.”

Ingethel backed away, slowly being enveloped by the dark void. Rainbow Dash tried to follow, but never got any closer.

“Hey, hey, wait!”

As the last of the daemon vanished, a tremendous blast knocked Rainbow off her hooves and against a snowy boulder.

A hurricane of laserlight blazed all around, accompanied by the shrill scream of a thousand weapons firing at once. Tattooed Chaos cultists in emerald-green robes charged uphill at a layered defence of dog-dirty troops, one of them holding aloft a standard topped with a skull pierced through with a dagger. Armored vehicles coughed ordnance at the defenders, blasting holes in what looked like a church behind them.

Men and ponies were falling, screaming, disemboweled and succumbing to wounds as their allies ignored them and pressed on.

The defenders rose from their trenches as the cultists began to waver and fall back. One of the counter-attackers stood out, wearing a black, gold-embroidered greatcoat, and a shimmering camo scarf around his neck. He swung a sword, coursing with lightning, in lethal arcs. His bulky pistol exploded men’s torsos with nearly every barking shot.

Rainbow tried to change form, but could not focus with the chaos. She tried to run as this man fought like he was possessed, and was getting closer. A nearby missile impact blew her down.

“First and Only!” he roared.

Rainbow Dash glanced back. He was already upon her, his face wrought with hatred and forlorn hope. His sword arm was shot through, running blood down the sleeve as the burning blade came down on her.

As Rainbow screamed, the world was replaced with an ashen plain, broken up by shattered boulder-fragments. Black smoke shrouded the brown-grey sky, rising like a curtain.

The very ground was exploding. Several times a second, gouts of rock and soil burst skyward, and raining down in an after-curse. Soldiers in trench coats and gas masks waded into the storm alongside house-sized tanks, each blazing with a dozen guns and cannons.

She looked up. A metal god strode above her. Blaring warhorns heralded its arms casting blinding lances of sunfire into a trench network. Earth instantly melted to lava, and the cowering defenders became no more than ash-shadows in their ditches.

Either way she looked, the same story played out, waves of soldiers and mechanical monsters attacking along a front kilometers wide.

Rainbow Dash flew away, reaching the clouds in under a minute, but even they were a cloying smog of chemical pollution. Soot already clung to her coat, and left a metallic taste at the back of her tongue.

A city the size of a mountain was the source, its peaks billowing industrial refuse.

How is this even possible? she thought. What kind of future is this?

The planet shot away, and the sky darkened to the black void of space in seconds.

It all came flooding in then, the sound of a galaxy in flames, the immaterial screams of billions of lives, fed to an ages-long war. Vast crusading fleets bearing millions of troopers, dedicated to righteousness or slaughter put entire worlds to the torch. Tears drifted from Rainbow’s eyes as the cosmos burned.

Whole star systems shot by in the time it took to blink. Void battles of thousands of warships were barely noticed. She curled up as a planet hurdled at her, but she stopped just a few meters above the ground.

She landed with quivering knees and short breath. Looking up at the starry sky, she wondered, how was this her fault? What could possibly be done?

Rainbow heard the bellow of a steam whistle beyond the narrow alley she’d dropped into. She stepped out into harsh light and busy, dense crowds. The very air vibrated with the thrum of massive hovering zeppelins with electrified engines. Brilliant floodlights shone from the eyes of enormous golden skulls on their prows, sweeping the crowd and blinding Rainbow momentarily with their dazzle.

She navigated the masses and streets, gazing on the high-towered buildings , none of which was without some icon. A warhammer, a solar eclipse, fluttering banners of the state, and soldiers on the rooftops. Equine skulls, crammed with electronics and metal tentacles lazily hovered over the crowd, snapping pictures, or carrying scrolls or slates in insectoid claws.

Rainbow Dash found herself at the back of a throng gathered before a raised stage of polished granite. An obese stallion in silk robes and a high headpiece was at the podium, supported on wheezing piston-legs.

Rainbow Dash quickly tuned him out as she looked over the titanic statues on golden plinths behind him. The princesses, Shining Armor, Karl Franz, and others cast long shadows over the crowd.

Where am I in all that? Rainbow thought. Where’s Spike, or Twilight, or—

“Excuse me.”

Rainbow Dash jumped. A young stallion, no older than fifteen years was looking right past her. His eyes looked empty and dead.

“I have to get by,” he said.

“H-hey, do you know where this is?”

He spared her a momentary glance. “Canterlot? Please, I have to get closer and hear the Patriarch’s good word.”

“Good word?” Rainbow muttered.

“And look down there!” the preacher bellowed, his voice amplified through megaphones on an orbiting zeppelin. He pointed at a mile-wide crater in the lowland.

Rainbow Dash gasped at the familiarity of the location. Ponyville had been there.

“That was where the great betrayers would foment their lies, the very birthplace of the evil that our good royalty give their all to fight, even now!” The patriarch pointed to each of the seven monsters engraved in the relief behind him, each of them was being cast into the jaws of a greater monstrosity, back into the Warp. Whoever created this took great artistic liberty, but Rainbow Dash could make them out. Her and her friends, vilified, despised. He pointed at Twilight Sparkle first.

“The Arch-Traitor, most favored of Celestia, and her lizard-beast shows us that even the mightiest can fall. Gird yourselves with faith, and be grateful our minds are not so open. Blessed is the mind too small for doubt.”

“No,” Rainbow muttered to herself as everyone else gave grunts of approval.

The patriarch ranted on each of her friends, calling them the Pony Eater, the Iron Mare, Destroyer, Fleshmonger, and Rainbow Dash herself, the Deceiver. Her blood boiled.

“And may their names be forgotten to all but the damned—”

“Rainbow Dash!”

The patriarch paused, and adjusted his hat as it started to slide off. “Who said that? Who disrupts this tempering?”

“Twilight Sparkle!” Rainbow Dash shouted again, ignoring the rapidly increasing number of eyes turning to her. Her sight was fixed on the lying preacher. “Spike! Pinkie Pie! Applejack! Rarity! Fluttershy!”

“And who are these ponies, who are clearly so important that you interrupt?”

“Those are the motherbucking Elements of Harmony, and we betrayed no one!”

The crowds began to back away from her as a pair of soldiers approached. “Miss, you will come with us for questioning.” He placed a hoof on Rainbow’s shoulder.

The last thing he would ever do.

Rainbow’s entire right side erupted in a tide of morphing muscle and toothy flesh, grabbing both the soldiers and slamming them to the ground until blood and brains were dashed across the tiles. Just as quickly, Rainbow transformed to metal form as gunfire raked down from the rooftops, panging harmlessly off her while she strode through the panicking masses. The fat preacher tried to run, but his artificial legs barely managed a trotting pace.

More guards stormed the stage, escorting him away, and firing fruitlessly on the shapeshifter. Rainbow Dash swatted them all aside with the wrecking ball of biomatter her tail had become. With heavy clubbing, she shattered the preacher’s legs; things he hadn’t been able to feel for many years.

“D- De- Deceiver…” he spat. “This is a holy world. The Princesses own the very land, sea, and sky, and my faith guards my soul from the powers you surrendered to!”

Rainbow Dash glanced up at the statues of Celestia and Luna. Their gold-wrought eyes seemed to glare at her.

She took a deep breath as her eyes began to water, and her hoof became a mace of bone spikes. “I’m not the one that deceived you, and my name is Rainbow Dash!”

Giving a shout of indignation, she changed again, a miniature hurricane of feathers and warpstuff, growing, coalescing to mimic Fluttershy in size and form. She casually tossed the preacher into the street, and went for the statue of Luna. With a squeal of tearing metal, Rainbow broke the princess’s head off, and, like a dagger impaled Celestia through the neck with her sister’s horn.

_________________________________________________________

Rarity had the awful need to scratch her back, but resisted. The openings were still fresh.

She rolled her shoulders, the action stretching the cut-out swaths of her back where cords of blue muscle were exposed. She hissed at the burn, and felt a warm trickle of blood as clotted wounds were torn. Her right arm felt worse of all. Across her collarbone, a clear pattern of stitches denoted where it had been reattached. It still felt like it hung off wrongly, a bit slower to react to her thoughts.

Her surroundings were lost in the tight, windowless space, which rocked and shook as it was moved to heaven knows where. There must have been thick walls and nullifying wards put on the metal box, as Rarity couldn’t feel the Winds of Magic. She felt cold and empty without its presence, and blind now that she couldn’t mind-see where she or her friends were. She rested her head against the cool metal.

Rarity had known for a long time that the gods of Chaos were not inherently malevolent. Soon after her mutated endowments, she could hear the heartbeat of creation in the Warp, but she had still misunderstood.

’You ignorant mule.’ Egrimm Horstmann’s words still rang.

The Elements of Harmony wouldn’t have worked. The true imbalance wasn’t in the north, but the south. A world in denial, gods scorned, and the power of the Warp rejected. The Old World must be shown the error of their ways.

The box lurched, then became still. There was a fifty-fifty chance of it being a good or bad thing.

The wall to her right fell away, and her senses were immediately overwhelmed. The Winds crashed back into her mind, setting every nerve on fire with its power the sounds of thousands of voices rang outside in a rising and falling chorus.

'Aaaaiii… aaaaaii.'

A bulky warrior stood at the opening, and he jabbed a thumb back for her to get out. Rarity stepped out into fading sunlight. A tent city was set up that stretched to the horizon, encircling a mound of ancient, petrified corpses, in which a standard of black iron, forged in the shape of an eight-pointed star, was buried halfway up its shaft. The breadth of the icon itself was taller than a man. Thousands of warriors surrounded the corpse mound, chanting, praying, begging for the hour to come.

A great maelstrom swirled in the sky, a million eyes staring down hungrily at the world from a vortex. Mountain-sized bodies of rock lazily drifted in its grasp, splitting and reassembling at random.

Rarity looked to her left; friends emerged from their own holding boxes. Rainbow Dash was pale, her eyes bloodshot. Applejack twitched constantly, gritting her four rows of teeth, and forcing her own body to obey and walk. Spike wore all his panoply of war, resting his claws on the pommel of his sword, point down in the ashen earth. The ground shook as Fluttershy cast a shadow over Rarity. She snarled, wriggling in the trappings that bound a massive iron howdah to her back. Drummers hammered away on their great leatherbound instruments, and eight-pointed stars hung from banners on each corner.

Pinkie Pie was last to emerge, and was something else entirely. Sweet cream trickled from seams in her waffle cone ears. A carapace of peppermint covered her like an insect's exoskeleton. A deep, jagged crack bisected her otherwise porcelain-perfect face into white and pink halves. This divide ran down her neck, chest, and underbelly. She glared around unblinkingly, letting an orange and black tongue run along her carnivorous teeth.

The drums and chanting went silent at once, giving way to a shrill ringing of countless bells.

Rarity looked up as the sky darkened. One of the largest eyes in the vortex wept a single burning tear that headed for the standard. The comet struck with a fantastic explosion of dust, but destroyed nothing, Black tendrils of smoke spread along the ground in an ethereal carpet, and a titanic figure rose from the crater.

Rarity had never heard its name before, but it was spoken to every mind in the congregation.

Be’lakor.

The daemon was of grey skin and batlike wings. Cloven hooves ended its furred legs, and rough horns ran along its elongated head. It scanned around, nothing but hate on its wrinkled, noseless face. It’s body language said it didn’t want to be here.

“Who now demands the attention of the Gods?” it growled.

“I do.”

Be’lakor turned around. Archaon was standing just under the standard’s peak, nearly at eye level.

The daemon snarled, “You again?”

Archaon chuckled. Be’lakor glanced at his claw, which was suddenly holding a saddle of furs and chainmail. The daemon prince looked up to the vortex, silently uttering a curse.

“Where is the replacement, then?”

On cue, Twilight Sparkle manifested beside Archaon in a flash of teleportation.

Her mouth hung slightly ajar, each struggling breath letting out a thin red vapor. Short spikes of bone jutted through tears in her hide, under which a savage musculature wormed and writhed. Her predatory eyes locked on Be’lakor, then she spread her wings wide, wrinkled and ribbed with bony fingers.

Be’lakor snorted and began attaching the saddle to Twilight’s back. Claws large enough to tear men in half worked with swift dexterity. Be’lakor hated it. Such menial labor, being the altar boy of the Gods. As she adjusted the strap around Twilight’s barrel, he made sure to tighten it a bit too much.

“The Gods are watching, Kastner. Make sure they are not ashamed,” Be’lakor growled, rising back to full height.

“Diederick Kastner died fourteen years ago,” hissed Archaon. “You know you speak to Their anointed one.”

Be’lakor ground his jaw. “I know. I…rrrgh... apologize.”

Archaon placed a hand on the shaft of the war standard. The hot metal was alive with the souls of the dead piled around it.

“Carry this.” he said.

“What?”

Archaon turned back to the daemon. “You were relegated to the sidelines of the last Great War, but now you will see it from the front. You will bear this standard.”

Be’lakor’s claw drifted to his sword. “I am not your flagbearer...”

“You betrayed the Gods and now pay the price. You will listen to the Chosen One of the gods you traded your mortal soul to. Now, obey.”

Faster than any mortal eye could perceive, Be’lakor drew his sword, rage fueling a mighty roar as he swung at Archaon. The Everchosen cooly stepped aside, and the massive blade bit a foot deep into aeons of petrified dead.

Be’lakor struck the mound again, and again, while Archaon stepped over to Twilight. Archaon dug a boot into the stirrup, and before mounting, met Twilight eye-to-eye. An instant of understanding passed between them, no longer master and slave, but their unholy alliance. He vaulted up. At the same time, Be’lakor freed the standard and raised it high, the star of Chaos burning with arcane fire, and he roared in rage and dismay.

Solid waves of cheering erupted from the army, crashing against the mound, howls of adulation from tens of thousands of throats. No sooner had Be’lakor planted the standard than the massed Swords of Chaos began to march around the mound, their arms snapping out and hammering their breastplates in salute of the Everchosen who raised the Slayer of Kings in response.

At some unseen signal a flame ignited on the ground and blazing lines of rainbow-flame traced eight arrows in the ground, each pointing at someone in the inner circle. Spike, Rainbow Dash, Pinkie Pie, Horstmann, Valnir, and others knelt. The adulation soared to new heights as the Star of Chaos seared itself into the sands of the Wastes, the Everchosen’s forces roaring themselves hoarse in his praise.

Pinkie Pie couldn’t keep her silence any longer, and added her voice to the din, her senses burning in pleasure at the sheer deafening volume of the cries. The Decadent Host echoed weirdly over the plain, ecstatic shrieks of pleasure and debasement that should never have been given mortal voice.

“Fly.” Archaon ordered.

Twilight smiled, and jumped off the remains of the mound. With great beats of her wings, she climbed, carrying the Everchosen in ascending circles over the warhost.

Hellcannons thundered in salute and Kholek Suneater hefted Starcrusher over his head in respect. The wind picked up the ashes of the ages-long dead which rained like confetti over Archaon’s mighty army as thousands of warriors cheered, their cries resounding long into the darkness.

Author's Note

Wooo! Third arc!
Bottom image source

Chapter 35: Mobilization

"Before you perish, know that your death will not be meaningless. The Lord of Skulls shall feast on your heart and drink of your blood, woman. And know, that in the times of Darkness that will soon come to engulf the world, the gods themselves will walk the land, leading their legions in the battle to end all battles. And in those End Times, Great Kharnath will cut down your Lady, hacking her head from her shoulders and great shall be the lamentation. Your goddess shall perish -- she knows this. And now, you too know the truth."

~High Jarl Egil Styrbjorn, to a dying priestess of the Lady of the Lake

----------------------------

Vinyl Scratch hated libraries.

She let out a heavy sigh. Well, she didn't hate them, but she’d always been a learn-on-the-job kind of mare. The floating silver tower of Egrimm Horstmann possessed a bountiful library, but now she was getting into work she was truly unfamiliar with: classical music, and literature thereof, which only made things even more of a headache.

It was all gonna be worth it, though. Her band, and Octavia’s orchestra were coming together for the End Times tour, and while Vinyl had her album completed and practiced with the band, Octavia needed help with her Magnum Opus. With the apocalypse on its way, Vinyl would be damned if she wasn’t going to help her.

She found a table to herself, away from the eggheads and further embarrassment of being seen there. She pored over the classics over the course of weeks, using magic to make music sheets play right off the page, up to and including Jeremiah Bickenstadt’s The Life of Skarsnik, warlord of Karak Eight Peaks. Who knew humans could make a middling little goblin sound like such a larger than life character?

Her neck felt sore, and when she finally looked up it made a painful pop. She felt stiff as a board, her mouth parched, and stomach growling. How long had she been sitting there?

Something warm started massaging her shoulders, and a voice hummed in familiar tones as they worked out the tense knots.

“Mmm… Hey, Tavi,” Vinyl mumbled appreciatively.

“No Tavi here,” a feminine voice chirped back.

Vinyl sighed, seeing that the tentacle on her shoulder was striped orange and black, and pushed it off. “Alright, whoever you are. What do you waaah…”

The section of the library was silent, save for the swish-swish of a liquorice tail happily wagging against the floor. Vinyl looked up at a mare twice her size made of peppermint, liquorice, and swirling lollipop disks for eyes. It slurped its long tongue back in, and a bright rock candy-filled smile graced its features.

“Hey there!"

“Pinks!” Vinyl turned, then leapt happily from her chair and hugged Pinkie Pie, who returned the gesture with a mirthful giggle. “Where’ve you been all this time?"

“Oh my gosh, you have no idea. First my friends and I tried to use the Elements of Harmony to cure the chaos guys of all their crazy, but they didn’t work for some reason. Then I got cut up and put back together by Gustave le Grande and Donut Joe, well, that was the second time it happened. I dunno what they did but now it feels so good to just be alive! Were you there at Archaon’s coronation?”

Vinyl’s smile vanished. “Wait, sh-shit… when was that?”

“Like four days ago?" She gasped. "Oh no, you missed it?”

“Vinyl buried her face in Pinkie’s chest to muffle her shout, “That was once in a lifetime-aaaAAAAGH! I need somewhere to curl up and fucking die!”

A deep, bubbling groan answered back from Pinkie’s stomach, making her grunt in pain. As Pinkie hugged vinyl tighter, the unicorn could felt that rumble rock Pinkie to her core, and she smiled as Pinkie licked her lips with a widening grin.

“There’s that greedy gut I remember,” Vinyl said happily. “Just let me put a ward on-woah! Already happening!”

it took just a few heartbeats. Pinkie's barrel opened into an impossibly large maw, lined with candy corn teeth, and exposing the inside of her massive stomach. The unicorn offered no resistance while she was shoved in, and sealed away with a single chomp. The teeth locked together under Pinkie’s striped fur, hiding the direct entrance to her monstrous gut.

Vinyl peeled her face off the taffy walls and spat out a glob of foreign stomach fluid. "Hey, let me put a ward up first, would you?” She wasted no time as the acids were already fizzling at her hide, and applied the protective magic barrier to herself in a flash of blue magic.

PInkie purred like an oversize cat as Vinyl wriggled and settled in. “Sorry. It’s just that being empty’s been hurting a lot more lately.” She shivered in pleasure at Vinyl’s natural flavors, and her body’s embrace of its meal. “Ooh it really missed you.”

Pinkie’s hollow interior was as Vinyl remembered it: warm, soft walls, a small space, but not tight. It easily stretched to accommodate meals, or guests, of any size, the difference depending on if they could protect themselves. She let herself sink into the folds, tentacles eagerly curling and licking at every inch of her body, and digestive churning rubbing syrup-enzymes into her fur. “It’s no big, this time at least. I just don’t wanna end up as padding on your flank.”

“Got it.” Pinkie didn’t really know what happened to all that she ate. Stuff went in, nothing ever came out or added weight to her figure. She started glancing over the stacks of books and music sheets. “Whatcha been working on here?”

Vinyl filled her in on Octavia’s last piece for the grand tour of the Old World. Pinkie Pie failed to grasp the song, scanning over what looked like a mess of bars and notes at impossible pitches. She gave her belly a firm squeeze while flipping through some of the books, not bothering to read but letting the thousands of pages flutter by in waterfalls of words, words, words.

“Hey,” said Vinyl, “do you have anywhere to be soon?”

“Eh, Sigvald had some of my mane cut off so he could sample it, then he told me to go away ‘cus now my mane’s ruined, so Donut Joe has to make some more liquorice locks for me and that’s gonna take all day… so no, I’m free-ahh-hehehe! Ticklish!”

Vinyl had scrambled up and smushed her face against the stomach walls. Pinkie saw the imprint of Vinyl’s face pushed out under her chest. “You think you can check out these books for me and sniff out Octavia? I’ve gotta show her what I came up with so far.”

Pinkie’s stomach groaned at the mention of a second course. She winced. “S-sure.”

As Pinkie gathered everything on the table into Vinyl’s saddlebags, she started humming what she remembered from skimming the music sheet and moved hastily for the exit. Anything to distract from this gnawing hunger.

“I can’t wait to hear what this sounds like when it’s done.”

______________________________________________

A call went out soon after Archaon’s coronation, summoning all the legions of Chaos to his banner. The Incursion had begun. The message was sent by raven, vulture, horseman; and one new, recently acquired method—dragon-fire.

The armies of the North came to him one at a time. Egil Styrbjorn brought the Skaeling from Norsca’s west. The Varg, Aesling, and Baersonlings came soon after. They actually seemed more tame and ‘civilized’ than the denizens in the Wastes, living in towns and villages over nomadic camps, the likes of the Hung and Kurgan. The horde swelled with their number, and with time, they resembled a mobile city of floating sorcerers’ towers, jarls’ palaces, and the soul-powered hell forges of the Dawi Zharr, their arrangement changing with time and the terrain.

Archaon’s command nexus was the Varanspire, a palace cast in the shape of a horned blade stabbing up from the very ground. It hovered on a cushion of seething warpfire, leaving the ground glassy and ash-covered in its wake. Bulges along its towering height denoted its levels. Slave holds, armories, and second from the top, a strategies hub.

Over two dozen warlords form across the Old World were in attendance, and even a few who weren’t physically present, their images being projected across the vast distance of the world by sorcerous means. The largest figure of all was Valkia, the bride of Khorne. Her broadcast image was a haze of blood mist, shifting in an unfelt breeze, and quietly hissing with scalding heat.

Twilight Sparkle was last to enter, behind Wulfrik the Wanderer. She found a place next to Spike. “A lot of competition to keep up with,” she whispered.

Spike hummed in agreeance, and wiped his sleepy eyes.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I just didn’t sleep well.”

“There’s a spell for that.”

“Somnium Panacea. I know.”

Twilight nodded. “Let me know if you have trouble again.”

Horstmann looked to Archaon, who sat atop his throne raised above the mob. Taking his signal with the Everchosen’s nod in satisfaction to the assembly, Horstmann planted his staff vertically on the floor. The bejeweled head beamed out a projection of the Old World over the central dais. Arrow-snakes ran along its geography, denoting invasion vectors and who would lead them. The flow converged on two places—Altdorf, and Middenheim.

“It is good that so many of you were able to attend.” he said, making idle conversations around the room die off. “I’ll not keep you longer than necessary,” He raised a hand to the map. “Here is what the Everchosen and his closest council have devised for our crusade. The power of Nurgh’leth still waxes since the Storm of Chaos, and so by his power the Empire will be weakened.”

The path from the Longship Graveyard to Marienburg glowed a little brighter. “Here, the Glott brothers, Valnir, and Wulfrik will march on the capital and keep the southern provinces cut off from the north.”

Valnir, unreadable behind a grille-faced mask, nodded.

“Heh, never killed me an emperor before,” Wulfrik smirked, scratching his ginger beard and eyeing Altdorf. “His skull would make a nice addition to my collection.”

Otto Glott, obese with bodily decay, gargled out a mirthful chuckle, with his head riddled with age-old bullet holes. “The river Reik will be poisoned by us. It branches and spreads like veins through the Empire’s heartland.”

“Precisely,” Horstmann grinned. “The first major strike for their enlightenment, is to expose their false faith, and topple those that claim some divine right to rule. The Eternal Flame in Middenheim is said to be the living heart of Ulric himself. Archaon will extinguish the flame, and with it, we will kill a god.”

Twilight’s ear twitched towards the door, hearing heavy bootsteps. Within seconds, frantic knocking pounded at the door, and someone shouted ‘Imposter! I am Wulfrik!’ on the other side. The instant a menial unlocked the door, a second Wulfrik kicked it open. Stark naked, his wrists were raw and bloody, and he clutched a similarly blood-stained length of rope in one hand.

Two clones of the warrior stared each other down from across the room. One beside Otto, laughing in amusement, the second in the doorway, seething.

“What is this, T’char?” Wulfrik number One said, continuing to lock gazes as he moved closer. “Surely this meddlesome agent of the Changer of Ways can ply his tricks at a more appropriate time—”

Wulfrik number two roared and launched himself at One. His brawn easily overpowered his surprised counterpart, and within seconds he was smashing his clone's head into the steel floor. Several skull-splitting blows were landed before the congregation could separate them, but by then, the damage was done.

Wulfrik One was barely conscious, his skin charring, then burning away in green flame. The creature being held down was no longer human, but a pony-sized insect of black chitin and drooling mandibles.

Twilight's eyes widened. She and Spike shared a quick glance between one another.

“Get off me!” Wulfrik growled and squirmed against five attendants holding him down. “Can’t you see I’m the real one? Look at that thing!”

Archaon strode down from the throne. “Release him. And what is this?”

“Plug its ears,” Spike snapped, then moved to do it himself as no one else knew why. They caught it already, didn’t they? It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Dragon, do you know this thing?” Valkia growled.

Twilight spoke softly, even with its Spike’s claws on its ears. “It’s a Changeling. They’re spies, infiltrators. Good ones that can hide in plain sight for years.” She quickly glanced over its features, unable to identify the strain. Was it new, or did the her research after the Canterlot attack miss something?

“Tzeentch created more than one?” Horstmann asked.

“No, no. These are out of Equestria, and there were tens of thousands of them. They telepathically relay what they see and hear to others of their kind. It just heard the plan for Altdorf and Middenheim.” Spike scanned around at the many faces in the room. “And anyone else in here could be another one.”

_______________________________________________________

Chrysalis was an observer outside her own body, the brightest of a collective of souls, speaking to one another across the hive, and the world. The Hivemind, the congress of the Changeling race, where every creature from worker drone to gene-forged guard was an equal speck and voice in the body.

Chrysalis’ mind drifted through some priority areas. In Warren 49, Tuva was in the middle of ending the life of a Skaven burrow-scout. She could hear the rat-thing’s squeal for dear life just before the drone snapped its neck. In Albion, Suitable ground was already being molded into a new underground hive, under the very feet of the giants and indigenous peoples of the region. All around her dormant body, the Darkstone Thorne was nearing completion, a throne of glassy depleted warpstone in the shape of a tremendous spiked crown.

The throne itself was a magic-killer, calming the ambient Winds to a standstill, and only the innate power of Changeling magic could work around it. She could almost picture a potential Skaven assault, their war machines, doom flayers, ratling guns, sputtering to a halt for miles around the hive, helpless.

High above her was an eerie chandelier of a dozen luminescent cocoons, the gently twisting silhouettes of the Empire’s condemned convicts suspended in an amniotic, sleeping prison. Hundreds more of them were in other warrens, and those in the chandelier were the queen’s personal selection. More would be needed though, if the hive was to feed properly, to grow, to prosper. Perhaps it was time to renegotiate with the Imperials and offer to take all their criminals who were declared never to return to daylight.

Her corporeal face twitched, a reflexive smile at her kingdom being reborn. Among the light and warmth of her people’s presence, she felt one of their lives dim briefly.

“My queen,” came its weak voice. Chrysalis recognized it.

“Gaan. Where are you?” Chrysalis felt as Gaan did, saw as he did. She only saw boots, and only heard muffled talking.

“The Chaos Man camp. I got into one of their meetings, but I’ve been found.”

“I fear I do not have long.”

The entire information transfer lasted a handful of heartbeats, the kinds of beasts and weapons, routes to be taken, names and appearances of leaders. It ended with Gaan being forced up to his hooves to look into the burning eyes of the Everchosen. The detailed etchings and runes in his brass helm glowed in anger, and his words came deep as an avalanche.

“Tell your queen to relay this to the Empire, insect. Tell them ruin has come to their world, death, despair and red war. Tell them their hopes and pride have come to nothing. Tell them their empty whispers fall upon deaf ears and their gods are dead, for the true masters of this world will not be denied. Tell them the End Times have come, tell them nothing can save them now. Do you hear me, Chrysalis?”

The queen’s face curled sourly. Gaan responded by attempting to spit in Archaon’s face, but the Slayer of Kings was faster. Chrysalis winced, sensing the blade pierce his neck. Already, the infiltrator’s soul was detaching from his body as it died, but something kept him from drifting closer to the queen. Noticing his trouble, Chrysalis reached for him, but the same something yanked Gaan away.

Chrysalis only saw it for a moment, a shadow in the light of thousands of souls. Dark tendrils gripped Gaan’s mind, letting a bodiless, fanged maw bite and pierce his soul.

Chrysalis shouted for him, and Gaan shouted in pain. Nearly every spark of life in the Hivemind noticed the psychic shriek, and light of his mind flickering out as a blown candle. Like that, the nest was stirred. The shadow reeled as the lights drew near, expelling its darkness. Gaan’s soul shattered in its teeth with a echoing cry, and the being shot toward Chrysalis, its eyes burning with rage, its maw alight with flame, and roaring with depthless fury.

Chrysalis stood suddenly, making the throne workers stare. She didn’t look at them, but sensed they’d paused.

“Keep working,” she said, stretching her four arms to the ceiling. Her eyes burned with pain from the after-image of the creature.

A hole bored itself into the far wall of the throne room, and Ditto entered. He’d been recalled since the Emperor apparently didn’t feel comfortable with a shapeshifting agent of an inhuman queen in his palace, and Cadence hadn't exactly been around to voice any objections due to her returning from her state visit. Chrysalis had presented the Triumvirate with the scarabs since, capable of projecting one’s image and voice from one to another.

Ditto's tone was short and respectful, but betrayed a haunted tremble. “My queen, I—”

Chrysalis put up a hand, silencing him. “Bring me a scarab, and I can bring this to the Triumvirate. Make haste.”

Ditto nodded, and ran off with the hole closing behind him.

She returned to the throne, her expression was a storm cloud of grief. Gaan had been one of her best infiltrators. It was the stuff of miracles to gain access to the Everchosen's own war council.

They'd underestimated that human, Wulfrik. If the man could come back alive from insulting the king of a Dwarf hold by comparing his beard to the hair on a troll's arse, mere rope and a stunning spell couldn't hope to hold him for long.

Chrysalis dipped her consciousness into the hive. Her people were scared. The queen's spirit shone like a beacon amidst the flickering souls, a soothing balm to her stricken changelings after the loss of their brother.

She did not allow herself to dwell on the thought of the Everchosen's looming visage for long. As soon as Ditto returned, she'd be paying Franz and the Princesses a very prompt visit.

The changelings were finally on the upswing, and the world was already ending. She chuckled darkly. Were her people cursed in some other way now? Was the universe actively trying to destroy them? If so, she relished the thought of her resistance to such fate. Make whatever force wanted Changelings extinct have to work for it.

Her horn glowed a sickly green, and the chandelier shook as the prisoners thrashed. Several threw their jaws open in sleeping silent screams, only letting bubbles out in the milky suspension. Ruby red mist streamed down out of each cocoon, and Chrysalis opened her mouth wide and inhaled the energy. The power of love tickled every nerve in her ten foot tall body, and eased the headache of crashing back to consciousness.

Why can’t we have nice things? she thought.

She shifted in the Darkstone Throne. Well, that was one.

______________________________________________________

The war plans had gone ahead unchanged. Putting faith in that the Gods were behind them, the Nurglites of the army were detached and sent across Norsca to the Longship Graveyard. The name made Applejack question its soundness, launching a naval assault from such a place. The settlement itself was largely locked down, most of it cordoned off by the locals to stop the nurglites from spreading their diseases.

“Now don’t be talkin' to any strangers,” she’d told Apple Bloom, warily scanning over the people who chose to watch from the barricades. Some onlookers gave gifts of tribal fetishes and words of encouragement and luck to the warriors. Valnir accepted a pendant made from the bones of some small animal.

Valnir had taken some getting used to. He’d given up using her as a riding animal, not out of her stubbornness, but that he didn’t like being on a ‘high horse’, like he was above the others. To him, all were filth, or were going to be. All was doomed to rot, and fall, to die. He couldn’t communicate in mere words the despair that Nurgle had shown him, and so opted to show her as best he could while she still had some, as he said, ‘misplaced shred of hope.’

He’d removed his helmet to Applejack, and the truth burned in his very eye sockets. Valnir was but a bloody skeleton, smeared and tangled with scraps of meat and flesh under all his armor. More than a zombie, he was animated by Nurgle’s own power. His empty eye sockets glowed with emerald witchlight, weeping yellow ooze that boiled away before even hitting the ground.

Through he was but a surrogate, Applejack saw enough. The end of all things, that’s what Nurgle was about. The calmness and solidarity with others once she accepted that inevitability took so much off her mind. Apple Bloom, Braeburn, herself, preserved effigies of life, in a limbo between life and death.

A family approached Valnir with a wretchedly sick relative, barely able to stand and his flesh chicken-poxed with blisters. Valnir insisted there was nothing wrong with them.

“He has chosen me among a few as his heralds, the reapers, to spread the truth of hopeless oblivion to all the realms of men. Do you feel the maggots coursing through your flesh? Do your lungs burn with every aching breath? Then rejoice. Truly, you are blessed.”

“Moody bastard!” Otto Glott shouted from atop the monstrously warped shoulders of one of his brothers.

Ethrac Glott, an emaciated thing in tattered red robes, shied away from remarking. He took a fire poker from the large brazier mounted over his back, and without looking, stoked the smouldering embers of a pair of blackened corpses. The both of them rode atop Ghurek, a massive creature, easily taller than a troll, and a walking slab of rotting meat and jutting bone. His arms were a toothy tentacle and lamprey’s maw. The only sounds he seemed to be able to make was gurgling grunting and moaning. Somehow, Otto understood him.

“All in good fun,” he laughed.

The shipyard was slippery with bodily fluids that leaked from the sheer multitude of walking wounded warriors. Trickling in overflow into the bay, the water became ill with dead fish. The armada was in the same shape, algae-encrusted warships, held together with rusting rivets and caked-on slime for sealing wax. To keep the docks themselves from rotting away under the warriors, gangways were set up straight from the yard to the ships.

The call went out to embark, and Applejack held Apple Bloom close in the press of bodies at the closest ship’s gangway.

“What the hay are you doin'?”

Apple Bloom paused in the midst of trying to crawl into a hole in Applejack’s abdomen.

“It’s somethin' Braeburn lemme do. Nurglings would get carried by some of the soldiers in their guts," she explained.

Applejack snorted at that. “Well, you ain’t a nurgling and I’m not Braebur—”

Crunch. An absent-minded warrior passed them by, his elephantitis-filled boot crushing one of Apple Bloom’s legs.

The filly glanced down, pouting at the inconvenience. “You see? I’m gonna get squashed down here!”

That might as well be true. Apple Bloom was a tiny thing compared to the rest of these obese fighters. She lifted Apple Bloom to sit on her back, and the filly actually had a good view of the fleet and army.

“Hmm, “Applejack cracked a sly smile. “If you’re tellin' me you’re too small to be walking ‘round here, then you sure as horse apples ain’t goin' to the front neither.”

Apple Bloom blew a raspberry. “Yeah, yeah...”

Applejack knew that tone, that ‘I’ll slip off at the first chance’ tone. “Don’t you use that voice with me. I swear, I’ll nail you to the keel of a ship if it’ll stop you from throwing yourself away.”

Sorting went along on the main deck, where heavier warriors were diverted to mass-transport ships further out. It was here that Applejack saw the full extent of the fleet. At least two hundred ships, many with stylized sails depicting Nurgle’s mark, or rotting skulls. They were everything from dragonboat raiders to mighty plague ships with battering rams and catapults. The ship Applejack was on had sails of leatherized human skin, warped faces and all.

“Lord of Dragonbone, on deck!” someone cried.

Applejack had heard of who would be leading the armada. Gutrot Spume, Lord of Tentacles. Waddling up from the stern’s depths, Spume’s entire left side was dominated by squirming, slimy appendages, several of them ending in a lamprey’s maw. His three-holed metal mask was strapped to his face, and a large spike jutted up from the forehead.

Stepping aside, he let a blue-skinned woman look on the embarking forces. Her exterior was that of shimmering scales, uncharacteristically clean for one having been in a plague ship, particularly her long scarlet ponytail that whipped wildly in the seaborne wind. An eyepatch covered one eye, the other was predatory, yellow and slitted.

Spume pointed to the legions of the plague god. His voice bubbled like sea slime. “I know you have one eye, but even you can see this, clear as day. This invasion marks the beginning of the end of this world, and revenge for both of us. I will bring them a slow, painful demise, and the beginning is at Marienburg. Your sea will feast on the dead we will cast into the waters. The whole of the Imperial Navy will be prowling for my fleet; I need your might under me if we’re to make the landing.”

The merwoman sneered with a mouth full of shark’s teeth, flaring webbed fins at the sides of her head. She looked the warriors up and down, and made eye contact with Applejack. The zombie mare instinctively moved to nod a hat that wasn’t there. It was somewhat substituted by the lipless grin she always displayed. She didn’t notice Apple Bloom who simply waved to the fish-lady. The creature walked slowly to the side of the ship, and stood on the very edge.

“Think about it,” said Spume.

She looked back for a moment, then donned her jagged-mouthed helmet. Stepping over the edge, the only sound that confirmed she still existed was a splash.

“She looked weird,” Apple Bloom remarked. “You think she can swim with all that armor on?”

“She better, if she throws herself overboard like that.”

“You, blonde mare,” Spume called out. He was looking straight at Applejack. “Are you Applejack? Valnir’s girl?”

Applejack raised a brow at him. “Yessir, born ‘n raised.”

Spume pointed into the forest of masts and sails.“Go across the planks, two more ships down. There’s a Braeburn and Macintosh waiting for you.”

______________________________________________________

Panic had gripped the Empire overnight as Morrsleib appeared in the starry sky. Its presence usually heralded some incoming disaster, like a chaos invasion or mass gathering of the undead to attack the living. This night, the eerie green moon was bigger and brighter than ever, rivalling Mannslieb in size.

Across the nation, fanatical flagellants howled their dirges that the End Times had come, and all must fight for salvation. Chaos Cults, hiding along the underbelly of Imperial society activated sleeper cells across the Empire, sabotaging rail lines, burning food silos, and stealing away people caught outside. State troops suppressed riots and cult uprisings, and, all told, more than two hundred citizens lost their lives in the first night.

The Auric Bastion was manned, Nordland mobilized its coastal defenses, state levies were called out, and years of building industrial might was awoken. With the new rail systems connecting the provinces, reinforcements could be sent anywhere they were needed. The Empire was ready for anything.

The Emperor’s court was always filled with nobility from across the Empire, and was a hotbed of political intrigue, social manoeuvring, and hedonistic frivolity. Foremost on the political side was the Council of State, a group formed from the noble families of the most ancient lineage. It wasn’t too uncommon for those looking for favors to claim lineage to someone close to the Heldenhammer himself. Though the Council had no constitutional authority, it advised the Emperor on all matters of state. Today, however, the gates were closed to all but those directly called on by the Triumvirate themselves.

The Grand Theogonist and his Arch-Lectors had come first. Volkmar the Grim, the Empire’s spiritual heart, had never been a man of political intrigue, but a man of faith, of action. Even as his hair grew white with age, he took to fields of battle across the Empire, calling down Sigmar’s blessings and wrath on friend and foe. He only stayed briefly in Altdorf, offering Sigmar’s protection and strength for the coming crisis, and set off to deal with the internal threats himself.

The Electors then trickled in over the next few days. Boris Todbringer, Emmanuelle von Liebwitz, Valmir von Raukov, and more.

Chrysalis, again wearing the form of an Inquisitorial agent, led the debrief on the captured plans. Afterwards, she watched the Imperial state bicker and debate how to deal with it. She didn’t understand the continued politicking and trying to get things from one another.

Still, a cohesive plan was forming. The Auric Bastion would be the bulwark against the invasion, apparently leaving Kislev to its fate. Steam tank production had entered full swing, and Nuln was able to get an engine out the door every day. The expense of such machines, and the limited expertise of the city’s engineers would have demanded monopolistic prices, but Emmanuelle offered to enact severe price controls, but still turn a profit.

“If Westerland wants our protection, they must return to compliance,” said Todbringer, his fiery-colored beard lending a feral look to his already present anger. “Look where their foolishness has gotten them. If they think just strapping cannons to their merchant-marine is enough to throw back the largest Norscan armada in the world, then their leaders are clearly unfit. The directorate should lose such autonomy, and the Republic of Westerland rightfully be ceded to Middenland. Their people are of Teutogen blood, after all.”

Theodoric Gausser tsk’ed. “Only after the Teutons butchered the Jutones. The land historically goes to Nordland.”

“Bah!” barked Aldebrad Ludenhof, holding up his necklace at Gausser, shaking Hochland’s white cross. “Some other territory to sate your ambition? Looking to invade Hochland was too obvious, eh? You don’t want Balthasar turning your treasury to lead again, so you look for prey elsewhere?”

Balthasar Gelt stood at Karl Franz’s right hand, resting on the Staff of Volans. Many of the electors’ eyes were on him, and his demeanor was unreadable behind his stoic golden mask. “I simply did my duty to ensure the stability of the Empire. Civil war is undesirable.”

Gausser simmered, drumming his fingers on the table. “And the province’s economy has not since recovered, even with the rock farming incentives. Taxing Marienburg’s trade routes would more than make up for it.”

Dressed in her most expensive white Nuln dress, Emmanuelle von Liebwitz leaned to Luna, who was nursing a headache from the presence of the chaos moon.

“Men,” Emmanuelle whispered condescendingly.

“Two-thousand years of this,” Luna replied, pointing to herself.

“I’m so sorry.”

Chrysalis dragged a hand down the side of her face, trying to hide her involuntarily grinding teeth. This disunity, so many conflicting interests. Right on the cusp of the largest Chaos invasion the Empire had seen in over a decade, no less. Well, at least they could get it over with now, rather than get bogged down in debate when push came to shove. She hoped, anyway.

Why a confederation? Chrysalis thought. What was the point of an Emperor if he could be ignored in this free-for-all? At least all the changelings could be pointed in one direction.

Franz, why aren’t you doing anything? Get them to focus. Say something!

Karl Franz was in conversation with Celestia. Chrysalis couldn’t hear them, but finally, Franz smartly rapped his fist on the oaken table. The few bickering Electors quickly silenced themselves, glancing over as Franz spoke.

“Westerland’s secession reveals that the Directorate cares only about lining their pockets. They betrayed Sigmar’s trust, and his vision of a united Empire. For this, the Directorate must be removed from power. Gorssel and the east bank will go to Nordland, and Marienburg will go to Middenheim. Let this settle it.”

Gausser and Todbringer stared each other down a moment, a silent passing of will between them before nodding.

Wolfram Hertwig of Ostermark demanded Stirland’s armies to help defend the southern section of the Bastion, to which Alberich Haupt-Anderssen refused, emphasizing the need to keep tabs on the vampires in Sylvania. Helmut Feuerbach offered two of Talabecland’s steam tanks to Stirland as a supplement to the Sylvanian border garrisons, provided they send some reinforcement to Ostermark. Matthias Grundwald took up Hertwig’s request.

No one liked Grundwald, a competitor to the late count Marius Leitdorf, who left Averland without an heir to the throne. He spoke in the dead count's stead, clearly looking to prove himself on the national stage, but the regent lacked the Mad Count’s vision and insight. Even if it was derived from talking to his horse much of the time.

Through it all, Shining Armor and Kurt Helborg provided the bigger picture, nationwide instead of the local and province-to-province issues. Where the Electors were concerned with battles, the Reikmarshals were concerned with fronts, supply and evacuation routes, centers of industry and bastions of defense.

Valmir von Raukov leaned forward, looking across the table to Chrysalis. “How, dare I ask, did you come across these plans? You would have to have infiltrators in the highest levels of Norscan leadership.”

Chrysalis tipped her tricorne hat to him, doing the very best to hide her smirk. “My deepest respect, lord Raukov, but you are not sanctioned.”

Valmir removed his fur-lined hat and tensely ran a hand through his cropped black hair. “No, of course I’m not. Why would the Elector Count of Ostland ever need to know anything about how the nation’s intelligence is being gathered?”

The changeling queen pursed her lips. “I believe that what matters is that the information is reliable, that Marienburg, Altdorf, and Middenheim were their prime targets, and we know what many of their leaders look like. I’d draw up a map of their attack vectors, but since they know they’ve been compromised, they might change their plans.”

“Still, we should send out messages to Marienburg,” said Gausser. “If the enemy want to land a massive army, they’ll need a large port. Where better for the largest plague fleet in the world than one of the largest port cities in the world?”

“I’ll draw it up and present it as soon as possible, lords,” Chrysalis said.

“Did the Elves not say they brought a substantial force last year?” spoke Helmut Feuerbach. "It’s a stretch, but they know how dire the situation will be. It would be wise that they come to our aid.”

“Cadence, maybe,” said Shining Armor. A wan smile flickered on his face, but quickly faded. “But she’s long since gone back to Ulthuan by now. The Elven leadership themselves might leave us on our own.”

"In a situation like this, Ulthuan might be more likely to look to their own defence. Most of them view us in… a dim light," Franz conceded.

“If they accepted Cadence and the crystal ponies, something must have changed their minds,” Celestia said.

“Still, we must prepare for the worst,” said Luna dourly. “Assume the Asur aren’t coming for us. Their enemy has always been Chaos, but the Empire stands as more of an ally of convenience. A means to an end."

A round of uneasy grumbles arose from the assembled leaders.

"I'll bet you anything they already know about this, and just haven't told us yet."

"Teclis might know. But his first loyalty is to Ulthuan, and they traditionally keep to themselves."

"We're getting afield here, lords, ladies," Franz remarked. "I will arrange messengers as soon as possible, to King Finubar, and to Thorgrim Grudgebearer of the Dwarfs as well. We will not be alone." He said the last slowly and pointedly, looking over the faces of each Elector in attendance.

"Each of you stands as a recognized representative of your respective provinces, and their peoples. Approach them with these revelations as you will, but remember, panic serves only the enemy."

The scarab in Chrysalis' pocket began to thrum, rattling its wings. “Speak of the devil. The princess Cadenza calls,” she said smoothly.

Celestia smiled beatifically. “Good. Let us hear her.”

Chrysalis withdrew the onyx scarab, set it on the table and, with a firm press on a tiny green jewel in its wing hinges, snapped its flaps open. Luminescent magic seeped up and coalesced into the watery image of Cadence on her throne. Less focused figures of the crystalline guards framed the picture.

Immediately, Chrysalis knew something was off. Cadence didn’t try to hide that she was anxious, and her tone spoke of impatience, with a tinge of anger.

“Greetings, all,” she said. “I apologize for my silence these past weeks, but some unexpected events beyond my control stole my time, attention, and delayed my departure.”

Shining Armor sighed in relief. A more compassionate voice was still in the Old World.

Franz waved a hand dismissively. “You can be brought up to speed in due time. I wonder, though, what did keep you?”

Cadence glanced between Celestia and Luna, and swallowed. “The king Sombra lives, and leads a breakaway kingdom of the Druchii around the Norscan colonies. He persuasively offered a non-aggression pact between his faction and the Asur.”

Franz leaned back in his chair, steepling his fingers on the table before him. He released his breath in a long, measured sigh, but said nothing. Celestia and Luna stared dumbly, unblinking. Shining Armor mimicked a fish in a search for words.

"He…" Celestia paused to pick up her jaw. "I… see. So…"

"He survived," Luna muttered. She glanced down, pressing a hoof to her head. "It seems we are to be hounded by ghosts even to this day."

Todbringer, frowning in distaste, clicked his tongue. “So they have a new leader, this side of the pond. Who is this 'Sombra'?”

Chrysalis exploded in sudden laughter that made several at the table jump.

“You blew him up!” she cackled. “Shattered, scattered in the wind! Can nothing kill him?!”

Chrysalis quickly lost her breath, wheezing, then choking on a wave of panic.

A familiar darkness creeped across her vision, suffocating, and bottomless in hunger to devour the light. Memories came crashing back to the surface, memories of a hive under siege, and legions of slaves under his command. Cold, green eyes glowed from every soulless mask, staring emptily, every mind belonging to one heart that bore no love, only hatred and a desire to be master over the will of all others.

She didn’t remember how exactly she managed to defeat him, but her final moments of consciousness in that fight were clear. Sombra's eyes were like frozen orbs of blood, fiery in intensity, yet piercing cold, without fear or mercy. His head was crowned by smoke and fire, and he casually cut down her drones.

She’d charged him as he reached her very throne room, and he burst into a smoky dark as she tackled him. She drowned in that darkness, blasting with magic, tearing at anything that felt solid. She did this until she couldn’t feel anything but fury and terror. The world turned red with her wrath, full of the screaming of slaves and tearing of meat, fueled by perfect fear of her imminent annihilation.

That was the first time she’d died.

Chapter 36: The Kindling

''Soldiers, at first sight of them, the enemy is to be crushed by your fierce charge, destroyed by your grenades and axes. The honor of Praag, embattled bastion of the north, must not be stained. Soldiers! Heroes! Her Icy Majesty has erased our names from record. Our souls have been sacrificed for the honor of Praag and the Motherland. Therefore, you no longer need to worry about your lives: they no longer exist. So, forward to glory! For the Tzarina and the Motherland! Long live the Queen, Long live Praag!''﻿
~Alexandre Rokossovsky, Kislevite General

-----------------------------------------------

They were reaching the edge of Baersonling territory on the way to Kislev. The air was much too cold for a Sommerzeit day. Breath puffed out in vapor clouds.

Yetchitch was the first Kislevite village encountered. Bereft of life and livestock, it was assumed to have been evacuated ahead of the oncoming hordes. Still, it was razed, as no structure was to remain as representative of the old order. This went on for Sepukzy, Ramaejk, and Kacirk, empty. Many warriors itched for something to kill.

And at Volksgrad, they found it. A large, fortified town and commerce hub of the High Pass road to the far east. It stood defiant in the face of the approaching hordes, but between the wrath of Kholek Suneater, Sigvald, and the Everchosen, the town did not last a day.

Pinkie Pie plopped a ball of snow atop the neck of a snow-pony in progress. She sculpted it quickly, giving it a broad smile and looking down from a hill at the burning town of Volksgrad. Even from half a mile away, she could hear the town’s dying screams, civilians being butchered, buildings collapsing.

Once her sculpture was done, to mark her passing, she’d join in and save as many of the people as she could. Their meat would be hers, their souls kept safe with her.

8 days earlier

The throne yurt of prince Sigvald was a monument to his vanity, with no expense, nor worthy victim spared for its makeup. Leather from the skin of Cathayan nobles made up its outside, furred with the hair of elves. The inside was choked with sweet smoke from hookahs and incense, visitors and favored individuals enjoying the goods the Chosen of Slaanesh had to play with.

Pinkie Pie herself was by Sigvald’s side, with him on an elevated, bejeweled golden throne. She intently watching the next visitors to see the prince a musician pair, with a lute and flute. They introduced themselves as Vittorio and Lucia Ercole, converts from Tilea, and hangers-on to the Decadent Host for over twenty years.

Resting on her belly like a waterbed, the liquefied remains of nearly a dozen rejected supplicants sloshed in her stomach. Even with such a feast packed away, her gut ached for more. Pinkie almost hoped these two would please Sigvald. They were good, very good.

At the end of their piece, they bowed to the applause of the patrons. Pinkie snapped her claws as her own way. They bowed low for Sigvlad, and the elderly Lucia needed Vittorio’s help to get up.

Sigvald leaned forward, hands clasped. “You, young man, may stay, but the hag, bah.” Sigvald dismissively waved a hand at her. “Pinkie Pie, remove her.”

“Your highness,” Vittorio stammered, wrapping an arm around Lucia in fear. “She’s my mother. I-”

“And?” Sigvald snapped. “You came here to impress me, and you did, not her. It hurts mine eyes just to look upon the one that birthed you, but at least she can die knowing her life led to something that serves me.” Sigvald snapped his fingers. “Pinkie.”

“You heard him, Vitty-bitty.” Pinkie Pie sang, and let her tongues whip at Lucia, who showed no fear as she was wrenched from her son’s hands.

“Remember what your father said,” Lucia spoke calmly, as the striped tentacles took her like an octopus with its prey. “Remember the rituals.”

Vittorio nodded with tears welling in his eyes, fighting every instinct to hurl wrath at the candy-creature. “Consume the flesh, and spice it well, and let the bones be burned.” They said in unison. “The flesh returns to the tribe. Becomes one with the tribe. Eternal rapture awaits.”
Dry and salty flavors filled Pinkie’s palette as she consumed the wrinkly woman whole. Vittorio stayed put, not wanting to offend Sigvald. When only Lucia’s face was visible at the back of Pinkie’s throat, she smiled she smiled to Vittorio.

“We see one another again, in time-”

Pinkie snapped her jaws shut and swallowed, the distenting bulge of Lucia lurching down her neck, and disappearing with an ominous gurgle into her stomach. She let out a satisfied sigh.

Vittorio took up his flute and bowed once more to Sigvald, stifling his grief. “I am honored to be in your service, lord.”

“Of course you are,” Sigvald cooed, twirling his golden locks. “Now off with you. I shall call for you on my time. Next!”

Pinkie’s nerves were tingling in pleasure as Lucia was already being broke down in a pool of acid and chyme. Her flavors mixed into the sludge her gut readily absorbed.

"Creature," came Lucia's muffled voice. "May I ask something of you?"

"Maaaybe."

"Please. Vittorio will die, tomorrow or in sixty years. When the time comes, could you be there and ask if he will join me? With you, with Sigvald."

Pinkie felt her inner tentacles awake to their new morsel, wrapping around Lucia and pulling her under the caustic mire.

"I'll definitely ask him if that's what he wants," she assured.

"Thank you."

Return to the tribe… become one with the tribe. The phrase repeated itself in her head. See you again in time. Pinkie felt the old woman land on the bottom of her gurgling gut, bubbles of her last breath breaking at the surface.

"Bye bye, Lucia."

__________________________________________________

Sigvald drove her through the snow alone with gilded reins, bouncing in the saddle with her trot. “Would you look at that pile of hovels,” he sneered.

Pinkie Pie didn’t respond since she knew he wasn’t expecting her to. Praag looked like a wonder to her. Rock cliffs, at least two hundred feet high, were the foundation the monolithic walls were built on. Even sky-bridges straddled the river Lysk that split it in twain. Onion-domed bastion towers were spread at regular intervals, and the great Mountain Gate was flanked by two of them.

Kislev’s banners flew defiant in the icy mountain air. Pennants of bears, tridents, and the ice queen adorned every section.

A puff of smoke blew from one section of wall, followed seconds later by the boom of the cannon’s shot, and Pinkie Pie watched a cannonball fly as if in slow motion. Smoke hissed from its iron skin, and it was even written on in white paint, “Определенно для вас!” It landed short by several meters, and Pinkie Pie flinched as clods of dirt smacked her, a minor annoyance.

“Those urchins!” Sigvald hissed and dug his sharp heels into Pinkie’s sides.

Pinkie Pie immediately recognized the anger in that. He probably got a speck of dirt on his boot. She glanced at his golden boots, and sure enough, a dark brown stain marred their perfection.

She made great speed back to the chaos lines, which were already setting up siege works. Slaves were digging trenches, hellcannons with their malevolent spirits were herded into firing pits, and premade parts for siege towers were already being assembled, from sidings to meters-wide wheels taller than a man.

Sigvald guided Pinkie Pie to the Varanspire, jumped off, and ran inside, shouting at the top of his lungs, “Archaon!”

Pinkie giggled and sat herself next to the tower. The ground around it was very warm since it landed. She pulled a notepad and pencil from her mane, and got to work scribbling down what might be needed for the post-battle party.

Skirmishes were on and off as the days went on. The city was completely surrounded, save for the river itself. Armored steamboats sailed in from the south, weathering most attempts to capture or sink them. Completely sealed, the ethereal ammunition of hellcannons simply dribbled off the sides with minimal damage. Extremely few were captured by cultist pegasi.

Praag’s lifeline to Kislev proper was thin, but functional.

_______________________________________________

It was said that the pact Kholek Suneater made with the Dark Gods was so blasphemous in the eyes of nature, that the sun itself refused to shine on him ever again. This promise, made beside the father of all dragon ogres, Krakanrok the Black, sealed the fate of a huge swathe of the ogre race to immortality, stripped of freedom.

Lightning was the light now, each flash was a like a photo of the world, a moment in time.

Kholek Suneater had been here before, nearly two hundred and thirty years ago. The whole scene was a familiar sight, the hordes of Chaos amassed, the supposed ‘end of the world’ underway. The Suneater determined towers would be useless here, just as they’d been centuries ago. Best to just force their way in.

Asavar Kul had been here too. Under his leadership, the city burned and was corrupted for all time, no matter how hard the Kislevites tried to scour Chaos’ taint.

Asavar Kul, Fourth Everchosen. Asavar Kul… Failure.

Fluttershy laid prone as a procession of warriors climbed up into the howdah-bunker mounted on her back. She glanced up and across the Lysk at Kholek once in awhile. The Shaggoth paced, turning Starcrusher over in his claws, and chaffing to bring the city destruction once more.

Spike held Rarity’s hand as they ascended the steps. He looked back at her, a worried face, lit up by a flash of lightning.

“Hey, don’t worry. I’ll be with you every step. I won’t let anything happen to you.“

“Thank you,” Rarity stammered. “It’s just, everypony going in at once. It’s going to be a madhouse.”

“And they’re on the other side of the city. I don’t want to sound nihilistic, but if there’s nothing we can do for them, we shouldn’t worry about it. They’ll find a way, or make one.”

Rarity nodded, and hugged his arm as they entered the howdah.

Sigvald guided Pinkie Pie at a canter along the battle line of his warriors. A fantastic body to behold, the Decadent host sought to emulate him in beauty and skill. Only the best, personally chosen by the prince himself. They cheered his name as their master passed, many in their native tongues.

“Sig! Sig! Sig! Sig!”

Sigvald held up a hand, and gestured to the city. “Sickly, sinful, spectacles stand, shuffle and saunter shamelessly in mine scandalized sight! I suggest a solution. Surely such sedition should sour and succumb to Sigvald - the salacious, scandalous, and sensational servant of Slaanesh!”

“Slaanesh! Slaanesh! Slaanesh!” the host cried back from thousands of throats.

“Son of Succubi, scion of sordid acts and slayer of squalid serfs!” Sigvald kicked Pinkie into a canter. “See how I stroll, stride, swagger and swirl, spin, slash and stab at stupid, senseless scum! Soon they shall swoon, shall seek solace and death from sundry torments wrought upon them by by strategic, severing, scintillating shower of shimmering strikes!”

Thousands of blades rattled against shields and armor, and praise shrieked in response. He drew Sliverslash, a gleaming silver sword wrought from shards of the personal weapon of She who Thirsts.

“They think their walls shall see them sheltered? Ha! Send for the sunderer! To slaughter!”

The ground began to rumble then. Thundering, pounding footsteps that cued the warriors to part ahead of the canter of an iron mare, the size of a Shaggoth. Pinkie Pie whistled as Fluttershy thundered by, and took off after her at Sigvald’s kick.

Fluttershy’s tread tore the soil. An army charged behind her, relying on her. She weathered the storm of detonations from explosive shot that ripped the earth round her. Scores of cultists were eviscerated by shrapnel in the ranks of the Decadent Host.

Rope and chain ladders were rolled up at the back of her howdah, emaciated flayerkin latched on and waiting for the time to unfurl them.

The first true destruction of a city of men, Fluttershy’s magma rock of a heart pounded in anticipation. The rotten world men had forged, would come to an end, starting here.

At the cliff, her claws sank into the rock as she climbed. She felt the poke of bullets smacking her ironform as the defenders poured rifle rounds onto her. Boiling oil splashed over her head, feeling little more than warm.

She reached up for the lip of the battlements, and a lance of pain shot through her claw as a cannon fired into it point blank. She roared in indignant anger, brought her claw back up, and tore the weapon out of its station, hurling it and two men screaming to the ground far below.

The slaves released the ladders, and down they spun to the waiting throng of warriors, baying and howling for bloodshed and slaughter. Fluttershy hauled herself atop the wall, balancing delicately, and eyeing the Kislevites in their buttoned-down, gold-trimmed uniforms. Rather than lash out, she dug her grip firmly, and let the howdah’s doors swing open.

Light beamed in through slits and tears in the giant iron box, interrupted by someone or other undoing their harness and hurriedly passing by. Rarity’s breath came in hiking gasps while she fiddled to find the release on her harness.

The main door fell with a screech of hinges and crash that let light flood in. Rarity heard someone shout outside, barely on the edge of her hearing.

The world turned black, and she screwed her eyes shut against a burning pain ripping through her. She saw herself, like an observer outside her own body, struggling with the harness. Spike hurried to her, and with some effort, lifted the bars and set her free. A fraction of a second later, a cannonball burst through the wall behind Rarity, taking off her head and Spike’s shoulder, leaving them with blood-gushing ruins of where their parts had been.

Her vision crashed back to the present, and swimming through repercussive pain, she found Spike cursing and pulling at the bars holding her securely to the wall. With a generous application of a telekinetic push, Rarity tore the entire harness out, shoved Spike with enough force to knock him on his back, and threw herself to the ground, screaming, “Get down!”

The voice came, “Ogon’!”

A great blast thundered outside, signaling a cannonball smashing clean through the wall, scattering what remained of the harness’ trappings and sending shrapnel whizzing at lethal speeds. Two warriors didn’t have time to react and dropped screaming with shredded arms and necks.

Spike helped Rarity to her feet. “Precognition?” he asked, to which Rarity nodded. Spike laughed, and slapped a claw on her shoulder. “Come on, we’ve got to hold the opening. Fluttershy can’t do it on her own.”

A cacophony of shouting and crashing blades and shields made Rarity gulp. Spike moved ahead of her, wings outstretched, sword and shield at the ready. He was her shield, and didn’t trust anyone else with her protection.

Bullets and arrows whizzed from three sides, sparking off heavy armor, or only making warriors shriek in pleasure as they broke flesh. Leather-winged monstrosities and warp-spawned daemons joined in the assault, tackling Kislevites off the walls and letting them drop, only to fly away themselves.

Drawing in the winds of magic, Rarity projected a shimmering barrier along many meters of wall, to guard against ground fire.

Another vision stabbed into Rarity’s retinas. A warrior in gaudy rainbow armor taking an arrow straight to the neck. She quickly spotted him, like he wanted to be seen by all.

“Look upon me and realize the greyness of your lives!” he bellowed, hacking a man’s head from his shoulders.

With a flick of the hand, Rarity magically forced his head to cock to the side, just as the arrow sailed past and grazed his neck. A cut, but hopefully not lethal. He paused only a moment, then laughed uproariously at his foes, as though the Gods had seen fit to shield him from the unenlightened fools.

The fresh warriors reached the ladder-tops, and Fluttershy began hooking them onto the wall itself, freeing her to wreak havoc elsewhere. Cultist pegasi brought up their own ladders, and soon the trickle of reinforcement would be a flood.

The sorrowful sigh of a string brought Rarity’s attention to a grey earth mare playing a cello under the shield cover. Octavia Melody played with eyes shut, calm, and seemingly oblivious to the world around her. The instrument glowed dimly with magical energy, which Rarity assumed was an enchantment put on it to sound clearly over the gunfire and clamour. Rarity listened, and the tune sang of terrible things to come, the first kindling embers that would soon engulf the world in flame.

Octavia forced the cello to squeal in unison with a scream from Fluttershy. The giant clutched the wall like a lifeline with a chunk of armor-hide blasted out of her shoulder. The nearest tower had its guns trained on her.

Fluttershy lunged at the tower, as it made one more shot, shearing ironflesh off her barrel and exposing bundles of muscle-cabling. She attacked with feral savagery, tearing layers of metal off its top until she punched through the roof. Unable to see inside, she simply smashed her fist around the interior, listening to the sounds of dying men, and crushing metal.

“Push out!” Spike bellowed, pulling a bloodstained sword from a Kislevite’s chest. He sucked in a breath, chest swelling, and roared emerald flame that scoured all before him of their flesh, sloughing off like molten wax.

Rarity kept close behind him, telekinetically knocking aside enemy thrusts, and yanking the weapons from their hands. Spike grunted as a bullet punched a neat hole through a wing he used to bat a warrior over the wall. Rarity spotted the rifleman, and reaching out with her mind, crushed his throat with a clench of her fist.

She stopped cold, running into Spike’s back. Taking a moment to orient herself, all had gone quiet and still. Bullets, arrows, ash, and blood droplets drifted at a crawl in flight, and every warrior was rendered still as a statue.

“Whew!” Pinkie Pie gasped, hauling herself over the embrasure.Sigvald held her reins securely, in mid-shout with spittle flicking from his lip, and sword raised. The Mirror guard were just reaching the top alongside, in gleaming armor that reflected the prince’s image from every angle.

“Oh, whoops. Sorry I missed you,” said Pinkie sheepishly.

“Pinkie, what’s happening?” Rarity attempted to touch one of the bullets, and recoiled at its heat on her fingers. “Is this how you move so quickly?”

“Yeperoony! But I just...” Pinkie rapidly circled Rarity, like a predator sizing up its next meal. “I don’t know why you didn’t stop. Maybe you’re just really dense with magic.”

The thought of Pinkie slowing the world to do with as she pleased made Rarity that much more uneasy.

Pinkie wiped sweat from her forehead, and stalked from Rarity. “But I can’t keep this up for too long. I gotta work fast.”

Pinkie picked her way through the carpet of bodies, grinning when she found one wounded but alive, and swiftly crammed him down her throat. Her stomach rumbled like caged thunder, destroying him and soaking up the ruins as quickly as she packed him away.

“And this is how you’re using a power that did this!?” Rarity threw her arms toward the frozen world.

“Pinkie gulped down her second wounded before answering. “It’s totally worth it, though! This guy was part of a cult that had this thing about eating the dead. ‘Return to the tribe. Become one with the tribe’. So I caught him alone and asked him, and they think that by eating the dead, especially the wounded,, they can keep the essence of their soul with the cult. Sooo…”

She took a moment to slurp down a severed head. “What if I’m keeping their souls with me?”

Rarity mulled it over, bending over to study the features of a Kislevite whose face was frozen in a rictus of pain, his belly split and innards exposed. “That sounds like an excuse to justify eating everypony who can’t fight back,”

“But if they’re dead already and there’s a chance to keep them with me…” PInkie Pie hugged the soldier and licked his cheek. “Feeling what I feel, and make them smile, even after they kick the bucket. You spent a lot of nights in my tummy, you know what it’s like.”

Rarity looked away as Pinkie devoured the soldier, not bothering to swallow, but push him down.

“Okay, real-time,” Pinkie sighed, veins bulging at her temples in strain. “Rarity, you might wanna take a step to the left. Arrow coming up from behind.”

Pinkie Pie vanished in a pink blur, cannonballing over the wall to the inner ground, as the world accelerated to real-time. The Decadent Host swarmed over the ladders, and stormed the tower after Fluttershy kicked in the door. Rarity was caught up in the rush of armored bodies the norsemen. Spike forced a way to her, and she took his claw, an anchor in the tide.

“PInkie’s damn fast,” he said, glancing over at the man-pony combo butchering an artillery battery below. “They’re not going to last long alone down there. With me?”

Rarity smiled and nodded, and they both took a step over the edge.

_____________________________________________________

How times had been changing.

The founding of the Karaz-A-Warhawks was ignoble at best, tracing its beginnings to the perpetual siege of Karak-Eight-Peaks.

Griffons flocked to the service of the Dwarfs since the Fall, initially something to do for cash and an excuse to get out of New Griffonstone, which was somehow worse than the old. Griffons worked as couriers where gyrocopters were in short supply, and air-mobile troops, where their literal eagle-eyes were invaluable for reconnaissance and marksmanship.

Gilda Bronzebeak had joined up with the 2nd Griffonstone Light Cavalry regiment, and their first mission was the Eight Peaks. The king, Belegar Ironhammer was hell-bent on reclaiming the ancestral home of his people, thrown out by the goblin warlord Skarsnik, and Skaven under Queek Headtaker. Daily, the grind went in a predictable pattern. Advance mere inches, and there would be a massive counterattack. Hordes of ratmen and goblins like a tide of blades and teeth in a hellish three-way battle.

It took less than a month for her to desert. So much blood and treasure was being thrown into the place, and she felt like she’d be just another body in the count. Over time, she ran into other deserters in the mountains around the area, deciding it was probably best to watch each other’s backs should they be caught for going AWOL.

First had been Gunter, a giant of a griffon, with the might to break her in half if their cooperation went south. Over time, their alliances of convenience became that of comradery. As more disaffected troopers joined them, Gilda came to a position of natural leadership. Whether it was due to charisma, or having Gunter to enforce group rules, she didn’t care.

They found their way to the Empire, and put their training to use on lesser operations, dealing with orc raiders or the occasional peasant uprising for burgomeisters or local lords. Gunter had come up with their name in a drunken rant. Karaz, or ‘Everlasting’, A-Warhawks, an ironic label for their lack of loyalty. News of them spread, and their numbers had grown into the hundreds with griffons from across the Old World, as far as fair Bretonnia and the Grey Mountains. Pay was good, and the fighting was relatively easy, especially when you got to pick your own battles and fly circles around grounded foes.

Now that she had met meet with the head of the Empire himself, and was serving as a medium of translation between Deathclaw and Karl Franz, their reputation was secured. Within months, their numbers swelled to well over a thousand, and it hit Gilda just how much of a legend Deathclaw was elsewhere in the world by their folklore.

The paddle boats were unbearably hot, cramped with supplies and bodies, and induced terrible sea sickness in their armored interiors. The smell of smoke and spilled breakfast was inescapable.

Something crashed against the side of the boat, making an inward bulge in the wall. Gilda stepped over Gaston, who was shocked awake by the noise.

“Colonel? Sacred Boreas, what did that?”

“Dunno, but I think we’ve arrived. Sit tight.”

The rest of the troops were stirring. Two hundred of them were on this ship, the Lagoda, and the rest trailing behind in the Valgo, Andrej, and Kalinka. Another two crashes struck the ship before the captain’s voice echoed through a pipe-horn.

“Approaching the Water Gate. Prepare to disembark. Repeat, prepare to disembark.”

“Fina-feathing-lly,” Gilda sighed.

The ships were stopped astern before Karlsbridge, and the outside air was no better.

Ash fell like rain, immediately staining Gilda’s face and field jacket. The Grand Parade was a mess of infantry traffic, ammunition handouts, and boyars shouting words of encouragement through metal cones. A ring of copper statues, children spinning in a ring and arm in arm centered the end of the Grand Parade boulevard. Cannon Fire echoed from the front, not too far away, accompanied by the baying howls of flange-throated monsters.

“Colonel Bronzebeak!”

A young trooper ran up and shook her claw.

“Ravem Chuikev, adjutant to General Rokossovsky. Sorry he couldn’t receive you in person, but he has his hands full at the moment.”

“I get it,” Gilda nodded. “They’re attacking early. Real early. How soon does he need us to be out and about?”

“As soon as possible, in particular at the Ogre Ghetto. We’ve set aside a wing of the art academy for your boarding.”

The Magnus gardens was home to the arts college, and like nearly every large building in the city, it was given over to fortification and supply storage. Boarded-up windows only let slivers of light in, and with the storms raging outside, all were limited to firelight. The place was still permeated with the chemical smell of paints and cleaners, long since disposed of.

Once established, the tasks were assigned. 1,749 griffons in five companies, each assigned to a sector. A-Company took to the Square of Kisses, in the shadow of the Citadel.

A breach had been made at the Mountain Gate on the north end, and the bulk of the invader would be coming straight down the center to get at the city’s heart. The New Town burned further down the hill, a lake of fire whose splashing waves sounded of screaming and wicked laughter.

The Square was an excellent killzone, with only one uphill entrance that spilled out into a coverless open. Even then there was news of superb climbers, including a massive metal quadruped that scaled the outer walls.

One hundred Warhawks made firing positions on the inward-sloping side of the roofs on two sides of the square. The last hundred and fifty of A-Company took up cover behind berms and on the Citadel’s inner walls.

Gunter was set up beside her, tinkering with the sight on his Albus Gun. The weapon itself was a modified barrel from a dwarf organ gun that fired projectiles the size of a fist, and only he was strong enough to carry it unassisted.

A thunderous crunch of static echoed from the bottom of the hill.

“Is… is this thing on-ah fuck!?”

A piercing feedback rang out. Many winced in pain at the volume. Whoever it was talking, their voice was scrambled as if put through a dozen filters.

“Good afternoon, Praag! What a lovely city. Before the band and I get started, I just wanted to break the ice ‘tween you and I.”

“You have got to be kidding me,” Gilda whispered.

“Hopefully some survivors from the walls made it back to tell you about the intro works done by my great friend, Octavia Melody! Let’s hear it for that one, The Kindling!”

No one in the square made a noise, but the enemy warhost erupted in cheering, weapon rattling, and stomping of boots and hooves.

“Boss,” Gunter said, glancing at Gilda.

“Yeah?”

“We have a bug-out plan, yes?”

“If it gets to that point, yeah. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.”

“The music we play today was inspired by Slaanesh herself, and we’re not completely one sided. This one goes out to the Karaz-A-Warhawks. For a bunch of deserting AWOLs, I gotta give you props for coming here of all times and places. So, without further ado…”

A hundred rifles cocked. Gilda licked her beak, awaiting the first head to poke over the ridge.

“The Square of Kisses!”

The music opened with a guitar, a bouncing introduction with a steady beating drum. Gilda ignored it.

A glint of silver caught Gilda’s eye. With reflexes and precision only a bird of prey could have, she fired. At least a dozen others also took the shot, and the everything above the man’s eyebrows was vaporized by the impacts.

The foe stormed the ridge in force, buying an inch more into the square with each death. They came poorly armed and armored, with hunks of twisted metal for swords, and wood boards for shields.

Meatshields,slaves, and madmen, Gilda thought, and sighted her next target.

Two. Three. Four. Brain. Neck. Eye.

“Ease!” Gunter shouted.

Dust jumped up with the Albus' report, and seven cultists had their chests blown open, or limbs clipped. Gunter’s true target, a beetle-backed warbeast, had its head crushed into its thorax. Snapping the breech open, a smoking brass case spun off into the air. Slamming another round home, his next shot took an arm off of a lurching, grafted flesh and bone monstrosity.

The speed and ferocity of the cultist assault carried them unto the berm, and a wall of Kislevite steel and and griffon talons met them. Gunfire continued to chatter from three sides as the cultists climbed the berm, sending them rolling back down, but still they came. Gilda slung her rifle and drew the six-shooter, discharging all its rounds in half as many seconds at point blank.

The trooper beside her screamed with a sword buried deep in his shoulder. A giant of a man in gleaming silver armor tore it out and split his skull in two with the next strike. Bullets smacked him but failed to penetrate, and with another blurring swipe, decapitated another Warhawk.

Gilda screeched, high and piercing, and the Warhawks took to the air. Kislevite reserves rushed forward to fill the gap as planned.

On the ground, it was man’s fight now.

__________________________________________________________

Spike felt anger now, hot and heavy, filtering into his body like boiling poison, clinging to the back of his throat and tasting of blood and bile. The Everchosen’s words burned in his mind, belittling him, thinking him simple. A walking, talking dragon apparently wasn’t enough for Archaon, and Spike’s ‘instincts’ were called into question. Archaon rebuked him as only coveting Rarity for the crystals clutched to her body like tumors, and that lit his blood on fire.

Spike killed his second Griffon, hacking her black-feathered head from her neck in a single blow. One of them, at a passing glance looked familiar, screeched, and the rest shot skyward like a flock spooked from the trees.

For a moment, Spike thought them on the run, until the Kislevites rushed to take their place.

Rarity was close by him, unleashing immaterial magic on the defenders. Though most blows between them were directed at Spike, he protected her when a blade or arrow looked to be aimed true. Blood ran down his wings as the ribbed edges had deflected more than a dozen blows aimed for the sorceress.

On climbing the berm, Spike breathed a gout of flame to flush out the enemy warriors. Rocks baked, and flesh disintegrated. The cultists had done their work in carrying the fight to them, and now the Decadent Host stormed over their dead. The twin towers guarding the gate to the Citadel boomed over the mutual butchery, blowing gouges through the oncoming horde.

Spike and Rarity slammed their backs against the wall, under the guns.

“Is Fluttershy coming for the gates?” asked Spike.

Rarity touched a hand to her forehead, and it came away bloody. She didn’t seem overly bothered by this, to Spike’s surprise. “She looked quite banged up from the first attack. She might still be getting repaired-”

A whistling shriek drowned her out. Heaving its weight to crest the hill, an iron platform hissed of steam, and shone dazzlingly with a thousand lights. Wide, spiked wheels carried it along, powered by a roaring engine, spewing jets of flame skyward. A team of dwarfs tended to the beast’s iron heart, and under an armor-glass bubble, a band performed, oblivious to the battle.

At the microphone, Vinyl Scratch danced and would sing herself hoarse by the time the day was done. Like her bandmates, her body was slick with sweat, but she was in bliss to the music, blaring from the mounted loudspeakers.

“Bringers of destruction are ravaging the land. Fury of the Northmen, a force to reckon with. Sets the world on fire, then turns to strike again. Flames are burning higher, the heads keep rolling!”

The cultists parted before the iron daemon as its piston-driven scythes and drills ground to animation, whipping at the air and ground with near-living hunger for something to eviscerate.

Bullets continued to rain onto the chaos horde, but for every one that fell, his place was filled up. Nothing appeared to make any difference in the sea of fanatics.

The Iron Daemon’s appendages tore at the Citadel gate, splinters and shards of iron flying with each hammer blow, and chewing of the drill.

Too quickly. They broke though far too quickly. Shaggoths, giants, and such terrible abundance of magic. The Citadel would fall. They were already in. Praag would burn.

Alexandre Rokossovsky looked up as the room shook with the sound of a distant explosion. Dust and pebbles shook loose from the ceiling. Sergai was dead, and Alexandre hoped he made good use of his grenade belt.

Wounded men surrounded him, barely able to stand, but still holding a rifle or blade, the last of the CItadel holed up in the top of the central spire.

“Someone's coming,” Valentin said, taking his ear from the door.

The walking wounded took up positions, some whispering last wishes of strength from Tor and Ursun.

Alexandre tossed Valentin a charge. “Give them a grenade.”

Valentin yanked the strip, and the explosive sparked to life. Cracking the door open, he tossed it out and slammed it shut. There was a brief panic outside, and a crump of detonation. Some of the soldiers smiled or chuckled at making the enemy suffer, even in their last moments.

The doorknob glowed orange suddenly, wisps of green flame coming through the keyhole. The brass melted away in seconds. Knuckles whitened around handles. Fingers twitched on triggers.

Slowly, the door creaked open, and none fired on the figure, guarded by a great silver shield. They backed up as he took a step inside. Nothing to shoot at, he was guarded head to toe. A pair of slitted green eyes fell on Alexandre, and the figure leveled a massive sword at him.

“The battle is over,” it growled.

Alexandre Rokossovsky plucked the last grenade in the Citadel from his waistcoat.

“Then I accept your surrender.”

Chapter 37: The Auric Bastion

”We seek the monsters that you fear the most. We chase the nightmares that haunt your cowardly dreams. The deadlier the prey, the more we exalt in the hunt, the more we honor our gods. Norsca breeds the savage, and we revel in it. The old world calls, ripe for our taking. We fought monsters, and we became them.”
~Wulfrik the Wanderer

At first, Rainbow Dash thought it was a mountain range that reared up suddenly into the sky. Getting closer, however, she made out monolithic towers, gatehouses, and banners. It was too big to be real.

Lightning Dust’s pencil flew across her notepad, recording the sight speedily. “At least eight hundred feet tall, ground to walking level… You trying to mimic a fish or something?”

Rainbow Dash finally shut her mouth after some minutes in awe at the titanic wall that filled the horizon. Towers that were castles in and of themselves, decorated with golden griffons and dotted with gunports, offshooting lookout growths and multilayered firesteps. Airships of Equestrian design lazily drifted between towers like fat bumblebees, but whether they were on patrol or ferrying men and material was a mystery.

Lightning Dust replaced the pencil with binoculars from her saddlebags. She was efficiently strapped with equipment. Binoculars, bandolier, snub-nose pistol, lever-action carbine, cracker ration, canteen, and more. Rainbow Dash carried a similar array of gear, save any firearm.

Reconnecting with Lightning Dust had been a little less than cordial. Lightning didn’t like new meat for her team, but a shapeshifter? Even Rainbow couldn’t mess it up that badly, she thought. And being the master to her inexperience, it felt good to show her up in the beginning. Grudges from fillyhood died hard.

“Archaon’s not gonna like this,” Lightning murmured, tapping the pencil to her lips. Glancing at Rainbow Dash, she was fidgeting with the trappings of her own equipment vest.

“They couldn’t load you down with any more?” she snapped. “Maybe lug around a whole campsite.”

“It’s called logistics, Dash. Amateurs who only care about being ‘tacticool’ don’t last long. Trust me, I’ve needed everything on me for one thing or another.”

"Even that rubber chicken I saw you pack in your bags?"

"Used it once to distract a tentacled elderbury bush," she shrugged.

Rainbow blinked. "What?"

"They really don't like you getting close to take their berries, so you need to throw something at them to distract. Lifelike rubber chicken? Perfect." She looked a little annoyed at Rainbow's stare. "What? I ran out of food, it was a long mission."

"Anyway…" Rainbow said at length, "I’ll fly in there and scout it out myself if it means I can get out of this for five minutes.”

Lightning Dust puzzled it over, scanning the highest ramparts through binoculars. They were too far to make out more than specks of people moving atop them. She pulled a pair of marble-sized crystals from a pouch.

“No distractions. Get the layout, potential weak points, and most of all—”

In the time it took Lightning to blink, she was looking at a perfect copy of herself. “Keep your form?” Rainbow said mockingly. “I got it, for the tenth time.” Her forelegs shrank to stubs, and disappeared into her barrel, mane and fur darkening to glossy brown. Now a twitching eagle, she snatched the gem in her talons.

Lightning gathered up the equipment Rainbow had shed. “I’ll hold down the fort, you stay discrete.”

Rainbow saluted with one wing, and took off toward the man-made mountain. She glanced back to where Lightning had hunkered down, and couldn’t spot her, already invisible in the foliage. Climbing, she could feel the altitude, the chilling, thinner air, and hugged close to the sheer sides of the wall.

“I’m losing sight of you now,” the shimmering marble buzzed. “Good luck.”

No luck, all skill. Rainbow thought with a grin.

She perched atop the hammer of one of many golden griffons adorning the tower, beak slack at the infrastructure put in place. Rail lines ran to both ends of the horizon, and on them were two trains in queue at a station, letting troops off by the hundreds. Lifts hoisted men in padded undercoats, materiel, artillery and more to the peaks of the bastion. Extensive barracks, warehouses, medical stations, and…

A buckball field?! Ouch, my fillyhood.

Rainbow sailed lower, eyeing a group of galloping horsemen in gleaming armor heading for a dome structure connected to the wall. The building itself was surrounded by engraved lodestones and etched in row upon row of runes and arcane scripture.

Serfs grounded the horses as the knights dismounted and addressed a tall grey mare and man waiting for them. Rainbow stuck low to the grass, changing form to a squirrel and, scurrying past the handlers, pretended to gnaw on the marble like an acorn.

Hands shook hooves, introductions brief. Inky Rose, an outright depressed-looking mare, her dress webbed in spider silk, buttoned with onyx arachnid-shaped jewels. Ludwig Schwarzhelm, white-bearded and wrinkled. What business did that guy have in such heavy armor? Kurt Helborg; apparently he and Schwarzhelm had a history. They joked, giving each a slap on the shoulder.

“I found a group that looks important,” Rainbow squeaked. “Do Schwarzhelm and Kurt Helborg sound familiar? I’m close to the both of them.”

She could hear faint chewing on the other end. “Yeah. Schwarzhelm’s the Emperor’s bodyguard. Helborg’s the highest general after the big E himself. If they’re in the same place, it’s definitely something important. Keep on them.”

“They’re going in a pretty empty room. I don’t think I can bring this with me.”

“Okay. Communication silence. I’ll be waiting for your contact.”

Rainbow Dash buried the marble in the grass in the crevice between the structure and bastion. She shifted into roach-form, colored as the cobblestone floor.

___________________________________________________

The snow continued to fall in blizzards, unrelenting and growing seemingly stronger as the Norscan army marched further into Kislev. In truth, the Ice Queen of Kislev was not yet done with her deadly command of the elements. Beasts of burden pulled ploughs, and giants dragged their feet to make paths. Yet Norscan resilience kept the army moving even in the harsh conditions. Survival of the fittest was always the rule in northern society; keep up, or you were food for the hounds.

Cheerilee and Twilight Sparkle commandeered the yurt of one of the many chaos cults attached to the horde. That of The Murder was dedicated to the Changer of Ways. The cloak of the grandmaster drifted gracefully in magical suspension in the center.

Cheerilee sipped a steaming cup of tea. The vapors were intoxicating, the sight of a skull throne filling her thoughts. “Tell me, Twilight. You’re standing on the shore of a lake, and you see a filly drowning in the water. what would you do?”

Twilight was almost offended by the question, and that bit of ire crushed the blood fruit she was juicing into her cup into a raisin. “Save them.”

“Even if they were foolish enough to jump in without knowing how to swim?”

“Of course. They need to learn the importance of those skills.”

“And what if they try to fight you off, because they’re afraid of you?”

Twilight folded her webbed wings in tighter, and took a sip. “Save them anyway, kicking and screaming.”

“So you know you’re in the right?”

“They might even be ungrateful, but I think they’d prefer not being dead.”

Cheerilee got up and headed for the grandmaster’s cloak. She passively compared the immaculate white silk and blue feathers to her tattered rags. “You seem quite confident. Let me ask again, why did you want to see me?”

Twilight sipped her tea, pondering for a long moment. “Did you ever ask for what you have now? Do you have any regrets, coming to this point?”

Cheerilee stared. No face could be seen under the blackness of her hood, not even the ambient light could reach in. Twilight had yet to see an inch of Cheerilee not covered in bandages, scripture paper, or cloak.

Cheerilee wrapped the cloak around herself. “Great individuals would seek power, to elevate themselves and their people in the eyes of their gods. But it’s the gods themselves who spin the threads of fate. For those they choose to do their work, great power is thrust upon them. Come.

“When Equestria burned, and ponykind was hurled through the Immaterium, I think I lingered longer than most. Days and years blurred, but what I saw will stay with me forever. In that time, I found that this was the way. All must learn this, whether their eyes are opened and they see the truth, or if we send them to the gods directly.”

Cheerilee chuckled, throwing the cloak around Twilight’s neck and lacing it up. “I love what I do, Twilight. I love the young, the impressionable. That’s always been the case since I started teaching and my cutie mark appeared. I didn’t ask for what I became, but I thank them for it. Countless champions have razed cities, killed millions for what you’ve been given. I feel it.”

Cheerilee placed a hoof on Twilight’s chest. She felt the heartbeat of a storm, swirling immaterial power and… tension, bound up and miserable.

“There it is. You’re fighting it. I could see something was wrong since Archaon’s coronation day. You looked uncomfortable.”

Twilight undid the feathered cloak and threw it back to the suspension field. Her expression turned ill, frustration and fear fighting for supremacy. She levitated the teacup to her lips and downed it in a single swallow.

“So much of the time I feel like I’m going to explode,” she growled, trotting around the perimeter. “It’s happened twice before it just runs roughshod, and I don’t feel like myself. The first time, I caught fire, and the second, I woke up with broken teeth, and claw marks on my neck. I don’t know what’ll happen if I slip up again, but I know if I let it build up too long, then anything could happen.”

Cheerilee cantered alongside her. “Archaon too had a crisis, much like yours. He was once a templar of Sigmar, and read of a prophesy that the one to bring about the reign of Chaos would be him. He went to the Great Cathedral in Altdorf, and prayed before the statue of the Heldenhammer, alone. The one destined to destroy his Empire offered himself up on a silver platter in despair and surrender, and what did Sigmar do?”

Twilight slowed to a halt. “Nothing," she whispered, realisation washing over her.

“Nothing.” Contempt dripped from Cheerilee’s voice like venom. “If you have any doubts that this power is anything but a gift that only needs to be controlled, let them die here. You’ve already shown tremendous willpower holding it in until now, but it's time to let yourself breathe.”

They both went back to the tea set. Cheerilee poured a cup of Dread Bloom tea and offered it to Twilight.

“To a clear head.”

Twilight took the cup, and a deep breath. Cinders left her fanged jaws in a sigh.

_____________________________________________________________

The reports from forward scout teams were spot on. The bastion stretched from the Sea of Claws to the World’s Edge Mountains, and positively radiated magic. With the altitude advantage, imperial guns could reach far. Too high for any siege tower, and the rock itself actually healed itself even as it was bombarded by hellcannons.

Information discovered by scout team Rainbow Dust was most valuable. The Emperor, the princesses, the Supreme Patriarch of the Colleges of Magic in person, generals, and more top staff would gather to install Valmir von Raukov as commander of the Sea of Claws sector. A single blow could be struck to decapitate the Empire from within. Pressure would have to be applied another way to maintain the appearance of the circling predator.

The day the hordes of Chaos came within view of the Auric Bastion, the entire length was alerted. Forty-thousand stood ready, expecting minor skirmishes, and probing attacks with throwaway-hordes of screaming cultists. The bastion was armed and manned. The day passed in quiet and, as night fell, the sky caught fire.

The wind whipped at Volkmar von Hindenstern, hot one moment, biting cold the next. His robes and scripture parchment whipped wildly, several purity seals having already been torn away and cast skyward. Sulfur and the coppery stench of blood was on the wind. What sorcery was the foe attempting?

Countless campfires burned among the horde, twinkling as though the earth and sky had been reversed. The epicenter was a swirling vortex of iridescent flame, impossible colors, and oozing twisted faces of every expression.

“Don’t look at it for too long,” warned Volkmar, hearing someone vomiting on the lower firestep. He marched between two towers, the loud hum of an orbiting airship’s engines mostly drowning out the chanting and laughter far below.

In his years of study and battle he had seen such several such fires before. Meant to breach the walls between realspace and the immaterium, and bring forth the horrors of the void. He wondered how many sacrifices were made to open this rift. How many thousands of men, women, children? He recited the Words of Warding aloud, and several guardsmen joined him, knowing it by heart.

Good men, he thought. Here they were, like Wilhelm III, and the men of the crusade of Magnus the Pious. Here, these men would carve their glory into the flesh and steel of the most hated enemy.

Volkmar felt a speech coming on, but had no time, as the vortex burst, and a flood poured out.

No amount of preparation could truly make someone ready, the first onslaught fell so suddenly. Its herald was a salvo from hellcannons, firing high, their shots arcing like mortars.

Rushing for refuge inside the towers, some were caught outside when the rounds landed. Detonating bolts of soulstuff struck the top of the wall and boiled men to meat-slag within the fireballs, and surrounding survivors screamed, cried, turned weapons on themselves and one another, or hurled themselves from the walls in madness. The fire-flood crashed against the Bastion like great ocean waves against cliffs, boiling and screaming at the touch of the holy magic binding the walls together. Innumerable daemons churned and howled in the miasma, clawing at the too-smooth walls to gain a grip.

The defenders reeled, stunned. Hundreds were already dead or seriously injured as the Bastion was bombarded in dozens of places. Officers rallied the dazed soldiery, and the reply began. With rifles, crossbows, dozens of great cannons and mortars, handheld and artillery-scale hellstorm rockets, the response was monumental. Once they’d begun to fight, a gleeful fury took the Imperials. At last they could address the enemy and fire in anger. It was absolving.

Dozens of cannon batteries opened fire, peppering the ethereal horde with grapeshot and high explosive, vaporizing thousands of daemon-spawn back to the warp. The planned killing fields were more than two-hundred meters deep, and the assault ran three kilometers along the wall.

Volkmar knew this assault could not be stopped by force of arms alone. The tide continued to rise, as if all the world beyond were filling up with evil, but it couldn’t continue indefinitely. Power was needed to maintain this rift, and this would be a battle of attrition. Which would break first, the spirit of the Empire, or the souls of the foe’s sorcerers? Volkmar bellowed his calls to action roaring hateful defiance to the burning sky as the daemons clawed up to the ramparts. He waded in among the troopers, white-knuckling the Staff of Command, and struck the first monstrosity in reach with his golden warhammer.

Despite even the magics enchanting the Bastion, magic was still the stuff of the warp. Trickles of daemons bled through the bastion, reaching the other side in breaches a hundred at a time. Each was contained by warriors on the ground, but still at cost. A food silo was set ablaze, a mortar battery butchered and general confusion in sending up reinforcements.

“So many. So many,” drolled a mind-numb officer, well into the third hour of the attack.

Living towers of daemonflesh arched up, latching onto the ramparts with hundreds of spindly, eight-fingered claws. It vomited nurglings and acidic pus onto the soldiers, clearing the way for what may become the first foothold on the Bastion for the hordes of Chaos.

It would be ended by the Hero of Hell’s Reach, as this particular stretch of wall would be known. A warrior whose name would never be known, but a grenadier by the amount of ordnance he carried. He dove into the monster-tower's gaping maw, swallowed whole in its mindless greed, and detonated in its throat, decapitating it in an squall of rotten gore.

After the fourth hour, the tide receded. The remaining daemons of Chaos still tried to crawl forth to kill, but the power sustaining them was gone. Scant few would be able to draw another drop of blood before fading away, and the ground outside the wall was lifeless. The defenders cheered wildly. After action reports would record forty percent losses among the first defenders.

The Auric Bastion had held.

_________________________________________________

Between the Empire and Border Princes lied the expanse of the Grey Mountains. There were few speedy routes through the southern reaches, one of them being Blackfire Pass. Three great battles were fought there between Man and Dwarf, and Greenskin kind. Here was where the eternal alliance between Men and Dwarfs was signed in blood as Sigmar and High King Kurgan Ironbeard defeated the hordes of Vorbad Ironjaw.

A pilgrimage town was built in the walls of the pass, alongside the dwarfs of Karak Hirn and Zhufbar. Dwarfen statues, two hundred feet tall lined the kilometer-wide valley, set in among jagged obsidian and waterfalls of liquid earth.

It was midday, yet every soul was asleep. In the markets, in the streets, at work, the guards, pilgrims, and farmers slumbered in the sun.

Three jet-black carriages rode into the town, the lead letting out a stream of purple haze that swamped the land in sleeping magic. The withered carcasses of horses pulled them, whipped and driven by immaterial, chittering spirits. They moved with unnatural silence and grace, disturbing none as they sped in and pulled up before the Mausoleum of Blackfire Pass.

Vlad von Carstein was first inside, clipping to his armor the keys he took off a guard. He brushed a hand along the crypt’s shelves, the remains of officers and various unit leaders, dead flowers and personal items entombed with them.

Nightmare Moon maintained the sleeping fog over the pass. Her horn burned bright with the effort, but she still had power aplenty to mix the winds of magic for necromancy. “So the letter to Franz was designed to be rejected?” she asked.

“A thought seeder, yes. With the northmen at the gates, the Patriarch’s project will fail, and they will be desperate, knowing they swatted our hand away. Who better to shore up a failing defense than the dead themselves? Would you care to take first pick?”

“Gladly.”

With a thought, every shelf drawer shot open with raking slams. Twelve Drakenhof Guard inspected the crypt in silence, pushing aside mindless corpses that began to walk again with their flaming skull-bearing tower shields.

Mannfred bore his position with simmering anger. Rising alongside the first of the von Carstein bloodline, he had enjoyed almost unlimited influence in Vald’s absence after the first of the vampire wars, but no longer.

The Mausoleum forked soon after the entrance. Vlad and Mannfred went one way, Nightmare Moon, the other.

“Oh, this looks important,” she smiled.

A wide octagonal chamber spread out before Nightmare Moon. The yellow and black banners of Averland hung from each side, illuminated by the glow of magically infused crystals. At the center were a pair of coffins, one of wood, the other engraved in sculpted obsidian and gold.

Nightmare Moon rounded the central coffins, unable to find any names. She glanced up, spotting one of the Guard moving to pry one of the coffins open.

“Stop. You will remain at the entrance here and tell me when Mannfred or Vlad are coming.”

He nodded, and took up the post.

Tendrils of magic spread out from her horn, seeping into every coffin as she channeled necromantic power. She could feel the power sinking into the very ground, the catacombs must run deep. Screaming erupted from every one, a hellish choir that fought against their return to life, coffins violently shaking with their convulsions.

Nightmare Moon opened them, and the dead marched out. A command staff, by the looks of them. A drummer, standard bearer, and more than a dozen great swordsmen. Still, the central two coffins didn’t make so much as a noise. She leaned over the corpse inside, staring into its empty sockets for some sign of animation. Finally, she had an identification on it, engraved into its onyx-black armor, Marius Leitdorf. On the inside lid of the second coffin’s lid, Daisy Kurt von Helboring II

And in a fraction of a second, its fist connected with her face.

“We will never surrend...errr! ...Wh- What is this?”

While Nightmare tended to her muzzle, Leitdorf sat up, dazed and confused at his command cadre shambling about like drunks. Breath rattled out of his ribcage in an eerie laugh, and he gripped the sides of his coffin, gaily bouncing in place, and loudly jarring his bones.

“Ha ha! We’ve won, didn’t we? Strange hospital, this is… Miss Helboring!” he cried at the shaking, rattling coffin beside him. "Don’t just stand there, you daft fools, help the poor lady!”

His guard stumbled to assist and tore off the lid. A desiccated, white-furred horse jumped up, whinnying and bucking men away in panic. Leitdorf guffawed like a madman, clapping his hands together while the recently-raised animal kicked and stumbled around the floor, narrowly missing clocking him in the jaw with a hoof.

"Yes! You made it, dear! Bless every one of y—"

“ENOUGH!” Nightmare Moon bellowed, her already-powerful voice ringing through the cramped walls like a church bell. Her mighty exclamation forced the raised men to their knees by sheer force of will. Even Helboring sat still and attentive like a well-trained pet.

Just as smoothly, Nightmare Moon gave them a quick glance up and down, wrinkled her nose, and said, “Make yourselves presentable. Off with this meat weighing you down.”

The wights began to pull and scratch at their tight skin, peeling it off in slivers, tearing into their own guts and ripping them out. Control, subjects. This was what it was about. Dominance. From these beginnings, a grand new army would rise.

Leitdorf and Nightmare moon locked gazes. She could sense his confusion, and a million questions in his mind. He leaned to his horse. "Miss Helboring, you didn't tell me you had such a frightening grandmother."

“The greenskins were beaten, wight, and that is all you need concern yourself with. Your men clean themselves, they’ve slept for a long time. Join them.”

“The battle’s won? Good then.” Leitdorf tended an itch on his cheek, that scarred and peeled until he was skinning his skull. Climbing out of his coffin, he extended a hand to Nightmare Moon. “Usually, I have someone to introduce me for me.” His skin was loose, and his skull was bare and caked with dry blood with a single demasking pull. He brushed off and replaced his poofy hat.

This one’s a clown, Nightmare thought. “I know who you are. Your history is enough to fill an anthology. Another time for your tales, we must go further to wake your men.”

“Sleeping, the slackers,” Leitdorf growled. Drawing his sword, he took Helboring by the hoof, and charged down the stairs. “Come, help me rouse these sloths to meet your gran. Wake up ya whoresons, we have a guest!”

“You had better have been a genius in life,” Nightmare muttered. “Guardsman, we’re going further down. Come.”

“Yes, master—”

A crump of metal and a grunt cut him off. The guardsman collapsed in a heap with a crossbow bolt through his cranium.

Impossibly silent, several figures in black armor and crimson helmet plumes strode into the chamber, firing crossbows into the undead with mechanical precision and speed. Nightmare Moon turned her puppets around, even as they dropped and the light of unlife extinguished from their eyes. Nightmare attempted to resurrect them again, but the necromantic energies slipped around them to no effect. The knights dropped the crossbows for their blades as the dead fell upon them.

The knights did not flinch in the face of the growing terror that snuffed out all light, and penetrated their minds to fill them with terror. Faith and duty, and rest for the dead. The Knights of Morr would serve.

Chapter 39 - Heffengen

“There’s a joke said about Ostlanders. That they’re so cheap, they can make soup from hot water and a single rock. Why? Because using more than one is a waste of perfectly good stone! Ha ha... But this Igneous Pie, I didn’t know he could actually do it.”

~Gregory Moltke, Captain of the 8th Nordland Artillery Regiment

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the highest floor of the Varanspire, the Everchosen’s council was abuzz with chatter, boasts of kill counts and heads taken in the fall of the Auric Bastion, and casual swearings of oaths that would be forgotten before the day was out.

Spike had his spot in the assembly be his quick-built relation to the chief of the dragon-worshiping Goromandy tribe, Orgon Styrbjorn. Feigning amnesia from the death of Jinam, he settled into replacing the great beast like a fish to water.

“... and when I woke up, she was there, like a fury sent from the gods,” Spike lied, relishing in his own imagination. “Rarity brought me back to the others, and said your people needed me, but neither of us knew what your people really looked like.”

Orgon nodded. “Until the fire-rivers.”

“Exactly. I’m sorry I didn’t recognize your people then. I was still new.”

“With still some way to go. At the rivers, and the wall, you’re style looks like you were trained by elfs. I’d be honored to teach you the Goromandy way.”

The roof hatches opened, and the entrance of four figures silenced all conversation. Rainbow Dash fluttered down first, while Twilight, Archaon, and Horstmann took the spiraling stairs. Archaon sat upon his throne, above the congregation, Twilight at his side.

“A mixed series of events. Great gains, many losses, and a revelation.” Archaon glanced at Twilight, and motioned her forward.

“The light that destroyed the daemons of the army was familiar to me, most likely the Elements of Harmony. Since they were successfully used, the Empire now has a potent weapon to all but eliminate daemons where they stand. As far as I know, Celestia is the only one who can use them on her own, so they can only be used in one place, at one time, but their reach is long.

“Jarl Orgon, your warriors were first hit by the Elements. What did you experience? How did it feel?”

“Like.. I couldn’t feel anything. I mean, I didn’t feel the rush of the charge, not even confusion, like my soul was being pulled out, if I had to describe that. Then, when it passed, I thought, what the faen was that rainbow dritt they threw at us?”

Twilight nodded. “That’s something I’ve never seen before. Speaking with lord Horstmann, we’ve discerned the most likely cause.”

In a flash of magical light, Twilight summoned a projection of equations and graphs to measure the Elements’ energies, detailed schematics of their geometry, and summaries of her own years of sorcerous research.

“Condense it down, perhaps?” said Horstmann. “You’re not lecturing at a university.”

“Right, right,” Twilight blushed, and dispelled most of the images, leaving only simulations of Nightmare Moon being launched to the moon on a rainbow comet, the dark power being stripped from Luna, and Discord in panic as stone encased his body.

“I’d met with Luna on several occasions before the Fall, and she said a lot about Nightmare Moon. A Nightmare Entity, one of countless Nightmare Forces she made a pact with for the power to overthrow Celestia.

“A thousand years on the moon to think about things, and stuck with the Nightmare entity, she seemed to become remorseful, and when hit by the Elements again, the Nightmare was ripped from her. When it came to Discord, who's a creature of disorder by nature, they instead petrified him. And with the Jarl’s description, their function seems to be to calm turbulence, and banish strongly Warp-aligned forces. We saw what it did to the flesh hounds, after all.”

Horstmann stepped forward. “So at this time, we cannot predict where Celestia, or Luna, and their Elements will appear. And when they do, we cannot call on our allies from the Empyrean. A waste of sacrifices.”

“And there is the intervention of the undead,” Archaon spoke up. “We have a source from within the hordes of bones. The von Carsteins mean to ally with the living, for we threaten the humans they see as cattle.”

Horstmann turned slightly, visibly confused. “My lord, my networks reach across the Empire and Sylvania. They’ve told me no news of the intentions of the vampires.”

“This one is new. Yesterday new. Vardek.”

Intrigued mutters were punctuated by the champion’s stride to the fore. The man’s skin was the color of old parchment, and gnarled like tree bark. He saluted sharply, fist over his heart.

“The Empire is amassing new forces in the town of Heffengen," said Archaon. "and I want you to break them. Take the Skaeling, your Kurgan, Arbaal, and Walach Harkon for this task. Destroying their unified armies will shatter the Empire into island city-states, to be surrounded and crushed one by one.

“The Fester Spites have faith that you can redeem yourself, and the success of their ritual lends it credence. We will see of you make good on this second chance.”

“It will be done, lord. On my life, the Southlanders will die.”

Archaon dismissed the remark with a wave of his hand. “Make no promises, no oaths. You will do, or die."

Twilight and Horstmann felt one another’s confusion. Harkon, leader of the Blood Dragons? What were vampires doing fighting alongside Chaos?

____________________________________________________

Messengers went out across the Old World, carrying the news that the Bastion had fallen, and the Empire called now for aid. The Electors all responded quickly with affirmation; but Bretonnia, Estalia, Tilea, and more were embroiled in their own battles with Beastmen, Skaven, and cult uprisings. As if all the forces of darkness had risen up as one, the Old World was ablaze with war.

Night was a beautiful sight in the hill-perched Ostermark town of Heffengen. As if one could reach up and touch the stars, the sky was a vast, glittering bowl. This day, the civilians had been evacuated, and the town itself quickly fortified with trenches and redoubts as Imperial forces gathered.

Scouts reported that the hordes of northmen were splitting up into prongs, to thrust into the Empire’s provinces. One of them was headed toward Heffengen.

Shining Armor headed the establishment of the Heffengen camp. Regiments from across the Empire martialed under the Triumvirate’s banner, but not all arrived in one piece. Despite Chrysalis’ intel on insurgent cults, sabotage had taken its toll on the rail system, stranding trains whose troops then had to march on half rations, harassed by beastman cultist ambushes. So far, only seventy percent of the requested manpower had arrived, and the enemy was nearing.

Princess Luna’s tent was built around two floors of platforming, a dark edifice with a grinning equine skull, framed by bat’s wings split among the entrance flaps. The guards raised their halberds as Shining Armor approached, and he found Luna talking with some officers about possible gun emplacements in and around the town.

“Dismissed for now. I will send for you to finish this,” said Luna.

The officers filed out past the Reiksmarshall.

Shining stood tall. “Answering your summons, princess."

Luna’s horn glowed softly, and a chair slid between Shining and the desk. Her expression was cold and devoid of any optimism. “Please, sit. What we discuss here will only be shared between us and my sister, once she returns from Ferlangen. Is that understood?”

“Yes, princess,” Shining said, and quickly seated himself.

“In these dark times, we must be willing to do whatever it takes to achieve victory, for the good of the world we live in.” Luna’s hoof idly rolled a scroll across on the desk. “The Elements of Harmony were delivered to us in a most peculiar manner. Analyzing the magical traces left on the Elements as they teleported confirmed our suspicions. They were sent by Spike’s flames. Apparently my sister's old messaging spell was never found and removed from him by the Archenemy, nor the Elfs.”

“Permission to speak, your highness.”

Luna nodded without hesitation. “Speak freely, Shining Armor. At ease.”

“So he, at least, is still on our side?”

“Celestia and I were unsure, and had his anchors to all of us broken over security concerns. We recreated ours and yours on another, more out-of-the-way object.”

Shining paused. “You've been intercepting my mail." It wasn't a question.

Luna rolled her eyes, and held out the scroll. “He seems to have sent you only one piece.”

Shining undid the copper seal of an eight-pointed star. Several places in the text were covered in erasure smudges and written over several times, as if they weren’t sure what to say.

It read: Dear Shining Armor. If the gods are merciful, then this will find you well. We’re all on different sides of a momentous occasion, and I want you to be on the right side of history. Preferably flesh and blood, and not just another statistic like the poor men and ponies who've already died in this war.

I've finally seen the truth, Shining. And I don't want you to think that I'm just another part of the fire that's burning the world down right now. I'm here. I'm alive. And I won't let anyone, especially not Celestia, say otherwise. After the End, I'm going to be a part of the solution. A solution to war. And I'll make sure the world will finally have a chance to heal properly.

The Empire can't win, big brother. They're all going to turn to ash. You'll turn to ash, too. I want you by my side to rebuild, and not just as specks and dust in the wind. So please. Please, come to me. And I'll make sure you have a place in all this, so help me Cha--... … Pinkie Promise.

Your LSBFF, Twilight Sparkle.

“She wants you to join her.” said Luna.

Shining sighed detachedly, and rolled up the parchment. “It looks like she’s going to be disappointed. If you called for me to reaffirm my loyalty, of course you have it. I didn’t get to where I am not knowing what it would take, and we’ve all seen what the enemy can do." He paused a moment to glance up into Luna's eyes. "But I ask that I be allowed to try to take her alive.”

“That would actually be preferred.” Luna nodded, and seemed to ease up a little. “Killing her would merely release her into the warp, from whence she may return in another time, place, and form.”

“Return," Shining muttered under his breath. "What if she can’t be convinced that this is madness? She’d be a prisoner forever.”

“Like you said, if that is what it takes to preserve this world.” Luna glanced at a timepiece on her desk. “The grand Theogonist is holding mass tonight. It would boost the army’s morale for the both of us to be among the common soldiery.”

“Really,” Shining chuckled. “Don’t half of them see you like a god?”

“They do,” Luna laughed. “but remember history, sir Armor. Even Sigmar prayed.”

________________________________________________

Enticing scents were on the tip of Pinkie Pie’s muzzle, sweat, musk, and blood. Sigvald held Sliverslash off to the side, and an attendant wiped gore off the blade.

A grey-furred stallion laid on his belly, gasping in the mud. A split in his back exposed his severed spine, fatty tissue, and pooling blood that ran down the barrel. Pinkie Pie stood over him, licking her lips.

“P-please,” he hiccuped. “I can’t feel my legs. Pleas--”

“Sh-shh.” Pinkie brushed his mane from his eyes, gently lifting him up with slithering tongues. “Your war’s over. TIme to relax.”

She opened her jaws wide, and effortlessly pulled him in. Light gulps eased his journey, and she ignored his muted protests, massaging the bulging shape in her neck and enjoying the struggles as he slid down. Swallowing more forcefully as the hind hooves passed her lips, she couldn’t suppress a moan of pleasure as the weight squeezed into her stomach, pushing the gurgling sac to hang down to her knees.

“Loose another one!” barked Sigvald, waving toward the prisoner train. “Make it more challenging this time, a pegasus!”

The slaves were fresh stock, taken from local villages and captives from the Auric Bastion. Four iron collars were already empty, and another was removed from an orange pegasus mare. Her wings snapped open, ready to take advantage for freedom, but she was frozen with fear, having watched others be picked off with such frivolous ease.

“Y-you’re just going to kill us all, aren’t you?”

Sigvald spared her a look. “Perhaps not all in one go, but yes, actually. What did you think I brought you out here for?” he pointed to the sky. “Now get flying, little bird. I want to exercise my javelin arm.”

Pinkie slapped her gut, sending ripples across its girth. “And don’t worry, you’ll be in a better place afterward!”

The Mirror Guard pushed her forward, poking and prodding with boots and sword tips, demanding the fly for their lord. Still, she remained, wings folded.

“Pinkie Pie, make her fly.” Sigvald ordered.

Pinkie tsked. “Shoulda made it easy on yourself.”

The pegasus finally attempted to flee as Pinkie came at her, mouth agape. Several tongues lashed out, binding the mare’s limbs, and Pinkie launched her in a screaming orange blur. Sigvald held Sliverslash by the flat of the blade, and chucked it after the pegasus, both of them vanishing into the canopy.

The mares' scream faded with distance, and Sliverslash came sailing down, sticking cleanly into the soil more than a hundred meters away.

Then came the faint trace of laughter, that went to silence.

Sigvald’s band was silent, none wishing to stand out when a mistake had been committed in his midst, much less by the Scion of Slaanesh himself.. Wordlessly, Sigvald strode to his sword and plucked it up. His eyes met Pinkie’s, and she flinched, knowing blame would fall her.

Suddenly, the canopy rustled with a violent rush of snapping twigs. All looked up in time to see a massive boulder hurtling down at them. The Decadent Host scattered just before it splashed down, ejecting a geyser of mud.

Sigvald reunited with his host, all drawing arms for the ambush. Only a cygor or giant could hurl such a massive rock. Expectations were square on some unaligned beastman tribe.

“Get to the clearing!” Sigvald shouted.

The group broke out of the forest edge, into a muddy clearing, spreading out wide to better avoid any more projectiles.

Dim lights twinkled in the fog, on the outline of a short cottage. For acre on acre, rocks were laid in rows, most of them bulging with colored veins of ores and minerals. Coal, iron, silver, and lead; just to name a few.

It was a rock farm.

Pinkie Pie suddenly felt sick. “W-well, there’s no way that boulder could have come from here. Nopony to launch it! Maybe they’re somewhere else—”

Another massive rock came shooting over from behind the cottage, spinning high into the air and forcing the Host to break formation once again. Soil erupted from its impact, besmirching the mirror-polished armor of the Mirror Guard.

Sigvald recoiled in shock at the sight. "Those Bastards! Upstarts!" he hissed in rage and disgust.

The lobbing came smaller and faster now, forcing the Host to charge the cottage, flanking on both sides. But as they rounded it with gleaming blades raised to strike, they found no hostiles, no rock-launching war machine. Only Pinkie Pie, somehow having gotten ahead of them all, was sitting among a pile of rocks and boulders, in pain and nursing her grotesquely swollen stomach.

“Got them!” she panted, forcing a sneer-smile. Harsh belches escaped her innards as her stomach struggled to control its prisoners. “No need to trouble yourseeeeelves.”

Sigvald started quietly towards her gravid form, but paused, glanced down, and turned over a rock with his boot. He lifted an eyebrow in frank interest, scooped it up, and eyed the lustrous veins of what could only be gold streaking across its surface.

He smirked, and began idly juggling the rock into the air, and catching it with his hand. “Let me talk to one of these peasants," he said, renewing his steps towards Pinkie.

Pinkie retched one of the captives back up her throat. Opening her mouth, the head of a terrified grey mare came popping out past her teeth, gasping for fresher air and dripping with a film of syrupy drool.

Sigvald held the gold rock out to her. “You have a new master. Tell those others they’re going to make me more of these.”

Pressing the rock to her face, Sigvald pushed the mare back down Pinkie’s throat. Pinkie gagged at the intrusion, and was forced to swallow the screaming mare back.

“Look at you,” Sigvald jeered. His face wrinkled in disgust as he twisted Pinkie’s head side to side, covered in mud and drool. “Pig.” He pushed her aside. “You will not be in my sight again until you right yourself.”

The Host set about gathering the most valuable of the rock farm’s produce, and stripping the cottage for everything that wasn’t nailed down before setting it alight.

Pinkie Pie stayed behind for a bit, watching the cottage burn and slowly collapse, their lives uprooted so quickly. The struggling inside her was worn down to futile squirms now, the stale, hot air stealing their breath.

Fighting back the urge to giggle at their tickling movements, she said, “Girls, p-please stop fighting my tummy. I need to get you to safetyy-ee-hee-hee-hee!”

She trotted on the edge of sight of the party, moved ahead and quickly followed their path back to camp. A dry, earthy taste filled her mouth, and she knew the acids were already at work.

________________________________________________

The army of Vardek Crom came into view in the early morning. Reaching back to the horizon. The central road leading to Heffengen was bordered on both sides by dense forest, making pushing organized formations through them useless. The army was a river of black-iron bodies and warriors, snaking through the trees and around hills.

Massing, the hordes began singing in the passage, blasphemies in a harsh tone that could be felt at some instinctive level, eliciting a primordial fear from before the rise of sapience. In response, the Empire chanted back their own prayers and battle hymns led by priests walking the fighting lines, censers trailing cloaks of smoke and dabbing holy water on foreheads. Swishing their halberds and pikes in an oscillating forest of arms, the combined sound reverberated like the breath of a titanic predator, patronizing the foe to charge its jaws.

Then, as the first glimpses of Morrsleib’s grey-green surface peeked over the trees, the warhorns sounded, and the Skaeling charged.

Shining Armor looked back from his tactical seat as another boulder flew overhead.

A one-stallion artillery battery was at work there, one Igneous Pie. With his own supply of basalt, he easily tossed boulders twice his size into the air, and bucked them over three hundred meters into the oncoming horde. The traceries of helstorm rockets and mortar shells followed each shot.

His map crawled with living drawings, a birds-eye view of the battlefield as formation markers shuffled, and the attackers were a great blackness careening towards the Empire’s orderly ranks and file.

The chatter of rifle fire began in earnest. Two hundred meters. Shining rubbed his throat. Enchantments to amplify his voice always left it itchy.

Front and center in the battle line, Luna decried the wicked northmen in a booming voice. Wings outspread and sheathed in silvery titanmetal, and haloed in a ring of summoned ethereal swords, she bellowed a promise of vengeance for the Auric Bastion.

The riflemen fell back between the ranks of pikes as the northmen closed, moving to positions higher on the hill to keep pouring on fire. Grenadiers pulled chemical strips from their ordnance, and lobbed them into the foe, crump detonations blunting the charge and forcing more to stumble as their legs were perforated. Throwing axes and javelins flew back in kind, cleaving helmets and splintering shields. And then they made contact.

Boar-like armored beasts rushed ahead of the Norscans, ploughing aside pike heads and careening into the Imperial line. Luna launched several blades into the creature barreling toward her. The shimmering blades pierced its hide, severing its legs and sending it into a skidding halt at Luna’s hooves.

She rested a hoof on its bloodied head and bellowed, “KNEEL, HEATHENS!”

A wave of telekinetic force locked the barbarians where they stood, twitching statues encased in a blue glow. Flanked by Lunar Guard in spiked midnight black armor, the Princess of Night advanced, radiating confidence, and the butchery began.

____________________________________________________

The engine of McDeath hummed loudly through the floor. The war galley dark and most of the crew asleep as it drifted in the River Reik’s current. The black depths of the forests curtained both sides of the river. On the prow deck, Captain Mutz took off his fine white gloves and stuffed them in his pocket.

They were too loose. He’d lost weight, and nights of sleep over the war and increasing paranormal activity on Sylvania’s borders. Ships like his were the watch on the Reik, against the undead of Sylvania and now the forces of Chaos.

He took to the searchlight, just one pass to assure himself that, at least for now, there was nothing to worry about. He was here, the war was wherever, and if he was needed to fight, the call would come, and he would answer.

At the flip of a switch, the lamp sparked to life, as a lumen crystal cast a bright yellow glow before the ship, and Mutz froze at what was revealed.

One hundred meters ahead, a section of the Reik was frozen over, and lurching columns of skeletons and nightmarish creatures marched across. He immediately lowered the light and attempted to shout, to call the crew to battle stations, but his jaw held shut.

His body wouldn’t move.

A shimmer of blue light illuminated a large, dark pony on the northern shore.

Magic… damned magic.

Surely the helmsman was under the same grip, as he heard no alarm. The ship would hit the ice bridge, the dead would swarm them, and more than a hundred men would be butchered and rise again as shambling corpses in this army of death.

As McDeath approached, the dead on the bridge parted, finishing their crossing or shuffling back to the southern side, and the bridge melted instantly behind them. Mutz could only look on in horror at the thousands of dusty grey eyes and smiling skulls staring at him as the ship passed. One of the skeletons, armored in the black and yellow of Averland, waved ecstatically.

“Averland colors, miss Moon! I knew there were holdouts!” it said. “Surely the province still carries on the war against those blasted fish-people. My boy! When you see them, say the first depth charge is on me!”

McDeath went by, the bridge was remade under the dark pony’s influence, and the dead marched again.

Mutz fell against the railing as the magic fled from him. The helmsman was already at his station bell, ringing and calling for the crew. As tired sailors and marines came up, Mutz knew they couldn’t fight that, and whatever reason they were let go be damned, he had to warn the North.

The dead were in Ostland.

______________________________________________________

Cheerilee muttered a curse unto the Skaeling for their cowardice.

The first assault failed, and the Norscans were running back to more friendly lines, with an army of raving, screaming flagellants on their heels. Vardek Crom ignored the Imperials’ celebratory cheering to draw his sword, and bellowed to his warriors to launch the second wave.

“Cheerilee, come on!” Vinyl Scratch called from the Iron daemon. The dwarf crew hastily goaded the engine to life, and Vinyl’s band mounted their stage. Cheerilee entered under the armorglass bubble and pulled up her book Liber Chaotica.

Wide-eyed behind violet sunglasses glasses, Vinyl wiped a smear of green dust from her nose, and her horn was already sparking from the effects of warpstone snuff. She clamped the power cables to her horn, feeding the energies into buzzing speakers mounted on the engine. “Are you watching, Sla’aneth?!” her voice boomed from the speakers.

The Iron Daemon lurched with huffing gusts of smoke and steam, keeping pace with the Kurgan peoples. Cheerilee turned to the passage, Wrath of Mortkin. Instruments were tuned, and Vinyl Scratch, needle-fingers on the dashboard, set the tempo with ‘A-one, two, three, four’, and Cheerilee read.

________________________________________________

’You take our lives, but I’ll take yours too. You fire your cannons, but we’ll run you through…’

Drifting in the sky, the airship Highness Ser Armaduke and Night Queen committed to sustained fire into the oncoming hordes. Sitting along the balloons and decks, the Karaz-A-Warhawks served as the defense detail.

The Empire made the best of the brief respite as more of the enemy came surging forward into the fanatical forces of Volkmar the Grim. The Theogonist’s war altar was aglow with holy light, and pulled by a heavily armored pegasus, snow-white and musclebound, his wings much too small to lift his bulk.

Shining Armor and his life guard navigated the foot traffic. Pegasi bearing stretchers carried the wounded back into town, and ragged companies cheered the Reiksmarshall in this first victory. Luna was at the fore, her armor was dented and chipped in several places. She was smeared in blood, impossible to tell how much was her own or the enemy’s.

“Sir Armor, call up the reserves, and order a general advance.” she said, and finally turned to him. Her eyes dimly glowed, pupils slitted and predatory. “We will follow Volkmar’s mob and keep up the momentum. Those northmen coming are Kurgan, closest to their gods. Rout them, and this kraken will have an arm severed. I will take the left, from Wilhelm’s Middenland troops on. I want you on the right, Grubar’s Stirlanders on. Range the artillery for four hundred meters with a creeping barrage, ten meters per shot. Is that clear?”

“Yes, Princess.”

“Dismissed.”

Shining saluted. “Good hunting.”

As Shining Armor hurried away, Luna turned back to her guard and the army around. “Heroes of the Empire! You have withstood the evil savagery of the northmen, and they have nothing left for you to fear. So raise high the black banners of vengeance — now is our time!”

A deafening roar of wrath and rattling arms met her. She cast her gaze to the sea of anarchy down the hill and shouldered a silver sword. “All regiments of the front, pike wall formations, advance two hundred meters. Forward, march!

And will someone kill that damnable music…

The ranks of the fanatics had swelled in recent weeks, with the coming of the invasion. Doomsayers and madmen congregated with visions of the last days of a dying world. When word of a battle reaches them, a fervor bordering on insanity had them throwing themselves into the fray.

This was Volkmar’s congregation, the souls who gave themselves wholly to the war against the dark. With maces, cudgels, spiked bells and zeal, they had crushed the flank of the Skaeling, hounded them in retreat, and now met the Kurgan.

Between such hate and forlorn hope, it was wanton butchery.

The center of the Imperial reserves waded in behind the fanatics, while the left and right flanks pressed home into the Kurgan sides. These were the knights and templars in polished armor of the Empire’s nobility, and now their titles would be tested like never before. Shining Armor and his life guard formed the speartip for the Knights Panther. The Reiksmarshall cast a bright red shield-plough before himself, and charged home.

Bodies bounced off the plough, throwing them aside to be trampled and speared under the Lifeguard and knights. Momentum only carried him so far. A grotesque mutant of a troll, twin heads roaring in depthless hunger, smashed a great club against the plough, cracking the barrier. At the speed of thought, Shining reformed the magic into a circular blade, launching it into the creature in a shrieking tearing of meat from its chest.

“CROM!”

If Chrysalis’ intelligence reports were correct, that was the name of the master of this army.

Luna teleported atop the head of a three-faced giant, driving her sword into its brain before it could reach up. It gurgled once, staggered a few steps, and collapsed like an ancient tree. Its massive claw falling before a staring warrior in a brazen brass helmet.

He raised his sword at her in challenge.

“Drive the spear into the heart of the beast! Everypony who can still fly, with me!”

Gathering behind her, the Lunar Guard, Knights Griffon, and pegasus troopers dove and skimmed the center of the horde. Spears skewered necks, lances took heads off shoulders, and pegasi were caught by the legs or wings, brought down to their deaths.

Luna formed a cone of sapphire light, driving straight for Vardek Crom. He did not move, holding his shield before him. He was too clear, too easy a target to skewer with her barrier. She veered left, the edge of the cone shattering against him. Some kind of anti-magic on him, she surmised.

She looped around and dove on him, bearing a pair of handleless silver blades. A telekinetic thrust threw his chosen guard away, opening a space for the Knights Griffon and Lunar Guard to land. Quickly however, the chosen rushed back, and the heart of the army became a killing ground.

Crom feinted a thrust for Luna’s chest, making her flap up and back to evade. He took up a fallen axe and quickly hurled it, sparking off her armor in another jink.

Before Crom renewed the assault with his sword, he noticed his opponent's horn glowing a sharp blue, and reflexively twisted to swing the blade in a full circle. It was the only thing that saved him.

Luna disappeared in a flash of light, and materialized near-instantly behind him. She twisted during the teleport while swinging her leg in a vicious backhoof, but just barely managed to adjust in time to tag the flat of the wicked blade and arc it upward, spanking off her helmet and sailing over her head. Eyes glowing furiously and horn still aglow, Luna telekinetically stored the force of the glancing strike in her leg as she finished her spin, and brought it crashing into the small of Crom's back.

A loud clang of metal on metal rang out. Crom's armor dented slightly under the sheer force. The man grunted and stumbled forward, but did not kneel or buckle. A blow like that would have crushed a lesser man's spine. But the King of the Kurgan was no such man.

He reversed the grip on his sword in the blink of an eye, and roared out as he leveled a vicious slash at the alicorn.

Crom stopped halfway when he saw that Luna had backed up a step out of reach. Scoffing derisively, he held his blade at ready, and faced her down.

"You won't get lucky like that again, witch," he promised, spitting at the last.

Luna began to slowly circle the man counterclockwise. She let out a derisive scoff. "You, slave of Chaos, accuse me of witchcraft?"

Though it was hidden by his helmet, Vardek's eyes twitched in anger. He advanced a step. Luna matched him, moving back. "True Warriors of Chaos trust in steel, not spell."

"Good," the alicorn retorted, her tone venomously patronizing. "At least when your masters grow restless and have you fall on your blade, the last thing you see will be what you trust."

Crom chuckled briefly, and craned his head to the sky. “Walach!”

As soon as the name was spoken, a great and terrible form rose above the chaos of the battle. Draped in ancient scales and rotting meat like rags, a skeletal reptilian abomination slithered closer. In its wake, the very dead began to convulse on the ground, grabbing fallen weapons and rising again to fight their own brothers.

On the back of the abomination rode a grey-skinned madman, shouting orders to his cadre of blood-red knights.

Vardek laughed, a harsh northern bark.

Luna bared her teeth and called for a withdrawal, teleporting above the din and telekinetically holding down the dead for her elite core to escape.

The abomination spread its wizened pinions and took off after the princess. Luna’s head throbbed, the channeling of magic beginning to take its toll. Still, there was hope here. There had to be.

As the abomination drew near, Luna launched her blades at it, severing its jaw joints into a gaping limpness. Recalling them, and in a single beat of her wings, she launched herself at the beast, eyes locked with Walach Harkon, Master of the Blood Dragons.

_______________________________________________________

In eerie silence, the dead marched. Soldiers of ages past, and fresh bodies occasionally felt here and there, marched side by side as equals. Risen knights formed orderly ranks and file in the vanguard, the legendary Grave Guard. With rusted and broken swords and spears, butchers cleavers and farming scythes, the lesser undead had numbers alone to to grind down the foe.

And they were Legion.

At the head of the vanguard, Marius Leitdorf bobbed on the back of Daisy Kurt von Helboring the Second, humming Farewell Erika, an old soldier's song. Riding right behind Nightmare Moon, he was still coming to grips with his condition. He looked down at skeletal hands holding Daisy’s reins, and had phantom sensations of a tongue that was long gone.

Nightmare Moon sensed trouble in the mind of her wight, and nudged him to other thoughts with a gentle application of suggestion.

Marius pushed the thoughts from his head. This wasn’t the time to think about such trivial inconveniences like missing skin. The land was in danger, and there was a war to fight. Afterwards, he’d march on Averheim and reclaim the seat of Elector.

Besides, being dead wasn’t a disqualifying characteristic, now was it?

The army marched toward the sound of the guns, a distant, unceasing thunder, and its increasing volume told of their nearness.

Nightmare Moon saw the edge of the forest ahead, and ordered her army to fan out. Spreading wide, the dead shambled under their own mobile forest of banners bourne by unseen hands. Symbols of Sylvania, her vampiric houses and legions daubed their tapestries. The flashes of magic and gunfire lit up the sky like early morning.

Nightmare Moon felt a familiar sting in the back of her mind, something trying to push to the surface, an itch she couldn’t reach.

A princess trapped in her own body, while another was in control. Fighting to return, only to be smothered and choked by the darkness. And she was screaming.

“Marius,” the Nightmare growled. “You have command of the ground elements."

Marius simply saluted as the Nightmare took off without waiting for a reply. The bats and flying beasts flapped skyward after her. Marius drew his sword, hateful at whoever must be wielding his beloved runefang now, and whipped Helboring’s reins.

“Forth, souls of the Empire! The nation needs you again!”

Nightmare Moon spotted the two of them in the sky. The rotting skeleton of a titanic horned lizard, and that familiar, disdainful princess. It’s broken-nailed claws gripped Luna in a crushing vise, splintering armor, and bringing blood coughing through her lips.

The rider of the abomination locked eyes with the Nightmare, a crazed milky-eyed glare, before having his beast drop the princess. The past was gone from that man. He may have been handsome once, despite the wrinkles in his beastial snarl, some shred of noble breeding could be seen like a diamond in the rough.

“Walach!” the Nightmare roared, closing nearly than a kilometer’s distance in moments. She struck the beast in a thunderclap of colliding energies. The undead shuddered at the conflicting powers raging overhead.

The beast crashed down, crushing dozens under its bulk and gouging a scar in the earth. Through the dust, Harkon struck out, catching the edge of a drifting smoke-shadow. It shrieked and shied away, one of its touched tendrils burning away in green flames.

“Traitor!” it hissed, driving icicles of inky black toward his head and heart.

Harkon dodged and lobbed them off with peerless grace, his skills having been honed in a thousand battles against heroes and monsters alike. “Me, a traitor? Von Carstein sent us to die!” Another flurry of spikes missed him as he roll, the attack stabbing into the ground. “Lost on the wrong side of the Auric Bastion, surrounded by only foes, we refused to fall without a slaughter.”

The darkness cautiously avoided the blade now, much to the vampire’s delight.

“Then the Lord of War cast his eyes on us. Our bloodlust, our hate catching even His attention, and we took his offer of actual power and blood unending!” Harkon gently put a hand to his breastplate, the mark of Khorne daubed across it. “Von Carstein thinks too small.”

Harkon leapt at the darkness, blade raised to strike, but something intercepted and slammed him down.

“And you lack patience,” the Nightmare growled.

The abomination creaked and groaned, blue fire blazing in its empty eye sockets, gripping Harkon ever tighter.

The shadow coalesced into Nightmare Moon’s equine form, looking down on Harkon with disdainful indulgence. “Your knights have lost the way, Harkon. You’re no son of Aborash.”

Harkon barely had time to scream as the dragon bit down over his torso, and rent him in twain in a single yank.

Army cohesion had broken down around around Luna’s battered body, both sides trying to claim her. With a desperate fervor, Grubar’s 5th Rifles charged into melee, bayonets fixed.

Walther Grubar paced his rearward firing line, occasionally stopping to fire his revolver at any enemy he found particularly ugly. “Keep up the rate! Stirland blood is like fine wine to the enemy, and if they want it, we’ll show them they can ill afford the price!” His last drum spent, Grubar drew his rapier and laid in with the rest of the regiment. “For the Princess, Fourth Company! Fury of Stirland! Fury! Fury!”

Amidst stabbing and clubbing, hands and claws grabbed at Luna, parts of her shattered armor being ripped off in the chaos.

Marius Leitdorf led the undead thrust into the Archenemy’s right, hooting and cheering for his countrymen, who looked on in utter confusion as a dead count rode into the fray. The surprise reeled the herald’s forces, pushing them back enough to surround Luna.

A stretcher was called, and the princess was carried back into town by pegasus bearers. The Nightmare following them in the shadows to make sure they made it before returning to the battle. By the time they reached the chief medical tent, Luna wasn’t moving anymore.

Or breathing.

Chapter 40: Marienburg

“At the turn of the tide, it is our turn to rise.
The force of Norsca at war!
Sail o’er the oceans on our way to the south,
On the road that’ll lead to Altdorf!
Our way will not be easy,
It will take us through hardship and pain.
Destiny calls, we’ll not surrender or fail.
March, we Norse!”
~Vinyl Scratch’s End Times Tour, Union
-------------------------------------------------------------

Failure.

The thought ate at Rainbow Dash’s soul. She’d failed to knock out the Imperial leadership, thanks to the intervention of a frantic Balthasar Gelt, but she’d improvised. She’d stirred up a panic, thrown the defenders into disarray, opened the gates of the Empire. Still, her primary objectives were not met. If not for her improvisation and deliverance of other useful results, the punishment would have been far worse. She was lucky to only be sent to RIP.

Still, her choler was hot. What Ingethel showed her was already coming to pass. The Princesses were disgustingly worshipped, Rainbow and the bearers of the elements reviled or forgotten. She was so close to them, and yet...

Rainbow Dash idly ground her teeth, wings tucked in her RIP fatigues for warmth in the unusually chilly night. She didn't know any of her other two hundred odd RIP-mates, and so stood alone, wings in her pockets.

Drill instructor Hargo strode by, glancing over the group up and down. He was a short, but strong-built human who looked to have been woven out of jerky. Signs of surgery scars on his upper lip cast his expression in a permanent sneer.

“You,” he stopped before Rainbow Dash, twirling a hardwood stick the size of a chair’s leg in his gloved hand. “No servant of the Everchosen, not even a wet-fart scalp like you, parks their bits in their pockets.”

He stroked the stick against her right wing, and an acute shock of pain flooded her joints through her joints. On ‘wet-fart scalp’, the stick touched her left wing, which was still in its pocket. On ‘their pockets’ it came up into her ribcage, dropping her to the dirt, sucking air.

“Upright, wings at your sides,” he sniffed. “No other posture is acceptable in the Everchosen’s armies, are we clear?”

“Yes, driller.”

“Shit-soft attempt,” Hargo tilted his head to one side. “You call that a clean loader? Is that all you’ve got?” He smacked the stick in the palm of his hand. “Are we clear?”

“Yes, driller!” Rainbow shouted. “We are clear, driller!”

“Get up.” Hargo turned to the others. Many were greatly amused. Day one of RIP was barely ten minutes old and already someone was on the ground with pain-wet eyes. “Staple your lips and in formation, scalps! Six rows, move! Ten, nine, eight...” Ranks were made by ‘three’.

“Alright ladies and ladies. I’ve seen some details, but you all take the brass ass. You are RIP, the lowest of the low, and making your life a misery is my purpose, given unto me by the High Powers themselves. You come to me as wet-farts, and I’ll return you proper warriors. Or… you die. Anyone have anything to say about that? Go on, speak freely.”

“You can try,” The stallion beside Rainbow suggested.

Hargo whirled like a snake and struck him in the throat, then again across the back as he went down, choking. Rainbow moved to help him.

“Nobody move! No one. Let him suck it up. Now, anyone? No? No? Now, you sons and daughters of bitches, welcome to RIP detail. 'R' stands for… I’m waiting.”

“Retraining,” they murmured.

Hargo smacked his baton. “I can’t hear you.”

“Retraining, driller!”

“'I'?”

“Indoctrination, driller!”

“And 'P', you know what that means?”

“Punishment, driller!”

“Well, at least you’re literate. Who here is for Punishment?”

Most of the detail raised their hands.

“Who’s for Indoctrination?”

More raised their hands, and Hargo nodded.

“And ‘R’?”

The rest, including Rainbow, affirmed.

“Shit, ten of you? Alright, front and center.”

Rainbow came forward with the others.

“Look and learn, scalps. As far as we’re concerned, these are cherry bloody scalps, never seen a day of hot war, never swung a blade in anger. You better make sure none of them do better than you, or I will personally take a revolver to your heads and smile while I twitch the trigger. Now, Laps around the camp, weight loads with him.”

While the detail filed off for running weights with one of the equipment handlers, Hargo regarded the R-candidates. “You eight. Thrusts, fifty reps. Now.”

He stopped Rainbow from going with the others. He growled, a predator having picked his target, “I will not catch you changing forms, nor in any form than what I see before me now. Do you understand?”

Rainbow had to force herself not to seethe. “Yes, driller!”

His vice grip left her shoulder. “Get to it.”

It took a long time for Applejack to become acclimated to the rolling and pitch of sea travel. She was always a mare of the land, and so the uneven roiling of the sea brought great difficulty in settling on the fleet. Enough time, and skirmishes with the Imperial Navy had remedied that, and one of the sailors, a scrawny grub by the name of Bubondubon recently started calling her sea legs ‘chicken feet’ rather than ‘wet noodles’. Where chicken foot sat on his personal scale, Applejack didn’t know. Chickens could be nimble, after all.

The fleet coalesced as it moved, raiding groups joining the main body in a beeline for the port-city of Marienburg. A plague fleet was not only a force of the god of decay, but a vector to carry the forces of Chaos to the far corners of the world. Among Gutrot Spume’s growing armada, Bloodships prowled like wolfpacks, jockeying for position, but even they remained behind the pride of the Red Reavers, carrying a battery of hellcannons on the prow. Great Winged Terrors hovered just above the waves, great blinking eyeballs along their hulls.

Big Macintosh rarely stayed put for more than an hour at a time. His joints seized with rust if he did, and it hurt to break the corrosion. His condition deteriorated with time, his iron skin becoming caked with flaking rust and tarred machine oil. Growths of throbbing flesh-slime had long since attached themselves to him, but he grinned and bore it. He held out hope that getting on land, away from the nexus of corruption that was Spume’s flagship might undo these effects. For now, moving was good and fighting was better.

As the battle bells rang, it was surely a happy day.

More standing around, waiting, but only a little longer. In a dark hold near the front of the ship, hundreds of warriors were crammed like cargo instead of passengers. Further ahead, the battle fodder swayed and groaned.

Poxwalkers. Ever grinning through lipless mouths, they were a man-shaped parody of Nurgle’s Plaguebearers. The risen dead clutched makeshift weapons, from swords to pipes, to shivs of jagged metal, oblivious to the cutting of their own hands. Bone-fungal growths spiked out from their bodies like the horns of lesser daemons.

Macintosh attempted to roll his jaw, the rust seal snapping like an overstressed bolt. The coughing and moaning of the ill was annoying.

Someone shouted on the deck above. “Battle speed!”

“Battle speed!”

Applejack was gone. She had tucked Apple Bloom in her hammock and told her to stay put for her own safety. There she stayed as the minutes ticked by, but the boredom and feeling of victimhood gnawed at her. Was she to just sit and wait and hope?

From under the covers, she watched the commotion of crew and warriors rushing to battle stations with weapons and supplies. Words of encouragement between fellows, their lives on the line, the writing of history around her.

She could not sit idle.

“Oy! Ammo monkey!” Something overturned Apple Bloom’s hammock, throwing her to the floor. A brutish man dropped a squirming sack on her. “Get up, child, we’ll have no dead weight on this ship! Get that to catapult three. Off with you, off!”

He delivered a kick to her backside, and Apple Bloom rushed off with the sack in her teeth. She let his insult roll off. She wanted to be here, to take part and make her mark.

She was a Crusader.

She followed one side of the traffic up to the scramble of the main deck. Making it up into the sunlight and salty wind, the crew was hastily at work. Done a hundred times before, the crew readied great catapults, furled the sails, and secured the ship for the coming tumult. Warriors jeered from the rope ladders, some gathered around the boarding gantries She peered over the side, watching hundreds of oars cut the water, beating through the surf like great wings. Bloodships surged ahead, skull-prows opening to unravel great pincers like beetle mandibles.

The sails of the plague fleet were a forest, blotting out the sky under their span. A ubiquitous cheer of anticipation echoed from all corners, an impatient demand to be carried to the foe.

Apple Bloom looked to their destination, and her excitement vanished. Waiting for them, a line of warships was arrayed in splendour. Under bright sails depicting golden griffons and hammers, those ships formed a ring between the Manannsport and the Reik. Their formations separated around a monumental island, on which towered a castle, a guardian of the sea walls and main entrance to the city.

Apple Bloom left the ship side as the line of ships vanished in a burst of smoke. She took cover under catapult three, a whooping doppler scream filling the air, and the sea rioted.

Once in a while, the hold shuddered, sending uncomfortable thoughts through Applejack’s mind. That was the hit that sinks us… No, that one.

It was cramped in the hold, bodies packed together with scarcely enough room to scratch one’s nose. A few of the warriors were praying, sneezing, coughing. Weapons were held close, corroded steel coated in filth.

“Now we arrive at the first struggle of this great crusade!”

Applejack recognized Braeburn’s voice further ahead. Did he have some cue, or was this coming from some well of conviction he just had to share?

“I’ve heard stories of Marienburg’s riches, their hospitals with their balms and medicine. Oh, oh, oh, this will not do! This here city’s in dire need of Nurgle’s gifts. Putrefaction without reason, rot without end!”

A grumble of assent filled the hold, which helped to assuage some of Applejack’s fears.

Never alone.

“Brethren of the Crow, tallymen of the Plaguefather, make them suffer!”

A lurch and squeal of wood and steel threw everyone forward. If not for the crowding, many would have fallen. Rattling chains heralded bright light pouring into the hold from the front. The crush became tighter as eager warriors bayed to get outside.

A thundering volley of gunfire echoed in, stray rounds chopping off the roof and walls. It took nearly a minute for pressure to let up, and Applejack half-joined, half was carried along in the surge.

She stepped on poxwalker corpses that had already been trampled into the floorboards. Stepping into the sunlight was like entering another world from the hold’s dankness.

The air was hot and filled with acrid smoke. Soot and dust was already collecting on her unblinking eyeballs painlessly, and she had to remind herself to blink. She couldn’t see the enemy in the flow, but the formation was finally starting to spread out.

Applejack slowed down slightly at the sights. Marienburg was vast. An archipelago of artificial and rocky islands, extensive ports whose docks reached out like a hundred fingers into the water. Towers and castles of noble and merchant houses dominated the skyline.

She was cut short when she felt something unknown to her for a long time. Pain. A sharp stab in her flank accompanying a sonic whoop-crack. Her right leg crackled and deformed into her molar-axe and she looked back for the offender, the enemy at last.

It was not the enemy, but one of their own warriors. A pox-ridden man wearing a burlap sack over his head, one hole cut out through which a yellow stain of an eye glared at her momentarily. He swung a whip of corded leather, ended with a barbed icon of Nurgle which was coated in Applejack’s own flesh and blood.

“Focus and move forward!” he shouted, cracking the whip over the heads of the warriors.

Flashes of smoke came from all over as adjacent islands lent crossfire. Ships of the plague fleet and Imperial navy performed a danse macabre in the Reik’s mouth, exchanging broadsides, and warriors by the hundred rushing across boarding gantries.

She felt tiny, an ant trying to navigate a battle between giants. And the foe, unreachable on the other islands, but she finally knew what they looked like. Ochre overshirts and blue ruffles. Those already dead as the host advanced littered the ground.

Crossing a cobblestone bridge, an imperial wolfship drifted alongside them. The triumphant advance turned to a panic as dozens of guns trained on the bridge.

Applejack saw their shadowed faces in the gunports. Furious men and ponies, slick with sweat and caked with soot. She ducked as it unleashed, instantly deafened by its broadside. Pulverized masonwork blew out in dust clouds, and cannonballs and shrapnel vaporized limbs and torsos.

The bridge buckled, spilling itself into the the water. The pressure of bodies recoiled back, forcing troops off like a leak from a hose. Many sought safety in grabbing the comrades beside them, only dragging them both over the edge. Groups of figures, clinging to each other fell away and were swallowed in the current. Applejack felt a frantic hand grab her wiry tail, dragging her to the ground, clawing for purchase.

It was sudden, the certainty of solid ground vanishing from her hooves, and the grasp of gravity unresisted. She felt terror for but a moment, until a large metal claw grabbed her flailing hoof.

Big Macintosh pulled her and Braeburn appeared over the edge.

“Gimme yer other hoof!”

They pulled her up, and Braeburn helped the whip-bearing taskmaster who was clutching Applejack’s tail. They shared a momentary glance at one another before he jerked his thumb to keep going.

“Come on,” Braeburn said. “Keep movin’ forward, keep ‘em on the backfoot!”

The other side of the bridge opened into more breathing space, and the coast of the island had two more ships beached on the shore, disgorging more barbarians. Whatever passed for discipline had broken down among the defenders, and combat was reduced to desperate duels. That allowed the northmen to flood the gaps.

Applejack’s blood was up now, tired of being the victim of all this. She tackled one of the trooper stallions into a wall, crushing his ribcage under her rotting bulk and sending blood coughing out of him. She spared him a moment’s regard as he choked, slumping to the ground. A single hammerblow of her axe ended his misery, splattering his skull over the cobblestones, beads of blood already being dusted over.

Like that, she was already looking for her second.

Beneath the opulent palaces and merchant houses of Marienburg’s elite, the wretched and refuse of the city thrived in darkness. Smugglers, traffickers, and blades for hire worked under the nose of the city watchmen, or outright bought their blindness.

Mundvard von Carstein fumed. His was a small but secure empire. In the centuries since the battle of Hel Fenn and the fall of Mannfred, house von Carstein was scattered and disunited. Mundvard found refuge in the underbelly of Marienburg and built up his base. Four hundred years of work had won the Master of Shadows half of Marienburg dancing to his tune. Thugs intimidated and killed at the sprinkle of a few gold coins, and the global trading city was a perfect place to ‘shop’ for livestock.

The blood of men was a staple, the multitudinous cattle that grazed and grew on its own, sustaining its own protection and wellbeing. Elves and dwarfs too came to barter, work, and negotiate. A couple missing every few months would disappear into the crime statistics. And now they were being threatened.

His patience wore thin as the Directorate deliberated and schemed. An Imperial army was camped just outside the southern gates, offering reinforcement at the price of annexation. The Directorate had already allowed the Imperial Navy to supplement the battle on the river, but were they truly afraid of annexation, confident of victory, or willing to let the city burn for their pride?

He sipped from the wineglass on the side table, a mixture extracted from a bretonnian girl and an elf.

Something exploded on the surface, the shock penetrating into the city’s underbelly. Dust shook from the mortared ceiling, and a few drops of blood fell from the glass, staining the upholstery of his armchair.

Mundvard sighed, upending the glass and downing its contents in a single swallow, and threw it against the wall. The glass did not so much shatter as disintegrate into a vitrified dust on the floor.

“Serfs, attend!” he barked.

The door to the office opened and two fair women entered, heads bowed.

Mundvard rose, pushing his chair back. His eyes, showing the beginnings of an angry, unnatural red creeping in at the edges, flicked between them both, then down again.

He reached out with a pale-skinned arm and fished from the table drawer a scroll sealed with the stamp of a red dragon looming on a black kite shield and handed it to one of the women. “This is my word of approval. Begin our evacuation to Gorssel,” he said. “As quickly as you can.”

The girl smoothly curtsied and extended a dainty hand to receive the scroll. No sooner had her fingers grasped it than she hurried away towards the exit.

“And you," the Lord of Shadows said, turning to the other. His face twisted subtly upward, bearing the marks of a cruel smile. "Tell the harem it is time to hunt.”

Gutrot Spume’s flagship hauled itself off the shore after disgorging its warriors. Its deck catapults screeched with each rusted-out throw, hurling sacks of lively wood-burrowing worms at enemy ships. A contingent of the fleet formed a defensive perimeter around the ship so it could launch the spearhead troops, and now it was eager to join the fighting on the water.

Sometimes a cannonball got much too close, and Apple Bloom could feel the sucking wind of its passing. A grey blur took a sailor’s leg off, the severed limb cartwheeling over board. She ignored him, she had no choice.

Keep the catapults firing.

One of the weapon crewmen took the ammo sack before she could drop it, and she took her momentary hiding spot, a corner away from the gears of the contraption. The platform rotated under her as it was aimed.

“Four hundred yards!” Bubondubon shouted, the crew adjusting sinew tension in concert.

At his order, the arm snapped up. Apple Bloom watched it fly for a moment, then moved to make another run. It wasn’t her place to know what they were shooting at, only make sure they had something to shoot with.

A cheer went up, and a moment later a sudden fiery roar set her ears ringing. An Imperial warship had shattered, broken in half by a blossoming fireball. It heaved and twisted, so suddenly put down.

A powder room had been hit, she thought. She didn’t care that it was another who loaded, aimed and fired the shot that felled the wolfship. That was her round, her first mark on history.

“Apple Bloom, come,” Bubondubon said. He pointed into the distant sky. “Your eyes are young. What be that?”

She squinted, locking onto a curious shape dancing out in empty space. Apple Bloom blinked, confused for a moment. She thought the creature was just a bird, but it moved too gracefully, its wings beat too slowly. Whatever it was, it was massive.

A terrible scream washed over everyone. Hands clasped over ears, warriors screamed, and Apple Bloom ground her teeth, every bone in her body vibrating.

Across Marienburg, agents of the Master of Shadows maneuvered the streets, avoiding patrols and trooper traffic to reach padlocks to marked chests, buried warehouses, and basement doors.

Marienburg was burning. Bent columns of smoke reached skyward, smearing the otherwise pristine sky like an oil slick. Guards at the southern gate still held their post, denying the Empire access and their annexation.

The Imperial 5th Army was arrayed in battle-ready marching columns, five hundred yards from the Knife Alley gates. General Aldred von Carroburg scanned the crenellations through a telescope, and lowered it.

“They’re spooked.” he said.

“Sir?”

The command staff rested behind him in chairs, sweating in their armor. Aldred recognized the voice, quartermaster Iron Harvest. A tall, lean pegasus of many years, and fast with a pen.

“They’re afraid.” repeated Aldred. “They can hear better than us what’s happening behind them, and if they’re uneasy, then the amphibious assault is probably breaking through. Mr. Gutro, address them again.”

“Sixth time’s the charm?” Gutro whispered, getting up. The amplification spell on his voice made him sound as if he were talking loudly.

Two men in gold breastplates bearing Imperial standards snapped to attention, following behind him, holding aloft the heraldry of Middenheim, and that of the Empire as a whole to flutter high in the breeze. Gutro took a position ahead of Aldred, and spread his arms. Some of the command staff plugged their ears.

“Hear yee, Free City of Marienburg! Their Imperial Majesties, Karl Franz, Celestia, and Luna offer you a boon in these dark times. The Archenemy is at your door, and here the might of the Empire stands ready to shore up your defenses. Our terms are but one article. Return to the Empire that which the Heldenhammer built with his own two hands. Remember your heritage! The nation calls, and we await your answer.”

Gutro made for his seat, feverishly scratching his neck. “Obiq, get this spell off me before I tear my throat out…”

While the unicorn undid the spell, Aldred raised his telescope again. Two sentries were weaving and whipping their arms at each other, appearing to be in a heated argument. The bigger one grabbed the other by the collar, pulling him in face-to-face. A minute later, they both entered one of the gatehouse towers.

“Mr. Gutro, I think you’ve started something,” said Aldred.

Emerging from the cracks and shadows, sewers and shores, the forgotten and cast out showed themselves. Mutants and monsters, a cavalcade of corruption that once hid from their ‘normal’ counterparts.

But no longer.

Applejack met many as the warriors of Chaos advanced. A man with a swarm of barbed tentacles sprouting from his mouth, a cyclopean woman with a walrus-tooth growing from her lip, and wide-eyed gurgling mermen. They came howling into battle with knife and dagger, tooth, claw, and hook.

“This is what happens when we work together, everyone!” the taskmaster shouted, his whip barking over the mutant’s heads. “The Plaguefather comes to give you a new chance, so repay what you owe him! Fight on!”

Applejack’s heart swelled at his words. By His power she lived through so much damage, lived to see her family again. She had so much to be grateful for, had such a debt to repay.

She followed a fleeing pair of troopers into one of the houses, smashing aside furniture they overturned to slow her down. Down stairs, another man was fiddling with a lock that held shut heavy iron doors on the other end of the basement.

She swiped her axe at one, knocking his legs out from under him. Mid-twist, her jaws clamped down on his neck, crunching through his spine and dropping him. His partner took the opening to drive a spear into Applejack’s chest, through her barrel, and into the floor. She missed, snapping at his hands, and wheezed several curses through her punctured lungs.

“Boy, boy! Is this a way out?” asked the soldier.

The tinkerer looked half-starved and wrapped in shabby clothes. Applejack got the spear out of the floor, the rusted-out lock snapped off, and he looked up for the first time in several minutes with a yellow smile.

“In a way.”

There was a phrase from the Red Reavers: when the blood was up, the world slowed down, and there was only the combat to be had. Fight Time. Followers of the Lord of Skulls fought like lions, with no care for individual lives, and all had to be an army in their own right. Each man bore his own arms and armor, fought in his own style; they were united not by the kind of rigid discipline of the Empire that made many men into a deadly force, but by their mutual, full-throated devotion to the battle, the greater war, and the great lord above it all whose unquenchable fury grew hotter with every gout of Marienburger blood.

Big Macintosh didn’t notice the yowling mob of Norscans and mutants following him through the streets. He didn’t hear their struggling to keep up as the iron rhinoceros gored enemies his horn and trampled them to pulp under his pounding stride. Most of the Marienburgers died with wounds in their backs, a most dishonorable way to fall.

Though his unblinking eyes were slick with blood, Macintosh saw one who was not fleeing. Bare-chested, save a harness for a greatsword that he drew with one hand. His features were feral, pointed ears, and eyes that burned like live coals. His right arm stretched out into a great bat’s wing like a webbed flesh-robe he wrapped around himself like a noble in fine silks.

Whoever he was, Macintosh didn’t care. He charged the figure, issuing a challenging roar that shook windows, but the figure stood his ground. Macintosh dipped his head for a thrust and the instant before he struck, the man swung his wing, and world went spinning. Wood shattered, glass trickled like rainfall, and when Macintosh came to he found himself resting upside down on his neck, covered in bread rolls and pastries. The figure was standing unharmed outside a large hole in the wall.

The vampire spared him a look and strode away.

What the hell just happened?

At first Braeburn was confused when a zombie bit him on the leg. Perhaps the poor thing was confused or in a frenzy over the battle, but he saw no worms eating its flesh, no ecosystem living off its body. It was dead, and nothing more.

They emerged by the hundreds from basements and manholes, wading up the shores and climbing anchor chains and ropes from the sea. In a voiceless march, the unbreathing horde fell upon the forces of chaos.

The Red Reavers laid into them with savage glee, raising an exultant cheer that the battle goes on. At their head, Wulfrik laughed, a haughty bark at a foe who would finally stand their ground.

Shuffling scraping and clatter of bones followed Applejack out of the house. They vocalized nothing in their pursuit, held no particular malice or hate, they only felt the will of their puppetmaster driving them.

To get these barbarians out of his city.

Applejack fell in with backup once she’d escaped the house, finding Braeburn shattering the skull of a zombie chewing on his leg. “Somebody find that blasted necromancer!” he snarled.

Plodding on Elephantiasis-infected feet, Ghurk Glott waded through the undead. His actions were purely savage for a slab-beast of foetid meat, stomping the enemy to powder and swatting them aside with the great lamprey’s maw that used to be an arm. Among the towering horns sprouting on his back, his brothers effortlessly balanced. Ethrac whispered his spells, casting miasmic clouds that withered the undead to dust, or broke the necromantic hold over them. Otto reaped bodies with every swing of his scythe, cackling at the show and guiding Ghurk with a boot to the back of his head. Otto spotted their next target and smacked the giant once more.

Many of the dead threw themselves bodily at the invaders, jamming armor joints with splashes of bones, clubbing with femurs and rusted-out swords and spears. Despite the clumsy assault, their strength was in numbers and the crush of their push. Some strikes found their mark.

Applejack pushed aside a mutant that had fallen against her with a bloody speartip poking out the back of his neck. Applejack struck out with her axe, shattering the offending skeleton’s skull. Her head jerked to the side as a spear tore through her windpipe and esophagus. She twisted her neck back, wrenching the weapon out of a zombie’s hands and brought her axe down, burying its head into its chest. Around the fighters’ legs bones rolled and clattered along the ground, collecting back together new skeletons to renew their assault. It was of little use killing them, too many, and they kept coming back.

Find the necromancer. Kill the necromancer.

Dark shadows passed overhead, an artifice of black iron webs fashioned in the shape of a great raised throne. Baleful energies pulsed about it, giving life to the skeletons grafted into its bulk that beat back on comers with impossible strength. Women, pale and voluptuous beckoned to the northmen, who came staggering to them, dropping their weapons with dumbstruck smiles and growing wobbly in the knees.

Those who got through climbed on the throne, entranced by the maiden’s beauty and promises. With swift slashes, retractable blades opened the men’s throats, and the maidens gently pushed them off, pretending to fan themselves while more suitors came pining.

Applejack saw Braeburn stumbling toward them as well.

He didn’t notice the spear that tore his heart apart, or the claws tearing strips of his flesh away. No longer thinking rationally, Applejack came bludgeoning the undead, pulverizing bone and tattered skins with no swing gone to waste. But the dead kept coming with no end in sight. The barbarians had been cut into pockets, and the section her kin was in was shrinking by the second.

“Braeburn, stop!” screamed Applejack. Her voice was lost in the din; she could barely hear herself.

Braeburn climbed onto the platform, enraptured by a petite bat-pony looking at him with half-lidded eyes. She leaned toward Braeburn, lips pursed, and he removed his helmet. It would have gotten in the way. Applejack tried to throw herself through the crowd, screaming feebly, her body becoming a pincushion of driven weapons.

A single punch put a blade through Braeburn’s forehead. His expression twitched, and his smile slowly faded. The bat-thing kicked him off unceremoniously and whipped her mane, already disinterested.

Blinking, dizzy, Applejack looked around. The crush of corpses was overwhelming, rebels and children of Nurgle were falling to these unfeeling puppets. Otto and Ethrac were gone from their perch, and Ghurk had collapsed against a building, holding the yellow ropes of his innards from falling out the the tear in his belly. Ghurk’s roar wasn’t of rage nor savage glee, but of pain. Creatures like him weren’t supposed to hurt, such sensations should have gone when their nerves decayed.

Something snapped.

Applejack roared something that northmen would argue over for years to come. Some said it was an Apple Family phrase, others an oath to the Plague God. Some said she was cursing herself or Big Macintosh for not reaching him in time.

She screamed the name of her cousin Braeburn.

She brought on a wild onslaught, summoning a frantic strength that few but an earth pony could muster in crisis. Desiccated bodies and parts of bodies flew skyward with each uncalculated swing, scattering enemies like a giant might throw the little people around its feet. It was impossible not to notice her rampage.

“Children of Nurgh’leth!” A yellow-eyed taskmaster yelled, putting his whip away for a second dagger. “Do you want to live forever?”

The Crow Brethren followed the dent Applejack pushed in the line, coming on like a tidal wave and crushing the undead faster than they could rise again. It did not take long before the pockets were connected, and Applejack shoved her way to the throne, beating down warriors who were about to throw their lives away.

The maidens’ composure broke as their charms didn’t faze the wrathful corpse-mare, and they fled up the platform. Applejack caught the bat-pony by the tail of her dress as she tried to fly away and dragged her down face to face. A retractable blade stabbed Applejack in the stomach several times before four sets of gnarled teeth destroyed her head in the most sudden and abrupt way.

Barbarians stormed the throne, cutting down the women in vengeance. Applejack held the headless pony high to the cheering warriors.

The vampires would pay. The Empire, their cattle, would pay the blood toll for Apple Family lives. Pumping the headless corpse to the sky, she chanted, and in her anger, she was heard. The army of the High Powers responded in kind, echoing the same cry as the undead weakened with their falling masters.

“Death! Death! Death! Death!"

____________________________________

The gates of Marienburg were opened, and people fled from within. A deluge of humans and ponies carrying prized possessions, babies, and children in tow. The Imperial army fanned out wide, catching deserting soldiers form the city, and questioning civilians. Many were more than keen to abandon the insanity of the burning city for the hard-edged protection and of the Imperial army, even those who had once scoffed at them.

The smoke had become a pall, a curtain draped over Marienburg like a funeral shroud. Orders had gone out to dismiss any fanciful stories by the civilians. Begging the Empire to retreat, spare their lives, fight another day, were to be ignored for the time being, and panic-mongers detained.

The Imperial leadership deliberated, argued. A punch was thrown, and accusations of treason shouted in anger.

Aldred von Carroburg cut through the heat. “We came to reinforce a city! Do you see a city? I see ruins, and its people coming to us for safety. Marienburg doesn’t exist anymore; there’s no strength left in the Directorate, and the people paid for their arrogance. Our only recourse now is to put them beneath the Emperor's banner, with all that implies. Gather every spare weapon we have and put the civilian men into scratch companies. This army will leave bigger than it arrived.”

____________________________________

In the southern deserts of Equestria there was an unnamed village, founded in ages past, before the rise of Celestia and Luna. It went almost unnoticed in the rise and fall of a dozen kingdoms that claimed the land, subsisting on fishing in the nearby river and irrigated crops. Almost.

A tyrant had come, only one creature. It led no army, for it was beyond any of the townsfolk. No cities or empire had its interest, only the village. It demanded their crops as tribute and in return spared their lives. As they languished under its greed, a single mare came forward and banished the tyrant, and entered legend for her life’s deeds since.

Ages passed in peace, and the people eked out their meagre existence. Then the tyrant returned. It bellowed for their hero to present themselves, voice dripping with venom as it named them.

‘Somnambula!’

No one answered, not a soul or building stirred. The tyrant tore roofs from houses and pulverized buildings in a single blow, and found no one in its rampage.

All it found was a mound of dusty skulls with all the tops sawn off burying the water well. Supported in its height was a wrought iron standard bearing an eight-pointed star.

Chapter 41: Trees in a Storm

Pinkie Pie would remember fondly, her sisters’ house burning, leaving nothing for them to come back to. After all, that was their past, an anchor in the old world, a dying world. She carried her sisters quickly from their home and back to camp, having saved them from Sigvald’s wrath. The apothecaries’ low-intensity tents took care of them, washed them off and treated their wounds.

She waited outside with some plates of fruit and vegetables. The Apothecary Magir said her sisters could eat, and might be safe to move. She was ancy, bobbing in place and watching the traffic and goings on of the nurses and patients.

The Magir emerged from the tent, covered in full-body black leathers, and his herbal-mask raised up. He took a breath of fresh air before noticing Pinkie Pie. “You’re lucky you showed up when you did. Any longer and you would have broken the skin, and we might have had to move them to intensive care.”

“But they’re okay?” Pinkie asked.

“A thorough wash, cold compresses, and some painkillers, but they’re fine, and you can take them into your care. No strenuous movement for a few days, and remove the compresses before retiring for the night. Also…” The doctor pulled a bottle from his pocket and rattled it. “The next time you want to pack someone away and not digest them, I recommend some neutralizer antacids. Given the time between ingestion and regurgitation and their condition, you might be looking at two tablets per hour held.”

Pinkie blushed and took the bottle. “Two an hour, th-thank you. And… and...”

Pinkie moved to hug him, but, with a flick of the wrist, the Magir put his indicator stick against the tip of her nose.

“Ap-bab-bap. You don’t know what’s on my cloak and how you might transmit it.” He looked up at the full moon and gestured to the tent. “Get them gone by tomorrow morning. I have some skin wolves transforming tonight.”

Pinkie waved him off, took a deep breath, and entered the tent. The smell of counterseptic hit her nose hard. She navigated the beds and resting patients to her sisters in their cots.

First came Limestone, looking intently forward that she might burn a hole in the wall with just a glare. Maud came next, stiff in her movements and refusing to make eye contact after she saw Pinkie coming. She wore the merest hint of a frown, and Pinkie had never seen her so miserable. Marble was shivering, despite the blanket wrapped around her. The meek mare glanced at Pinkie out of the wiry remnants of her mane, as if staring too long might provoke candy creature. All three were covered in acid burns between their bandages and compresses. Their fur was worn thin and patchy, exposing raw skin discolored from stewing in Pinkie’s stomach for too long.

“Hey, girls!” Pinkie sang, setting the plates next to each of them. “I know you haven’t eaten since yesterday, so I thought I’d put together a little something for your first day here!”

Maud didn’t look at Pinkie, but picked up her plate with a curt ‘Thanks’. Limestone immediately bit an apple in half, and Marble just stared at her plate.

“It’s just some food, Marble,” giggled Pinkie. “It won’t bite.” Marble spared a sideways glance at her sister. Pinkie could see it in her eyes.

But you do.

“Well, I’m not sure where to start,” Pinkie said, sitting in the middle of them and tossing a lettuce head in the air. “You guys must have questions, right Marble?”

Marble squeaked and pulled the blanket tighter around herself.

“Why’d you take us here?” asked Limestone coldly.

“Oh, good one! Sigvald and his troops were gonna murderize you guys for throwing boulders at them, so I had to make you stop before they did. They were dead set on setting you dead, so om-nom-nom, and I rushed back here.”

“That reminds me,” said Maud, “I had Boulder with me when you ate us. You destroyed my clothes so he’s probably still in your stomach. He’s a silicate-based trap rock, so he should be acid-resistant.

Now that she mentioned it, Pinkie felt a small lump at the bottom of her gut, chalky and indistinct from her sisters’ lingering aftertaste.

“So where exactly is ‘here’?” asked Limestone.

With a burp and cough, Pinkie spat an unremarkable grey stone into her claw and handed it to Maud. “Just north of Bokenhof, I think. It took maybe a half hour to get back here.”

“You move fast, Pinkie. A half hour could take you to another country for all we know.”

“The crossing of the Ostroad,” One of the passing nurses put in. “Bokenhof is about six miles south.” The sisters glared at him. He’d lowered his mask, and was just a man. Not a mutant or monster. He looked to Pinkie. “These are captives? Slaves to one of the lords?”

“Buck off,” growled Limestone.

The nurse put his mask on and hurried away.

Pinkie cast a glance around at the curious looks Limestone’s remark attracted. “Don’t be so mean.”

“Or what? What’s he gonna do? What did you do? You said you’d fix this!”

Pinkie thought, picking an apple from her plate. “Well… things changed.” Striped tendrils lashed form her lips, yanking the fruit into her mouth. She didn’t swallow, but the feelers simply pulled it down her throat. “People are going through alot right now, and I wanna bring back some laughter, and help as many hurt people as possible.”

“We’re not laughing,” Maud said pointedly. She cleaned Boulder as best she could with a napkin, though it was still slick with slime.

“I know, I know!” Pinkie pulled her mane back. “But! But but but, you’re safe now, and the doctor said you’re free to move, so I can take you to my quarter, get your stuff that Sigvald doesn’t take for himself from the house moved in and it’ll be just like home in Equestria! You can keep up the family business and It'll be just like normal! Just like home!”

Pinkie squealed and bounced about the tent as the realization dawned on her. Somehow, she didn’t land on anyone with her eyes shut, and she seemed to ignore the nurses’ calls for quiet.

The Pie sisters silently exchanged knowing glances before Pinkie swept them all up and left the tent, going on about sleepovers and making them comfortable in their new home, despite their protests.

___________________________________________________

The elector’s palace in Hergig commanded an impressive view of the countryside and cityscape. Hochland’s rolling hills stretched on like a green ocean, frozen in time.

A spotted martial eagle landed in the mail coop, receiving a treat of fresh rabbit meat in return for a scroll with the Reiksmarshall’s seal.

On a balcony overlooking the outer suburbs, Celestia and Karl Franz waited for Ditto. Throughout the morning they’d reviewed messages and pending orders for the Empire. Mobilization authorizations, transit rights between provinces, conscription numbers, new regiments to be founded with that manpower, factory and farm outputs, records of cult activity, terrorism, and suppression. Then came complaints from merchants and unions for the ‘disruption’ in business from commandeering of trains and horses, and the sacrifices to be made for the war effort. Rationing, taxes, nationalization of rock farms for raw material. A strike that grew into a riot had already seen a factory in Teupitz burned in the chaos.

A letter from Reiksmarshall Shining Armor came as priority. Heffengen held, but at a heavy cost. Luna was injured, but lives, the Undead under Nightmare Moon intervened, the third intervention of the vampires, and the Archenemy hadn’t launched another full assault since.

Celestia and Franz broke conversation when a pigeon landed on the stone railing with an onyx scarab in its beak.

“Ditto?” asked Franz.

The bird twitch-nodded.

“You’re late. Celestia, if you please.”

On a thought, Celestia’s horn flared with golden light. A shimmering veil closed around the three, a noise-light shield for their private discussion.

“My apologies, your highness,” said Ditto, shuffling off the rail with feathers burning away to his true form, “but the subject has found it difficult to accept our medium.”

Celesta sniggered. “Culture shock, I’m sure.”

Ditto pushed in the scarab’s head in as he put it on the floor. It’s wings popped open and its green jade interior projected a vaporous image between the three. Distortion settled, and buzzing noise tuned to a sighing voice.

“-it is. Ah, and there they are.”

The man on the other side was darkly handsome, with a face of high nobility. His accent was a thick drawl; Kislevite, perhaps, but more exotic. He laughed, “The wonders of the future. Do you all know me?”

“Vlad von Carstein,” said Celestia, glowering at him suspiciously. “First of the name, and current occupier of Drakenhof Castle.”

“Close enough.” Vlad turned to Franz. “You must be the Emperor in this day and age. I’ve read up on the histories while I was absent, and I must say, you do men like Wilhelm proud.” Vlad turned to Celestia and noticeably winced, ever so slightly. “And the pony princess… charmed.”

“What do you want, vampire?” Franz prompted tersely.

“I want what you want," Vlad responded without missing a beat. "For the Empire to stand, and the enemy destroyed.”

“And having the Supreme Patriarch removed moves toward that?”

Vlad raised a brow. "You refer to Balthazar Gelt, yes? What do you mean by 'removed'?"

"He gave up your name during interrogation." Franz's tone was flat, and uncompromising. "And he had a few choice words about how you attempted to meddle with the Bastion. And attempted to recruit him into being your thrall."

Vlad stared at him, his expression gradually settling into something of a resigned frown. "I hope you're not suggesting I taught him the dark arts, Karl Franz," he responded. "He is a man of some character; I doubt he would have even considered the offer if he hadn't taken up the books on his own. They held great knowledge, and he held great fear." Regret tinged his tone at the last.

"And your motivation?" Franz pressed. "Altruism? Saving him from that fear, or saving your kind from persecution for black magic in the bounds of the Empire?"

"For which the punishment is surely an ignominious death, so much so that only one's fleas would mourn them," Vlad finished. "Yes, believe it or not, that was one reason. You and I are alike in one way, Franz; we both detest waste. He chose to pursue his studies in Altdorf… but in the libraries and laboratory facilities of Drakenhof?" He allowed himself a rueful chuckle. "Perhaps we could have created something even greater than my father-in-law’s colossus."

Silence followed his remark. Celestia glanced sidelong at the Emperor, finding his features creased in a disapproving frown. She raised a hoof as if to take a step towards Vlad, only to stop when she noticed him flinch away from her, seemingly on instinct. Celestia gently returned her hoof to the floor, and cleared her throat.

"Speaking of great powers, and great magic… I couldn't help but notice, von Carstein, that just as your host arrived and joined battle at the Bastion, the sky became darkened by an eclipse."

Vlad had kept his eyes mostly on Franz as she spoke, but now, he afforded her a glance of his own. It was a knowing kind of look, accompanied by a slight, awkward tilting of the lips in amusement. He wasn't considering her; merely something that had relation to her.

"That wasn't a coincidence, was it?" she muttered darkly. "We'd heard rumors, before… and then, as Franz has told me, a certain name was on one of your first letters, in a place of honor by yours, no less. And I doubt you've any mage among you who can muster power that strong, least of all while maintaining your existing forces."

The vampire lord didn't reply, though his head shifted almost imperceptibly to the side. He was curious, and waiting for her to finish.

Celestia obliged him. "It's Nightmare Moon after all," she said, letting a hint of a seething rasp into her tone at the name. "And not merely helping you in spellcraft… but also, it seems, actively leading your legions of damned souls on the field."

Vlad's eyelids climbed up a fraction, and his lips parted, making him look caught between wanting to rebuke her or compliment her logic. "We don't--"

"I wanted to thank you, first of all," she pre-empted him. "For saving my sister. Indirect as it was. I don't know what force you hold over that daemon's head, but..."

He turned his head, and stared, more squinted, as though looking into the sun, at her. A bemused huff escaped his throat. "She's been helpful," he said simply. "And while I'd usually leave it at that, it's somewhat refreshing having her voice in my court, if only for the grief she causes for some of the more...traditionalist among my fellow Counts. That in and of itself is valuable, as well," he raised a palm, graying yet manicured fingers splayed, and laid it over his chest, "since I firmly believe that a war of this scale cannot be won by only following past habits."

Celestia knew a political segue when she heard one. Franz beat her to the punch, however, clearing his own throat.

“And the past is closer to you than us. It must be frustrating, waking up at home with the last thing you remember being falling from your greatest triumph at Altdorf’s walls, and being told it’s a new century. That your legacy is a novel memory as the court has moved on without you. As for your request for Sylvania's reintegration, if our silence wasn’t enough, let me say it, all stipulations are wholly rejected. Our existing alliance with the Dwarfs precludes any direct cooperation. The Karaz Ankor would end our millennial pact, and I feel the Book of Grudges is a more binding document than anything you and us could write.”

“Then we don’t have to agree on anything,” Vlad growled. The memories were still fresh, and there was the faintest flicker, or shift in his face to something not entirely human. “The Empire and Sylvania are co-belligerent in this war. That is reality, and the Dwarfs are too preoccupied with greenskins and Skaven to notice. Can you afford to make more enemies in these times? Or can you see the benefits?

“I have at my disposal a labor force of limitless number and inexhaustible stamina. Tell me, Franz, Celestia. I understand we disagree on the details, but what would you do with an army of automatons, tireless and utterly obedient? You build wonders, free your citizens from menial work and put them to greater things. We have limitless industrial potential, mines that run deep, and the labor to exploit it. Will you take the aid?”

Franz and Celestia exchanged looks.

“You will recall Nightmare Moon from the north, then your offer will be considered.” said Celestia. “Her presence will stir panic. It was not so very long ago she was active in the Empire's borders, as I've… recently discovered." Her face twisted, creasing in lines of disgust and revulsion. "We've heard word of her exploits, before, that I didn't want to believe were true."

Vlad quirked an eyebrow in her general direction, still trying to not quite look directly at Celestia. "And what might those be?"

"Child sacrifice, for one," she spat.

For a moment, the vampire lord's face remained impassive; but Celestia could see a frown tinging the corners of his expression. Vlad clicked his tongue thoughtfully, and sighed. "Archaic, barbaric, and a complete waste." He glanced upwards, staring at nothing. "Much better to let them grow, at least for their blood, and then only as needed… and failing that, become hardworking citizens of the realm; in life, or in death."

Celestia glowered at the vampire. "So, I suppose… you have your own problems to deal with, trying to bring so much together, yet having to turn a blind eye to everything else to make it happen."

Vlad sniffed, and bobbed his head in a nod. "Perhaps…" Then, his eyes lowered, looking back to the approximate space between her and Franz. "But we're not so different there, are we? Don't think I haven't heard plenty about you, O Goddess of the Sun." He said the last with unhidden derision. "Always trying to do the best for your own… seeking to protect them, give them a home, a purpose, even amongst humans, who might otherwise see you as little more than an exotic curiosity for a zoo."

"I love my people, and will do anything to see them live, and thrive," Celestia retorted in a terse, measured voice. "Even if that means allying myself with those who don't exactly share our ideals, and who some of us might claim as 'archaic' and 'barbaric' themselves."

Next to her, Franz awkwardly cleared his throat. “But we look past those differences, and know that we all stand on the side of order. Even Elves and Dwarves can put aside the War of Vengeance when a mutual foe approaches.”

Vlad, seeming to ignore him, looked fully at Celestia, with something akin to grudging respect in his gaze. "And you've thus sacrificed so, so much… all for this, a life of eternal war and hardship," he said. "Tell me… was it worth it?"

"It will be," she stated firmly. "You'll notice I didn't use the politically correct word, 'survive'. And while that may have been what we've done -- what we've had to do, these past years -- all you have to do is look around you, at the changing world, at the marvels that peace and cooperation between such different races as ours can bring to it. And, come the Storm, we will bring them down upon our enemies. I am fully intent on proving, not to you, or the Everchosen, or even the Gods, but to this world, that there is hope, and that it is worth fighting for."

Vlad clapped slowly. “I advise saving such words for mortals who might be more receptive to a good uplifting platitude, but we are in agreement. The tree that does not bend in the storm is uprooted and destroyed. We all must bend under this pressure, or shatter. On the subject of our… mutual acquaintance, I’ve orchestrated these interventions merely for your attention. Nightmare Moon will return, and, as a gesture of goodwill, I offer eight-thousand blades, arriving in Kubel in three days.”

Franz waved a hand. “You have your answer. Go.”

The image of Vlad laughed as it disintegrated, and Celestia released the light cone.

“We have agents in Sylvania who have seen their work,” Ditto piped up. “They’re mobilizing legions of the dead to work, and they have turned rock farming to a factory practice. I will not pretend to fully understand your culture, your majesties, but these are extreme circumstances.”

Celestia sighed and rubbed her temples. “The indignity of it all. It’s like a dog negotiating with its fleas.”

“Well, see it from the fleas’ point of view,” Franz chuckled. “If the dog dies, what will they do?”

The peace around sleeping village of Regensdorf was broken one night by a loud and rising buzz that seemed to draw closer. The night watchmen raised an alarm, stirring the residents to prepare for a raid. Yet as the sound faded into the distance, and no sign of attack was seen, the villagers remained on alert. They would not be caught unawares.

Queen Chrysalis felt Balthasar Gelt clinging to her. He was used to the saddle and harness of his loyal pegasus, Quicksilver. Now, the Changeling queen was carrying him like a babe while flying against the blackness of the night sky. Gelt risked a look down. Regensdorf was a small collection of lights among the black lake of dense woodland.

“Are we there, yet?” he asked for the third time. Chrysalis ignored him for the third time.

The air-sucking beat of her wings came to a sudden stop, and she held him closer, her four arms shielding him from debris as they glided down through the forest canopy. Branches broke against the Queen’s bulk and momentum, and she came to a running stop on the ground.

“We’ve arrived.” she said, setting him on his feet. Before Gelt could stretch his legs from the hour-long flight, Chrysalis knelt down, and blinded him with a camera flash. The Equestrian-made machine spat out a slip of paper that quickly developed to Gelt's likeness.

“I’ll need material from you. to make this work. Saliva, hair, nail clipping, what can you give?”

Rubbing his eyes, Gelt swooned, disillusioned. “I don’t deserve this, to keep going on. The nobles want me dead, and you said you’d give them what they wanted.”

“And they’ll get it. Balthasar Gelt must die for confidence in the Colleges of Magic to be restored. And, Gregor Seigel,” Chrysalis poked him in the chest, nearly knocking him off his feet, “will succeed where the Patriarch failed. Think of this as being born again. You’ve repented your crime wholeheartedly, now atone with a new name, and pay the Empire back. Give me a bit of yourself if you want to live.”

Gelt glanced down at the picture for a moment, then his eyes rose back to Chrysalis' own. "Do you truly believe you can fool them all so easily?" he asked.

The Queen's face darkened. "It worked well enough for you, O great Gold Wizard of Chamon."

His chin rose a fraction. "That was you?"

“Your Emperor was easy enough to mimic, especially given all the time I’ve observed him," she remarked, waving a claw dismissively.

"Fair point," Gelt murmured. "But you're talking about tricking the entire Empirenow, you realize."

"Is this concern, or academic curiosity I hear?" she riposted, a seething, yet amused arch to her tone. "I've been doing this for a long, long time. This is just another formula. We have an audience that wants to believe something. And we, that is to say, I, can give them exactly that. The larger the throng, the louder the cries for blood; until it drowns out even a fleeting interest in knowing the reality. They must be placated."

"And the Inquisitors?" he persisted. "They are not so easily…"

Chrysalis silenced him with a knowing smirk.

He huffed in bemusement. "I see." Gelt took the picture, and reached up to the ridge of his gold mask. "Good hunting, then… and thank you." With that, Gelt lifted his mask up, and spat on the picture.

Chrysalis could only look down on him, and never saw his face. She stuck the picture up on the nearest tree and ignited her horn in a boiling green glow. The tree began to creak and wilt, swelling at its base with green flames licking out of its cracks. It erupted like a bomb of splinters, and as the smoke cleared, a nude man collapsed out of the smoking ruins of the tree, dripping with sap. Chrysalis carelessly raised up his coughing head, twisting it left and right to study his features.

She nodded in approval. “You used to be a handsome man, Balthasar.”

Chrysalis changed form to her inquisitor’s disguise, and picked up the spluttering Gelt clone, holding his hands behind his back. “Hiding in a swamp, Gelt? Are you truly that desperate?”

The clone snarled, having found his breath, and thrashed uselessly as Chrysalis put cuffs on his wrists. “It’s too late, flesh-blister. The Bastion’s fallen, and the Empire will burn!”

“Silence, heretic! Gregor, gag him.”

Gelt noticed something squirming in his pocket, and fished out a strip of cloth. Before applying it, he stroked a gloved hand across his mask, turning its composition from gold to silver. It was making sense now. Before coming to the woods, Chrysalis had him discard his patriarchal robes for a laborer's grey burlap smock and sackcloth trousers. Combined with his mask, he looked like an executioner, sans the axe.

Chrysalis put the clone over her shoulder like a boar freshly caught. “Come, Gregor. We’ll find lodging in Regensdorf for the night; shouldn’t be too far from here. Time for this traitor to face justice.”

Whispering voices and emotional soulstuff passed over Rarity’s body of light. Fluttering images and the aftershocks of life grazed the soulform, giving her pangs of what their progenitors felt. The roiling mass of thoughts and feelings seemed to stretch into eternity, originating from peoples and species she’d never imagined.

She sifted through the vast information for some nuggets of usefulness, a past to take into account, or things to come. Despite the feelings trying to worm into her mind, she had to control her own flaring thoughts.

Predators swam the currents of the Warp, attracted to the energies of mortal minds. The trivial thoughts of layfolk were but sparks and beneath their notice, but the wizard, the warp-touched, glowed bright. While she worked, Rarity kept herself emotionally passive, shrouded by a veil of psychic dampening. Still, one entity was near.

A boiling dark purple cloud drifted nearby, bearing the outline of alicorn. It orbited listlessly, like a deep-sea creature conserving energy in the empty expanse, or perhaps basking in what miniscule energy leaked through the Rarity’s veil.

Rarity sifted through another thread of reality, teasing out a desert, rolling, unending, and… a burning stone sphynx. A Khemrian war construct alight with green flames. Skeletal warriors jumped out of its howdah and stood back as its rocky exterior sprouted purple fur, its eyes turned yellow, looking down with a lust for domination.

A crack of thunder broke Rarity’s concentration, and the thread dissolved into the sea of thoughts.

A storm was blossoming in the warp. Sounds of hate and slaughter echoed from it with ten thousand voices as it rippled and tore at the unspace. Predators emerged from the void, partaking in the energies of the murder making, and consuming the souls of the slain.

It caught the attention of the cloud nearest Rarity. It stared at the feeding frenzy, growling and drooling.

Don’t, Rarity thought, but feared to voice it. She considered abandoning the venture and returning to her body, but it took time to get in, and more to recover once returned. Just a couple more threads to make this worthwhile.

One of the next four was interesting, ships of tattered sails and scabby hulks drifted toward an island castle. The number of vessels was impressive, easily a battlefleet on a long campaign. The leader was laden with a rickety hellhammer cannon with ‘Queen Bess’ embossed on the barrel. They sailed toward the sunrise, headed east.

Another crack, much closer now, shook Rarity. Before she could look up, the storm was upon her. Iridescent clouds of impossible colors battered the veil, which only lasted a second before shattering.

The psychic screams of the battle washed over her like a hurricane of razor blades. Predators howled, snapping jaws at the morsels. One such beast came straight for her, a semifluid worm of meat and sinew, a million blinking eyes coated its body like glistening foam. As it opened its lamprey maw, Rarity saw her end, her mind to be snuffed out to feed the creature and body left a vegetative husk.

A shot of bright energy knocked it off course, and it vanished into the currents. The inky alicorn bit down on her arm and yanked her away from more of the massing predators.

Rarity struggled to concentrate, she couldn’t take her eyes off the amorphous mass of vicious tendrils and snapping mouths that chased the alicorn and the bright light it carried. She felt herself returning to flesh, the sound of her heartbeat, Spike’s voice nearby. Her body of light began to fade.

A lash of muscle and teeth reached her, severing her leg at the knee in a glassy shatter.

______________________________________________

“They’re still busy, but I think they’re near a breakthrough.” Spike said, and a goat-headed hybrid jotted down his words. “Take this to your master. They’re fully aware of the need for a report today, and they’re working diligently to deliver.”

The creature scribbled a bit more, and nodded to Spike, snorting and shuffling away.

Spike shut the door, returning to the meditation chamber. His breath misted in the sub-zero air, and his footsteps crunched on pure frost that encrusted every surface of the room. Rarity and Twilight Sparkle sat opposite each other, bone marrow claws holding hooves, and they both looked to the ceiling with blackened pits for eyes. They were surrounded by a frozen-over ritual circle. The candles had gone out when they took their dive into the empyrean, and Spike relit them with his own breath, casting the room in green light.

He sat to one side of them, watching their subtle movements. At first, he was reluctant to sit in on this episode of witchcraft. Magic was one thing, he knew of magic, but this seemed more sinister, and the stink of the less-refined warp magic was almost nauseating. He’d also had to delay talks with Orgon Styrbjorn about his future place in the Goromandy. But that could wait for a while at least, since his lady needed him.

The first sign that the bond between Twilight and Rarity was over was Rarity suddenly letting go of Twilight’s hooves. In the time it took Spike to blink, they were repulsed in opposite directions by some unseen force. Spike leapt into action, collected his shield and sword, and made ready for whatever might have come back with them.

The distortion in realspace abruptly expired, letting bounce on the ground an eye the size of a golf ball, and six human teeth.

Spike sighed in relief and moved to help Rarity, as Twilight was already getting up. The sorcerer was still on the floor, moaning and holding her left knee. He helped her sit up, and asked what was wrong. Her leg didn’t appear to have anything amiss.

Twilight didn’t know why her presence was demanded for the report. Rarity could speak well enough and was a salespony once, so she was familiar with compiling documentation of sales.

Weakly, Rarity related her findings. The ghost ships, the burning sphynx, and the battle-storm of Marienburg.

“And last, Marienburg burns,” she said weakly, leaning on a crutch, papers in the other hand. “The Imperial Navy is scattered, but they inflicted significant losses on Spume’s fleet. I’d like to return to the derelict fleet. They may be indicative of retribution in the future. One of the ships had a most tremendous cannon called Queen Bess. Does the name strike with anypony? Lord Horstmann?”

Horstmann nodded. “Luthor Harkon’s prized weapon. He’s had many a run-in with the Skeggi in Lustria. Perhaps he comes to plunder the Old World while it burns. Lot of good that will do him.”

“It will do him good,” Archaon growled. He shifted in his throne, glancing up at Horstmann. “He’s a creature of many minds, and seeks artifacts to heal himself. However unlikely he may acquire them, there are artifacts abound in Altdorf’s underground vaults, including a book of Nagash, and his crown. The von Carsteins must be ingratiating themselves with the Empire for access as well. Rarity, you and Spike will send a message to Spume to accelerate his plans. I want him in Scheinfeld in five days, heavy equipment or no, and provide copies of your findings to the Cabal.

Rarity bowed as far as her support would allow her. “Yes, lord.”

“Then you are all dismissed, but Sparkle, a word.”

Horstmann and Rarity left with Spike in tow, discussing the implications of soul-injury in the Warp, and how long it might take for the mind to regrow into the flesh.

Archaon moved to look out a window, beckoning Twilight to join him. “You fear for her safety.”

“It was close. And I know why the monsters' predators wanted her. She’s… intoxicating.”

Far below, a million tiny figures went about their daily duties and routines. Drilling, training up new recruits, seamstresses repaired tents and clothes, blacksmiths repaired and forged new and old weapons, and warriors conversed and joked over bowls of gruel around fire pits.

“What is your understanding of the governance of an army?” asked Archaon.

“My time under Celestia’s wing taught me that statecraft and ruling a kingdom is far more complex than most can imagine. It must be like the intricacies of a national economy, all the different industries and people working in seemingly unrelated concert to make the whole function.”

“Then she’s taught you well. A war needs tools at every level, and Rarity is one such tool. Communications, intelligence, the magically possessed are valuable assets and should be protected, as you’ve done. And they must be allowed the time necessary to recover from their work when time can be afforded. But there are always risks, and what Rarity suffered was getting off lightly. Do you understand?”

Twilight’s ears pinned down. “I do, sir.”

“There are good warriors I’ve lost I would have given much else to save. I bought the Slayer of Kings with the life of Ograx the Great, so brave he lifted the finger of Krakanrok the Black to retrieve the sword. But then the daemon in the blade screamed, Krakanrok stirred, and it had to be slaked with his royal blood to save the rest of us. Look there.”

Archaon pointed to Fluttershy, held in scaffolding and being tended to by hundreds of scurrying ratmen. Her repairs looked to be nearly done.

“I’ve learned of the pain she’s suffered to protect you. Know, one day even her strength will fail, and none will be able to save her, be it this war, or the next, or in a thousand years. Until then, I intend to use her to the full extent of her abilities. I feel service with the Blood Pact would be most productive. They’re up and coming, and show good promise.”

He glanced at Twilight for the first time since the meeting began. “You’re dismissed.”

Twilight bowed as Archaon strode away. She looked back out the window, watching the tiny people working. A column of joggers was snaking through alleys and gaps between tents. At the head was an ugly man-creature, and second was an unmistakable pony of many colors.

Hargo’s training regimen didn’t seem to run on days, but by ‘can’t see to can’t see’. Rainbow Dash thought the man ran on pure spite. Deep into Retraining, Rainbow felt she’d missed too much. She was itching to get out from under him, back to the Company.

The morning run took them on a three mile run for the humans, and five for the ponies. Rainbow Dash’s athletic history gave her a marked advantage, but Hargo was certainly insane. Once the humans were done, Hargo kept going with the ponies. He didn’t seem to pant or gasp, hell, Rainbow Dash couldn’t hear him breathe despite being right behind him.

“Last leg, scalps! On the right. Find an instructor and get shooting.”

A firing range was set up on the camp’s edge with the humans already taking their shots. In line for a weapon, Rainbow Dash walked in place to come down from the run, her hooves feeling ready to crack.

That was no workout, that was a bucking death march.

Early in the detail, a jokester who took to the name Snake started giving everyone in R-detail nicknames. At first no one went along with it, until it was found useful to not exactly know each other by name once the detail was over. Everyone wanted to just go back to their tribe or unit. The boy before Rainbow in line was ‘The Mountain’, a scrawny lad barely old enough to shave.

“Next!”

Mountain quickly fiddled with his weapon as soon as it was in his hands, expertly working the revolving drum and hammer for the feel.

“Next!”

Rainbow took her weapon, a griffon-made rifle, exquisitely machined, and inscribed with chicken scratch of kill tallies on the butt.

“Lane twelve,” the handler grumbled, pushing her on.

Rainbow found and settled into her spot. Every part of her ached, her mind was almost numb with exhaustion. She shouldered the rifle, wingtip caressing the trigger. She inhaled, feeling the cold, dry burn in her overworked lungs, and pulled the trigger.

The drill ended after some twenty minutes. Shot after shot she readjusted and compensated for previous off-mark hits. R-detail lined up for score evaluation, hoping to hear the magic passing score of sixty-eight after their name.

“Jurten Voss, sixty-four, Whispy Winter, seventy. Indolaf Skarsenson, eighty. Rainbow Dash, eighty-six…”

Rainbow let out a breath she didn't know she was holding, and fought off a rush of lightheadedness.

Hargo stopped before The Mountain. “Explain this.”

“Sir?”

“This.” Hargo pointed to the his score. “One hundred and six? Impossible. Who did you bribe? Who was your instructor?”

“I didn’t cheat, sir. The scale goes to a hundred and twenty-”

“Then how did you manage it, soft little beanpole like you?”

Rainbow glanced down the line at Mountain. Maybe he’d shot before, hunting experience. But the boy hesitated and swallowed.

“Luck, sir?”

Hargo responded with a baton to the sternum, and continued his assault as he went down. Some members of the detail winced, but kept their silence.

“Feeling lucky now, scalp? Luck’ll get you free of me?”

“Hey!”

Hargo paused, white-knuckling the blood-stained baton in the air over The Mountain. Rainbow Dash had broken rank and was staring him down furiously.

“You’re way too happy with that stick. What kind of idiot punishes someone for getting it right?”

Hargo straightened up, and marched toward Rainbow Dash. She stood her ground and inclined her head to the sky. “That’s right. I spoke out of line. Dish out punishments to people who actually deserve it.”

Hargo stopped, sighed, and hooked the baton back onto his belt. She was taking the sport out of it.

"Get back in line, and someone pick this shit-stain off the floor."

Chapter 1: Glow on the Horizon

Author's Note

I am in great need of an editor to help with upcoming chapters. If you like this, please PM me if you're able to commit to this long term effort.

Chapter 1: Glow on the Horizon

The sun had set on the town of Ponyville though its light still shone on the horizon. The moon had risen, its glow dulled by the light still possessing the sky.

The Golden Oaks' librarian paced nervously around the bust at the center of the ground floor, her mind operating at maximum speed. "Mmh! Why hasn't the princess responded to my letter yet?!”

With a deep yawn, a tired baby dragon rolled around in his bed basket to silence the chatterbox. "I sent the letter only like, six minutes ago. Give her time to at least read it, and get some sleep; you're going to pace another rut in the floor if you keep that up."

Twilight wasn't impressed. "But how often does this happen? Once a decade, a century?" She pressed her face to the north window, glaring at the edge of the earth and sky. "Why in Equestria would Princess Celestia not lower the sun all the way? I can still see the light but not the sun."

Spike was just trying to come up with an answer to end the conversation. "Then it's a party with a lot of lights! Look, we have stuff to do tomorrow and we're gonna need the sleep, at least I will." He twisted back and drew the covers over his head.

Twilight surrendered, heaving a frustrated sigh and went straight upstairs to bed. Yet even as she lay amongst the comfortable sheets, she couldn’t help but turn over and gaze out the window to inspect the light once more. It seemed to flicker with subtle, yet great power, like a mystical flame. Eventually, the needs of her body won out over her curiosity and she slipped into slumber.

All through the night, she had sporadic dreams of creatures with warped and twisted visages. Their parts were cobbled together on their bodies with the blundering and graceless hands of a child. Most of them were standing on only two legs, waving their upper limbs through the air. Howling, screaming and performing macabre, outlandish rituals, obscured by a shifting, eerie haze.

The epicenter of the congregation was the largest being among them. It was covered in coal black metal plates trimmed in crimson, with spikes on almost every surface. The horns sprouting from its head looped upward, reminding Twilight of a minotaur. It proceeded to mount an exceptionally large stallion of some kind which bellowed unnatural sounds all the while. From the metal plate across its face, a single massive spike protruded from its forehead.

Once the biped was on, it hoisted up a banner with a large circle on the end and thrust it to the sky. Eight arrows stretched from its center in radial directions. The stallion then reeled on its hind legs and let out a thunderous roar. The metal spike began to glow a dark pink and both rider and horse burst into purple flames. The shouting of the spectators grew louder, their ragdoll-like dances intensified into grand seizures.

That morning, Twilight woke up in a cold sweat. Her horn was aching for no perceivable reason and she put a hoof to her forehead. "Boy... what a nightmare." she murmured to herself. The light pouring through the window was irritatingly bright for what should be early morning.

She noticed Spike’s bed was empty. In it was a note. Tried to wake you. Gave up. Went on errands.

It was good that he was being responsible, going without Twilight having to, but it was strange. He’s gone already? What time is it? she thought. Groggily walking out onto the balcony, Twilight looked up and saw the sun was almost directly overhead. "Shoot! It's that late!" she yelled.

By that time she'd already missed a few appointments; helping Pinkie take inventory of ingredients at Sugarcube Corner (she was glad she hadn't Pinkie Promised), and sending Rainbow Dash the newest book of Daring-Do which was finally in stock. Before she could go over the list of disappointments in her head, two ponies ran past down below as if to something very important. Behind them, a family of three was walking, the smallest with one of its legs in a splint. All had some injury and looked miserable and fearful.

"Excuse me! Where are you going?" Twilight called out from the balcony.

“Anywhere!” the father answered hastily. “It’s not safe here! Run while you can!”

“Why? What’s coming?”

The pony looked up to her, and Twilight’s eyes widened a bit at the expression of pure fear and despair on his half burnt face.

“Chaos!”

A great throng had gathered in the town square, surrounding a large covered cart with a cloaked colt standing atop it. His red robe was tied around him in twisting, barbed chains. His fur was ragged, patches of skin were exposed and chunks of meat were missing from his head. He bellowed loud and clear, madly, and ignored some of the denizens’ offers of medical or mental help.

“Can you not see the stream of refugees coming through here?” he shouted. “This place is next to feel the maw of chaos swallow it and none will be left alive! Give yourselves to the gods and be saved! Resist, and your souls will be damned!”

A tan mare with grey mane and reading glasses stepped forward. “This is an unauthorized event you’re holding here! Even that showmare Trixie had to get a permit!”

“Permits!” the madpony mocked. “What is law in the presence of chaos? Introduce just a little anarchy, do something that isn’t according to plan, and everypony will lose their head!” He laughed wildly. “What will you do if I don’t leave? What security or coercion can you bring before I am done? Listen here, and you may live once he comes to claim this place.”

“And who is—”

The mayor was interrupted as he resumed his diatribe. She angrily trotted off to request at least some means of dealing with the unlawful from Canterlot.

Twilight wormed her way into the crowd, just as disturbed by the strange sermon. A hideous stench assaulted her nose, emanating from the wagon. It smelled like a mound of rotting... something. Not fruit, she knew that smell, but this was far more foul. The mad pony preached on, slowly pacing back and forth atop the lumpy cart.

“Surrender to the dark lords and they will bestow upon you unimaginable gifts! Serve the prince of decadence and every sensation, every feeling you experience will be augmented a thousand fold! Your abilities in painting, music, handicraft, all will be unparalleled”.

“Bow to Khorne and you will defeat all enemies! Upon you, martial skill and strength beyond any non-believer warrior will be bestowed. You shall never be trifled with and you will be able to protect all that you cherish. Disease will become unknown to you. No ailment or sickness can touch you when you worship the all-loving Nurgle, the Plague Lord. Accept his invitation to join his family, and grandfather Nurgle will extend his loving grace to you as well.” He scanned over the audience, all looking on with revulsion and fear.

“Perhaps a few of you desire knowledge...”

Twilight’s ears perked up.

“Or power, though I worship the four, one stands out as closest to me.” He undid his cloak and removed it. A far more hideous creature stood there now. A second face opened its eyes on his chest, twisted like a foal set loose upon clay. His heart was visible in the face’s mouth. Several bones stuck out from his joints, winding like animalistic horns and his hind legs were backward-arched like a bird of prey, rending talons in place instead of hooves.

The throng shared a gasp of horror. Some fled in fear and a couple of lighthearted mares fainted.

“Do you see the brilliance of Tzeentch?” he said with a soul-rending grin as he cracked his head upside down. “Let him twist and reforge your body to his design!” The perched unicorn jumped down, the crowd giving him a wide berth. “This is his gift to us, look!” He held up a gnarled foreleg. The skin peeled back and out grew a serrated, lance like bone, dripping in black fluids. “Who needs weapons when the gods make you one?”

More fled at the sight of the weapon, more were disgusted. Twilight’s view was constantly obstructed by the congregation’s shifting heads. She had no idea about the freak that was slowly making his way through the crowd, parting them with his appearance like the Red Sea. The ponies separated, leaving Twilight and him glaring at one another, one in disbelief and terror, the other in cruel glee that he had found a volunteer.

He launched forward in a blur of motion; before Twilight could take even two steps back, a bladed leg was pressed to her face. The tip rested at the edge of her nose, the tiny pressure already drawing a drop of blood. He glared with burning red eyes, a depraved and gleeful madness about him. She didn’t dare to move lest he thrust the cruel blade forward.

“Another corpse for the cart.”

Twilight’s heart sank like lead. Other ponies pulled away the cover of the reeking cart and gasped at the horror within. Piled and stacked three meters high in interlocking, interwoven masses were dozens of broken corpses, festering with fat, oozing maggots. A fog of disturbed flies exploded from the wagon, their droning buzz seemed to vibrate the air.

The mutilated body of a filly fell out, its carved up orange coat peeled back like a banana down to its haunches. A fat fuzzy fly walked across the dusty gray of her unblinking eye that was sewn open and looking out with horror at something only she could see.

“Feed on them, oh lovely worms!” the mad pony screeched. He paused a moment, like he was hearing something no one else could. A frightened and regretful look cast on the purple unicorn before him. He took his blade away like she would destroy him at a glance. “Agrammon,” he whispered, and instantly lunged at Twilight in savage fury.

His normal hoof assailed her mercillesly, with a strength beyond that even of an earthpony. The cart was the last straw and the crowd quickly converged on him, tearing him from Twilight who was by then bludgeoned unconscious.

He cackled at the top of his lungs as the angry ponies dragged him away. “My duty is done! I come for my reward, oh changer of ways!” He wrestled his bladed hoof free of the crowd and dragged it hard across his own throat.

Chapter 3: Liber Chaotica

The stink was back, stronger now. It was familiar and made Twilight remember the cart, the madpony, and his berserk and sudden attack on her.

Waking up was sudden and before she even knew what was going on, she was sitting upright on a wooden floor. Little stains dotted the space with large flies zipping around them. She patted herself down, hoping to find that everything was still in the right place. She still had her lavender-colored fur, and her hind legs were firmly attached, but her horn felt very cold. She reached up to touch it, when the floor suddenly jerked up and crashed down again. Twilight slammed into a wall with a dull thud. When she opened her eyes, she took a better look around. High sides lined the space, smooth and pitch black. It was dark inside, but there was a slit at one wall. She went up to the hole, peeked out and saw two ponies pulling the box she was in down a moonlit path.

“Hey! Hey, you guys! What’s going on?” Twilight whispered loudly, but winced when a sharp banging noise rang out.

“Quiet in there!“ an otherworldly voice yelled, the sound resonating ominously in the space. Twilight jumped back, scanning the ceiling but saw nothing, deciding it must have come from outside.

Going back to the space in the wall, Twilight looked again down the path they were traveling. The flora appeared distorted, twisted and waving at awkward, unnatural angles and directions. There appeared to be a clearing up ahead through the light fog with what looked like several small lights drifting in the air. The hauling ponies proceeded slowly, no doubt under great strain from the load of a cart much larger than them.

“The Dark Gods speak, and I respond in kind,” the voice said in the silence of the night, surprisingly calm and subservient. A black rope lashed out from above and struck the right pony in the flank, producing a sickening crack. He grunted and flinched as drops of blood trickled from the wound. Both ponies picked up the pace.

’Dark Gods...?’ Twilight thought. ‘He works for them? Oh, no no no no no no.’

She started looking around desperately for some avenue of escape and made her way to the opposite end of the space, pushing against the doors. At first they didn’t budge, so she started throwing her weight at them to break them open. The loud banging alerted the cruel voice.

“I said quiet!” it shouted shrilly. Twilight didn’t let up, believing just a couple more slams ought to get it open and she’d run. She didn’t know where she’d go, but anywhere to ‘postpone’ the Gods’ plans seemed worth it. “Enough!” the voice yelled, producing a ghostly echo.

The cell heaved to a halt and Twilight was thrown back from the doors by the force. Chains from the harnesses on the towing ponies rattled for a while after. There was a loud thump and the sound of rustling grass. Twilight followed the position where the sound seemed to be coming from through the walls, breathing heavily from her bombardment of the doors. The sound of chains and a lock at the back gave her an idea.

‘As soon as he opens the door, I’ll bolt. Even if I have to jump off its face I’m getting out of here,’ Twilight thought. A grinding, metallic snap and the end of the incessant noise was her cue. From the front she began running to the back, then sprinting. “Don’t stop, don’t look back and keep running...” she repeated to herself as the doors flew open.

The tall figure standing in the opening was blackened from the bright moonlight glare. Just as Twilight jumped from the back edge of the cell and saw the path behind the figure, she felt her flight arrested sharply, and a great pressure on her neck. The pressure increased to be very painful and she found herself dangling by her neck, struggling for breath, legs still scrambling in a running motion.

Twilight managed to stop her legs and look down at the figure, now easier to see with its face glaring up. Its face was shrouded as its head was wrapped in a worn brown hood and a bandana-like cloth of the same color over its mouth. It had long fingernails, digging into her neck, nearly drawing blood. Spiky, black torches, levitating at its sides were bound to it by chains. A book with an eight-pointed star embroidered on the cover hung from its neck by a chain-link leash and rolls of paper, written all over in a strange language flowed over its shoulders and wound around its arms, growing short, onyx-like horns and shards.

Lowering Twilight down to eye level, the masked figure began pulling down the cloth covering its mouth. A maw of jagged wooden splinters opened and a light slowly grew from within. Noticing her choking, it grasped her with both hands on her body and pulled her face closer to his. The wooden teeth started bending outward, toward her. Twilight was struggling to get free, even pounding the abductor’s arms at angles that snapped and buckled at the impacts but she felt herself slowing down and uncontrollably letting up as the light brightened. Her limbs grew numb and finally lost feeling. Its face seemed to be getting even closer now and despite the numbness, Twilight managed to turn around to see her own face, lifeless and drifting away with a white ethereal smoke streaming from it.

The figure paused and its features retracted to what could barely be called normal. It jerked its head up, as if searching the sky for an invisible threat. The night was still and silent; there was nothing spying on them but the deformed vegetation. From Twilight’s view, she collided with her limp body and was thrown back into the cell by her captor.

“Very well.” It spoke with a reluctant, yet servile tone.

It slammed the doors shut and reapplied the chains and lock. Twilight felt chilled to the bone and curled up into a quivering ball, her sanity dangling by a thread from shock and fear. The cart rocked as the figure ascended the cell. Another loud thwack, grunt and lurch forward indicated motion again.

As the carriage came closer to the light-littered clearing and Twilight finally organized her gnawing thoughts by urgency of assessment, she could begin to hear the sound of crying, screaming, chanting and ghostly howls and moans. The lamentations soon became ubiquitous, sounding diverse in age, young and old. The cell lurched to a halt again.

Once more, a thump, rustling grass and the tumblers of a lock. Twilight scuttled for the furthest corner of the cell from the door, fearing another wrenching experience. The final snap of the lock, the unraveling of chains made her wish for the most obvious but unlikely, to simply disappear.

Twilight paused for a moment, then facehoofed. ’Of course; why not just do that?’

She tried focusing energy through her horn for a teleportation spell, but the chilly feeling on her forehead intensified to being painfully icy, and nothing happened. The figure had, at this point, entered the cell and took her up by the mane, dragging her out kicking and shouting in pain from the rough handling. It threw her out of the cell, hurriedly re-scaled it and drove off.

When Twilight opened her eyes from the impact to the ground, she noticed several tents, dozens, hundreds, as her head swiveled in amazement. This reaction quickly died as new horrors came to view. All around were terrible amalgamations as one only saw in nightmares. Guillotines, hellish devices, and crimson-soaked blocks with axes lodged in littered the area - many of which were being prepared for use by horrid creatures. Shrunken, dried heads and skulls of all manners of creatures were mounted on the surrounding tents. Twilight looked aghast as her fellow Equestrians were held in cages, gibbets, pens, and, thankfully, and blood trickled from the feet of iron maidens.

Beings of motley appearance inhabited most of the camp. Many had several mounts, eyeballs dotting their bodies, horns growing in unnatural places, and their flesh contorted and twisted to look like they were sculpted by the blind, in a dark room, with a dull knife, out of a block of swiss cheese.

However, the dominant creatures were almost all alike in form, walking tall on two legs and carrying things in weird multi-jointed appendages, who varied in general appearance. They all dressed as warriors, but few were uniformed.

Those apparently on the lowest rungs of their hierarchy had a lot of bare skin and random metal plate armor; those looked to perform the more menial tasks, from sacrifices to maintaining the camp, and always obeying the bigger, more frighteningly decorated ones - these were clad in full-body armor suits. Their standard garb seemed to be red, blue, green-rusty and leaking fluids from every crack, and pink, elaborately decorated, but they all deferred to those dressed in black and trimmed in bronze. The eight-pointed star was everywhere, engraved on armor, tattooed on flesh, branded on ponies, and hanging from every tent-side. The frozen sensation held, apparently now suppressing the sight of the stars rather than the failed teleportation spell.

One such hulking soldier approached Twilight. It stood over her, both glaring at each other. It looked a lot like the epicenter figure in the nightmare two nights before, but smaller in stature and the horns on its helmet looped around the front instead of over its head. Her mind screamed at her to run, to get away, but she was rooted in place by fear. The tall figure reached for a sheath at its belt, and with a steely rasp, withdrew a long, serrated sword, lined with rending iron teeth.

Twilight’s eyes widened even further and she shot up on all fours - but the figure did not move to strike her, instead pointing the blade toward the back of a procession of ponies leading before a large tent. Guessing the being’s request, she gave a fearful nod and turned around, gingerly walking to the back of the line.

She yelped in surprise as a rough kick from the armored figure nearly sent her to the ground once more. For good measure, the warrior shouted at her in a guttural, incomprehensible tongue, and Twilight immediately picked up the pace, wincing over her stinging rear.

The line moved in a predictable pattern. From the back it was too difficult to hear, but there would be a couple distinct yells, a murmur, and the line would move forward again.

As time went on, curiosity broke Twilight’s silence. “Uh, excuse me.” she asked the pony in front of her. “What does this line lead to? Why is everypony here?”

He had brown fur, an hourglass cutiemark, and spoke in a light Trottingham accent. He turned his head to answer, keeping to a barely audible whisper. “They’re looking for somepony. It’s the only reason they’re sparing us for now. They think one of us is something they keep calling the ‘Fourth Trea-’”

His mane suddenly parted down the center of his head, even the underlying flesh splitting open, exposing his bare skull, and teeth lining the sides of the fissure. The cavity somehow screeched lightly, and he in turn grunted in pain. Twilight recoiled back in shock.

“Oh my gosh! What is that?” she asked, barely keeping her voice down.

He managed to recompose himself, but was still twitchy. “I…I think it’s just daemonic possession. Nothing I haven’t faced before. I am surprised, though, to see humans again after being here for so long.” Twilight blinked in confusion, but chose not to question him about what ‘humans’ were for now.

“Are you going to be ok?” she inquired, trying in vain not to stare at the slowly closing crevice.

“Yes, I think so.” he responded, “But uh, I don’t think it likes the conversation. Something else?”

Twilight started, then cleared her throat sheepishly, taking her focus away from his head to look him in the eyes. “Uh... well, who are these guys?”

“I’ve seen them before, on one of my exploits to the Old World.” The brown pony answered. “They’re the Hordes of Chaos. Kind of reminds me of that Discord fellow that messed with your town a while back. Their ultimate goal is to bring about the End Times; the unmitigated rule of their gods over all creation. Their leader, the Everchosen, is considered the will of the gods made manifest. He lost one of six artif-“ He winced as his mane began to shift and crackle, “Lost…something very important for him to do his job, and evidently thinks he can find a new one here.”

“Wait, so Artichoke is somewhere here!?” Twilight quaked.

“Shh, it’s Archaon.” The brown pony corrected her, “I actually had the displeasure of seeing him before his coronation. H-How do you know his name?”

Twilight cringed at the question. “Uh, I…heard the soldiers talking about him.”

“Oh; that’s not good for them. In both the Empire and the Wastes, saying his name without rank is tantamount to blasphemy. Sorry, but I feel I need to ask; what’s that on your horn?”

“What?” Twilight asked, dumbfounded.

“Well, that right there...” He reached up to touch her horn and as soon as he made contact, at what sounded like the clink of a hoof to metal, he froze in place, pupils dilated to black saucers and the beast inhabiting his head freaked out.

His skin split open again, much wider and deeper, fracturing his entire skull in half, both sides waving up and down while a ghastly shriek emitted from his shattered larynx. Veins and muscles spasmed and swiped between the halves of his head. Several adjacent ponies in line were repulsed by the sight. Many wore expressions of terror and others tried to flee but were forced back by the soldiers. Twilight was also rendered immobile by this event but could fully see the freak show before her and was overwhelmed with fright.

The surrounding Chaos troops took action and separated them. The earth pony’s head snapped back shut, and he yelled out, flabbergasted, “What the bloody hell was that!?”

“I-I-I don’t know!” Twilight shouted, shaking her head in confusion.

Two soldiers stepped forward before he could say more, black steel gauntlets clamping around his body as they proceeded to drag the colt away from the line despite his protests, muttering to one another in their dark language.

”Exorcise the daemon, we will need an unoccupied sacrifice.”

Twilight was thrown ahead, behind the next pony from the back.

It was impossible to make sense of the incident, or why she wasn’t taken away also but Twilight knew she was linked to all that happened - especially after remembering the gathering of the four leviathans.

The prevailing voice directing the line soon became understandable as the distance closed. It would ask for a name, do something that produced various glows of light and decide where they went. Labor, Khorne, Nurgle, Tzeentch, Slaanesh, Undivided, or the pit.

Twilight was now close enough to the front to see the figure heading the categorization. It wore a black full-body robe and hood and carried a large book, passing a finger across each page as if reading it. Textual scrolls rolled from broaches on its neck and a luminous blue haze steamed from under the hood, obscuring its face - if it even had one.

For some reason, there was a chaos warrior in line carrying a familiar yellow pegasus in bonds. When it was its turn, it approached the reading arbiter.

“Name.” It asked throatily.

“F-F-Flutt…” The pegasus’ voice became more raspy and high-pitched until she broke down crying.

”Despair only when death comes for you!” The warrior declared.

It plunged her head into the book to silence her. The stiff pages turned a bright red and instantly melted into a viscous fluid, kept from flowing off the book by apparently magical forces. The pegasus’ struggle only intensified, having her nose and mouth submerged. After some time her resistance was allayed and she appeared to pass out from suffocation, giving a final twitch of a hind leg. The warrior lifted her head off the book and the pages solidified.

The librarian was still passing his hand across the pages as if nothing had happened. The pegasus’ face was soaked red, wide-eyed as if having seen an unspeakable horror, mouth agape. Seeping in anywhere it could, the fluid entered her head around her eyes, into her mouth, and nose. Twilight remembered how Khorne’s drink acted the same way, flowing against gravity.

“I think you know where to take it,” said the librarian. The warrior trudged off, carrying the stupefied mare.

Time went on, the line kept moving, and finally it was Twilight’s turn. She stood before the librarian who, from that angle, clearly had no head, let alone a face; just a blue mist flowing under the hood. It kept reading, not even looking at her.

“Name.” it asked.

“Uh…” she feared what the librarian’s reaction would be. “Twilight Sparkle?”

The librarian’s finger halted over the book. Its hood twisted in her direction and it slammed the tome shut, throwing a cloud of dust from the pages. At the same time, some distance away, a guillotine blade slammed down and near it, shouts of confusion and anger were heard.

“Where did the brown one go!? Find him! The sacrifice must be completed!”

“Follow.” The librarian instructed.

It pivoted around and glided into the massive yurt structure. Two armor-clad warriors moved to Twilight’s sides and pushed her forward and up the platform to the entrance. She squealed in fear as to what she might see inside, pushing back fruitlessly against the force of the armored wall behind her. She clenched her eyes shut as she passed through the entrance flaps. The flaps seemed alive as they caressed her body in an almost pleasurable fashion, reminiscent of Slaanesh’s gift of renewed control. Once the sensation was over, she noticed the air churning and blowing unnaturally. There was a sound like a heap of steel shifting.

“Have your draconian ways finally borne results, librarian?" a low, mighty voice said.

“Have faith, lord, for I may have something.” another voice, similar to the librarian’s said in return.

Twilight couldn’t parse out a word of the strange language and, hearing no aggression, opened her eyes. The yurt was larger on the inside than it appeared outside. Oversized weapons and masks of a strange nature hung on the walls, which were oscillating inward and outward like lungs. Miscellaneous items, treasures, weapons, chests, armor, and skulls were flotsam about the space. Three large figures sat around a table with a map of Equestria on it and small flames in the northern areas. They glared back at her. She was disturbed by the strange nature of the yurt and staring masks, many looking like real faces.

“Bring it before me, that I can make judgment.” The other voice ordered.

Twilight could barely contain her anxiety as the librarian lifted an arm toward her at the iron man’s words and started battering the warriors behind her with her hooves, trying to get between them and escape. Despite the rattling and echoing of their armor at the purple mare’s blows, they stood unphased, blocking the exit. She felt an upward pulling motion on her coat that quickly got stronger until she was airborne and floating toward the table, seating the steel figure on the other side. Twilight continued to kick and flail about, squeaking in fear but trying to avoid screaming, to counter the levitation but to no avail. The librarian lowered his arm and she fell to the floor just before the table, shaking the fixtures from the crash.

“Leave us.” It said, its voice vibrating Twilight to the bone.

The warriors, librarian, and those also at the table stood up and silently marched out the back way, carrying off what they apparently brought in. She was tempted to say ‘Please don’t leave me alone with him,’ but feared a backlash. Both exits showed large hallways and other rooms, defying the external size of the yurt and sealed shut into a seamless wall following their leave.

Twilight remained tensed up with anxiety as the table began sinking into the wood floor. As it sank, her view of him was no longer obscured. He appeared exactly as in the nightmare; great in stature, wearing pitch-black armor, embroidered in red, a chainmail coat underneath. A third, glassy eye beamed from the forehead of his helmet and the omnipresent eight-pointed star hung on a necklace around his neck. Flowing behind him, a great, dark purple mantle hung down to the ground. His helmet was iconic. Two beady little yellow lights glowed from the eye holes and the horns, like tusks of an elephant, arched upward.

The instant the table had completely disappeared into the ground, he quickly leaned forward, bringing his face closer to hers. She cocked her head back, not wanting to be so close, staring into his luminous, unblinking eyes. They maintained a long silence, each second to Twilight seeming like an eternity spent in fretfulness.

“Norse?” he said suddenly, the wind of his voice blowing her mane back. She recovered from the blast and looked at him quietly in confusion. “Bretonnie?” he said again.

Twilight’s confused expression remained, not knowing what he was saying.

“Kislevite?…Hochgotik?...Guótài?” he said, one after another. She still couldn’t understand and afraid he’d do something if she didn’t answer, had to say something.

“I-I’m sorry, I don’t understand.”

“Ah; Low Gothic, then. I would have expected a more noble tongue from one who could even be a possibility.” he said, easing himself back into his iron throne. “And you’re the first of your kind I’ve seen with one of these.” he reached out an arm toward her. She backed up at the nearing gauntlet. “Come here that I can see.” He ordered, his eyes turning red and the soft breeze about him intensifying.

A hundred voices whispered in Twilight’s head, just below her ability to hear it. They were unintelligible but somehow induced a feeling of reassurance and calmness. She reluctantly stepped forward and the wind died down. He touched the sides of her horn and examined the object around it.

“A collar of Khorne,” he mused, “Negates the power of magic. One so small would usually be used on developing flesh hounds. Why would you be wearing one and not the others?“

“I woke up with it in a cart, I guess.” Twilight answered. “It made somepony... he said he was ‘possessed’, or something; his head split open and he freaked out!” she spun her eyes in different directions to simulate the motion.

He winced at her statement, and clenched his hand on the arm of his seat. Twilight saw the tense reaction and wondered if she’d said something wrong. A moment later, a warrior and a shorter, decrepit creature, vaguely shaped like the other two came in through an emerging split in the wall. The warrior stood by him at attention.

”Stuntak has found him. Keep your eyes out for him; and slave, show her to her quarters...” the seated superior said.

“Ja, Herre Archaon.” the warrior acknowledged in his native tongue, nodding his head. He exited through the front, the wall opening and sealing behind him.

Twilight was startled at the sounding of ‘Archaon’ as she assumed ‘ja’ to be ‘yes’. “Y-you’re the one they told me about!” she exclaimed, scuttling back.

Archaon raised a brow under his helm and asked, “Who are they?” he held his hand out to stop the squirrely thing from taking her away.

The whispers grew to speaking chatter, placating her again, “One was, uh... red, really angry, yelling all the time, and obsessed with this red drink of his. The pinkish one, I don’t know how to describe him but just perfect in every way like you wouldn’t believe.” she caught herself starting to drift in thought. “There was this big rotten thing, just a sorry sight to see. Sores and blisters everywhere, and his gut was wide open! Little monsters treated it like a playground.”

She wrapped her hooves around her stomach, being sickened from remembering the image. “And I think the last one’s name’s Tzeentch, a big raven guy with a bunch of eyes.”

Archaon abruptly sat more erect, clutching the star on his necklace. “And you somehow didn’t lose your soul upon seeing the Prince of Excess?” he asked.

“No. He said he ‘summoned’ it, whatever that means to do.”

Archaon leaned to the mewling corpse slave. “A being summoned by the gods deserves slightly better accommodation. The spare room, then.” he said to the creature, taking his hand away and letting the small creature seize Twilight by the forelegs. She struggled to break its grip but it twisted her around on her back and started dragging her off. Fighting to be released, and every attempt to cast a spell failing, she lashed out to Archaon.

“Where is he taking me? What are you planning? What are you doing to everypony!?”

He ignored her question as she was towed past. “I refuse to speak in your inferior language for long, so learn the language of the Wastes.” he stated simply, reaching over to pick up the book the librarian had left beside him. He dropped it on Twilight’s abdomen as she passed and the weight knocked the breath out of her. Winded, she promptly stopped her verbal barrage and simply flailed weakly as she was dragged into another opening in the wall, which shut firmly the second they passed through.

“She’s met the gods.” he mused. “Few other than I have had such an opportunity; but those of this world, so small.” he banished the thoughts. “The gods do everything for a reason, and they must have a plan. She must be the one, there’s clearly a connection.”

Normally, Archaon was the last being this side of the Warp who needed reassurance in these matters. Still, however, he couldn’t keep a few of his doubts about the whole situation from nagging at him.

He paused, then sighed and shook his head. This insane world was already beginning to wear on his nerves.

The clatter of the locks on the door caused the cyan mare to cease pacing around the cell. It banged open to reveal a gaily dressed figure slightly obscured by the lantern light outside, which beamed into the dark room. It was carrying a limp yellow and pink maned pony under one arm.

“Fluttershy?” Rainbow Dash asked to no one in particular.

“Another playmate.” The warrior mocked, walking past the cages.

“Oh hi, Fluttershy!” Pinkie Pie yelled from a cage across from Rainbow Dash. She snapped her head over and spoke to some invisible entity next to her. “Well she’s my friend! She’s really nice and I bet you’ll be instant pals when you meet!”

Her head slowly wilted back and her eyes started shrinking and drifting in different directions.

Rainbow Dash tried to bring the pink pony back to focus. “Wouldja please stop talking to your imaginary friend? And why are you still so happy? This isn’t exactly a summer camp where you can make friends willy-nilly. We’re obviously prisoners for Celestia-knows-what and they’re probably gonna do to us what they’re doing to everypony else!”

Pinkie wrapped her hooves around the bars of the cage and shot back, “He’s not imaginary! He’s right there. Can’t you see him?” She pointed at nothing beside her.

“I can see him, darling…” Rarity said in a stupor from the next cage over, leaning weakly against the bars. “He’s so handsome and suave.” She made minor twitches and jerks, waving her hoof into Pinkie’s cage.

Rainbow Dash rolled her eyes, “You’re both losing it.” and went over to the side of her cage where the warrior was opening the door to the adjacent cell.

It threw Fluttershy in carelessly, her fall barely cushioned by the scant hay on the floor. Rainbow Dash saw her eyes fixed open and turning pink at the edges as if she hadn’t blinked in a very long time.

“Jeez, what’d you do to her?!” she asked as the warrior closed and locked the door.

“I didn’t do anything. She’s another special case.” It glanced at Fluttershy for a moment. “She is looking better already.”

Rainbow dash looked to Fluttershy to examine her more closely. Her coat was slightly darkened; a more golden yellow instead of its lighter shade, and a bright red color was appearing in expanding blotches on her mane.

“Oh, man...” Rainbow Dash whispered.

“And this one…” the warrior said, tapping another cage with an orange pony in it, shivering and breathing heavily. “…Is doing just fine. She’s been blessed by the Plaguebearers.”

“Ah hardly call gett’n nicked by one of them slime covered swords a bless’n.” Applejack scowled and showed a small festering cut on her neck. A fit of violent coughing overtook her, and she covered her mouth with a hoof and found a few red droplets on it afterward. She moaned and threw her head down on the hay padding as flies began to land on her.

The warrior left the way it came. “Rejoice in your afflictions.” The sounds of the outside instantly silencing as the door shut.

“We’ll show you!” Rainbow Dash through the door. “We’ll find a way out of here! Right, Pinkie?”

Pinkie was rolling around on the floor, laughing. “Stop tickling me!” she gleefully pleaded to no one. Rarity was also giggling at her spontaneous merriment with a slightly dreamy expression.

Rainbow Dash sighed in dismay and turned to check on Fluttershy again who was now, somehow without being noticed, standing up with her face pressed between the bars of her cage on Applejack’s side. Her face was wickedly stretched in a nightmarish smile.

“Hey, Applejack,” Fluttershy whispered loudly, “Can I have some of that?”

“Some - uh, what?” Applejack asked sluggishly, lifting her head. She froze as she saw Fluttershy staring at her with piercing eyes, now reddened around, and a wicked grin. Her mane was now completely bright red and her coat further darkened to a brasslike yellow.

“That red stuff on your hoof.” she answered quickly. Applejack checked the hoof she had coughed on. The drops were smeared and blackened. Her confusion mounted.

“Why...?” Applejack looked at her in askance.

“I’m just really thirsty and that looks awful good right now.” she said, her left eye twitching spasmodically.

Applejack looked dubiously at her friend, then glanced at her soiled hoof. “Ya know what this is, right? Ah don’t think you want none... You sure you’re all right?”

“Oh, I’m fine. That big guy was really nice.”

Rainbow shook her head. “He just threw you in there like a sack of-”

“So if I could just have a little bit.” Fluttershy went on.

“No!” Applejack said in disgust, “That ain’t right, Fluttershy. Ah’m gonna clean this the first chance ah git.” Another bout of coughing ravaged her throat and more droplets trickled onto her hoof, bigger now with some whitish substance mixed in.

“I’ll clean it for you. Just scoot over here aaaand-” Fluttershy stretched her hoof further, straining her skin on the bars.

“NO!” Applejack shouted back. “You might catch what I got anyhow, and it’s a dosey-”

“YOU GIMME IT OR I’LL RIP YOUR WHOLE LEG OFF!” Fluttershy snapped, forcefully pushing between the bars, swiping at Applejack who hastily shuffled against the furthest wall of her cage, gazing in terror at the beast that had suddenly replaced her friend and tried to wipe the stain off in the hay.

“What the hay’s gotten into you!?” Rainbow dash grabbed Fluttershy’s tail in her mouth and pulled her from the bars. The pegasus tried to claw her way back toward Applejack but, owing to her hooves, had little traction.

Rarity kept giggling and repeating to herself, “All according to plan… haha… just as planned.” Pinkie played patty-cake with her friend, oblivious to the scene.

As Fluttershy thrashed and snarled more intensely, there was a faint popping sound, like a grape getting squished. A pool of red massed on the bottom of her eye and started to run down her cheek. She stopped struggling and Rainbow let go of her tail, believing her mad fit was over. Fluttershy touched the wet spot on her face and looked at the red stain on her hoof - and then she began vigorously wiping her face with her leg, licking off the drops of blood in a near-frenzy.

“Ugh...” Rainbow dash cringed.

“Man you must have been thirsty, Fluttershy!” Pinkie said, still making patty-cake motions.

Having wiped her face clean and failing to find any more of the ichor, Fluttershy shivered and collapsed. A moment later she started to cry.

“I’m sorry... I’m sorry... I’m sorry...” she sobbed, burying her face in the hay.

The skinny creature threw Twilight into a fair-sized room and the book in after her, as it had fallen off. Finally out from under the heavy tome, she tried to make a run for the door before the creature closed it but was met with the heavy frame slammed in her face and the sound of a lock engaging.

“Darn it!” she yelled, banging her forehooves on the door in frustration. “Held captive to face Celestia knows what kind of treatment, a bunch of lunatics running around Equestria swiping up almost everypony they can find, and this thing…” She grabbed at the collar on her horn and tried pulling it off to no avail, “…jamming my magic so I can’t even do anything!” She angrily kicked the book and it thundered on impact, flying across the room, seemingly by its own accord, hitting a large mattress and flew open. Twilight, intrigued by this behavior, walked over to the book, admiring the surprisingly well-furnished room.

Luminous stones built into the walls provided light and an archaic dresser, much like the one in her library, spanned much of one wall, though it was too tall for her to get to many of the drawers or mirror. An empty suit of Chaos Warrior armor stood in a corner next to the door; it wasn’t on a frame, but the parts levitated in the proper order. Torn up, ragged bear pelts covered the floor, many of them dried out and shriveled. Beside the mattress there was a smaller, gilded cushion. On the mattress there was a symbol similar to the kind tattooed on the pink and purple warriors, embroidered on one end.

She stepped onto the mattress, but was immediately shocked by the blast of sensations that surged through her she touched it. Though it felt unnaturally pleasant, she didn’t trust it and nudged the book to the cushion, which was still comfortable and didn’t bliss-zap her when she sat down. The book’s letters shifted and morphed in self-translation. Across the first page it read “Liber Chaotica – Complete Edition by Tarok, most pious servant of Chaos”. In the table of contents, she could make out the words “Equestrian Hunt” wondering if it was recently added. It was near the end of the book that the chapter began.

2523 I.C. The Old World quaked at the return of the hordes of Chaos. Within one year of his coronation, Archaon, Lord of the End Times, Chaos Incarnate, The Anointed, Favored Son of Chaos, Scourge of the World, Herald of the Apocalypse united the Tribes of the Chaos Wastes under the banner Chaos Undivided. This freed the followers of the gods from thousands of years of civil slaughter between rival kingdoms, renewed the alliance with the Chaos Dwarves, subdued to compliance the ork tribes of Warboss Grimgor Ironhide with the aid of the king of the Kul, Vardek Crom, maintained partnership with the Dark Elves in their joint pursuit of the destruction of the arch enemy, the Elves of Ulthuan. He launched the first Storm of Chaos, sixth great incursion, into the Empire to usher in the glorious End Times, when the Dark Gods rule over the Old World, all is consumed by the unholy power of Chaos, the Empire is freed of their false gods, and the temples of Sigmar burn.

The Grand Principality of Middenland, the Empire of Man:

The first Storm of Chaos had been underway for little less than one year, and Archaon’s legions, supplemented by the tamed Ork tribes were on the doorstep of the City of Middenheim. Valten, the supposed incarnation of the false god Sigmar, assembled a host of men to retaliate from Bretonnia, Kislev, and other Imperial provinces and met Archaon’s army on the outskirts of the city. Vardek Crom had fallen in Sylvania, battling the undead forces of the Vampire Counts and was unable to aid his liege. His body was recovered and buried at the Keep of Skulls. The legions met in glorious slaughter and Archaon and Valten eventually fought in duel. Valten struck and felled Archaon’s mount, Dorghar, Steed of the Apocalypse, with the dreaded hammer of Sigmar, Ghal Mahraz. Though Archaon ultimately slew Valten, he himself was blindsided by the subjugated Warboss Grimgor, and the Ork fled yelling “Grimgor is da best!” The damned Greenskins turned on his army, and the Everchosen abandoned the field with the remnants of the Gods’ followers to the Wastes.

Losing Dorghar, the fourth treasure of Chaos, Archaon nearly lost his title of Everchosen and barely managed to retain dominance of the tribes and kingdoms of the Wastes. The Dark Gods, blessed be their unholy names, sought a new steed for him. The Changer of Ways found just that and more in a place through the Warp known as Equestria. The Lord of Change discovered the one he believed to be apt for the position. A unicorn filly named Twilight Sparkle caught his attention with her early mastery of the magical arts and perspicacity for knowledge and planning. Tzeentch observed her development through early life and in one incident, he chose her to propose to his counterparts in the far corners of the Warp. A simple letter, not sent on time to the princess of the realm, sent her quickly spiraling to insanity. This incident sealed his decision as she seemed madly obsessed that all things must occur just as planned, though it would take persuasion of the other three powers to make a final decision. Archaon received a vision from the Great Sorcerer with vague details to locating “a replacement”.

He passed into the Equestrian realm with two thousand soldiers by warp portal in 2525 I.C. After searching for only three days on this new world, Archaon reached, plundered and took captive the population of the errant’s resident town Ponyville. Holding off on burning the town until he was sure she wasn’t there, a cultist, hoping to find riches of his own but last to search the town, found her unconscious in a tree library and in mid transit to Archaon’s camp and unaware of the part she was to play had to be stopped from extracting her soul by a message from Kairos Fateweaver. For possibly damaging precious cargo, the cultist was struck down shortly after dropping her at the camp. Awaiting scrutiny by the chief librarian, Twilight encountered the hated one, the Dimension Traveler, who escaped sacrifice to the Dark Gods. Before her, five of her associates were found and judged earlier in the screening.

Three of them were spared a terrible pre-fate; one succumbed to the Red Thirst and Black Rage, and the other would contract the first stage of the greatest of the Plague Lord’s gifts, Nurgle’s Rot.

Twilight stopped and wondered what was happening to her friends, virtually disregarding all previous words that had been pushed to the back of her mind by the whispers. The next page was a list of the names and fates of the ponies of Ponyville, but only a few names were displayed, most faded away from the page.

DAY THREE PRISONER REPORT- JUNE 21 2525 I.C. – PONYVILLE – FATE PENDING

Thunder Lane- labor

Vinyl Scratch- Slaanesh

Octavia- Slaanesh

Bon Bon- pit

Rainbow Dash- Vardek Crom the Conqueror

Applejack- Feytor the Tainted

Pinkamena Diane Pie- Styrkaar of the Sortsvinaer

Rarity- Melekh the Changer

Fluttershy- Lord Haargroth the Blooded

Lyra Heartstrings- Tzeentch

Big Macintosh– Khorne

Golden Harvest- labor

Derpy Hooves- Undivided

Berry Punch- Slaanesh

Mayor (title stripped)- Tzeentch

Cheerilee- Tzeentch

Snips- pit

Snails- pit

Cake (Mr and Mrs.)- labor

Diamond Tiara- pit

Names not given. Referred as Cutie Mark Crusaders- labor

Spike (purple drake?)- showing rapid mutations

Twilight wondered who bore the names by her friends’. She remembered the name Vardek Crom, the last thing Tzeentch said before sending her back and new words began to burn onto the page.

Twilight Sparkle- To receive Eternally Burning Mark of Chaos, June 22, 2525 I.C.

Chapter 19: Where There's a Whip, There's a Way

"Arise from your graves and obey my will! As you are, so were we. As we are, so shall ye." - Chant of a Vampire Counts necromancer while resurrecting skeletons.

"Nurgle's children, our sweetest, our favourites...how much Nurgle loves his children, how much Nurgle loves his little darlings..." - Excerpt from the insane scribblings of a man, written in his own entrails after he ripped them out with his bare hands.

"All Men dream, but not in the same way. Those, who dream at night, in the dark of their minds, awake in the morning to see that it was all an illusion. But those who dream at day, are dangerous people. Their dreams are dreams of hope, dreams of betterment, dreams of change. Out of those come forth the accursed followers of chaos." - Imperial Grand Theogonist, Volkmar the Grim

Blood, blood and more blood, regardless of the source, whether it be of your enemy or your own. This was the motto of Khorne, which personified the Old World. One could say that literally everything and its grandmother wants you dead, so you have to kill it first. Chaos marauders, bandits, the Imperial Inquisition, all roamed the countryside intent on senseless slaughter, riches by any means, and cleansing mutants and witches in holy fire respectively. These ponies were, by the Inquisition’s terms, in dire need of a bath.

Braeburn had the most combat experience and supervised everyone’s ‘self-training’, not caring a whit for Twilight and the Doctor’s constant excuses to get out of it. “I ate something bad,” she had said. “The Doctor’s going to help me through it.” He snorted in annoyance. Running a fever of about three-hundred and fifty degrees fahrenheit and shivering like she was locked in a freezer, he thought she was in great condition.

And now he was stuck with Rarity, who did nothing but moan and gripe, tired of the sweat and pain. He provided a little incentive for her to keep on, holding Sweetie Belle under his hoof and threatening to vomit corrosive bile on her.

“Let’s go, Rarity! Just a little shock, like touchi’n a doorknob.”

“Right...” she muttered to herself. “A little shock, simple.” Through her horns, she plucked a bit of warp energy from the Immaterium. It crackled and buzzed across her skeletal hands, like electric pet boas. A buzzing, stinging sensation pricked every millimeter of her and intensified as she concentrated the energy in her fingertips. “Oh, that smarts... Steady. Don’t lose control.” She took aim at a practice dummy, fashioned together out of sticks and foliage. The shot was a mere *bzzz* that left a bit-sized, steaming grey area that burned through one leaf, but Rarity smiled like it was an achievement. “That should send any ruffian into a tizzy, right?”

“What was that!?” Lyra shouted in total disappointment. “You had almost blasted a hole in the wall of the apartment a couple of days ago!” A pair of fiery whips snaked from her fists and she cracked them against a tree, leaving a black hissing gash. “Step it up!”

Rarity turned back to Braeburn, whose head was uncomfortably close to Sweetie Belle, whispering something like a childish secret. “Ya know how a fly eats, Bonnabelle?” he asked jovially. She carefully shook her head while a fuzzy fly walked across his dust-covered eye.

“Well, first they spit acid on their food, let it melt and break down,” The fly spat on his pupil and scraped away at the cornea with its forelegs. “Then they drink it like soup.” The fly squirmed into his eye through the pupil, making the ball bulge and throb. At that moment, black ooze started to drip between his cavity riddled teeth. The blades of grass the droplets touched smoked and liquified on contact.

“Rarity!” Sweetie Belle cried for dear life.

“Don’t you get a drop on her!” Like an instinctual reaction, power suddenly surged through Rarity’s form and she quickly became lively as a lightning rod.

“That’s it! Give it more juice!” Braeburn jeered on.

Rarity blinked in confusion. ’Give what more jui—’ “AAAGGH!”

The instant she was aware, the raging power took her to her knees. Innumerable screaming emotions and thoughts from the warp flooded her mind, pouring energy into her relentlessly. Features began shifting, her mouth elongated to bisect her jaw and one of her horns swelled until it was a grey, bony tumor stuck to her head.

“Cast it! You have to let it out!” Lyra shouted urgently over the popping drone of the lightning.

Rarity fought the jerks and twists of her muscles to stagger up to her feet. Sweetie Belle didn’t even blink as she watched in horror at her sister burn and seize like a galvanized corpse spasming back to life. The very space around her began to warp. The air, the light, bent and meandered, showing doubles or triples of the unicorn and creating distending bubbles of warpspace that shimmered dazzlingly.

The glass eyes of her suit illuminated brightly and the very mouths on the breastplate creaked as if letting out a great groan. Her body felt petrified as she brought a flaring hand up and focused the power just before her palm. For a moment, she had peace. The pain was gone. Like a concentric ringed planetarium, the warp ball churned and spun. It looked so organized, so ready, and with a flick of her fingers, she let it go.

It wasn’t what she expected. She vanished entirely, as if the universe had made her suffer from a serious case of critical-existence-failure. The three ponies waited for her to reappear. Perhaps it was an illusion. But a minute passed, then another.

“Ra...Rarity...?” Sweetie’s eyes started to water and she suppressed a sob.

“Shame,” Braeburn said. “Well, no sense in letting you suffer without a sister.” He opened his jaws wide and readied to crunch down on the filly’s skull.

“W-wait, she’s back!” Sweetie abruptly shouted, and he paused, looking up just in time to see the mare collapse an instant after reappearing.

He took his hoof off the little prisoner, who bolted straight for Rarity as soon as the cloud dissipated. Her sister lay on the ground, in a hissing, smoking heap. Dust blew from deep tears in her flesh. She was bleeding.

Sweetie Belle desperately searched for any sign of life. “Rarity, are you okay?”

She gave a ghostly sough as the sand pouring from the gashes crystallized, forming swirling, glassy surfaces across her torso and legs.

“She’s fine,” Braeburn said. “You’ll do it agin soon as yer up, bird brain.”

“N...no.” Rarity murmured, just beyond hearing. “No more.”

The pestilent stallion came up and brought his head down to her. “You’ll do it, or else.”

“I don’t... want to.”

He came closer to her ear, his stench making Rarity’s eyes water. “Ya know what I wanna do? Take a big bite right outta Sweetie Belle’s head.” He let it sink in for both of them and sniffed deeply in the filly’s direction. “Mmm, ah can smell it on ‘er. All that warpfire she’s got’s fried her guts good enough for a barbecue, ‘n those big juicy eyeballs, when they pop between yer teeth—”

Rarity lashed out with what little energy she had left, forming her fingers into five prongs and stabbing them clean through Braeburn’s chest and mouth.

He chuckled amusedly, “Ya see? Ah ain’t gett’n whut ah want. Now you give somthin’ up. A little blood, a little pain, and ah won’t eat yer sis’ spongy little brain.”

He started sucking on the finger that had pierced his mouth. She tried to pull her hand out, but the wounds closed tightly, locking it in place. A burning sensation picked up and the bone started turning a snotty yellow. His acidic saliva ate down to the marrow and in an agonizing crunch, her hand was free, with only a sand-bleeding stump of a pointer finger left.

The severed finger disintegrated to dust in Braeburn’s mouth and he spat the greenish spit mixture to the ground like a wad of chewing tobacco. “Keep practici’n.”

Rarity clutched her maimed hand, too weak to muster up more than a puppy’s whimper in response. In her last flickers of consciousness, she watched him walk away, wishing for the strength to behead him. It might not have killed him, but his disembodied head would be powerless. She chuckled at the thought of kicking his head around like a soccer ball and as her senses shut down one by one, she saw a pair of mint-green legs and felt something poking her cheek.

“Hey, Rarity... you alright?”

And the world went black.

Fluttershy played with her paws, sliding the blades against each other and making a few pops of sparks. They were incredibly lethal, tapered down to amazingly sharp tips. She occupied herself with some benign destruction, cutting logs with her nails and eating them for warmth. She could hear the splinters pitter-patter down her iron insides and a short burst of heat as they burned in her internal furnace.

A couple of fillies played around her towering body like a jungle gym. It was comforting to hear the happy laughter, but the rattle of the iron rings and chains growing out of her was a constant reminder of her condition. A little zombie filly with a red bowtie swung in one of the hooks of her mane like a playground swing and a horned orange pegasus rummaged through one of the burlap saddlebags for something interesting. Fluttershy was basically the group’s pack mule, but she couldn’t even feel the extra weight and often times didn’t notice the baggage with her strength.

“So whut does that taste like?” Apple Bloom asked, reaching the height of one big swing.

“Wood.” Fluttershy said flatly, popping another log and crunching down on it.

“Figured. Doesn’t it hurt? Splinters ‘n all?”

“Not really.”

“I don’t think ponies usually eat wood. Does it taste good?”

“I can’t really tell. Kind of, I guess.”

Apple Bloom probed and prodded Fluttershy's tough mental barrier. She was about ready to give up. “Come on, look ‘atcha! Yer big ‘n spiky, ‘n it’s just like ‘tha Iron Giant story Applejack read me. That part where the robot says, ‘I ain’t a gun’, that can work for you too.” Fluttershy curiously turned her eye to the filly. “Just cus ya look like a monster doesn’t mean y’are one.”

“And it’s so cool!” Scootaloo’s voice rang out as she bounded to the top of Fluttershy’s head. “She’s like, indestructible. It’d take a cannon just to make a dent! You could go stomping through a town like ’Raaaghrrr!’” She put on the most threatening pose she could think of, but it only made her look cute. “And they couldn’t stop you.”

Fluttershy gave a shaky smile, but the mood was ruined by Applejack vomiting down the tarp on her back.

“Consarnit! Aaugh!” Apple Bloom scampered up Fluttershy's mane and down her back. The restrained mare twisted against her bonds. “Where the hay am I!?”

“Applejack’s back!” Apple Bloom sang happily, hopping up and down.

Applejack fought a million sensations; fatigue, the urge to vomit again, and every joint in her body screaming in pain. “Back? Where’d I go? Why am I tied ‘ta Fluttershy’s back?!”

The giant undid the rope that bound Applejack and both nurglites went tumbling down. With a wet thud, Applejack landed on her face and broke her neck in three places. She tried to lift her head, finding it was firmly staying on the ground. “Uh, I think mah face is stuck. Somepony give me a hoof?” Apple Bloom helped pull her out and found a strange object on her sister’s forehead after she shook off the dirt.

“Sis, whut’s that on yer forehead?”

Applejack put a hoof to the area, discovering an upwardly-curved, bony protrusion. A pestilent stallion bounded over to greet his cousin, elated by her new object.

“It’s a horn! Hooo-eey! Nurgle be praised, ya made it!”

“T’aint no way,” Applejack said in disbelief. “Ya mean I became a unicorn, or somethi’n?” She gasped. “Is it magic!? Can I do all them mind powers?”

Braeburn shook his head. “Nah. It ain’t magic. Plaguebearers got horns, too. It means Nurgle’s blessed ya!”

It was just there to be disgusting, and it was disgusting. Bright red, inflamed veins ran along its length and it was partially cracked, slowly oozing coagulated blood plasma. His cousin made a hollow, unimpressed “Oh...”

“Oh? Just ‘oh’? This is great! Yer one step closer ‘ta daemonhood.” He gave her a short, tight hug. “Y’all is movin up as one ‘a Granpappy Nurgle’s children.”

“I ain’t no child ‘a his.” Applejack spat vehemently at the name.

Braeburn gave an uneasy chuckle, but Applejack continued to stare hard into his eyes. “Wait... whatcha mean? We’re all his kids, one big happy fam—”

“We’re monsters, Braeburn—just a buncha zombies with an extra brain cell.”

The fetid stallion’s mouth fell open in shock, releasing a swarm of flies which surrounded his head in a buzzing sphere. Braeburn popped out one of his eyes, wiping it with a foreleg like a glass lens before replacing it and regarding the mare before him with disbelief. “Y’all can’t be serious! He gave us immortality!”

Applejack shot back, “Cuz we’re already dead!”

“We can’t get sick and don’t feel pain!”

“Cuz we already got every disease in the world! You look like you’ve been rotti’n away for three years!”

“Ten,” Braeburn said with obvious pride. “And even if Big Mac ain’t been blessed the way he have, we’re better off now than we’ve ever been!”

Applejack’s anger vanished, replaced by a flickering curiosity, then hope. “Ya know what happened ‘ta my brother?”

Braeburn swiveled his hoof. “Turn around.”

Applejack snapped her neck around one-hundred and eighty degrees, because actually turning her body would take slightly longer.

She’d expected to see her big brother, maybe a rotten corpse like her, maybe normal. She was instead met by Fluttershy, sheepishly shrinking back. She waved slightly. “Hi.”

“Not funny, Braeburn,” Applejack growled, turning her head back. “Where is he?”

He took out his unbeating heart with the left hoof and raised his right. “Swear to ya, he’s there.”

“Fluttershy, y’all two in on some kinda prank, cuz it ain’t funny!”

“Oh no, I’d never!” The iron giant wrung her paws. “Macintosh... he... well...”

“She ate him.” Braeburn interrupted. Fluttershy went slack-jawed at his accusation.

“No she didn’t!” said Apple Bloom. “She told me whut Cheerilee told her. She’s unstable or... something, so she can’t stop soakin’ up metal that she touches. She bumped into him in ‘tha city—”

“Woah, wait a second.” Applejack said. “Y’all tellin me Big Mac’s made of metal?”

“Yup, a juggernaut, just like her.” Apple Bloom knocked on Fluttershy’s leg, producing a hollow ringing noise.

“It really was an accident,” Fluttershy squeaked as Applejack tapped her shoulder. “He might still be alive.”

“Might?” her countenance changed. “You mean he might be dead?!”

The iron pony quivered frightfully under Applejack’s gaze, trying to hide behind her mane. “I...No, I don’t think so...”

Applejack rolled her jaw, thinking. “Well we gotta get him out ‘ta make sure, now don’t we?”

Fluttershy nodded. “But... I tried, and I couldn’t let him out on my own.”

“There’s gotta be another way.”

“Maybe if we just—”

*Pang*

The giant definitely felt something suddenly hit her back and she locked up in shock. “Can somepony see what that was?”

The nurglites found a feverishly-shivering purple alicorn resting in one of the outcroppings on Fluttershy’s back.

“Twi, whut are ya doin up there?” asked Applejack.

“Slacki’n off and not practici’n, that’s what!” scolded Braeburn.

The mare didn’t respond and curled up as tight she could against the war machine’s warm iron body against the advancing cold that stung and numbed her from hoof to core. ‘I shouldn’t have eaten the souls. I shouldn't have even kept them... argh, why can’t I help it?’ Fluttershy noticed a strange smoke fuming from the purple mare’s nose and mouth. ’He’ll come for me... He always does...’

Twilight felt a great pressure squeeze on her head and suddenly yank her up, bringing her face to face with the black devil himself. Without a word, he thrust the Slayer of Kings into her abdomen and the daemonic blade reveled in the taste of her blood.

Fluttershy was frightened sick of the mare’s convulsions, holding her up and trying to snap her out of it, but to the victim’s perception, all was still frozen in time. Archaon clutched his hands to each side of Twilight’s head and squeezed harder and harder inward.

Fluttershy shook her. “Come on, Twilight, whatever you’re seeing isn’t real! You’re okay... Please be okay!” She looked back to Braeburn. “You have experience with sicknesses. How do you treat a seizure!?”

He shrugged. “I give ‘em and get ‘em. Curi’n ‘em’s blasphemy!”

Twilight didn’t hear anyone, and screamed as the vision cracked her skull. She felt her cranial fluids dripping on the inside of her head and her jaw snapping in half, but the Everchosen was not done. More and more he squashed her skull until he’d nearly torn her brain in half. Releasing her, he extracted his sword and with the same fist, struck her across the face, immediately making her lose a fang. She fell off Fluttershy’s back, landing with a crack on one leg. A snapped bone stabbed out through the skin. She had to get away... get help.

“Kivsin! Anypony!” she agonizingly shouted through broken teeth. The whole world around her was still as a photo. She saw Fluttershy, still looking onto her own back in worry, Lyra helping Rarity to stand, and Apple Bloom and Braeburn still looking for whatever had disturbed the giant.

In Fluttershy’s paws, the writhing bat-winged alicorn’s mane started to rise and wave and her coat singed, smoked and hissed, accompanied by a fiery glow growing within her.

Archaon jumped down and continued advancing on his chosen steed, stepping on her broken leg and shattering it even more. He grabbed the protruding bone and swirled it around in her leg, eliciting more screams of pain before ripping it out along with shreds of muscle and tendons. He stabbed its broken end through Twilight’s chest and her head dropped, short of breath and her vision fading. She coughed blood up onto her lips and he stood over her. In his burning eyes, she saw his anger and frustration. She heard a dark chanting that grew in number and volume. Archaon slowly raised his sword to the voices, blade down with both hands. The daemonic choir got louder and louder, more and more frenzied, and at it’s climax, the Slayer of Kings came plunging into Twilight’s neck.

BOOM!

Twilight went supernova, producing a whirling fireball that exploded a great distance. The nurglites were behind Fluttershy and were shielded from the blast, and the others were barely out of range. The juggernaut dropped Twilight in fright and felt that something had suddenly stuck to her face. She peeled it off and found herself holding a burned purple pony’s hide in her claws. Its empty eye holes were wide and its mouth hung in a horrified, ghoulish frown. The beast quickly fell into hyperventilating, dropping the charred flesh that flopped down before a glowing mare. A bright yellow pony gasped for life, it's baleful white eyes dimming to show terrified blood red irises. Crackling flames made up its mane, tail and wings and it looked around frantically, wide-eyed and huffing for the tormentor. Twilight looked at her hooves, her burning wings and tail, and sighed with a mix of relief and sadness.

“Master!” Kivsin bolted to her, but she held her hoof out to stop him.

“I’m okay, Kivsin,” she said raspily. Her throat was still burning sore and her heart pounded in her chest. She looked up to the juggernaut, forcing a smile on her lips. “Hi.”

”EEK!” Fluttershy jumped back like an elephant to a mouse, nearly crushing the Apples as she dashed behind a tree that didn’t hide her massive frame all that well.

Twilight slumped over and Kivsin supported her, her warp-essence flames having gone cold. Braeburn picked up her empty purple hide cooly, like seeing a pony explode into a daemon was commonplace.

“Lookin’ mighty fine there, Twi,” he nodded as he ripped up the hide and hoofed chunks to his family. “‘Ta Applejack’s recovery, Twi’s blowin’ up, n’ crappy health for years ta come!” He took a big bite out of the flesh. “Whew, that’s good tastin’.”

“Jeez, Twi. Y’all made me almost have another heart attack.” She slowly circled the daemon and whistled in impressment. “Wow. Makes ya wonder. If ya turned Kivsin into a big angry critter, what can ya do to— Oohhh.” She suddenly looked back to Fluttershy, grinning ear to ear.

She peered around the tree trunk. “What?”

“She is late,” Franz said annoyedly.

“She arrives whenever she means to,” responded Luna with the same displeasure.

The door of the grand negotiating room opened and in stepped the queen, flanked by two drones. The black, chitinous insects nonchalantly strolled around the table and four waiting monarchs, and settled into their places. The monarchs and their associates wore gas masks or filtering cloths against Chrysalis’ respiration smog, and a couple of the large windows hung open to the outside air.

Arranged in a wide hemisphere, the round redwood table cast a long shadow as the sun set behind it and torches were lit by the servants. The Emperor’s seat was placed with its back to the sun and the gold panther on his helmet cast a snarling, baleful gaze on the insects.

The room was almost dead silent, life was only given presence by the working attendants. Cadence, Franz, Celestia, and Luna watched and waited while Chrysalis made herself comfortable. The celestial princesses had the most angered demeanours.

Celestia’s armor was almost animated with her influence; the gold-plated sun behind her head, in a warped slow motion, quietly churned and erupted solar flares. Though Luna sat next to her sister, she seemed like a distant observer; her armor was a dusty, light grey and in the chestpiece was a carved jade eye.

Chrysalis leaned forward, resting her chin on two of her sharp, interlocking hands, folding the other two on the table, and throwing a derisive smirk in their direction. “It’s about time you two got an upgrade. Miss me?”

“Hardly,” Celestia replied tersely. “We thought you had perished.”

“And rightfully so, you should have.” Luna added.

Chrysalis huffed off a laugh. “Well it doesn’t really matter, since I’d simply be reborn by the hivemind.” She rubbed two fingers together in a pecuniary fashion. “Death comes cheap to me, you see.”

Hammer asked, “And how long would it take to be rebuilt?” He and his associate, Anvil, were the Crystal Ponies’ diplomats in the Old World. As their names implied, one kept the other side talking or kept himself talking, and the other would shoot down their unfair proposals or force forth their own. Though, he could be a little headstrong.

Chrysalis smirked. “That’s a bit confidential.”

“Speak words of purpose, insect,” Franz said firmly. “What is your business with the Crystal Princess and the Empire?”

Chrysalis scowled at the Emperor as if he were an insect himself. “I would appreciate it if you addressed me by title.” Her changeling companions buzzed irritatedly with her. Franz’s expression didn’t change. “Love and cooperation,” she said plainly. “It is all I want.”

“And you attempted to gain the former by attacking Princess Cadenza,” Luna warned. “This is tantamount to a declaration of war with Ulthuan, and you are about to cross the line with the Empire.”

Chrysalis considered it a moment, but Ulthuan was on the other side of the world. The elven army in the Old World now was only to halt the Storm of Chaos.

“They’d have a very difficult time finding me,” she said finally. “And until the line is crossed, I’ll dance around it.”

“You cannot afford to make enemies.”

“Then let’s not be enemies!” Chrysalis said grandly, opening her arms in a friendly gesture. Her demeanor snapped to that of a friend trying to apologize for a prank. “You’re all making this more complicated than it has to be. We have all fallen on hard times and you know the old saying, ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’.”

Anvil spoke up, placing his hoof on the table. “You only number a few hundred left, dwindling by the day. What can you bring to the war effort?”

“Intelligence,” the queen offered. “Skaer, Ditto, and I just waltzed in here with nary a suspicious look.” the three bugs burst in flame and assumed the look of two reiksguard stallions and Franz. The clone-emperor leaned toward the original, and even his voice was copied exactly. “Imagine what I could do for you. Imagine what I know already of your armies, the Skaven, the Hordes of Chaos, even your...” She giggled, “our little Luitpold.”

The Emperor’s eyes narrowed balefully. “What do you know of my son?”

“He is in the theater now, the play is in intermission. My drone is near, just beyond his bodyguards.”

“You know,” Celestia leaned forward as if discussing the weather, “There is a spell to force changelings back to their natural shape. If we were to disclose information on the spell to every unicorn soldier in the Empire...” A smug grin curled her lips and Chrysalis understood, telepathically ordering the changeling to leave the Emperor’s son and relinquishing the spells she and her entourage had on. But she wasn’t out of cards yet.

“I don’t think it would be in your best interest. What if heretics get this spell and spread it amongst their ranks? Then I won’t be able to gather more information on Chaos. Besides, few of us can disguise ourselves anymore. The ability has gotten increasingly rare as we have been warped. A few of my informants are close to some high-ranking members, mimicking their slaves and servants.” Chrysalis could feel the hivemind running low on energy and the hungry chatter of her children. ‘Clever mare, Cadence. Only a day’s worth,’ she thought. “I’d love to relate the vast knowledge they’ve gathered, but I am simply parched.”

A steward stepped forward with a dish carrying a pitcher and glasses of water. “Oh, no water, thank you,” Chrysalis dismissed. “I just need a sip of love. Anypony have any spare love on them?” She motioned to each seated figure one at a time, each annoyed by her act of innocence. “Celestia, Franz, Luna, anypony? No? What about you, Cadence?”

The crystalline alicorn shifted nervously as Chrysalis’ drones got closer. Hammer and Anvil solidly stood in their way.

“Look,” Chrysalis said in a straight and sincere tone, drawing curious glances from across the table. “All I’m asking for is a simple trade. My children require love, and of a strength and purity of which there is naught to be found anywhere else in this land. You are likewise in need of something with which to aid in your own survival. Give us what we need, and I give you my word you will have your information.”

“One moment,” Luna said. “And just how are we to be assured that you even possess any information of worth? You know about the workings of the Imperial city, yet—”

“Did you know that there is a rather large horde of Skaven burrowing their way towards Castle Reikguard at this very moment?”

All eyes in the room flicked up in surprise at her offhanded comment, Chrysalis’ own countenance showing neither mirth nor malice.

“...Are you certain of this?” Franz said at last, his eyes set with steely determination on the Changeling queen.

Chrysalis recalled some bitter memories. “We have had our share of conflicts with the vermin. For some time my subjects have contested them for dominance of the Under-Empire, but we were outnumbered, and...” She hesitated at the next bitter word. “Outmatched. I figured leaving a few eyes back there would be of some use.”

“I think...” Cadence said tentatively, considering the chitin-covered mutant carefully before giving a small sigh. “I think she’s telling the truth. At the very least, she does not have anything to gain from lying to us now, short of satisfying her own vindictive nature.”

Chrysalis glared at the crystalline alicorn for a moment, before a vicious smirk slowly curled her lips upward to reveal rows of fangs sharp as daggers. “I’m impressed, Cadence. You’ve acclimated to the chicanery of courts and intrigue quite well.”

Cadence bore a look of sadness, before closing her eyes and sighing deeply. “Let them come.”

Hammer and Anvil reluctantly stepped aside and the chattering insects moved on the princess. A decade of feeding on fear and hate had done a number on their species. Both changelings were balancing on their hind legs like fowls. One’s forelegs were scything claws and the other‘s were fused together, shaped like some kind of projectile weapon, and crawling with tiny worm creatures. Both sniffed at Cadence, seeking sweet spots of high love concentration. They soon began their work, drawing out the nourishing aether.

“Now talk.” Cadence said.

“Very well.” Chrysalis cleared her throat. “There is a chaos force headed for Frote from the Brass Keep. I suggest sending the Middenland 2nd Legion. There are two chaos-corrupted mayors, one in Kemperbad and Salzburg. The Skaven are planning to assassinate Marshall Kurt in one month at the rim of the crater of Talabheim...” The longer Chrysalis went on, the more the diarchs considered her seriousness. “And the pièce de résistance; the Everchosen is stalled.”

Everyone’s eyes lit up with interest. “What delays him?” Luna asked.

“He is missing his horse, the steed of the apocalypse.” Celestia failed to hold back a wide smile. Twilight was not found. At least not yet. “Until then, the Storm of Chaos is a bottled force, waiting to explode from the wastes as soon as he finds it.”

After she finished, the room was pin-drop silent. Emperor Franz slowly raised and reached his hand to Chrysalis. She looked at it for a moment, then to his face.

He nodded with a grim expression. She in turn took his hand and they shook.

After popping a couple of pustules on her foreleg, Applejack painted her leaking blood in the shape of a chaos star on Fluttershy’s forehead as she laid on her back, shaking like a washing machine. The plague mare was angry and Fluttershy could see it in her eyes, but the time was near. The juggernaut she absorbed would be expunged.

Twilight nervously wrung her hooves. It was enough hell to perform a possession spell once, but again? She didn’t know if either of them could take it, but if she was successful, it would relieve two of her closest friends.

“Cost and benefit analysis,” She whispered to herself in reassurance. “Still haven't lost my mind.”

“She’s ready, Twi,” Applejack said impatiently. Her body was absolutely giddy, insects and maggots in an energetic feeding frenzy on her rotting hide. Twilight lightly slapped herself on each cheek, warming up as if going into a wrestling ring.

“Okay, let’s go. Let’s do it, Twi.”

Everyone but Rarity had gathered eagerly to watch. She was still sobbing and plucking at her wide, toothy scar of a mouth and bulbous mass of a horn, “I’m hideous... Why?”

Daemonic possession was considered a blessing, but between two neverborns, the result could be unpredictable. Twilight feverishly rested one hoof in the center of the star and Octavia recited what she remembered from the daemonancy tome. Both hesitantly acknowledged the implications and Twilight began the spell. Her form slowly dissolved into a bright yellow ether and flowed around Fluttershy’s terrified face. The giant resisted every urge to sit up, swat the mist away. She kept reassuring herself, it was her friend... it was her friend... She’d make some of the pain go away.

The last of the daemon’s vaporous essence entered the beast and she breathed a sigh of relief that it was over. Most everyone was let down, however. Vinyl expected Fluttershy to explode into a bajillion pieces, the Doctor feared she would be instantly enraged and lash out.

“Well, that was anticlimactic...” Lyra sighed.

Fluttershy was surely glad it was. She could have been turned into a similar monster like Kivsin was when Twilight possessed him. After a bit of rolling on her back like a turtle, she managed to fall sideways and get upright. Everyone was moving on. She put a paw to her heart, which beat erratically. Her friend was inside her, swimming like a ghost and the very thought made her feel sick. There was no howling of the warp, no clawing at her mind by the daemon in her being, for the monster within her wasn’t a slave to the darkness. It would take a while for Twilight to get her bearings in Fluttershy’s head and the band marched on. Eventually, Fluttershy heard a familiar voice swelling in her thoughts.

’Fluttershy...’

The giant pegasus paused a moment. “Twilight?”

’Yeah, I’m here.’

“Finally!” Braeburn huffed, noticing Fluttershy’s acknowledgement. “Ya’ll see Big Mac in there?”

Fluttershy felt a strong tingling all throughout her body as Twilight searched. Between the parts that were Fluttershy’s, the hellcannon, and Big Mac, she was stumped.

’Can... can you tell them it might be a while?’

It didn’t sit well with the diseased ponies. “Work fast, sugarcube.” Applejack growled.

All throughout Fluttershy’s psyche, Twilight searched for the soul-imprisoned juggernaut. It was a dark void, winding with glowing, stringy nerves and memories. The whispers of both the former pegasus’ happy and increasingly numerous miserable experiences hissed softly from these nodules, and one in particular was throbbing red. It resonated like a wardrum, a heartbeat of destruction.

Twilight poked it once, and the whole void rumbled and growled. Fluttershy suddenly got very annoyed at the Apple’s circling. “Would you guys just leave me alone?!” she snarled. “Twilight’s looking for him and he’ll get here when he gets here! Now go away before I mash you three blobs together into a single body!”

“Yeesh, fine,” Braeburn said cautiously and backed away with his family.

The nerve slowly cooled and Fluttershy resumed a more abashed demeanor. “Thank you.”

Twilight moved away from the crimson node and moved on. 'Curiosity killed the cat, Twilight. Let's back away.'

She soon found the soul-chained hellcannon. It’s monstrous bore screamed and roared and the faces of souls down the barrel, sacrificed to forge the weapon, howled and wept forever. The wheels madly spun forward and back. The sentient artillery wanted out, but if it were released, it would attack the first thing it saw, everyone else.

’Fluttershy, you mind if I take over for a bit?’

“Take over what?” the pegasus asked nervously.

The daemon spoke sweetly. ’Just relax, let yourself go, and I’ll show you.’

Fluttershy tried to ignore the circling nurglites and clear her mind. She felt Twilight’s energy seeping in. She let her paws hang down, loose as vines to gravity. Twilight slipped herself into the vessel, one limb at a time, and after a rush of coldness and a couple muscle jolts, she opened her new eyes.

Everything looked smaller, even Applejack only came up to just below her shoulder. The hooked chain links of her mane hung like a butcher’s shop of horrors. It felt more like dreadlocks.

“Oh, wow!” she said excitedly. Rolling her vehicle’s stiff joints, the clunking of iron made her feel tough, invincible even. “She's got an amazing set up here!”

Twilight held up Fluttershy’s paw and focused on it. To her delight, the hellcannon’s bore took shape at the end, a titanic weapon at the end of her leg. It wanted to fire, to rain fiery destruction on everything, but it was bound to the juggernaut’s thoughts and Twilight pretended to fire it, taking aim at random.

“Pew! Pew!”

“Fluttershy, what in Sam hill are ya doin’!?” Applejack ducked as the weapon made an arc over her head.

“Oh, no—It’s Twilight. I’m using her body for a little bit.” The giant’s face scrunched into concentration. “Maybe if I’m at the front... I can find Big Mac more easily.”

The puppetmaster toyed with Fluttershy’s mind, probing and searching while also trying to keep her soul calm that there was another in the driver’s seat. Twilight wove a dream for her, tried to make it a peaceful as possible. A warm sun, cool breeze sweeping along the valley and bowing the tallgrass like lake ripples, and under the shade of a fledgeling oak tree, the butter-yellow pegasus sat on a picnic blanket surrounded by the animals she took care of. Mr. Bear slurped honey from a jar, the squirrels and rabbits chittered between nuts and carrots, and Fluttershy, she finally looked happy. Not forcing a smile to apologize for destroying someone’s house, but the smile of one among friends.

It dawned on Twilight, a slow wave of realization. Fluttershy was living a shred of normality in that dream. She might not want to wake up, just stay asleep and pretend that was her reality. That she could go down to Ponyville and see her friends, Applejack not a horned zombie with a hole in her cheek and guts spilling out, Rarity, not bleeding sand and electrocuting herself, and Rainbow Dash, not having disappeared to Celestia knows where. But Twilight would have to leave her body eventually and wake her up.

Day drew near, and camp was pitched again. Kivsin and Octavia had come to really enjoy one another’s company, and the mutant musician had finally goaded the batpony to take off his armor and come into her tent with her.

“So, what exactly did you want me for?” he asked, smiling with her at his back, pushing him through the tent entrance.

“You’ll see,” she said lewdly.

Inside was a white unicorn to the side, her enchanted voice playing an oddly lucid, romantic number and with a look as if in a world of her own and a pink mare lying with her hind legs crossed, licking her lips as Kivsin entered. Vinyl’s horn provided a dim, sunset glow on the interior.

“Um... what is this?” he asked nervously.

“I thought we might want to ‘consummate’ our friendship.” Octavia said.

“What does that mean?”

Octavia brushed his broken ear gently with her muzzle. “You’ll see. Help me down?”

Octavia let go of her cello and Kivsin slowly lowered her to the ground. Pinkie wrapped her tongues around the mare and dragged her to her mouth.

“See you on the other side,” Octavia said before being devoured.

He squeamishly watched his marefriend be swallowed down and expand the earth pony’s belly. She fixed a still hungry gaze on him. “Next.”

Kivsin hesitated, but it had to be okay, right? Vinyl and Octavia got eaten plenty of times by Pinkie and she let them out, so...

He took a step closer and she practically inhaled him.

“Welcome to my little mobile home.” Octavia giggled and helped Kivsin get his face out of the stomach acid.

Pinkie squeezed her occupants tightly and yawned. “You two have fun in there.” All the blood started flowing to her stomach to fuel its labor and she soon dozed off.

Kivsin’s ears twitched. “She fell asleep?! We’ll be dissolved in here!”

Octavia put her hoof on his shoulder. “That is why we have this” Tentacles slithered from her body cavity, bearing a syringe that lightly pierced into the stomach walls. Pinkie took a sharp, pained breath, then sighed calmly as the chemical was carefully injected. The dark purple goop secreted from the walls turned a little lighter. “And there we are,” Octavia smiled. “The acid is neutralized. “Vinyl never goes anywhere far without sedatives or stimulants.”

“Are you sure?”

“Oh yes. She makes her injections so well, she might as well have a PhD in chemistry. Come now, relax.” She cuddled up against Kivsin. “Why don’t you tell me another story. From your exploits abroad, perhaps?”

“Hm... Oh, The Shadow King launched an expedition into Ulthuan and brought me as part of his guard.”

“You must have been quite the fighter in that armor of yours.” Octavia purred, sizing him up appealingly.

“The Black Guard have to be the best of the best. I can’t remember how many I killed when the High Elves retaliated and the Black Guard regiment ploughed straight into the Phoenix Guard.” Kivsin raised his hooves in praise. “The Lord of Murder must have smiled on that struggle. We were both devastated and found that both Princess Cadenza and King Sombra were gone, but of course, we kept fighting.”

“Did you win?” Octavia asked eagerly.

“No. He ordered a retreat and, strangely, the High Elves and Crystal ponies abandoned the field at the same time. The king was in especially low spirit on the sailing back to Naggarond.”

“My poor stallion. Thank the gods you made it out alive. Do you miss Naggarond? Did you ever think about going back?”

“No,” he said darkly. “Sombra had me mutilated and I can remember now what he does to my brothers and sisters. My master has shown me kindness and affection. Now I can see his wickedness.”

They heard Vinyl’s song end and the unicorn wiggled under Pinkie’s paunch, making an awkward hump between the two grey ponies.

“Damn it, Vinyl.” Octavia grumbled. She twisted herself out of a contorting position and smacked her hoof down on what she hoped was Vinyl’s head.

“Ow! What?”

“We were in the middle of something!”

“Well I’m freezing out here, so get used to it. Rrgh... what’s with my leg today?” Her injured leg had been stiff and lost a lot of flexibility. Most recently, it went numb. She unwrapped the cloth bandage and found a strange object in place of her hoof. A cylinder of a plastic-like material and metal, entwined in copper wires and blue and purple rubber insulation. It looked like something out of a cyberpunk poster. “Du-hu-hude. I don’t even remember shooting up anything! Am I still that high?” She lightly bit the cyber-hoof. Sure enough, the taste and texture matched the look. “Ermahgerd!” she exclaimed with a strange accent. “Slaanesh’s giving me something!”

Octavia couldn’t care less. “Congratulations, now go to sleep.”

“No way. You guys keep doing whatever and I’ll... figure this out.”

“Just be quiet.” After a moment of nothing but the sound of Pinkie’s grumbling belly, the grey mare smiled.

She rolled herself onto Kivsin who was wiping some gastric goop off his face, in the mood for some roleplaying. “In the belly of the beast, two ponies are eaten alive by a voracious predator.” She cuddled him provocatively, brushing her forehead under his chin. “Its heartbeat thumps, just above them...” They heard the ba-dum ba-dum of Pinkie’s heart. They could almost feel it around them. Kivsin’s body temperature quickly began to rise and he smiled slightly on his partner. “And its cavernous stomach grinds away and tries to digest them. What do they do?”

She pressed their noses together and stared lustfully into his yellow, cat-like eyes. “Do they wither like flowers in the flame, or make the most of their time together, and go out with a bang?”

Kivsin grinned sensuously and pulled Octavia’s body down to him, locking the contours of their forms together. “Out with a bang.”

EEEAAAAAOOOOAAAAAEEEE— *BANG!*

“What kind of patrol rolls around a fucking screaming skull catapult?!” Vinyl shielded her eyes from the whining flash of an artillery projectile. The shrieks of a dozen souls burst from the blazing skull that hit the ground, erupting in a geyser of white hot energy. “This is just like that play, Saving Private Lion! You know, the beach of Normanedy? One of the fuckers took his helmet off after a bullet bounced off, and he got nailed on the second shot!”

A light green fist came conking on her helmet. “Would you shut up and focus, you stupid loudmouth!” Lyra shouted. Like a soldier from said era, she poked her head over the embankment, halberd in hand. She focused her power through the shaft and fired a seething beam into the undead, exploding like a grenade among them. “You just kept screaming and making so much noise, flaunting that new hoof, and it drew these guys straight at us! If we survive this, I’m gonna kill you!”

Arrows flicked down from over the ridge they covered behind. Sylvanian skeletons slowly advanced on the natural barrier while Fluttershy lost her mind in the best way possible. She got inventive with the hellcannon, forming multiple barrels on her hooves that fired in rapid succession, pounding the undead with thudding shot. Her face was twisted in sickening glee at the carnage.

“YAAHAHAHA! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE! KILL! KILL!”

The ordanance shredded ranks of bony warriors, but fearless and unthinking, they advanced on in a rigid shield wall.

“I’ll keep you safe!” Pinkie pleaded, trying to force her maw over the Doctor’s head.

He was getting soaked in her spit, hooves up to hold her back. “I don’t need your help!”

Her tongues came whipping down and yanked him up into her gullet. In one gulp, she downed him easily “I won’t let them get you. Just until it’s safe.” Her belly responded by screaming in indignant anger.

Something hit Vinyl’s shoulder, landing soft and heavy. She looked up into a mutilated face of torn and charred flesh and broken teeth, glaring at her with cloudy grey eyes. It let out a weak, throaty moan and lunged to bite her.

“Holy shit!” she snapped her voice-powered hoof cannon around and fired. Rib bones exploded outward as its chest was flattened and a black ooze gushed from its mouth. The body was hurled back several feet and when Vinyl peered over the embankment, it picked its head up and started clawing forward again on its torn belly. “These zombies don’t take a hint!” She fired a magic beam straight through it’s forehead and it fell limply. “Hey Rarity, how’s that boon of mutation coming?”

The novice sorcerer was still lighting her head on fire with energy to come up with the spell, then her hand flickered to light in a miasma of colors. “Ready!”

“Yes! Charge me, doc—”

“Wait!” Octavia put her strings on the unicorn’s shoulder. “Are you sure you can handle it? Look at me, I can barely walk.”

Vinyl held her hoof firmly. “You wanted your cello to be a part of you and you got it. I was strong before you took part of me.” She took the hoof off and pressed it to Octavia’s cheek. “This is my chance to get it back. Who knows if Rarity can get the spell right again?”

Said unicorn’s horns popped and crackled painfully. “I can’t hold it for long.”

“Hit me.”

Rarity held the sides of Vinyl’s head and funneled immaterial energy into her and the loudmouthed mare fell into an awestruck, shaking trance. The whims of chaos played with Vinyl’s features, beyond Rarity’s control. The living, warpforged cybernetics expanded and crept across her body. If she couldn’t bring her stereo system with her, it would be on her.

Braeburn checked to make sure his rusty helmet was still on. A shot anywhere else on this chaos zombie and he’d be relatively fine, but a hit to the brain would be his end. “Gonna see if I can distract their archers. You better hurry up, Scratch.”

“Be careful.” Applejack said.

“I will.” He climbed up into the open, an arrow already impaling into his eye socket. “Come on, you sorry excuses for the dead! Y’all couldn’t hit the broadside of a barn, even with eyes!”

“It’s too quiet...” Vinyl muttered as the transformation neared completion. She got angry, really angry, slapped Rarity’s hands away and took up her weapon in a talonlike plasteel claw. “This quiet...” A lethally red glowing eye glanced to Octavia who was scared frozen. It swiveled forward again and VInyl crested the ridge, raising her sonic gun in hedonistic rage. “This quiet offends Slaanesh! Things shall get LOUD NOW!” Everyone covered their ears as Vinyl sucked in a huge volume of air. “EEEEEEEAAAAAAAWOOOOWOOOWAAAAAA!!”

She sang the Cacophonic Choir. Like a thousand screaming daemonettes, Vinyl wailed to the heavens. Even the undead shuddered to a halt, some of their skulls shattered and exploded, and arrows were diverted off course from the buffeting air pressure. Braeburn’s jellified bodily fluids helped to displace the pressure and he was already somewhat deaf.

Kivsin stealthily flew around the skirmish, en route to the rear. His acute hearing rang at the sound of a hypersonic cry from the ridge. Perching among the tree branches, the bat-pony spotted the insidious device below. Formed of giant bones and sinew, skeleton crewmen chattered among themselves before the lead gave a retaliatory shriek in an echoing, ghostly voice, thrusting a bony fist to the air.

The arm of the engine flung up, hurling a giant flaming skull through the air like a howling comet that exploded dangerously close to the ridge. Vinyl and Braeburn stumbled to remain upright in the gusting shockwave. Kivsin arched himself, wings outstretched, and launched like a bullet, hurdling down on the closest skeleton. He tackled it down, the charged lightning claws pierced the lead skeleton’s cranium, the warpstone power vaporizing it into white sand.

The rest of the crew came at him and he quickly dispatched the clumsy soldiers with cruel gaiety. The crackling claws slashed through one’s pelvis and another arc severed its head. Each swipe of his weapons was followed by a crumbling skeleton. The last crewman went down with a shattered ribcage and his skull shattering like white pottery. Not in so long had he felt the joy, the thrill of combat. If the undead still had hearts, he’d cut them out and drink from them, cackling. He cut the ropes binding the catapult together and piece by piece it collapsed into a skeletal heap.

Back at the besieged embankment, they noticed the catapult had stopped and now it was time to put Rarity’s metalworking skills to the test with their new armor.

With the fury of the Forsaken the ponies charged into the last of the skeletons, screeching, hacking, and slashing with claws and halberd with total abandon. Applejack kept the three fillies safe behind the raging, possessed juggernaut. The daemon within the giant frantically fumbled through her body.

“Where is he? WHERE IS HE!? There you are!” The iron daemon was wrapped in bloody chains in the mental void. Twilight quickly flew up to him and shook his unconscious face. “Mac. Big Macintosh!” That didn’t wake him, but a magic shock did.

“Ah! Ah...uh...”

Twilight worked at the chains, burning through them with magic energy. “I’m here to get you out, Macintosh. Your family is out there!”

“...Apple Bloom?”

“Yeah, she and Applejack are worried sick about you.”

He smiled widely. “Applejack’s there, too- *Clank* Whuh- AAAAAAAAHHHHH!” Macintosh tumbled through the void in total freefall when the bounds snapped. He would be way too heavy for Twilight to carry by wings or magic.

“Oops.”

An enraged Fluttershy readied to jump the ridge and join the others in slaughter, but a wracking, squirming feeling throughout her body impeded her.

The sensation culminated in her chest, bulging like a parasite ready to burst from within her. Like a giant drop of steel water, a mass swelled and hung down, then it broke from her and thudded on the ground, slowly morphing and changing. As it took a recognizable shape, Apple Bloom raced through the thinning arrow fire to the juggernaut taking shape.

Fluttershy drew heaving breaths, unable to decide whether to slump at the pain in her chest and hooves, or smile that half her nightmare was finally over.

“Come on, Big Mac! Wake up!” Apple Bloom jostled the machine’s shoulder, searching for some sign of life. The empty, black eye sockets flickered, sparked, and little balls of fire soon came to life in those iron bowls. A low grinding grew into a steady hum within his shell like an activating machine. An elated smile curled the filly’s face as the machine slowly stood, vigorously shaking his head.

Whilst knocking his senses back into order, he caught a glimpse of his former tomb which was fearfully backing away and trying to look as innocent as possible. “H-h-hi... B-b-b—”

“Big Mac!” Applejack sounded. “Yer alive! Wouldja look at ya!”

The juggernaut only smiled for a brief moment before catching the sound of battle nearby. Duty to the lord of war came first. He launched up the ridge, his weight shaking the ground under his iron hooves. Like a living battering ram, he smashed into the undead, not losing an iota of momentum to the lightweight corpse soldiers. In his wake was nothing but a line of shattered bones and crumpled armor. He only slowed after he’d run all the way through them and wheeled around for another strike.

“Look at ‘im go!” Applejack cheered. “Fluttershy, why ain’t you like that?”

It didn’t take long to mop up the last of the undead. Braeburn had his hoof on the face of the last skeleton. It clawed and tore chunks of meat and flesh off his leg. “T’sokay,” he whispered as it screamed. “Just go back ‘ta sleep, child. Go back ‘ta sleep and Nurgle will welcome ya back home.” He put more pressure on it until its skull cracked, and shattered. The rest of its body fell apart. “There ya go.”

“That’s the problem with skeletons,” Vinyl said, weaving a necklace of bones. “All thumbs and too predictable.”

“N’ them damn vampires dun brought all of ‘em back ta life after they got Nurgle’s grace,” Braeburn said angrily. “They needed ‘ta stay with the Plague Father.”

“N’ope.”

The diseased stallion turned a curious, annoyed look to Big Mac who was racking up a couple skulls on the spikes of his body.

“Then where do you think they go, wiseguy?”

The iron stallion said haughtily, “Kharneth.”

“Don’t be usi’n that fancy-shmancy black speech with me. Mmm...” Braeburn pondered, tapping his lip. “Nah. Nurgle’s god ‘a death. He gets em.”

Even the slightest disagreement and the khornate engine was displeased. When Braeburn had his back back turned, looking for something to eat, his horn stabbed through the stallion’s back and Macintosh lifted him on his head.

“Y’all wanna play it that way?” Braeburn gathered a wad of acidic bile to spit and twisted his head around before Applejack interrupted them.

“You two go at each other easier than a starvin’ snake to a rat!” The two glanced at each other a moment. Braeburn drank back the acid and Macintosh let him get off his blade. She put her hooves around them and brought them close. “Come on guys. We’re family, back together agin!” She sat between them, leaning toward Macintosh. “Big Mac, ya put a hole in cousin Braeburn’s chest.”

The juggernaut rolled his burning eyes and hesitantly said, to break the awkwardness, “Apologies, cous’n.”

“Ah, nothi’n a quick snack can’t fix.” Braeburn ripped the arm off a zombie and bit off a good chunk of meat. He swallowed it and his body used it to patch the hole. “Oh, ‘n look here.” He plucked out the zombie’s eye, and his own right eye and replaced it. After a couple blinks, the new eye swiveled in sync with the other. “Much better. An arrow grazed my other one. Y’all right, Mac?”

“Yep.”

“Any damage from bei’n trapped in Fluttershy?”

“Nope.”

Braeburn picked himself up. “Right, then. Let’s get back on the move. Great ta have ya back, big guy.” A welcoming hoof patted Macintosh on the back.

“Try not ta touch me too much,” he said. “Y’all gonna make me rust over.”

“Then ya better get used to grindstones, cus I ain’t lett’n you outta my sight!” Applejack chuckled, and wrapped her moldy forelegs around his neck.

Chapter 38 - Gelt's Folly, Black Sun

"With a heart of steel, and Hell on wheels,
The kings of metal lead us!
It's the king of kings, the crown of ring!
Carry on, as our kingdom come!"
~Excerpt from the Imperial Tankmen’s March

Pinkie Pie rifled through a file cabinet, one of twenty-six arranged in a circle, this one labeled “L”.

“No, no, no, no… There you are, Lokha.”

She pulled the ochre folder, and pored over the little girl’s life history. Lokha Styrbjorn, daughter of Orgon Styrbjorn, Goromandy tribe, eleven years of age, her favorite color and foods, her friends, and…

Her friends. Sweetie Belle and Scootaloo were near the bottom of the list, probably having met her recently. Pinkie Pie suddenly felt a knot in her throat.

No, this was an opportunity to make it up to them, make it great. Pinkie tucked the folder in her mane, and was already prancing around the cave, sequestering the basics for a youth’s party.

It felt liberating to be able to do this again. Not fighting, or settling another one of Sigvald’s petty niggles. The celebration in the burning ruins of Praag was on another level, the music, the wine, smoke, noise, food. She’d woken the day after, cuddling half a stallion, and with a hangover enough to kill a man. Even with the lingering migraine, days later, she finally had time to herself, to work, and hoped to bring her talent to the older people of the horde.

Under the light of hanging discoballs, she passed the armory, taking a box of filly-safe fireworks, and some low-yield confetti bombs. She juggled the ordnance in brief practice, wondering how Rarity must have felt when in the attack on Praag’s citadel. She’d been a split-second too late to shield herself and Spike from a Kislevite bomb, and the amount of shrapnel removed from her legs was nauseating to see. Rarity would have to minimize the time spent on her own two talons for a while, and Pinkie was happy to help ease the burden.

Pinkie missed a beat, and a grenade had slipped through her claw and bounced across the floor. She caught up with it at the back of the armory, where it stopped against the skid of a pedal-powered helicopter. She blew the film of dust from the handles and seat, memories and ideas of helicopter rides for the young ones coming to the fore. It would need a major overhaul first. Trying to mount it, she almost laughed at how much she’d outgrown the machine; her bottom spilled over the seat’s edges, and her head was among the rotor blades.

Pinkie firmly rubbed her belly to rouse its contents. “Hey, Rarity, wakey-wakey...”

A heavy weight shifted under the muscles of her guts, and Rarity moaned back, “Hmm… yes?"

“I need to fly my chopper for a few minutes, so things might get a bit bumpy.”

“Oh. Alright. Where do you even find these things?”

“I build these myself, silly. I never told you that? Where I keep them, ehh you don’t need to worry about that. Just enjoy the ride.” Pinkie hunched over to avoid the rotor, and started to pedal. Thwopping gusts of air pushed the contraption off the ground. “Oh, and does Sweetie Belle have a fear of heights? Should this be fully enclosed, or would that ruin the view, or...”

Gunning the underpowered mechanism, she flew straight up the heli tube, and reentered the Old World.

___________________________________________________

“The King in the North! The King in the North! Here comes the King in the North! The King in...”

The soldiers paraded around the corpse of another infiltrator, in parody of Archaon. Tied upright to a horse, a foil-wrapped boar’s head was bolted to his shoulders where a man’s should have been. Onlookers laughed at their passing.

Rainbow Dash was sweating, watching them pass. Though her disguise seemed to be holding for now.

“Geoffrey, come on!”

Rainbow Dash hurried to catch up with her ‘friends’. Trutwin, Lukas, Wortwin, and Voltz. She was the 6th Company Captain, 27th Ostland Spears regiment. She was Geoffrey Wurtz, and Geoffrey Wurtz was being paraded around with a boar’s head on his shoulders, and another dead man’s tags around his neck.

The chapel set aside for the ceremony was new, of unweathered marble, with a bright blue-tiled roof. Rainbow glanced up as she entered, looking to a crowned skull on a golden cross in stained glass. The interior was abuzz with nobles, officers both retired and current, even dwarf emissaries. Security was everywhere. A Reiksguardsman was at every colonnade, four at the preacher’s podium alone.

She took a wine glass from a passing waiter, and glanced about for the Emperor, or the Princesses. She avoided her ‘friends’ and talking to anyone as much as she could help it, and made up some bits of Geoffrey’s life when compelled to share by Trutwin. Damn him, he was practically using her as a conversation crutch when his memory failed. Eventually she managed to excuse herself from the party, and trailed off on her own exploration.

She actually got invested in a conversation with Filthy Rich, a familiar face who was starting to show his age. He’d rebuilt his wealth almost from scratch since the Fall of Equestria, and contributed to Spitfire’s consolidation of order in Cloudsdale. Perhaps she’d spare him a thought once she went after the royalty, and try not to step on him.

“Starting over… it was surreal,” Rich said. “Maybe a fifth of the ponies you knew made it out of the Fall, and now you’re stuck in an alien land, at the mercy of another species. No offense.”

“None taken.” ‘Geoffrey’ snickered, and sipped the wine. Sipping was something she had to learn the hard way. This stuff wasn’t like Equestrian cider, let alone Applejack’s homemade brand, and knocking back her first glass of Bretonnian wine nearly made her gag. If there was one thing she was grateful for, it was that it at least helped her stay in character. “Things moved so fast since your lot fell from the sky. How did you find your way back up?”

“Logistics, management. There’s a reason my cutie mark is money bags. The princesses put me and some other business types in charge of keeping everypony in line early on, and to prove we could contribute to the Empire. I was flattered when Mr. Gelt called our magic, ‘casually mastered’.”

“He must have been terrified knowing there was such magic freely flying around.”

“Oh, you have no idea; the regulations were stifling! ‘Earth ponies cannot lift more than twice their bodyweight’, ‘Imperial citizens must report any unsanctioned use of unicorn magic, down to telekinesis’!” Rich choked up a moment. “You’ve seen the Punished Blind?”

Rainbow shook her head. “I grew up out here, on the frontier. There’ve never been many ponies around here. News of race relations doesn’t carry out here much.”

“Right. The Blind were unicorns who were caught freely using magic, and had their horns filed down to the forehead. The lighter patch of fur looks like a third, blind eye.”

“Disgusting, that. Like taking a man’s hands away.” Rainbow squeezed her glass tightly, and put it on the outgoing tray of another passing waiter. “Better times for your lot now?”

Rich nodded. “For us all. Well, it would be, if not for that rabble beyond the wall.”

The steeple bell sounded, reverberating in the stony hall.

“May I have your attention, please?" A page called out from the podium. “It is my honor to introduce, Karl Franz Holswig Schliestein, the Emperor Himself and Son of Emperors. Celestia, Eye of Heaven. Luna, Mother of Moon and Stars.

Rainbow Dash felt her blood boil at the sight of them as they strode to the top of the stairs, all smiles and grace as applause greeted them. She slowly eased forward between onlookers.

Sure was nice of you to just forget us. Abandon us.

“Here we are, at the new edge of the world,” Franz said. Power punctuated every word, and he raised his arms. “Our efforts have culminated in this, the ultimate bastion to defend the world of men. I applaud each and every one of you, your contributions to build it, defend it. It is a shame Lord Balthasar could not attend, for without his genius, this would not have been possible.”

The crowd made a rumble of assent and clinking glasses. Rainbow advanced, building up the energy within for her transformation.

Mother of stars, Eye of Heaven… ugh! You think you're some kind of gods now?

Her skin hardened to steel, her fingers merging together into a short blade under her sleeve. The human blockade of Reiksguard was but a few meters away. Franz was nearing the end of his speech when the chapel doors slammed open thunderously, and someone screamed.

“ASSASSIN!”

A bolt of lightning dropped Balthasar Gelt before the Triumvirate. He was ragged and wheezing, his golden mask streaked with red tears.

Rainbow saw Celestia, Luna, and Franz stand bolt upright, unbent by the blinding flash and loud boom of the Patriarch's entrance. The Emperor was staring hotly at Balthazar, one hand on Ghal Maraz, and saying something quickly, but she couldn't make it out over the sudden distress of the crowd.

Balthazar didn't respond to whatever it was either way, instead gesturing frantically with one hand and yelling, “Seal the doors. Let no one out!”

Rainbow felt her gut drop. Now or never.

In the commotion, as the Reiksguard attempted to contain the fearful crowd, Rainbow pushed people out of her way. As she drew closer, she made out more of Gelt’s plea with the triarchs. He’d had a vision, he said; it was not safe, they must get out.

Rainbow reached a metal hand between two guests and toward the last knight in her way. He was distracted with someone shouting at him to open the doors. She aimed just above the gorget, right for the throat.

“Unhand me!” Gelt shouted as another knight took him by the collar.

A wicked aurora passed between Gelt’s hand and the knight attempting to stop him from grabbing the triarchs. A screaming body of light separated from the knight, wearing his face.

“No, no, stop!” Gelt wrestled his own arm down, and the knight collapsed in a gasping heap.

The guardsman before Rainbow turned sharply towards Gelt, his hand already moving towards his sword. She un-steeled her flesh, pointed at the Patriarch, and yelled, “Necromancy! It’s him!”

Celestia and Luna, their faces riven like thunderclouds, immediately forced Gelt to his knees with the force of their combined telekinesis, covering him in a flaring aura of clashing gold and blue. Franz was half-turned into a combat stance when members of the Reiksguard on either side surged forward to bracket the three rulers and surround the fallen patriarch.

But the damage was already done. The crowd surged in panic, and broke free of the containment. Dozens of nobles poured from the chapel, shouting of assassins and the patriarch practicing unholy magic. The word spread like wildfire, and within minutes reached the ley nodes. The wizard covens maintaining the Auric Bastion’s magic were thrown into confusion at the prospect of forbidden arts holding up the walls, and the madness dark magic could destroy them with. One by one, the ley nodes went dark, and the bastion’s magic waned.

________________________________________________

Gutrot Spume’s fleet had been reassigned to prowl the Sea of Claws. Delays in the Everchosen’s army moving on the Empire had mounted. Still, the fleet was not idle, partaking in coastal raids and battle with the Imperial Navy on the seas in recent days. The flagship was like a rotting whale, surrounded by schools of teeming escorts. There were more than one hundred ships in the fleet, with pustule- and rot-covered Nurglites working them like swarms of ants.

Applejack laid in her hammock, unable to rest after the most recent letter from her friends, only stare at the algae-covered boards, and the bugs crawling across them. The letters had been coming regularly, detailing their goings-on. Praag burned, Twilight experimenting with forms of magic, Rarity’s injury and recovery from a grenade.

In the latest, Rainbow Dash had been given a mission to take out the Imperial leadership. She felt the reason Archaon gave was horse apples, and recognized Rainbow’s penmanship. “You will face many challenges, one after the other. I will send you on your most dangerous, so I know I’m not wasting my time.” Rainbow hadn’t been slated to go in for days, and Applejack lost nights of sleep over when the time would come.

She heard heavy footsteps approaching, a rhythm of wheezing hydraulics and clunking metal.

“Macintosh, I told you I ain’t playing no driftwood banjo. It’s an art that deserves a real instrument.”

A few badly tuned notes made her head turn. Apple Bloom struggled to get her hooves around the instrument, and clumsily played out a few strums. A cowpony hat made of seaweed rested on Macintosh’s facial horn. A note was tied to the middle with a big ‘Happy Birthday!’ in gold glitter.

Applejack sat up and took the hat. “Aw, shoot…”

“With everything goin' on, I’m surprised Pinkie Pie still keeps track of everypony’s birthdays,” said Apple Bloom. “She even made this here banjo, and we made you the hat. It was uh… a challenge, sayin' the least.”

Macintosh rolled his eyes. “Yep.”

“And I can’t fault neither of you for losin’ track. Date system here ain’t exactly the same as Equestria’s.” Applejack paused in the middle of tying the chinstrap. “So Spike can send other things, ‘sides paper?”

Apple Bloom plucked another sour note. “Guess so.” She handed over the banjo, a well-made construction of polished steel fittings and still smelling of varnish.

Applejack expertly tuned it. She strummed a few melodious chords, and laughed. “I gotta send them a raven askin' how that whole thing works. Ya think Spike could send a lit bomb dropping into ponies’ laps? Or how bout droppin' you in the middle of a block of Empire troops?”

Macintosh shrugged. “Could be useful. Shame he ain’t here.”

Whistling and calls to the main deck on the floors above roused the rest of the crew. Applejack hastily hugged Macintosh, and they went with the flow of bodies to the main deck.

Midday on the sea, the banners of the plague fleet hung in full view, illuminated by glow-bug lanterns. Dozens of zombified Imperials were speared along the hull, moaning and thrashing uselessly at the sea, grim trophies of recent raids.

The masses gathered, attention fixed on Gutrot Spume on the poop deck. A pox-ridden raven perched on his shoulder, and he held a balled-up parchment in a fist. Once he judged there were enough in attendance, he held up the paper.

“Took them long enough! Practice your sword arms, and weigh anchor. We’re on for Marienburg!”

Cheers erupted from the congregation. Big Macintosh crushed Applejack in a hug, and with a free hoof, Applejack tossed her hat skyward with a whistle.

_________________________________________________

Rarity opened her eyes. The mundane world of flesh caged her again. The lightform always felt so liberating, like the purest form of being, the liberation of the soul. But van Horstmann warned her that such joy cannot last long. Many an acolyte refused to return to their bodies while in the lightform, believing themselves enlightened and ascended, only for their souls to dissolve into the Warp, and their bodies left comatose husks.

She stood up from Spike’s lap, straightening out her chainmail robe, and rested a hand on the prow of Fluttershy’s howdah. The Auric Bastion had a ghastly wound, a breach more than two hundred feet across. Pummeled open by artillery, then widened by two previous assaults.

“Did you see anything?” asked Spike.

“Not much. Fluttershy?”

The giant turned her head slightly and grunted.

“Don’t stop at the trenches. There are tanks you’ll need to contend with behind them.”

Fluttershy impatiently pawed the ground, and many more monstrosities bayed their impatience around her, like hounds, waiting to be unleashed. Some of their bodies flickered, as if not wholly there, their existence sustained by the turmoil of both sides, and imminent slaughter.

She was assigned a team of ten riflemen, from a cultist organization known as the Blood Pact. They wore heavy armor, bore rifles of similar quality to Imperial weapons, and their faces were obscured by sneering iron masks. Cheerilee helped them secure their gear for the ride, witnessed their oaths, and marked them for glory.

Hundreds of corpses of cultists and warriors hung from the blood slicked Bastion, an entire giant was crucified against the face. A wave of roaring sounded from the bastion. Defiance, iron will.

Rarity’s focus was broken by the trumpeting of elephants. Five mammoths moved up to flank her, each of their howdahs adorned with dragon banners and shouting Norscans.

“Jinam! Jinam!”

“Oh, dear gods, they found us,” Rarity laughed.

Spike felt a familiar, childish ego at the attention, and this might just be sufficient to get past the breach. “What do you say, guys? Jinam for now?”

Fluttershy pounded a fist on the ground to a beat, which drew mimicry from the warriors around. A thunder of stomping hooves and blades clashing against shields resounded. Even the rifle team joined in, thumping their rifle butts on the floor.

“Well, I’ve always wondered what it would be like at the head of a warband,” joked Rarity. “Let’s live the dream, at least this once.”

Spike drew his sword, holding it high as the blade ignited in iridescent flame, drawing the applause of the Norscans. Today, he was theirs and they were his.

He spotted a comet of violet light lazily sailing across the sky, followed by a cloud of pegasi, their number blackening the sky like a murder of crows.

Warhorns sounded, and Fluttershy smiled at the sound. “Hang on, everypony!”

_________________________________________________________

Atop the walls, Karl Franz and Celestia witnessed the surging tide. A mad, barking pack of flesh hounds bounded ahead of the first wave of marauders that had yet to fully form up for an attack. Being so close to the immense nexus of power that was the Bastion drove their daemonic allies onward in a frenzy for its energies, even chewing at individual blocks and bits of rubble in their way as others raced the gap, only to be obliterated in the bottleneck by helblaster volley guns and massed rifle fire. The calls of ‘Ready! Present! Fire! Reload!’ became an incessant chant.

Franz had always thought there was something beautiful in the first moments of battle. Here were the moments of highest emotion, the fear of mortal men, the frustrated bloodlust and screaming overconfidence of the Empire’s enemies. In these moments, when battle is joined, the purity of the mortal spirit is revealed to the foe.

Franz squinted, his eyesight thick through the smoke. Yet no one could miss the hulking, equine form towering over the horde, her metal hide glinting dully in the sun. “That thing used to be the Element of Kindness?” he remarked.

Celestia opened the small box chained to her armor, and levitated out the Elements of Harmony. The gems had lost their distinct shapes, now simply hexagonal gemstones. “Perhaps she can be, once again.”

The soldiers around her receded slightly as the Elements lit up. Celestia channeled her own power through them, awakening memories of the Tree of Harmony, of Luna, the Nightmare, and Discord.

Gleaming rainbow ribbons branched between the gems. Celestia watched as Fluttershy charged, hearing her roar of hate and wrath. She looked to the purple comet and smiled. The energy of the Elements climaxed, and a supernova of magic blossomed forth. The storm faltered in the face of the oncoming wave, and they were defenseless as it washed over them.

The neverborn disintegrated in its wake, like sand in the face of a tsunami. Their dying screams echoed across the plains as the soulstuff of their being was calmed, and flowed back into the warp. Those few caught on the edges were left partially petrified, fully half of the hounds' lanky bodies turned from corrupted flesh to what was little better than brittle clay. Their howls turned to shrieks of pain and dismay, and many of them tumbled like rocks down the slope where much of their bodies crumbled to dust.

A few Imperials nearby who witnessed the spectacle raised their swords and let out shouts of jubilation at seeing their most hated foes undone. The warp gods themselves felt the touch of Harmony, and they were weakened.

Karl Franz watched, his whole body tingling so close to the epicenter. He didn’t know what to expect. For them to lay down their arms, surrender, for mutations to reverse in moments? As the aurora struck the comet of black and violet, it flashed momentarily as though it was being reflected, and its light dimmed.

He only had Celestia's recountings of the Elements’ capabilities until now. This might actually work; the might of the North, and Chaos itself subdued.

The horde slowed, but did not stop, and nothing seemed to change among the flesh and blood warriors. The war horns blared once again, reaffirming the order, and the charge renewed with unmitigated fury.

“It isn’t working,” he snapped, then shouted to the troops. “Deathclaw, hop-up.” The mighty griffon bowed to let him to mount the saddle. “Daemons destroyed and they still come, ey? Gluttons for punishment, they are! Make ready!”

The Elements died down, their power spent. The aurora of colors shrank, and swiftly dissipated into the ether. Celestia stared in disbelief, but quickly grit her teeth and returned her attention to the battle. “Artillery, fire at will!”

The hastily prepared ground defences shored up. Mortars and rocket batteries thundered in discharge, and soldiers mounted the firesteps of a ranked series of trenches, a stair of fire awaiting the foe. Three steam tanks, the Stormcast Eternal, Iron Heart, and Schwerpunkt had their guns leveled just above the top redoubt.

A series of trumpet blasts cued a platoon of unicorns to project a shield wall. Moving in unison, their aetheric steams mixed and built up the barrier expected to hold for mere moments to blunt the charge of monsters.

The comet changed course, arcing toward the barrier, and accelerated to a bullet’s speed. It broke through in a scintillating shower of magic shards, and impacted in the center of the killzone, kicking up a blinding cloud of dust.

Through the dust, like a nightmare birthed from the void, an iron mare stormed the breach’s center.

Fluttershy rushed over Twilight and Archaon, a black shadow whose booming stride nearly drowned out the fusillade of fire from the Imperials.

The giant didn’t stop, climbing the trenches and moved to grab the turret of a steam tank behind them. A beam of golden light intercepted her claw, melting a divot in her armor.

“We break the Imperials here,” Archaon’s voice thundered in Twilight’s mind. “Trust in me, and obey the reins.”

Mammoths charged in her wake as if spawned from the dust, trunks trumpeting. Iron Heart fired, snapping off the leg of one mammoth in a tree-trunk crack of bone. Streaming around it, the Swords of Chaos charged headlong onto the trenches, bullets ricocheting off their heavy armor.

Archaon guided her from one trooper to another, cleaving men in two in a single swipe. Their concert was a blur of motion and teleporting flashes, never ceasing and every turn finding a new victim to reap.

A lance of pain shot through her cheek, quickly feeling hot and wet. She spotted a rifleman re-cocking his weapon. There was fear and glee in his eyes for the grazing hit. With a telekinetic thought, the weapon was yanked out of his hands, himself teleported to her, his neck already in her jaws. The bite instantly crushed his spine, and in a single draw, the corpse shriveled into a mummified skeleton.

Archaon jerked the reins, yanking her head up, and half-swallowed blood dripped down to stain the grass. “Out. We need more important targets, the airship.”

Beating her wings to leave the trench, she shot for the nearest airship, its gunports gushing burning oil onto a giant and sending it fleeing in panic. Cultist and Imperial pegasi fought for supremacy over its airspace, filling the air with feathers and a drizzle of blood on the world below.

Archaon guided her through the maelstrom, slashing at any Imperial within reach. Once alongside the ship, he drove the Slayer of Kings into the balloon, and renting it end to end. Gasses blew out, the hull listed, and its fate was sealed to crash.

Twilight saw the battle from above, as bullets softly whizzed by her.

The Empire was overwhelmed. The full might of Chaos was forcing itself through the breach, from woolly mammoths rampaging through the lines, and the northmen’s savagery tearing into the armies.

She thought the red thirst was hitting her again as the view darkened, but it wasn’t just her; others looked up, some even stopping in their tracks to stare at the sky. The world was quickly losing color, muting all to a lifeless grey.

“The sun,” Archaon said. His voice held uncertainty.

A black orb hung in the sky, haloed by sunlight, like a dead eye staring down on the world.

“Are the gods doing that?” asked Twilight timidly.

“No," Archaon said simply, though he was just as confused as she.

A sonorous wail rang out that chilled her bones, and the hills in the distance darkened, a rolling carpet covering the land in its advance. The noise became a screech, eldritch and hateful. Flapping forms, too big to be birds across that distance, floated above a dense tide of shuffling forms that blanketed the ground. As the sudden eclipse grew until the black disc swept nearly all light from view, the stentorious chirping of a rising black cloud of creatures, flying in their thousands above the army, filled the air.

“The dead come,” growled Archaon. He whipped the reins, pushing Twilight into a dive toward the fray. “We break them now!”

Cheerilee’s voice was enchanted before the battle was joined via an amplification spell, so her litanies would be heard far and wide. She sang portents of doom, promises of filth and bloodshed. Fluttershy’s howdah was her pulpit, Empire and Chaos alike her audience. Above the blood and fire, she preached. A band of five played from an locomotive-like platform behind her, under an armor-glass bubble. Noticing them, Cheerilee only slightly changed her cadence to fit the music.

Fluttershy dug her claws under the prow of a tank that was backing away, straining to lift its front end up. With a grunt, she managed to flip the machine on its head, and tore out its wooden underbelly. Scooping out the disoriented crew, she crushed them with one clench of her claw, and hurled the mangled bodies across the field.

She felt invincible, watching the war machine of a nation flee before her with Cheerilee's words giving them wings. She pounced into a formation of charging knights, swatting men and ponies into the sky, their armor crumpling like foil under her weight. In return, she felt only papercut stings from their enchanted lances. Armor-piercing, but not deep enough.

A far stronger stab of pain hit her shoulder, and liquid metal ran from a fist-sized divot. She scryed through smoke and fire for the source of the blasts that harassed her since she took the breach.

A golden blur flashed between the bent pillars of smoke. She followed it, raising her palm cannon at the cloud it vanished behind.

But before she could properly aim, an eldritch screech pierced her ears. A titanic creature soared overhead, with tattered, leatherywings, and broken horns on its scaly head. Fluttershy immediately switched her aim to it, yet a much more immediate threat presented itself.

Fluttershy froze, unable to comprehend what she was looking at. This thing wasn’t the stuff of Chaos; a different power burned within it. It towered, taller than her, but lanky in build. Wooden planks and iron pillars made up its bones, wrapped in skins and flayed muscle, the viscera of the dead binding the abomination together and straining to give it animation. At its heart, a mausoleum was crammed to bursting with corpses, the dead groaning and withered arms reaching for Fluttershy, and the ramshackle giant mimicked their desire.

Fluttershy fired wide, and the shot sizzled past one of its legs. The colossus lunged forward, and its claw struck her across the face. She was thrown off her footing, head ringing like the toll of a great bell. In concert, a massive bat, easily the size of a dragon dove on her and took her by the mane. Flapping with rotting pinions, it played Fluttershy like a puppet on strings.

Her passengers tumbled out of the howdah as she crashed onto her back. She screamed and swatted at the bat-thing, which slashed at her face with rending talons. And all the while, the dead colossus bore down on her, swinging its claws in wide arcs that tore rents in her belly.

Spike leapt up to intercept its claws as they reached for her innards. He breathed green flame onto the ironwrought digits, and they quickly softened and dripped away. In quick reflex, it attempted to swat him away, but Spike managed to dive away and roll to a stop on the ground.

Fluttershy managed to grab the bat-thing's legs, pulling and tearing one out in a squall of congealed blood. It took off frantically, just in time for Fluttershy to re-align her cannon arm, and fire a shot point-blank into the colossus' body. Raw warpfire met undead muscles and their cage of metal supports, blasting them into slag. The monster recoiled, a hundred voices groaning in rage, but when the smoke cleared, two things became obvious: One, that the flesh and metal had mostly spread away from the impact like a crater, rather than falling apart or disintegrating like human bone and tissue; and two, that it was already beginning to slough back into place, the muscle re-integrating itself and pouring into the wound, pushing out the warp-corrupted flesh in the process.

Fluttershy shuffled back from the monster, knowing her weapon would need to charge. The colossus didn’t follow her, however, instead casting its burning glare across the field, to a battery of hellcannons being ushered through the gap in the wall, with a band of chaos dwarfs settling the rubble around into serviceable platforms for the machines. Seemingly choosing the greater threat, it loped into an earth-shaking gait towards the breach, bellowing the rage of the damned. Within seconds, it was out of reach, leaving its victims on the ground, in between the opposing armies.

Fluttershy leaned up, resting a claw over the gouges in her stomach. On one side, a tide of dead things crashed into the Everchosen’s host. Skeletons, zombies, and rotting monsters flowed through the broken Imperial lines. The living of the Empire, confused by the lack of hostility from the undead, took the chance to rally and form a more orderly retreat.

On the other, she looked over at Spike, who was helping Rarity up, and the remains of the rifle team setting up a fire position behind an overturned wagon, one of them passing a heavy book back to Cheerilee. Fluttershy raised the other claw to address the damage to her face, and found one of the Pact men smeared across her palm, an unfortunate victim of her landing.

She was about to ask Spike how he and Rarity fared, but she heard the familiar chilling shriek. The bat-thing finished its circling, and dove for her once again.

The dungeons of Castle von Rauken were infamous for the sounds that emanated from below for all to hear. Valves built into cells that carried the sound of tortured souls to the outside walls, so all would be aware of the East Warden’s wrath.

Today, the dungeons were empty, save one occupant.

Luna’s jaw ached with how much he’d been grinding her teeth, and wine did nothing to ease the stress. Between interrogations and coordinating the fortification of the castle, her hooves were full. She was very thankful when Queen Chrysalis appeared to her, and offered to help with her prisoner after she’d witnessed the chapel fiasco vicariously through one of her drones at the event. The drone had felt a familiar magic in the room, someone else using transfiguration. Gelt's shouting of an infiltrator was spot on.

Leaned up in his cell, Balthasar Gelt seemed lifeless. He made not even an errant twitch, but his voice came out of that stoic, golden mask. He’d protested having it removed, and Luna granted him at least that.

Karl Franz stood before Gelt, unmoving, his eyes fixed on the mask. But in truth, it was Chrysalis herself, taking his form while the Emperor attended the battle raging miles away.

“Why don’t you try to run?” she asked sternly in Franz's voice.

“Where would I go?” Gelt murmured. “I’m ruined, my arts tainted. None of my colleagues will ever accept me as their own again. You should have… you should have just killed me. I betrayed all I vowed to keep sacred.”

She ignored the remark. “How long have you kept this from everyone?”

The masked man drew in a shallow breath, and replied, “Six months, perhaps. The von Carsteins took one of the Bastion's nodes some time back, and I investigated. Vlad said that we should unite against the common enemy, and gave me a book.” In his first noticeable movement in more than two hours, he looked at Luna. “It is in my office in Altdorf, in the chest under my desk. Leather-bound, black pyramid embossed on the cover. You’ll know it when you see it.”

There was a long pause, in which the two stared at the man. 'The Emperor' slowly shook his head, and asked simply, "Why?"

“I thought he had a point. So many would die in the war, from violence, or the sheer hardships of having their homes and lands devastated. But the true tragedy of this war, like all wars, is not that so many die; it is that so many die as victims. Unable to use their deaths to buy anything of value." As he spoke, a faint note of strength crept into his voice, as though he were convincing himself of his own point. "Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor; they all bleed for the Empire. So why shouldn't they have the chance to fight again, to take vengeance, and preserve those who still live?”

“You know humans can’t use more than one wind at a time,” Luna said curtly. “You, of all mankind, should know that.”

Gelt's fingers twitched reflexively, and he averted his gaze. “I... had to try. I am not strong enough on my own.”

Chrysalis knelt down. “And are you stronger now, Balthasar?”

Gelt did not respond.

Luna took a step forward, and inclined her head towards his mask in a subtle admission of respect. "Putting the world on your shoulders isn’t your responsibility," she began. "At the very least, notwithstanding your… explosive entrance into Our presence, it would seem you were in fact correct on one point."

The man remained silent, though his mask did lift up an almost imperceptible fraction towards her.

"We felt the unsanctioned use of magic—" she glanced at Chrysalis "—in the chapel, just before you arrived. Transfiguration magic, to be precise."

"The Changeling," Gelt murmured under his breath.

Chrysalis and Luna exchanged a pointed look. Luna pursed her lips thoughtfully. It was several moments before she addressed the man again. "You're… referring to Tzeentchian trickery, then. That was the reason for your screaming of 'assassins' in the chapel?"

A pause. Balthasar let out a raspy breath, which gradually turned into a dry, shallow laugh. "Trickery," he parroted. "That was it. The visions, the… warnings. Gods. I… I should have known."

Luna let out a long-suffering sigh, and momentarily closed her eyes. Yet when she opened them again, she didn't look away from Gelt. "Nevertheless… We appreciate that you came to Us, regardless of what transpired thereafter, and acknowledge that your heart was in the right place."

Chrysalis stood, drawing herself up before the man. “But that won’t sate everyone after they saw you nearly rip out a man's soul. A hundred highborn saw your folly, and they’ll demand justice for the treasure they poured into that wall. Not to mention the Chaos invasion, coinciding so perfectly with the weakening of the Bastion, leaving questions as to your loyalty, and that of the Colleges of Magic... I can think of any number of witch hunters who would scream for your head. They’ll all want your head, Balthasar.”

He continued to stare down at the floor, unmoving, with all the mien of one resigned to his fate. “What will you do with me, my Emperor?”

Chrysalis turned to Luna with a sly grin. “We’ll give them what they want.”

_______________________________________________________

Hills of dead, fresh and ancient bodies and bones, were plowed away in the aftermath of the fall of Hell’s Reach. The undead appeared to cover the retreat of the Imperial forces, swamping the warriors of Chaos in a tide of bones and shambling corpses. It was barely enough to shield the living.

Construction of a new fortress around the breach began immediately, and the hordes began funneling through unabated. Columns passed for days, and the ones who led the last strike recuperated in camps around the former battlefield.

Dwarfs picked over the carcass of a fallen airship, prying off titanmetal sheets and taking trinkets of technology for study.

“Sir Haster, I’m fairly certain your teams were charged to her,” Rarity said, finding difficulty in controlling her tone.

Haster threw a device of unknown function onto a carriage, and clapped his hands of ash and dried blood. “Our job, is to fix minor damages. Parts fallen off, recalibrate a piston. We could use the chassis metal from this ship for a temporary patch-up, but the forge I’ve been using was taken to the front.” He ran a hand through his beard and grumbled under his breath. “There are others, though.”

He motioned her to come closer. “Look for any ratman around here who isn’t wearing armor; they’re the easy pickings. Make sure he’s clan Skryre, and make him take you to Ikit Claw.”

“I think we should reconsider, guys,” Fluttershy said meekly.

A rickety scaffold awaited her. Rotten wood and nails barely driven home. Hundreds of ratmen surrounded her, a fuzzy, chattering carpet, radiating palpable fear. Rarity and Spike were perched on her shoulders, an assurance in coming to the verminous multitudes of Skavendom.

One out of the many stepped forward. Covered in brass plate, and unusually white fur, Ikit Claw was no less twitchy than his slaves. They all seemed to be filled with pent up, manic energy. Even out of battle, his cranium was armored, looking up at the iron giant through glowing green lenses.

“Magic Rarity-thing will come down if she wants to pay!” he shrieked at them.

Rarity rested a hand on Fluttershy’s cheek. “Keep your composure. We’ll handle this.” Fluttershy lowered them in her palms. “Lord Claw! My my, you’re more imposing than your worker had described.”

“Work-slave makes undersell, he get flayed for his incompetence,” Ikit growled. “but so good of you to have an eye for my-mine work. I have seen metal pony-thing fight, such hate-fire. Mighty Clan Skryre sees room to improve it.”

“She,” snapped Rarity. “Fluttershy is a she, not an it. And no extra work, just repair the damages.”

"I give much credit, forget payment, yes,” Ikit insisted, bobbing his head excitedly. “First service free if Pony-thing shows me its warp-cannon, give Skryre idea-schemes for rat ogre weapon-arms, improve design for lightning cannon—"

"No means no!" Fluttershy thundered, startling the rat-man into silence.

"There you have it," Rarity quipped. "She needs to be in working order," she punctuated each word, "and ready to get back in the fight. Thirty tokens for the work, was it?”

“Indeed,” Ikit settled with a grimace.

While Rarity levitated out tokens from a pouch, Spike was silent and staring with one claw resting on the hilt of his sword. ‘Trust the Skaven’. At any other time it would be impossible to use those words in the same breath. Thousands of years of infighting and treachery led to this, each set of eyes, beady red points, ogled him. Silvered armor, valuable to nick. Big sword, valuable to nick. Stealing, stealing, stealing. Flammable secretions left a sour taste in his mouth.

Through the noise of the chattering mobs, he just made out a clicking noise, barely on the edge of hearing. It didn’t match the manic clacking of Ikit’s teeth. It was more sporadic, like static build-up, and coming from somewhere on his person.

He knows.

Rarity kept counting. “Fifteen, sixteen…”

Fluttershy’s first reflex was to flick back the first slave that got too close, then saw he’d been goaded forward by the others. She picked him up before he could run, and while he panicked, convinced of his imminent demise, she gently scratched him on the head. He soon stopped screaming, and surrendered to the petting with a smile. The other slaves looked on jealously, and hissed at the ones that pushed the first one at her.

“That sword,” Ikit sid eagerly, staggering a bit closer to Spike. “Warpstone. In the hilt. Where did you seek-find it?”

Yeah, I’ll shove it down your throat if you want warpstone so badly.

“Took it from the dead hands of an elf about two hundred years ago,” Spike answered off-handedly. “Pretty sure he was about to tell me his name, but I was already bored of his going on and on.”

“Pointy-ears be most boastful things,” Ikit snickered.

The clicking was faster now, continuous like a simmering pot as he reached for Rarity.

He knows.

Ikit left hand was encased in a jagged steel claw with a hole in the palm. A device strapped to his arms squealed, a needle smacking the red zone of a dial.

He knows!

“Twenty-nine, thirty.” Rarity replaced the token in the purse, dropped it in Ikit’s claw, and he stashed it away feverishly. His eyes flicked back and forth excitedly between her and the dial.

“We fix big pony-thing, yes-yes, and I see much business between you and I. Many repairs for pony-thing in big war.”

Pursing her lips, Rarity pondered that for a moment. “Don’t count on it, Ikit. If she doesn’t like what you do here, I’ll melt down whatever I can find and use it to patch her up myself, if that’s what it takes. But you have your payment. Do try to treat her with respect.”

“Of course, for my most-most generous of new customers.” Ikirt gave an ugly, bucktoothed grin. “Come, Fluttershy! Sit-rest in the scaffold, and tell me where it hurts most.”

Rarity gave Fluttershy a reassuring smile as they departed. The mobs of slaves parted before them. Spike spat on the ground near those who didn’t move fast enough, and they recoiled at the small detonations

“This is a bad idea,” he whispered.

“If she doesn’t like what they do, she’ll step on them. Besides, they’re in the open, and it’s quite difficult not to see her.”

“And you didn’t see that thing on his arm? He was measuring you, and knows you have more warpstone on you.”

“We still don’t know if it was picking up me or the purse. Either way, he knows we have it, he wants it, so he’ll keep in our good graces to get more.” Rarity sighed heavily. “Despite what I said, if Haster doesn’t get access to the forges, we’re most likely going to see Ikit again…. And again… This is going to cost me an arm and a leg.”

“Literally.”

Rarity slapped Spike on the shoulder. “Oh shush, you!”

Author's Note

What's that? Rats of unusual size? That's ridiculous!