Darkness and Flame

“How about a trade, princess Twilight?”

The gravelly voice of Tirek poured over and through Twilight Sparkle as she stared him down. A trade? she thought, as she felt the anger grow in her soul. Surely he's joking?

Scarcely had she thought this when Tirek snapped his fingers, and several magic bubble fields popped into existence into the air around the centaur's head. In them were her greatest friends in the world, and Discord. Every one of them were frightened, worried, and utterly drained of their innate magic.

“Their release,” Tirek continued, with only a second's pause, “for all the alacorn magic in Equestria!”

Twilight gasped as her mind processed the offer, and by extension the implied consequences of refusing it. He wouldn't, she thought, even as her friends raised their voices in protest, begging her to deny Tirek's deal. Even as heartless as he is, he couldn't possibly...

He would, a second voice in her head spoke up. The finality behind the sudden insight hit her like a hammer blow, and Twilight froze. He's rampaged across Equestria, stolen all of the magic we need to grow our food, to build, defend, and run our very civilization, and betrayed his one ally out of pure spite. He would, *he will*.

“What's it going to be, princess?” Tirek pressed, his smug tone announcing to all of his confidence in what Twilight would pick. The arrogance of it all pressed on her mind, and burrowed into her very soul. The anger that had been temporarily banked at the shock of seeing her friends in such dire straits now rose again, fed by the centaur's vile behavior.

While she thought and stewed on the situation, a small part of Twilight's analytical mind noted an exchange between Fluttershy and Discord that warmed her heart and dimmed the anger. She was not the only one who noticed it, though, as Tirek lost his temper at their words. “ENOUGH!” he shouted, and then stomped his forelegs into the ground. He then raised a hand and pointed towards Twilight Sparkle. “I want an answer, and I want it now!”

The callousness of his ultimatum, coming right on the heel of his continued mistreatment of her friends, finally snapped something deep in Twilight's mind. Even here, even now, when he holds all the cards, he demands more and denies my friends the treatment they deserve, she thought, as the fury began to grow. He threatens them, he threatens me, he threatens everything I love and cherish, and he thinks he's going to get away with it? That I'll cave in? For a moment she had planned to do exactly that, but the beast's ill-timed outburst forced the idea from her mind. Twilight's expression started to shift, slowly morphing from one of shock and fear, into one of determination, and then anger. Her lips peeled up and back to bare her teeth, and her eyes narrowed as she turned her gaze upon the centaur's twisted face.

“I'll give you my magic,” she promised, yet her tone said something very different from her words; it was not a voice of conceding, but an oily promise of violence. Even as she spoke, her horn lit up, and the magic she had absorbed from her royal peers welled up in tune with her own. “I'll give you every damned drop!” she shouted, and then unleashed a beam of destructive power. Her aim was true, and it blasted into Tirek's face to send him flying backwards and into the mountain that the two had plowed through only minutes ago. A satisfying crunch of stone announced the impact, and a small landslide fell over the crater to bury it in loose dirt and boulders.

A moment of silence fell over the scene, but was short-lived as Tirek roared under the tonnes of material and then exerted his will upon the magic he had stolen. The pile of rock and dirty blasted apart as if a bomb had gone off, and the centaur strode forward with a look of seething hatred upon his visage. “You pathetic fool!” he roared, as he snapped his fingers again and teleported Twilight's captured friends to his side once again. “You knew that wouldn't work, and yet you throw your friends' lives away for nothing!” He reached out, and then grabbed the orb that held Spike. “You'll pay, starting with your worthless assistant!”

“No,” Twilight stated, he voice projecting a great distance despite the fact that she hadn't spoke louder than a normal conversation. The single word of refusal carried with it an undertone of something beyond the ken of those who heard it, and even Tirek paused as all eyes turned to regard Twilight Sparkle.

Or what had once been Twilight Sparkle. The instant she saw Tirek grab Spike's enclosure she felt her fury morph into something she had never experienced before: rage. Pure, unadulterated rage filled her, and in that singular point in time she found something within her that had been buried for years, a power that welled up from a font she hadn't even realized she had. Her mind, already blinded by her emotions, never questioned it as she drew from this new well of energy and found it to be as deep and mysterious as the Elements of Harmony she had once wielded. Yet the power of Harmony had felt warm and welcoming when she used it, like a mother's embrace. But this new power was more than warm, it was hot, searing, and it burned like nothing Twilight had ever felt before.

And she loved it. She reveled in it as it flowed into and through her, and then manifested itself outside of her body. Her mane and tail flashed and became orange flames that trailed from her as her hair had done, her coat lost all of its color to become a pure, unmarked white, and her eyes became pupil-less orbs of red. Those friends who had been with her during the hydra encounter at Froggy Bottom Bog recognized the form, and yet she continued to change as her wings spread open and changed from feathers to flame, while lines of fire rippled across her coat, looking as if an endless wildfire was eternally consuming her fur. The air itself rippled from the sheer heat pouring off of her, and when Twilight began to stalk forward she left behind glowing patches of semi-molten rock in her hoofsteps.

“I am Twilight Sparkle,” the alacorn announced as she moved towards Tirek and her friends. Her voice resonated with the new power she held, and a sense of foreboding filled those who heard it. “I am the Element of Magic, a princess of Equestria, Daughter of Fire, and Mistress of the Eternal Flame,” she said, her voice growing more alien as she spoke, no thought given to the words that came from her mouth. “Life and Death flow from my hooves in equal measure, and the Sun itself is a vassal of my empire. I am the very maw of entropy, and you will not, hurt, my, friends!” At that, Twilight flexed her wings and shot into the air. The more she flapped, the more her wings grew, until their ends became indistinct and the flames surrounded her in a mighty corona.

Tirek looked upon her, and his expression finally betrayed a hint of fear. It soon faded, however, as his usual sneer reclaimed his face, and the centaur charged his magic to send a massive orb of destructive power towards the altered pony. “Die!” he shouted, even as he released the bolt.

The ball of death flew true and slammed into Twilight's protective aura. A massive explosion filled the sky with fire and dust, and for a moment it seemed that Tirek had finally won. A grin crossed his face for the briefest of moments before the dust cleared, and he saw Twilight as she was before the impact, still hovering in place. “Impossible!”

The expression on Twilight's distorted face twisted into a sneer at Tirek's outburst. And then, quite surprisingly, she laughed. “You are a foal playing with forces you don't understand, hungry for power that you have no idea how to wield,” she said, amusement in her booming voice. “Before me you are but an insect to be squashed.” The humor faded from her voice and expression at that, and a look of hunger washed over her face. “Or better yet, consumed as the insignificant morsel you are.”

Tirek snarled at the pronouncement. “You dare to dismiss me?” he shouted, as anger overrode fear of the fiery being before him. “You pathetic excuse of a pony! Of any living creature! I am Tirek the Conqueror, before whom entire nations fall!” At this he turned, and then dug his enormous hands into the side of the mountain behind him before he heaved with all of his might. A great slab of granite, easily the size of the royal palace in Canterlot, was torn from the living rock, and Tirek lifted it above his head. “You are beneath me, and I end this farce now!” he shouted, and then hurled the great stone even as he willed his magic to cause the earth below Twilight to erupt upwards in a spike.

Twilight Sparkle looked upon the incoming stone with contempt, and a wave of her hoof caused a loop of incandescence to erupt from the corona around her. The burning prominence slashed through the granite slab as it reached her and sent the two halves flying to either side, while below the spike simply impacted her blazing shield and instantly slagged into lava. The rage in her heart peaked upon seeing his pathetic denial of her power, and the fire around her grew. “You wish an end? Then so be it,” she said, and then shot forward with a flap of her burning wings. She flew through the air at a speed that even Rainbow Dash found herself in awe of, and as Twilight closed in on Tirek her body seemed to be consumed by the flames, until all of her flesh was naught but fire that glowed with the light of the sun. Even her head and face were now nothing but a conflagration given form, and her friends could only watch in terror as her mouth opened, and then grew inequinely wide.

Then she reached Tirek, and the image of her body disappeared utterly as the flames of her power wrapped around the centaur's hastily-erected shield. He began to work on a spell to launch a counteroffensive, but balked as the shield spell itself was eaten out from under his mental grasp. “What? How!” was all he had time to shout, before the living inferno that was Twilight Sparkle finally fell upon his flesh, and the screams began.

Twilight ignored his screeches of pain, as the sensation of consuming filled every corner of her being. Yeesssss, was the only thought she had, while Tirek burned away under her touch. Her new power was not any normal fire, nor the mere pyromancy of mundane magics, but an eldritch flame that consumed the very matter of the centaur's body itself, converting it into pure energy that Twilight absorbed into her very soul. The transformed pony felt nothing but ecstasy as she fed upon Tirek's body, only to have the feeling abruptly end as the last of his bones were consumed and her flames found no more to feast upon. For a moment she considered the magic Tirek had stolen from Equestria, but in that moment of contemplation said magic burst outwards in every direction and soon found its way to its rightful owners.

Disappointed, Twilight released some of her new power and felt her body reform into the white-coated appearance it had before she launched herself at Tirek. The flames pulled back, leaving only her mane and wings afire, and she simply stood and stared at the blackened ground that marked the centaur's last stand. More, she thought, as she narrowed her red eyes at the spot, and the desire to regain the ecstasy she felt became an overriding impulse in her mind. I want more. I must have more.

“Twilight?” a voice asked, and the flame-wreathed pony snapped her head around to see that her friends had been released from Tirek's holding spell and had gathered a few meters away. Everyone, even Discord, had looks of horror upon their face, and they flinched under Twilight's glare. Applejack had been the one to speak up, and she gulped as she pressed on. “Are... are ya okay there, sugarcube?”

A grin most terrifying spread across Twilight's muzzle. “More delicious morsels,” she said, and then licked her lips