A Song Of Death

by JLB

Rating: teen
Tags: Main 6, Other, Princess Luna, Original Character, Adventure, Princess Celestia, Crossover, Gore, My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, Dark, Alternate Universe
Length: 44613

[Dota 2 Crossover] When the Undying rises from the grave once again, he quickly discovers that he is no longer where he was. It is not a field of war, but a lush land of radiant souls. He dreamt a song of death... and woke to finally compose it.

[DOTA 2 Crossover]

Takes place at the very beginning of Season 3

The Undying is an ancient, once-human, undead general of endless armies. The main conductor of the Song of Death, written so painstakingly by his Dead God. Not even a stitch in space and a slip in gravity can stop his devoted crusade. Finding himself in a new grave and a new world, he continues his quest. With new power and ancient resolve, the towering abomination sets out for the new, ripe land. What can possibly stop him? Can Equestria truly fight back such a damning assault?

One thing is for sure - with the newcomers' arrival, their world is most certainly turning into a Nightmare.

Originally written in collaboration with Rinderin. I have now assumed control due to circumstances.

Cover art HERE. That is Undying.

Alternative cover art HERE. That is our hidden friend, Atropos, the Bane Elemental. Shhh, don't tell anyone.

Marked Alternate Universe due to the drastic difference in how the Griffons are organized between the show and the story.

Published 2014-09-21 04:50:05 UTC
Last updated 2015-07-11 01:37:55 UTC

Chapter 1: Coronach

The towering hulk of undeath shambled rigidly onwards, to where the song of death was begging for release. His long-rotten limbs stretched forwards, sapping the life and summoning decay upon whatever loomed in his blank sight. The growth of decay filled his un-coursing veins with defilement, hastening the steps.

Since ages long past, he was dubbed the Undying - both by the living and his Dead God. He existed to bring forth the Almighty Dirge, so that the living may join his deity's song of death. And before him, he saw life - life, fighting spastically for survival. They near called upon him and the ones brought close together by the common goal. He aimed to answer.

Death’s orchestra was already sounding the triumphant pipes, aiming for the high crescendo. The Dezun berserker, adorned with more wounds and scars than the Undying himself, was roaring furiously as his spear went into a ghastly figure on top of a steed that defiled the notes of death, skinless and torn, yet alive in concept. Rabid wolves, smelling death as well as he heard it, circled and swiped at an all-too-hard to perceive shape, stray pieces of grass, soil and debris circling round as it aimed to crush back - their master, a rough human in a noble’s worn clothes, unleashed two creeping daemons from a rotting-green tome on his belt, rushing past the commotion and into a toughened tower at the edge of sight. A large fiery shape stomped round, clawing furiously at a serpentine shape, blurry behind a prismatic barrier, blinking desperately under the spell of the tall Oglodi from afar.

“The dead hunger.” His rotten vocal chords erupted into an unwilling growl of focus, as a bone and stone sculpture rose from the ground. Restless dead poured from under every last inch of soil, gnawing at those whom the Undying pointed them towards. Before the opposers could recover, a rust-red link cruised between them, heralding the fiery explosion that brought forward yet another fiery shape. Somewhere afar, the sound of falling rubble signaled the end of the tower. The fighters persevered - the rider had engulfed himself in mist, the serpentine archer’s barrier stayed active, and the gravity-mending shape had grown large, fortified with swirling yellow light.

The Undying aimed to rip their souls and decay their bodies, so as to grow his own bulk and tear the living to shreds, but before he or the other conductors of death could react, a roaring red body emerged among their ranks.

When the Dead God’s chosen bearer of the Almighty Dirge could see again, he was pointlessly clawing at thick, red skin, which resisted spears, magic, fangs and bullets, and towards him charged a ghastly apparition of a galleon, its crew crying out cheers of death.

He would not even be slain by that which had a resemblance of Death’s perfect note.

He and the others were pulled off balance, and drawn into a hopelessly dark void, darker than even the gaze of Death.

“If light cannot escape me, what hope have you?”

The void submerged Undying, and all light was lost.

When Undying awoke, the entire world had disappeared.

Nothing moved, the darkness had shrouded everything from him, excepting, of course, the Song of Death. He could hear them, the dead, they were all around him. The orchestra roared in the darkness, bringing a moment of clarity to the death-riddled mind of the deceased Hero.

He was underground.

Undying’s arms twisted in an unnatural manner, angles which should have been snapping his tendons. His claws navigated through the dirt easily. He found purchase on a rock and began pulling himself upwards, emitting a deep guttural growl as he went. Small, sharp rocks cut at his flesh as he drew closer and closer to the surface. He cared not for them, they were nothing but a nuisance, which would be dealt with later.

It was then, that the Herald thrust upwards, his soil-covered appendage breaching the surface. The long rotten muscles jolted at the breeze of unnatural air, and his fingers convulsed, leaving his palm to signal a threatening V to the world above.

With his arm freed, Death’s General clasped onto the ground, finding good purchase on the grassy land above. The Undying growled, and the surface above him decayed, weakening the soil. He pulled himself out of the darkness below, his terribly scarred visage emerging, the light blinding his blank eyes. With half of his body out of the ground, the Herald scanned his surroundings, discovering that he was on what must have been the remains of the battlefield.

His stagnant neck flexed as the stable song of Death turned into a cacophony of incoherent sounds. The Undying’s vision blurred and shifted as his rotten mind worked through the surroundings.

A large pile of long deserted wood sat perched on a rock formation - no doubt the vessel that charged him and the others, so teasingly ghostly in its shape, but ultimately composed of matter. Dozens of skeletal remains laid strewn across the perimeter - the likely remainders of the undead he had summoned to fight for him. The mariner who commanded the onslaught was nowhere to be seen. It seemed that he and the others had left the field long ago, the Undying’s death dealer associates left forgotten in their tracks.

They had failed.

The assumption was given more ground as the hulking corpse rose in full, barely standing still after the strain of the vicious energies. His molding, misshapen head hung face to face to a stone monument. Even in the uncertain blur of the post-shock confusion, the Undying saw the hood and the eldritch lines engraved on it. The brooding Oglodi, the Warlock, must have been left a mere statue by the serpentine fighter they so hoped to avail of her shield.

“No… burial…” he vocalized in a gurgle, feeling obscure anger at the apparent loss of a valuable assistant.

The undead general’s enduring form shuddered as a wild screech erupted from afar, springing the memory of the ghastly rider’s steed in his mind. Could he have stayed, anticipating the never coming death of the Undying? From what was known to the undead hulk, it was very much possible. The Lord of Avernus had foresight which could match that of the Dead God’s servants.

His rotten head aimed to turn itself, urging the rest of his body to move along - with that, he saw a chaotic landscape, indicative of a significant passage of time. He must only have awoken decades, if not centuries after the fateful battle - the Ancient’s spark and Dead God’s will had been delayed by some means of their opponents. The Lord was likely to still be alive - albeit the Undying heard no more sounds, and felt no mist encompass the surroundings, a usual sign of the rider’s entrance.

A grim forest had erupted all around the site, consuming the remains of buildings and statues that were never there. Hungry vines wrapped around chiseled monuments, put up after the supposed triumph. Some of them were in conditions that lead him to assume that the red giant, the Axe, as he recalled his usual monicker, eventually rebelled and lead a roaring rampage through the pristine streets. Stone, chopped to pieces, concrete, stricken apart - whatever happened had to have been a site of incredible violence.

The Almighty Dirge nudged the Undying along, forcing him to look for signs and clues as his deceased mind tried to recuperate. And so he did find what made him feel the drive again - the smell. His nostrils had long ago decayed off, but the smell stayed, and he knew the smell.

Death.

It was a dead city.

His trudging leg hit an inconvenient bump, and the towering hulk bent over in a contortion that would have had anything else fall flat. The inconvenience was lost as he examined it.

A big, bulky - to anything but him - skeleton. It was of a wild beast, that much was sure. At first thought, he took them to be what remained of the Dezun berserker, who wore a similar-looking set of bones on his head and back, but then he saw more. So many more surrounded the one - they had escaped his view during the initial confusion. It had turned out that the Undying awoke rather fittingly. The dead city had become a graveyard for a deadly species.

If he had any ability to visibly express himself, he would have smiled.

“The sleepless… wake!” he commanded, aiming his long arms at a nearby pillar, and thought to bring the deceased under his control, encompassing the significantly smaller skeletons near the pile of wooden rubble.

A horrid spark of multi-colored light flashed instead, and the Undying realized that something was wrong.

His head moved erringly, looking at the pillar, searching for a reason.

An incredibly large statue depicting an equine with wings and a horn stared at him with a penetrating, stony gaze.

Not once had he or any other Dead God’s followers encountered a creature like this in the world they aimed to have sing. Worse yet, the runes were incomprehensible to him. The one thing he could decipher was a much newer addition, a warning post of sorts, which stood in the middle of the ancient plaza, now devoured by time, death and forest.

“CANTERLOT TRADE PLAZA, DANGER: EVERFREE EXPANSION IN PLACE, DO NOT PROCEED!
250 AD NM”

He was lost.

Twilight Sparkle, the Element of Magic, sat alone in her train cart.

The landscape whizzed past her, rolling hills and forests becoming one in a cacophony of colours and shapes. She gazed skywards, taking note of the Celestia’s sun being slowly dropping out of view, the short fringe she wore her mane in creeping over the eyes just a little bit. As quickly as the sun had vanished, the moon began its own gloomy ascent into the heavens.

Her cart was empty, save for the occasional train steward, crossing over from one end of the train to the other. Keeping her eyes open had become increasingly difficult - after all, her weekend had been spent attending the opening of a new museum in Canterlot. She had been personally invited by the chairpony of the whole ordeal, an offer which no young apprentice could reasonably refuse. The museum’s opening ceremony had been greeted by a vast gathering of scholars, having been drawn to the event like moths to a lightbulb. By a certain point, she had become a singular purple dot in a sea of individuals overly excited about ancient history.

She had spent hours greeting them, her eagerness to learn slowly being replaced by absolute exhaustion. The once interesting delegates had quickly become boring and she found herself simply ignoring what they had to say within hours. By the time that the event had come to pass, Twilight had become undeniably relieved at the prospect of returning home. The unicorn yawned, her yearn for slumber having finally taken a foothold in her subconscious. With a relieved sigh, she lowered her weary head onto the pillow, her eyes slowly drawing to a close.

After all, a little sleep couldn’t hurt.

Twilight awoke to a horrendous screeching sound.

The train shook and screamed with effort as it slowed to a stop. Twilight was flung from her seat and sent crashing onto the floor, her body crashing into the cart’s wall. After a moment or two, Twilight slowly pulled herself from the ground. Her body hurt everywhere. By the time she was upright, the train had reached an absolute stop. Nothing but silence permeated the air.

Twilight stumbled over to the window, only to find it tightly locked by a heavy wooden shutter which she couldn’t recall ever closing. Then, she attempted to use her magic to try and move the shutter, only to receive a brain-scattering headache. With a gasp, she fell to the floor, clutching her head, as the pain passed slowly. Once Twilight had gathered her composure, she took the time to look around the cart.

The door leading into the next cart hung open. Luckily, at least one of the lights in her cart remained intact, providing a somewhat eerie glow to the cabin. With a scowl, she made her way to the open door. Then, when she reached it, a horrendous cackle dug into her mind, eliciting a searing pain above her eyes forcing her to lean against the door for support. After what felt like an eternity, the horrible laughing ceased, allowing her to think somewhat clearly.

Twilight stumbled through the doorway and into the next cart. The room glowed an eerie red, although she couldn’t quite figure out from where the light was being emitted. This room had taken a far greater beating than her own - everything which had not been nailed down had been flung across the cart. The floor was littered with glass and nails

Near the doorway leading to the next cart, a white object was sticking out of a pile of broken planks and nails. She approached the object with caution, carefully navigating her way through the jungle of shattered glass. Once she arrived at the doorway, she could clearly make out exactly what the object was.
A piece of paper.

She carefully lifted it out the the pile, avoiding the sharp nails and badly damaged planks. Once the the piece of paper was out of the pile, she brought it into the light and upon further investigation, discovered that it was a note.

The words “Dipped in corpses, alive in death” were hastily scribbled onto the paper, which appeared to be stained in some vile, gooey liquid.

Twilight left the note on the floor and proceeded into the next room, which appeared to be a replica of the the last cart. Excepting, it was a dead end. No sooner than when she had stepped into the room, the door behind her slammed shut, drowning the unicorn in absolute darkness.

Again, the horrendous wheezing and cackling started up again, driving Twilight to the floor.

“Dipped in corpses, alive in death.”

The phrase was repeated over and over again, like some kind of insidious chant. Then, all of a sudden, the cart lit up in the same gloomy, red glow. A being of untold horror emerged seamlessly from the shadows, and drifted towards the light.

The chanting stopped.

The creature was equine - however, the primate-like torso attached to it completely obscured any relation to a pony. It was freakishly disfigured - one arm appeared to be longer than the other and its legs seemed to have been broken and healed in a twisted, peculiar manner. Its skin was a dark hue of purple, although nothing could compare to the creature’s face. An eyeless, smooth head, with a mouth far too wide to even vaguely resemble normality. The monstrosity drifted in the air, erratically twitching and dripping with a vile, dark ichor.

“Mhmmm, I can smell your fear, little one,” the creature chattered in a raspy, shrieking voice.

Twilight had never seen something so vile and terrible - darkness seemed to swell around the monster, and with every breath, a sickening smacking sound resonated from its throat.

“Ghh, I like your smell. Mhmmm, yesss. Too bad our time is short. I’d like to share my dream with you while we still have some…”

The creature disappeared in a vile swash of darkness, revealing the wall behind him. Words were painted onto the wall in a dark ichor, which dripped onto the floor below. In the same dark ichor, an insignia of a cluster of small stars surrounding a larger, singular one, was also scribbled onto the wall.

“The moon will bleed and the sun shall weep.”

Beyond the wall, she could see a another terrible being.

A towering, shambling figure, decaying the land and sapping life from trees and animals. A monolithic structure erupted from the ground, crafted from stone, a large ursine skull impaled on its roof. The vision slowly faded away, Twilight’s headache becoming nearly unbearable.

“Dipped in corpses, alive in death. The moon will bleed and the sun shall weep.”

The world went dark, and everything was silenced.

Twilight awoke on the floor, covered in sweat and panting.

She felt the familiar feeling of the train tracks underneath her, rumbling away, providing a satisfying hum. The room wasn’t engulfed in an eerie red glow, nor were the windows shut. In fact, the bright morning sun bathed her in light, a welcoming reminder that what she had just experienced was just a dream.

A nightmare.

She slowly recollected herself, her heart rate steadying itself. Twilight couldn’t help but sigh in relief. She propped herself onto her hooves and trotted over to a nearby pitcher of water. The unicorn poured herself a glass and hopped back onto her seat.

Twilight looked outside and quickly realized that the train was passing through a mountain range overlooking The Everfree. Somewhere in the distance, she could see the remains of Old Canterlot, rarely visible from anywhere but a considerable height, signaling to her that the train must be within a few hours of Ponyville.

Just as she had settled in, Twilight took a look at the old capital, taking in the beauty of the scene before her. Something was a little bit off with the peeking ruins, something she couldn’t quite put her hoof onto. It was only when she looked near the edge of the destroyed city that she figured out what was wrong. The forest seemed even more dead than usual, almost as if the life had been drained from it. Then she spotted it.

A tall, unmistakable monolithic tombstone with an ursine skull at the top.

Chapter 2: Hymn

It had been some time since the undead hulk had found himself separated from the orchestra. His initial confusion had by then diffused. The magic that he attempted to use was one of the basic ones given to the Herald - it was more than alien for the simple energies not to conduct properly. When it exploded into rays of needless colors, it become all too obvious that he was wrong to assume that merely time had passed. The mana streams flowed differently, they had a different texture, a different taste. Space had moved as well, it became obvious. He was no longer there where he came from.

This world was very unlike the realms any Dead God’s follower had ever been in. Its mana tasted… sweet. It was not the sour stream that composed magic and other energies elsewhere. How far away was he taken?

Which plane did the conundrum of gravity send him to? Where were the other four? How would he reunite with his Dead God’s crusade?

These were not the questions Undying cared about long. His long deceased mind formed a very simple equation.

This realm’s mana was sweet beyond belief. That could only signify that it had sentient life. It was full of it, in fact. Life, festering and bulging in tumors over landscapes that belonged to his kind - so much life that not even the biggest kingdoms could he ravaged could compare. It was present in quality and quantity both - innumerable sour sparks, each of them radiating with such putrescence that even the most soulful lives devoured by his God paled. They transcended life - they were magic. Pure arcane energy.

And the Undying knew full well how to operate it. He was no longer sidetracked. Now, he was dedicated. A symphony to plan out, a dirge to sound for a world to put in his wake on the way back. Enough for him, enough for the army, and enough for any of the other dealers of death that he would find among the new landscapes. If he did.

The link once established between them had been rendered. All he could feel from it was fragments of scratches and faint, maddened chattering - nothing like the spastic, yet melodic staccato of varying thoughts. It distantly resembled the air that the floating creature of nightmares had around it - dark enough for even his mind to feel pressures of anxiety when it was around.

They were on the same side back then, the Dead God having brought them to fight the war together. Undying could not recall whether it was even present in the fight that rended space apart - it was a safe assumption that in order for anything like him, anything that could pierce dreams and create those of its own, a similar kind of force would need to be applied. It was the one question that kept him in doubt.

It was also far from being the priority.

“Rise!” His vocal chords vibrated by near instinct, and his arms twisted upwards, channeling the streams of magic rebalanced. A simple test of proper strength, something he would need to conduct the orchestra. Vile green streams aimed at a nearby pillar, one that had a large ursine’s pierced skull on the top, as if it impaled itself with prejudice on top of the deceased structure.

A field Tombstone. A transistor for the Dead God to communicate and command those who belong in his realm. It was a vastly inferior emergency type of it that Undying had made out of the abandoned building. The kind that he would use in the heat of battle, when there was no time for better composed pieces. These formed themselves of dirt, stone and bone - the dead that followed them fell apart in mere minutes, and so did the structures. Sometimes - like then - existing buildings would well be fit for conversion, only to crumble and fall into disrepair within little time of reanimation.

This one emitted so much power that not even specifically designed Tombstones, those that he created to lead full armies, could compare.

“Death sings!” he roared, watching the building cover itself with notes for the music, letting out so much power that even the fully dismantled skull on the top attempted to move in its place.

This was merely a sliver of his power, and it had already given him more than he once had.

Rattles and screeches had begun to creep in from various angles. The large skeletons of creatures that had taken the dead city for their graveyard rose, and immediately bowed, for they had no command issued to them just yet. Bony limbs of various kinds shot up from the soil. A large, once-blooming plant, dead upon the Undying’s approach, rose up straight and whirled its long leaves around as if trying to reach for prey. So many gathered so quickly.

He had absolute control over them. It was better than that of all but his most perfect creations back in the Dead God’s realm. A miniscule bit of magic had created warriors from incomplete skeletons. The thoughts of what he could do once enough strength had been regained through souls of the living - the sparkling, shining souls…

The undead General smacked his mostly missing lips, and turned to the wooden wreck. That which he took for the Admiral’s materialized vessel was, in fact, one of the air - something that reminded him of tall tales of the Keen that made himself a flying machine, far away in the land he was now distanced from. It must have crashed, like most dreams of the living - the wreck and the corpses were a lot fresher than the rest of the graveyard city. However, it was not what interested him. The blank gaze aimed specifically at the corpses near it.

There was something about them.

“My will.” A vile finger stretched towards the now sitting arrangement of small husks. They turned their heads towards him, and, without another word, ran up as quickly and safely as they could, taking positions near him. Sitting, standing, lying - giving him better access to their bodies. The small pieces of their souls, remaining a dusky shine within the frames, were… brighter than those he was used to seeing in the living.

He was right.

These were the creatures that had to have been the majority of this world’s population. The size must have allowed to spread thick, and the sheer taste of the unripped souls hinted exactly at what the mana streams were powered by.

Small, equine-looking quadrupeds. They resembled the one atop the towering pillar, standing by the Tombstone - only nowhere near as big, and lacking parts.

A confused gurgle emerged from his throat. They looked like… horses. In essentiality, that was what they were - mere animals in his world. Their body structure differed rather drastically, with some features much more commonly found in humanoids, but for the most part, they were very much equine.

Of course. No world with souls as sweet as this could ever be inhabited by predators.

The obedient servants laid, sat and stood as long as they needed to, allowing the Undying to study their physiology. Unfortunately, all they could afford was the skeleton - and even that was broken for some. Parts of interest, such as the horn-like extensions some had protruding from the skull, or pairs of wings that others had, would need to be present in flesh to be studied better. Ideally, he would need a living specimen - a delicious soul to rip and restore some of the power, but also a burden of memory which to read and decode.

The Dead God’s Herald needed information to work off. A simple horde could take down a city or two - a whole realm would take strategy. He needed to know locations, specifics… he needed a living one.

“Hello? Is anypony there? Hello?”

His neck twisted at the source of the shrill voice. Close, in the forest.

“I’m lost!”

He made a step in that direction, crushing a winged skeleton - the new encounter had purged the need for the crumbling skeletons from the Undying’s mind.

The forest that devoured the city was full of life, yes, but it was plants and animals. Most of them predators, or at the very least venomous - a dreadful jungle for anything that was not already dead. A monster’s paradise, of a sort. The sheer smell told him that much. Non-sentient life was easy to decode.

But this… this was exactly what he needed. Sentient.

“I… will…” he growled to himself, making fists of his rigid palms and readying the notes of decay. The equines may have seemed puny, but they did inhabit a large part of the realm. It was only proper to assume that they possessed some sort of powerful weapon in their possession - and only reasonable to think that one that made its way so deep into the danger-filled forest had access to one.

“Hello? Anypony? He- AAAAH!”

It peeked from the trees, right behind where the large skeletons sat in obedience, sometimes moving around via instinct, attempting to breathe. Its eyes shot first at them, then the green, runed Tombstone, and then at the towering, undead hulk that was Undying.

All it emitted was mindless dread and nothing more.

He waited for more, standing in place, ready to decay its body and rip its soul as soon as it showed its plan. Only it seemed to have none.

The puny, grey, yellow-maned equine shuddered in place, a bag filled with white sheets on its side. Some laid scattered around it, thrown out as it jumped upon sight of the death-consumed opening. Its jaw hung open, its oddly mismatched eyes had their irises take up most of the space within. It was doing absolutely nothing but standing in place and twitching.

He grumbled, having become frustrated with waiting for its show of power. It was not a necessity, but it would be of major assistance if he knew their secret right from the start. But all it did was stand in place and twitch.

The Undying tilted his elongated head, taking a better look of the equine. The bag obscured something of importance - it was a winged one. For a moment, the General contemplated his course of action. Whatever he did, he would have knowledge of the winged equines’ structure.

Then, he finally deemed the specimen defective, and unleashed decay upon its miniscule body.

“W— whhh—”

Its convulsions would soon end. His arms stretched to the sides, and then clapped together.

“Ah. Fresh soul…”

However Twilight tried, she could not rest her head. What she had seen tried to make itself seem like a coincidence, but superstitions within her rang loud. Something was wrong.

Something was very, very wrong.

The tired unicorn tried to get it out of her head in many ways, spending a few hours reading through a novel she had taken with herself, so as to purge the anxiety. It all seemed like such a silly thing to assume. A premonition within a dream.

She very well may have encountered more than a few supernatural elements over the course of the two years she had spent in Ponyville, and even more about them she knew from books, but this seemed out of the question. Not in an age when Princess Luna had returned and established control over their dreamland’s safety.

Something as potent and as vile as this would have had to go through her first - that, or it would require a loophole. Their Princess guarded them from any threat within the limits of this world.

Twilight Sparkle knew full well that Princess Luna was in good health, even at the moment, and that she would never have left any sort of loophole - and if she did, she would find out immediately. Especially considering that, whether she liked it or not, she was important - and so were her friends. They bore the Elements. They would be the first targets should any planned invasion happen, and so there was much more security based around them.

In the worst case scenario, Twilight would already have been contacted. She was not. It was all just a silly dream, and the structure was merely something that remained of the old ruins within Everfree, something she had never paid any attention to.

“This is ridiculous,” she said to herself, flipping the book over, “It’s just a nightmare. Get yourself together, Twilight.”

Some self-reassurement was in order, but it made for little payoff. Whatever the case, there was no more time for that. A familiar line of trees and hills emerged - soon enough, it was announced that they were approaching Ponyville Station. Her things were in place, and Twilight sincerely hoped that so would be her mind.

Trotting out of the train, barely inconvenienced by the few who were leaving at the small town, the unicorn already knew to put her worries to rest for at least a minute, and surround herself with a force field. That was customary for every time she returned via train.

The first three times her pink earth pony friend almost choked her to death, claiming that she missed her so much after two days, one week, and six hours respectively, were indicator enough that Twilight’s throat was in great danger each time she returned. The rest of her closest friends would sometimes meet her, depending on how busy they were, but she was a constant. A very pleasant, but overly asphyxiation-happy constant. Who refused to listen to Twilight’s pleas not to choke her whenever she returned.

So it was all the more strange that when she arrived, there was noone waiting for her. The faint purple barrier held on for a minute more, but then it was discarded.

Something was wrong.

It had been three hours since she had arrived. Enough time to settle back in, greet Spike, feed him a diamond she bought specfically for his pleasure, leave to get food, and then send Spike to check in on the archive - something he was supposed to have done over the time she was out.

And still noone had time to greet her. In fact, noone was around. The most she had seen of the townsfolk was a few silhouettes behind the windows of their houses.

Twilight sat by the table, sorting the books on the shelf behind her for relaxation, and wondered. It was reasonable to assume that each of them had their own commitments - it was not like she was jealous over how they had jobs of their own and things to go through. That would have been ridiculous. But something… something was wrong. Something in the air.

The unicorn yawned and went into a sudden coughing fit just as there was a knocking on the door.

“Come in,” she answered once her lungs went back to normal, “How may I—”

Visitors to the library would normally just come in and go about their book business. It was very rare that anyone would knock. Only now Twilight realized that - far too deep in her thoughts to give it more consideration before it was too late.

What awaited her, however, was not an unwanted visitor of any kind.

It was something that made her heart skip a beat.

She had only seen her in a state anywhere near this once. The time when a big unfortunate misunderstanding resulted in her thinking that she had been abandoned by her best friends. Just a silly mistake, but it had her turn pale, weak, straight-maned, and a lot less stable.

Compared to how she looked now, that was her at the peak of health.

“T… Twilight? Twilight, is everything... is everything okay?” the pink earth pony barely mumbled out, staring aimlessly into space, even after the door had been telekinetically pulled open for her.

“What’s wrong? Has something happened?!” the unicorn asked in abstract horror, watching at what had so suddenly become of her friend. Her mind had not even caught up to it yet - she was merely struck.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

“It’s… Twilight, it’s… are you okay?” she would not even step into the library. Her body, usually just a bit plump, now shook frail at the doorstep. It had only been two days since Twilight had departed.

“I’m fine, I’m alright, just... Please, tell me what’s wrong!” Twilight had made her way closer to her friend, wary and getting more and more concerned with each second.

“It’s… Twilight…” The bright teal eyes stared at her like if they had just seen something absolutely terrifying, “I… I’ve had… Twilight, I know you know, please, I’ve…”

This was getting too much. The strange dusk over the town, the empty streets, the weird sensation in the air, the absent expressions on the faces of so many, the feeling of pressure over her head, the lack of presence of her friends, and, finally, the nightmare she had seen. Something was wrong.

And Pinkie Pie knew it, too. For her, it was much worse. She had always been a lot more… sensitive than others, when it came to the supernatural.

She was dragged into the library, sat in a comfortable chair, given tea and a consoling hug. That was what it took to get her to speak coherently. Twilight brought Spike in too, and he sat nearby, watching them talk.

Like if there was not enough things off with the situation. Normally, he would be more active. This time, he would just sit there and look at them, as if he had very much the same feeling the whole day. Even when he greeted her, something was off.

“I’ve seen it too,” Pinkie had finally managed to say.

“You’ve seen… what?” Twilight had a good enough idea to be horrified, but tried to look staunch in her expression.

It took the earth pony some time to gather herself and speak up. She said one word.

“Bane.”

“Uh… What?” the unicorn was taken aback by what she had heard.

“B-bane.”

Bane of your existence…

Twilight’s breath went rapid and spastic. She heard Spike shift in his seat with a definite lack of comfort. Something was very, very wrong.

She looked at her friend with an inkling of terror in her eyes.

“Pinkie… why did you only come find me now? Did you go see a doctor? Did—”

“I’ve… I’m… I’m just out of bed.”

Twilight did not want to know… but she was starting to. It was all very, very unpleasant. The things she was coming to did not please her.

“It’s eight in the evening. Don’t the Cakes wake you up when you oversleep?”

“W-what? It’s… Twilight, I… I went to sleep when I saw you off, and I’ve been… I... You just left, and now you’re back, and I don’t know… I don’t know anything anymore.”

They did not please her at all.

“Twilight, I’m scared.”

Twilight coughed profusely, her vision blacking out for a second.

“Pinkie… I’ve been away for two days.”

They stared at each other in the awkward moments that followed.

“Did you just sleep for two days? How did noone notice?” Spike added his voice into the confusion.

“I… I don’t know. I haven’t seen the Cakes yet… or… or any of our friends…”

“Twilight, um… I haven’t seen them either. They didn’t even come by in the past couple of days,” Spike spoke up weakly, stifling a cough.

The gears in her head turned and turned, and the conclusion had formed itself.

She wished it was all just a nightmare all over again.

“And who is this Bane you are talking about? Did I miss something again? Twilight? Twilight?!”

“That all depends,” the high-pitched hacksaw voice sounded in her ear, and she collapsed, “on what you call a nightmare, little one.”

The blanket of dreams before her shifted and sung a stable, quiet note. Her consciousness had separated into thousands of little pieces, pouring into the dreaming minds, and helping untangle their slumber knots. She was one, but her eyes were many, and she kept watchful vigil over the safety of her subjects.

Princess Luna - or, at least, her prime consciousness - floated in a carefully constructed subsection of her mind, dreaming internally, all while controlling the dreams of thousands.

Everything was fine. Nothing from her realm of existence was going to harm her little ponies.

“I dreamed a world of prey… and woke to find myself upon it.”

Nothing from her realm of existence.

The screeching, sly, demented voice emitted from all around her, and pierced all of her minds. With a stricken gasp, she was thrown to the floor of her chambers… only it was not them.

This was a nightmare. She had not had a nightmare in over a thousand years.

The last one she had was a Nightmare.

She was not losing to one again.

“Avaunt!” the dream realm around her crashed right apart. The sleeping chambers, perverted wrongly in a way that only a dreamwalker right her could imagine, exploded in a fountain of deep blue light.

Perhaps, some would have called Luna paranoid for being perpetually prepared for any kind of intrusion. After all, there had been no intrusions ever commited to her own dreams.

Being paranoid paid off.

“You cannot hide!” her voice boomed through the abstract nocturnal plane, amplified through the power she had within. It was her realm.

“Oh-hoh-hoh… Fear what you cannot see, hmmm?”

The Princess growled and unleashed a scouring wave of black fire on everything around her. It may have been a metaphorical attack, something to hurt that which existed in dreams, but it was a burning hot storm nonetheless.

Whatever it was, it was going away. Not again.

All questions could wait. It had to be burned, to be scourged, to be removed. It was nothing good. Not at all. Perhaps, she was too radical - her sister would surely have told her that - but Luna knew best when it came to creatures of the dreams.

This was nothing good.

“Go back to where you came from!” her consciousness snapped into a myriad little pieces, and they filled the nocturnal field of battle. Whatever vile creation that came to bring evil would have done well to consider who it was trying to go up against.

This was her world, and she was ready to fight.

“Nnnyyuuagurharghh…” A twitchy, spastic sound emitted from right beside all of her, and existence went dark, jagged, and painful. The myriads of shards her consciousness had broken into were gone, lost by their target, navigating so effortlessly through her kingdom of dreams.

A disgusting knot of needly spines came into being over her, and her nonexistent legs failed her. Her incorporeal gut went cold, and her head was stung with weakening pain.

She was not ready to fall.

“Don’t think you’re done with me,” her voice screamed from all around yet again, a deafening manifestation of the resolve she bore.

“I… must be dreaming,” the voice slurped, “You fought better than some gods did…”

Luna tried to move, to shift out of place and reestablish territorial control, but she could not. Her body was all enfeebled. And she did not even have a body on this plane of existence.

“What… are you…” the Princess of the Night choked on her own words when maggots filled her throat, and she could breathe no longer.

“Me?” the sly, incoherent voice perked up, “Oh, Princess…”

It knew what she was. It twisted the word like if it was comedic.

“...I am the Bane of your existence.”

Deafening laughter emitted from all around, and with each blasted sound, Luna changed shape, and the land near her switched form. She could not move one bit. It had her in a grip. The horrible fiend simply came to her and destroyed all her defenses, left her exposed, and filled her realm with nightmares. Where it came from or what it was, she did not know. She could barely think.

The maggots had disappeared. A first try, she understood - the dreamwalker logic read in that creature’s movements. Luna would too first assume wrongly… only she fought those nightmares. She did not create them.

This thing, however, did. The Princess took much longer to horrify than so many of these that died in their sleep thanks to his efforts. She never knew that. To her, it was mere seconds until the basic frights, from maggots to spiders to rats to worms and to perversions, were exhausted, and it had found that with which to paralyze her mind. Her projection was already paralyzed, and now she could no longer wake up until it wanted her to.

She sat static on a dusty throne, her pitch black coat adorned with enchanted armor, and her stifled gasps coming out with such familiar distortion.

“Something… unites us,” it spoke, floating right in front of her, “Our worlds… Princess… Luna.”

Her eyes, with a change in irises, could not distinguish it from the desecrated throne chamber and the corpses of all whom she loved. But it was there.

“Yours is… so succulent. So efficient. So bright. So many souls to dream and take under my pall.”

Princess Luna, trapped within Nightmare Moon’s body yet again, did not know why she was still able to think. Her whole being screamed. She did not.

“I feel… left out. I am not from here, you see. But… I do not feel homesick, Princess. I suppose I have you to thank, hmm?”

It had begun to become visible. A terribly twisted, contorted, purple mockery of an equine with facial shapes that would instill horror in a lesser heart all by themselves. Disproportionate limbs, a ghastly ichor dripping from its extremities, and a constant twitch in its movements. It was an elemental of nightmares if there ever was one.

It already had Equestria’s only defender against such things under its sickly, dangling hoof.

“You all shine so bright. So sweet, so—” the creature slurped, “—nutritious.”

Why was it telling her all this? It could merely tear her soul apart and conquer her realm. And Luna knew it knew.

Something was even more rotten than it already was.

“Oho-hoh-hoh, you are smart. I underestimated you. It is… unusual for creatures of your… disposition to be so savvy,” it read her mind, “I applaud you. I truly do. You… call out to my heart.”

It floated right up to her and stuck its eyeless mouth right in her much hated face.

“Nightmare Moon.”

It already knew. It did not just pull the visage from her subconscious, it gathered information. It knew why she feared it so much.

“Something unites us. Nightmare Moon… Mad Moon… a twist of discord… a pull of gravity. I am so very glad to be here.”

Luna was merely a listener. This was the Bane of her existence.

“But not all of us share that standpoint, Princess.”

And it wanted something from her.

“I am… not the only one who came from those sour, nasty lands. Tchah! I can’t believe I’ve feasted on these withering minds for so long and thought it delicious! It will never be the same after I tasted your subjects,” Luna nearly fell from her seat, the rage so hot within that the creature had to reestablish its control, now so much more tight, “They were the sweetest I’ve had in such a long time. How they scream… is unimaginable. There was a pink one… her I kept screaming for two days. She was the main dish.”

Her feelings could no longer decide between horror, agony, and rage.

“And that was merely a sip! Oh, she and her friends alone can last me for months. Such finely groomed foods. The first ones I ever lay my grip upon, and already there is such delight. To think that you have a whole nation full of those,” the Bane chuckled, “Oh, I thank you again.”

Luna breathed. It was the only thing she could do.

“But… that is beside my point. Enough of my thanks to you,” the elemental floated away, over the mangled corpses of Celestia, Twilight, her friends, and so many more, “I did mention that I was not the only one, didn’t I?”

A string of horror went off in her heart. What else could come from the wretched world this abomination originated from?

“Oh, yes, there is one more. I can feel his stench even now. His mind is so… terrifyingly… SOUR!” it contorted in such a spasm that for a split second, Luna thought it was giving birth, “His terrors are hard to come across, and he is very… hard to work with. He is loose, Princess. And, unlike me… he will not want to stay.”

She was starting to understand.

This was even worse than being devoured.

“The Undying and his Almighty Dirge will want a way to find their Dead God. And your succulent souls will power its trek with ease, believe me. Drown you in corpses, alive in death. The sun shall weep, and the moon shall bleed. Your souls will be sundered, and none left for ME.”

This horrible, vile creature, this Bane, wanted her help. It was the only thing that stopped her from being devoured, and her kingdom from being its plaything once and for all. Celestia could never muster enough strength to defeat it in its realm - Luna could not do it herself.

But it knew that in the real world, she was necessary. It did not want to gulp and choke and feast. It wanted to savor every bite, and it could never do that without her.

It held her hostage.

And it had an enemy.

“So watch, Princess. Watch and see. He has to be stopped. Do call me again. You will know how. I will come aid you...”

Her mind had begun to black out. An enormous, towering, primate-like shape had begun to enlarge, and then such visions came that catharsis was reached.

“...or there’s none left for me.”

The Undying vomited profusely, hour after hour, after devouring the soul of the grey winged equine. A necessity. His stomach had to get used to the new food.

It was all so disappointing. So much unnecessary thought, so… off-center in its obliviousness. This one was defective, it very much was.

But even a defective soul told him of the nearest surroundings, the “pony” anatomy, the layout of the world, and of many other things that sickened the undead General.

The hum of the Song of Death emitted steadily from the single Tombstone - it gave off new melodies. He could tell the wind of sickness already. Should he find more suitable Tombstones, the plan would have been fit to be set in motion.

There was a town just ahead, and there his reaping would be large.

More importantly, he knew that a community figure lived there. She would know so much more than all the others. Her soul would lead him on ahead, and push the Dirge to completion.

“Hunger…” he growled, his undead skeletal minions rushing to meet him and follow. The undead hulk made step after step, into the forest that threatened all life, apart from that which was too stupid to realize its threat. Unlife, however… had no issue getting through.

He would find the one they called Twilight Sparkle. He would rip her soul to shreds, and from then, he would know all that could be necessary for invasion.

But first, the General needed an army. The skeletons and the crawling fleshy grey-coated corpse were only the start.

Chapter 3: Lament

The Canterlot Towers had been in spastic chaos and disarray of preparations for the past four hours.

It had been approximately four and a half since Princess Luna rushed into Princess Celestia’s bedroom and the bigger part of the capital city shook under the impact of her voice.

“What is the transporter status?”

“ETA is eight hours, we—”

“We need it faster.”

The nocturnal alicorn was visibly livid and highly distraught. She had been overseeing the early-morning evacuation efforts, lending her assistance wherever she could. Despite looking like all life had been sucked out of her and occasionally collapsing into violent coughing fits, Luna was rather pleasantly surprised by the situation.

When she stormed into her sister’s bedroom and told her of what she had seen, the first thing proposed was a cup of tea and a shared bed.

Once Celestia had recovered from the hoof-slap on her face, the second thing was a concentrated evacuation effort on the town of Ponyville.

Having read perhaps too many novels where it all went downhill from the first time, Luna was brought into vigor by how her sister had the common sense to trust her, and not assume that it was a practical joke of some sort.

Unfortunately, that was the only good thing in all that was going on.

“Has Twilight responded yet?”

“No, ma’am. We’ve been sending all kinds of emergency notifications for the past four hours, but there has been no response,” responded a communications officer whose name Luna could not hold in her memory at that particular moment.

“Anything from the Mayor?”

“Same results, ma’am.”

“It’s been long enough. Send out a courier. We need Ponyville back and in communication with us if we want to save the town,” Luna ordered, barely sustaining her speech as the sickening feeling in her throat and head resurged at an inopportune time.

“Yes, ma’am, I’ll pass it to the Guard.”

She stood with her hooves resting on the balcony overlooking the construction of a mass-teleport beam in the cleared-out part of the city. Since three in the morning, the Towers staff had been hard at work making sure of the preparations. They had done an admirable job clearing out space and making sure nothing would go wrong once the plan worked. It was going to be enough to fit the entire population of Ponyville - just barely, but it would.

Her sister would issue a concern of how it would be unwise to think that the plaza was to fit several hundred ponies being transported all at once.

So did Luna. And Celestia knew well enough which exact part of that statement was the source of concern. The vomit-inducing images flashed through her head again, reminding her of that source.

She feared they would not be meeting several hundred ponies at all.

“Stand back,” the Princess ordered to whoever may have been behind her, knowing that in the ruckus of the hasty operation the workers would be running to and fro.

A blinding blue light, quickly fading into a purplish-black one, emitted from her horn as the alicorn herself issued a pained groan. The matter was absorbed into the growing orb of the teleport construct, and so it grew just a little bit. It was slowly starting to draw the very consciousness out of her, but she kept supporting it, adding her own magic to that of several dozens of specially trained staff on the floors below.

A disgusting slug of purple ichor left her through the mouth as she had to turn and spit again.

If only the severe lack of rest and overall distress were her only problems. If only.

She could still hear his voice, and she could still feel his presence. It had enfeebled her greatly. It was still there, not on the same plane of existence, but watching and waiting. The sickness and the feeling of paranoia were his methods of toying around with her, she could feel. It was not pleased that she did not introduce her sister to him from the very start - something it definitely planned upon.

Luna had no time to. Celestia was smart enough to figure out that something was terribly wrong with her on her own. There was little doubt that they would meet almost immediately after the preparations were done, and by then she would be very well aware of what was going on.

For the time, however, both of them had enough common sense to lay off that issue and focus on the task of importance. The construction of a portal large enough to transport all of Ponyville’s denizens and their belongings to the capital city.

The Dirge was coming. She could almost hear it.

“Are there any reports on the supposed threat?” the Princess asked a communications officer that she knew would have been close enough to hear her ask - they were always shifting round, changing posts in the chaos that had erupted.

“Negatory. We are consulting scouts near Everfree, but there aren’t many. Still waiting on any word from them.”

“Keep trying.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

And she feared that her little ponies could hear it too, all too well.

Twilight would never have been out of touch for so long.

The abnormal forest round him gave off vile scents, snarling at each step his growing army made. It lashed its poisonous vines and jagged traps at the recently deceased flesh of the manticores that strode in front, acting as shields for the more vulnerable and less maneuverable string of corpses which followed. The resistance had little point to it. Whatever died, joined. Whatever lived, succumbed.

Whatever persisted was not corporeal, and merely floated in the air, roaring in anger as its ancient sleep was disturbed. Murderous, insane spirits, locked forever by the haunted forest. Familiar hauntings - the Undying had left myriads of them there where he came from. Spirits that never found peace, souls that never were fulfilled. This forest was choking on them, so much of its poison owed to their influence.

Their souls were sour and unfulfilling, nearly cherishing their release. That slight inkling of brightness was barely worth wasting the time. They would remain in the now nearly fully undead forest - perhaps, a supply of power for later.

“Dead ahead.” The lumbering figure stretched out a finger, having found fitting ground for expansion.

He already knew, though, that they were having a visitor. His undead have felt it too, but did not act on it, as he wished to examine it more clearly. It was an effect of the Tombstones that he had suspected for some time now, watching the small creatures that rummaged under the leafy, viny covers die all by themselves, crawling onwards to the monuments even in death.

Sure enough, a small equine shape stepped rigidly towards where the last Tombstone was fashioned out of a large tree.

That one was different. Its physique differed only slightly, but its eyes and coat were not the same. Slightly smaller eyes, striped coat. Those eyes had gone blank and rolled to the back of its head, and it trotted unevenly, its mouth hanging open.

It seemed that the “ponies” heard the music too. Noone in his realm did but the dead. Back there… only the biggest Tombstones sounded the melodies. Here, each and every helped conduct. They spread the Dead God’s notes to the unknowing world, and emitted energies the Undying had long forgotten by then.

He walked up to the equine, his leg towering so high above it. It did not seem to notice. The black and white creature rammed into it a few times, adamant in its desire to reach the source of the song.

“Uuurghhh…”

Her mind was so much more delicate and full than the other one’s. The soul was filled brisk, exquisite energy. It felt unusual on the tongue. It channeled knowledge enough for him to be given a large advantage, coupling that of what the “pegasus” told him and the army of various creatures he had assembled…

...but it was put to secondary processing when he saw the place his newest singer came out of.

It looked like a hut. Wooden structure, stern frame, surrounded by artifacts similar to those of shamans and witch doctors of nations he had converted so many years ago. A small pool near it.

The energies that emanated from it left him no choice but to aim his arms forward and burst the ever willing Tombstone high into the air, the underground rock formations encompassing the hut and lifting it to the peak. Enchanted stone covered it in runes, and the magnificent sounds of his Dead God’s magic had begun to twist and bend all that surrounded it.

Not all structures were fit for Tombstones. Some could be converted quickly - nearly all could - and, at times, even mere soil and rock sufficed, but for truly fitting ones… The process was special. It was a vignette of demise that he composed on the fly.

This building was right. The heart of life in a forest full of death, it had such a significance, such a… specific fragrance to it. Its owner was nothing special for his army, but the place, the structure, they were right for his army. They deserved a song all for them. A triumphant dirge to sound upon the unsuspecting world yet more of his still gathering power.

As the green, decaying beams left his hands, eyes and mouth in an artistic trance, his followers had begun to join in. Skeletons rattled in place, twitching and twisting to the rhythm, recently decayed manticore creatures had begun to roar with their rotting chords, and the two equine minors had begun to moan and raise their extremities to the skies.

Their blank eyes shot up forward, meeting the point he had been aiming at - the rapidly increasing bulk of the hut on top of the craggy, growing stone. It covered the moon and cast a shadow over his army of multiple dozen decaying, rotting, recently deceased predators and more than a hundred equine corpses of differing age.

The ghostly figures, wailing in anguish, joined as well, and aided his choir with their mourning soprano. With time, it had begun to feel as if the forest itself convulsed to the spastic, rapid rhythm that sung of the death of the world. The Undying had no time to watch over the trees - he was conducting.

His arms swung violently, with little rhyme or reason to any mortal onlooker. They all but tore themselves off at the joints, breaking over multiple times as his body contorted in flashes of green energy, the Tombstone rising ever further. His throat roared out gurgles of concentrated effort, and all of his death-ridden mind was consumed by one thing - the music. He ordered the mana flow, he pointed the instruments, he helped the melody escape its unfulfillment. Each note had soul to it. So many souls.

So many more once it was over.

When they were done, the director of the Dirge slumped on the ground and bit off a recently deceased equine corpse that dug its way out of the shallow soil. He felt such hunger, but the ecstasy was more. What he had made… it was better than some of his earlier masterpieces.

In fact, it was so great that the Tombstone, this time built and fit properly, immediately realized its potential that the Undying saw in it. Surely a full Tombstone would do much more than the emergency ones did - and the emergency ones had become infinitely more powerful than he remembered them being.

The very first thing he saw was a poisonous, ghastly, pallid mist that oozed out of what used to be the windows. His piece had brought the energies within the house to mix with that which the Dead God made be. Toxins and poisons that the creature stored mixed into essence, and slipped out, unrestrained, and aiming exactly where they were wanted. A biological weapon already. He stretched out an arm and felt the wispy substance, seeking to check its magic.

“Coffin… cannot contain,” he commented once he had realized what exactly it was.

So many ages ago, the Dead God instilled him with strength. It was not the same back then. The Undying had undergone changes, so many changes over the millennia that he had existed for. Little pieces would lie strewn round his mana body, but the source of their power would ultimately be lost - something he would lose in fights with certain entities, and something would merely be deemed unworthy.

This was one of the things he had lost over the years. The air that made mortal hearts falter. Too slow and unfitting for the rapid assaults that had become so much more effective with time, it was discarded, left to drift in the air of his old world.

It had returned. And it was merely the first Tombstone that he had found a proper spot for.

“Guuuaahhhhh…” a tiny shape crawled up to him and nudged his rotten flesh with its nuzzle. The grey “pegasus”, its head half-decayed and its hind legs dragging behind aimlessly.

“Against the living,” he answered, looking at the invigorated, trudging corpse.

His army felt as dedicated as he was. Twilight Sparkle was within reach, and her mind combined with that of the learned striped equine would tell him all he needed. Perhaps to spoil the occasion, vile magic emanated out of an obscure source somewhere far in the distance, some spell being prepared.

Only natural to assume that whatever allowed the equines to conquer the plane would have been informed of him by that point. It mattered little. He had power, he had knowledge, and he would have more once the striped one’s soul was done being digested.

The orchestra was going on tour.

“Get up. Get up, Twilight—”

A throat-rending series of coughs hurt her ears as her mind looped into consistency. These were not her own.

“Come on! Get up!”

“Twilight, please… I know you know something’s wrong, just get up, get up, get up!”

“Damn… Her heart is barely beating in there. She really isn’t well at all.”

“I don’t think any of us are, Applejack.”

Her vision was a blurry haze, and her thoughts refused to form together. She felt as if her head was repedeately bashed against a stone wall. All that there was to the world was a swirl of blurs, a string of voices, and a dreadful odor.

“Twilight! Focus! Pinkie keeps saying that you know what’s going on, so could you please get up and explain?”

Her limbs felt as if they were made of wool. Damp, old, rotten wool.

“Twilight!”

“Please… stop shouting so much… It— it really hurts when you’re so loud…”

“Dammit, I’m… I’m sorry. I can’t help it, it’s… It’s all so messed up.”

“Well, the only other thing is Twilight, and she is barely breathing! And the whole town is covered by this stupid fog, and I can hear my heartbeat - which is barely there, by the way! - and something tells me it’s not just some wind current from Everfree with poison joke pollen again! Sorry if I’m worrying too much, but it’s GETTING too much! I can’t even fly or think straight!”

Then she remembered what she saw, and the cackling, screeching voice sounded through her head once more. Twilight groaned in pain, moving slightly on the bed her friends had made for her.

“Girls… Girls! I— I think she’s conscious. Twilight?”

“Twilight? Twi? Can you hear us? Just nod if you can.”

A loose bit of stomach acid left her through the mouth when she did nod. It was all so very rotten.

She was starting to hear things.

“Okay! Okay, okay, she can. Twilight…”

A moment of silence, and a disappointed, frustrated sigh.

“Darn it, she won’t be able to do anything like this. We can’t just MAKE her talk.”

“That’s it, I’m going to the hospital.”

“Rainbow Dash, you aren’t going out into the fog. Plain and simple.”

“Or what then, we just sit there and wait for whatever Pinkie says is about to happen to ACTUALLY HAPPEN? I’m not gonna sit in place if we’ve got something that is causing THIS—” Twilight could tell that the pegasus pointed at her as she ranted. “—Is about to enter town! This is all bull—”

“Please… stop shouting…”

“Okay, girls… Dash has a point. Twilight can’t help us,” She really could not. “And we can’t just sit in the library and wait. We’ve been doing that for the past four hours, and what changed?”

“Fluttershy got sick, Spike disappeared and Twilight woke up.”

Spike. He was there before. She recalled him sitting there, talking… coughing. It was evening back then.

Her senses barely worked, but she could hear the sounds of the dreary night outside. If anything, it was the makings of the early morning.

“Well, that’s just not going to end well if we stay here. We need to get her a doctor, it’s all we can do. We’re barely holding by the threads as we are.”

“Actually… Maybe I could go to Everfree, get Zecora, and—”

“Are you suicidal, by any chance? You have watched Time Turner walk into the fog, and I don’t recall him ever coming back. He just walked out of his house in the middle of the night, left the lights on, and walked right towards Everfree. That is NOT a good sign. We have to do something, yes, but that “something” doesn’t have to be effective suicide.”

“We don’t know what happened to him, Rarity, maybe he just—”

“He just what? Went to the grocery store? No, I doubt that’s what happened. If anything… if anything, we should try to contact the outside world. I can feel that there is some magic trying to manifest within the library, it’s just being withheld. Spike couldn’t make anything power through it…” The dip of sadness in her voice was obvious enough even to Twilight, who felt much the same anxiety. “...but maybe I can try. It can’t be too difficult, it’s just—”

The suggestion of her unicorn friend sounded almost completely sound, and the ailing Twilight was about to rest just a little bit easier for it… but the gasp, shriek and cough that interfered made it much more somber.

“Rarity, you ain’t at the top of health either. You could barely lift a quill up just an hour ago, and I doubt it got any better. Now, me and Rainbow, we’re the most fit by far, so I say we go out for a quick scout.”

“Yeah! We’ll see what’s outside, you’ll keep track of us through the windows, it’ll all be fine, and then we’ll—”

“He’s here,” her last friend, having sat in silence for so long, finally spoke up.

She could tell by the tone of her voice that nothing had improved about her condition in the hours that passed. Even though the layer of confusion, panic and delirium, Twilight could clearly hear how distraught Pinkie was.

“Who’s here?” A set of hooves stomped on the lower floor, accompanied by a gust of wind. “Who the hell’s in here? Come out!”

“I see him.”

“Where? Who are you talking about? I don’t see anyone,” AJ spoke, closer to Twilight - evidently, Pinkie was left on the lower floor while the rest had gathered next to her bed.

“He’s there… out the window…”

“Who— oh. Oh, what the hell is that, what the hell is THA—”

Her mind collapsed into darkness yet again, and the last thought that made her near scream with terror was that it was not at all the end.

Something was wrong. Her heart skipped another beat.

It did not come for them.

It came to them.

The little town was drowned in sickening fog, its heart beating slower and slower. They wanted to get out, they did… Panicking, rushing to gather their belongings, only to find out that none who leave the houses ever come back. Sitting grouped up, in fear, left however they were when it had entered. Some left alone, some merely separated from friends or family. Scared. Confused. Locked off.

The Almighty Dirge was coming, its ranks rising by the minute. The lumbering corpses marched on to their first destination, wishing to rip, tear and devour. The first city out of so many to fall. Sealed away from all and any help attempts - surely they would have been informed of their situation if their Princesses could help. But they could not. And so they sat, dripping with fear and going slowly insane.

Finally, it was just enough of a sip, and he was full for the day.

He drifted towards the window and looked at the delicious pink treat that lasted him two whole days while he was so confused. Such a good friend.

He only had one business to settle with the six exquisite dishes, and then he would let all the letters come through. He had disposed of all the distractions, walking and not.

It was fun, but they did not all need to die. The dead had such terrible screams, they were almost not worth pulling.

Chapter 4: Monody

“There’s nothing there. Dead air. No sort of communication pierces through, magic or not. There hasn’t been a barrier this strong put up since—”

“Any word from the scout?”

“Negative. We tried to contact him, but it seems he’s in the dead air zone too now.”

“Prepare another one. Teleport him directly into the settlement and keep the link.”

“But the beam construction strain—”

“Prepare another one.” The communications officer had to know that the conversation was over from that point on.

Princess Luna had finally figured out what felt wrong with her health. That thing left a mark, yes, but it was not an invasive agent or anything wholly debilitating.

It was a marker for its absence.

That “Bane” decided that she will want to know when he leaves on business. He did so through purple ichor soaking out of her orifices and nausea taking over her head, but it did so nonetheless. His thoughts and actions were visible to her, as if he wanted her to know. Partly so, in obscure images, but visible. To show her who was whose better.

Luna clearly recalled never letting him out into the real world, or allowing him to take action by himself. Not once during their… negotiations. He acted completely independently, and there was not a blasted thing she could do about it. His blunt superiority was established, and opposing him in their mutual native plane would be suicide.

In the meantime, the immense evacuation effort the Princess had been overseeing for the past six hours was progressing. In just a bit of time, they would be able to teleport whoever remained in Ponyville vicinity into the specially prepared plaza.

That was not good enough for Bane, and he went off to show her, the ruler of the whole country, how she should have been doing things. He never said anything - they never communicated properly, not since the first time - but she could tell. This creature’s mind was something so dark and perverted that Luna could barely help but know all too well what he was thinking.

An eldritch, alien abomination was trying to one-up her in saving her subjects’ lives. That was his independent action. Not a reign of terror over all of the country, not the murder of the government, no. He was performing emergency extraction as if he were no more than a creature of the night at her bidding. At least, that is what it would surely look like to whoever found out and never knew the context. Not in any way, shape, or form, was it good.

“Stand back,” Luna warned before firing off another concentrated blast at the steadily growing beam, powering it up further. It was becoming more and more difficult to keep doing that, and her magic had near completely switched its color to nightmarish purple, but she kept doing it nonetheless. This was the one route that was both safe and efficient.

She was not letting that thing humiliate her in such a way. He would not get her to change tactics, and he would not be the first to succeed. Ponyville was being evacuated the right way, all in one piece, safe and sound.

Not through whatever means Bane was burrowing tunnels through the dreamscape for.

Tunnels that Princess Luna, Equestria’s only official dreamwalker, saw with clarity, and did not, at any point, attempt to shut them off.

“We need them back,” she said to herself, raspy after a series of sludgy coughs, “We can’t lose the Elements.”

Her legs moved on their own accord. The blackness in her mind coddled her anxieties and insecurities, drowsing them to sleep. The placid skittering of blackened veins on the surface of the orb that surrounded her head hypnotized her further, making shapes like a kaleidoscope would. Her world was asleep,

If only Twilight Sparkle could be suppressed so easily with all the terror that she was going through.

“Mmmmhhh…”

“Shhh. Go to sleep.”

“Whhh?..”

“Everything is fine. Go back to sleep.”

She listened to the voice of her father, echoing slightly in her head. It was so difficult to think - more importantly, it was so unnecessary to do so. She only needed to stay asleep and it would all be fine.

But something kept her on the bridge between sleep and reality.

“Where is… everyone…”

“Grrraaaaaaargh!”

With a sudden shock, her breath strained heavily, and her eyes shot wide open, still unseeing. Her whole body, previously woolen and weak, went into heavy convulsions and hysterics.

“Can’t you just stay asleep?”

Why was her father yelling at her?

Twilight strained her neck to look up at Night Light, who stood in front of her. The sight of her parent pacified the terror-taken unicorn, and nearly lulled her back to sleep, but something was wrong. Her thoughts would not be stopped so easily.

What was going on?

“Everything is fine.”

Where was everyone?

“They’re okay. Go back to sleep, Twilight.”

Why wouldn’t he call her Twily like he always did?

“Please, just be a good girl and go back to sleep.”

Why was he there?

And why were his teeth so crooked?

“I’m… I don’t…”

Her body argued there where her mind would not. Choking and twitching in place, Twilight was fighting herself to become aware of the surroundings. The dark purple ichor that surrounded her head like a plastic bag invited her eyes to stay shut, and only her father was visible, standing right in front of her.

“Nothing is wrong.”

“No… No, no…” she blabbered defiantly, sleepwalking against her will.

Pieces of memories shot back into her mind, only to be met with more purplish haze. It wanted her asleep. It was…

She remembered.

“No! Get this off me get this off me get—”

“Nnnttchhhkaaaaah! Can’t a simple thing ever go right?!”

Night Light contorted in a bone-twisting manner, and his face sprung up right next to hers, melting like hot wax.

“I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” Twilight stuttered in panic, feeling a cold, freezing sting take over her spine.

Horror. Everything was horror. She watched the purple substance circle and swirl, obscuring the world outside, and in that substance, images showed that the unicorn could not hope to comprehend. Outside the sphere that enveloped her head, more terrifying imagery was visible. Night Light tried to cover it up with his expanding visage, but it was for naught.

Twilight had become aware.

“No… no, st— stop…” the wide asleep unicorn muttered incoherently, her own mouth not obeying panicked commands.

Ponyville. The town she had grown to love so much over the course of these years. Her second home. Her legs pulled her through the streets and to the hillside, dragging the struggling body through things that aimed their sharp mandibles to scar her psyche.

It was all gone.

Dead.

Crushed and pillaged. Corpses littered the streets. Torn apart at the seams. Drained and bleak.

“Drown you in corpses…”

“No, not that! Not that one! Ah, why is this so DIFFICULT?”

“Alive in death…”

“How does one even DO this? How do you not— Uuuuunrgh!”

Twilight’s body swiveled back and forth as her eyes coursed from one ravaged body to another. Their colorful coats had all been greyed, even their blood and intestinal matter losing color. Sucked dry of all they ever had.

All magic was gone.

“Twilight! SPARKLE!” her father’s terribly distorted voice got her to leave horror and enter confusion, “Listen to me.”

“No, no… no…” her mouth answered incoherently without any prompt from herself. Twilight was locked within her mind, sleepwalking awake.

“You are safe. All of this is not real. I just need you to follow me, because otherwise you will die. Do you understand?”

“I… I…” she had begun to drool, but, with an immense effort, her foreleg moved off its place and signaled to her father. His face had, by then, lost its eyes, and the mouth expanded far beyond the edges of the muzzle.

“Follow me. Good girl. I’ll get you out safe. You’ll be fine.”

Twilight struggled to breathe, to think, to move. It was not her in charge, not even remotely. Her mind was being suppressed from all sides, and the world argued with itself. Just a few minutes ago… Just a few minutes ago, she lay in bed, dying slowly, and her friends were nearby.

Now she walked after her father through what little remained of their peaceful city, and the purplish veins of the menacing dark cover orbiting her head built terrifying images her mind refused to read. It struggled to operate, but even in such condition, it realized something was wrong.

“Where… are my…”

“They’re okay… They’ll all get home. They’re looked over, and they will be fine. As long as they don't do anything very stupid, they are fine. You'll see them again, just come with me.”

The screeching element of Night Light’s voice made her heart beat with scarring intensity, but something about it made a more distant section of Twilight’s memory perk up with curiosity.

No, this was not Night Light.

What this thing was… it was very strange for it to behave that way, from what the unicorn could barely remember.

“But…”

“Twilight…” the dark blue unicorn-ish creature walked up to her, stepping over disemboweled bodies and casting a shadowy pall over the solemn light of the bleeding moon, “...none of this is real. It is a Nightmare. You’re safe here with me. I am doing what I can so that you won’t be hurt. I… am not the best at it, but I am trying. Please, help me help you. Come with me.”

It extended its hoof, and all Twilight Sparkle could offer in return was a twitch of the speeding eyes.

“Okay, Twilight?”

She stared with terror into her father’s melting visage, barely realizing what she was doing. Her rational thinking tried to fight through, to take over the paralysis.

The unicorn nodded rigidly, and her father’s two frail arms, springing from the neck, clapped slowly, motioning her to follow.

It was all too easy.

The living fought, the living struggled, the living refused to concede their pointless existence and join the choir. Always flinging their weapons to the last breath, or running until their legs gave. Even those that gave up hope, or were debilitated, would panic and run.

These just walked right into him and his army.

His lumbering frame loomed over the small buildings, but nothing came of it. No resistance. No frightened settlers. Noone to notice the hundreds of decaying bodies crawling, shambling, walking, dragging themselves to their peaceful abode. The Tombstone’s influence did create thick fog and an air to stop hearts, yes, but there was no magic in it that could do… this to them. Sentient creatures could not have been affected by the magic to that extent.

Up to a dozen have walked into his army, more zombified than his already present corpses. Wiped and devoid of will, they were quickly consumed and repurposed. Were they not the rulers of the realm? Were they not the kings of the whole planet? The striped one’s knowledge pointed to that. By all means, they should have been so much more of a challenge.

They just… walked into them. Was the Song really so easily heard by these creatures?

Were they truly so special in their own, dimunitive, weak-willed way?

Or was it some other influence?

“Uuuugrhhhh…” the halved grey corpse that had been crawling by his side through the whole journey twitched and moaned in a new tone when the Undying’s leg stepped right through a roof.

“The dead are here,” his throat’s scarce contents rippled in response.

“Guuurlhhh…” it responded, latching onto a passing placid walker’s leg and biting into it with admirable resolve. The large red male with a bright yellow mane continued to walk towards the still distant Tombstone, dragging the flailing grey zombie with his hind leg, now that its teeth were stuck in the thick muscle.

The scenario made the undead general sincerely curious. Most past invasions were all very similar. Different tactics, different landscapes, different enemies, but the core was simple. His unfeeling, unflinching, perfect army against a wall of stubborn sour notes that refused to give up the cacophony that was life. The dynamic persisted.

Even now, he could hear distant screams of horror and fighting. No, not all of these "ponies" were like that. Some had the same stubbornness. He could see an unusually lively specimen, clad in armor that the rotting militant could identify as that of a scout, be surrounded by the corpses and skeletons of his former kin and torn into little pieces. Just like in the place the Undying came from, the scout's vocal chords would take a drastic rise in pitch as teeth and bones ripped them from the throat. This was a similarity. But the rest… There was something about the rest. Something about this world.

The flow of magic in it, the sensitivity of its denizens, and even the behavior of his own undead felt all so different. Not so rigid, more flexible. While he would not think that they truly did understand the Song and give their lives up on purpose, he still saw the fact that their musical hearing was so much better. This plane had potential, Undying realized.

What if his conquest would bear fruit of not only the triumphant return to his Dead God, but also the creation of an army that no previous one could hope to compare to?

His own symphony? Never perfect, no, not to contend with his God’s work, but a creation of his own nonetheless?

He contemplated, walking his thoughtful shamble over the town buildings, crushing them with his fists and stepping on the hopeless denizens. The potential for information extraction was passed up in favor of continued thought. He would know all he needed once he had Twilight Sparkle.

“Twilight… Sparkle…” his mouth let out two words that it had never spoken before. The rotting hulk vomited generously over a large tree-like structure and crushed through it in his fall. It was empty and hollow.

In all of it, something was wrong.

“Twilight Sparkle,” he repeated, and felt a sting of uncertainty rise within his shallow heart.

There was only the run. She ran like she never did before. Past the gloomy streets and the bleak turns, through the shadows and into the clear. It was the run of her life.

“Gotta keep up, gotta keep up,” her mind reminded repeatedly, pummeling the phrase into her conscious in the rhythm of her hooves hitting the ground.

There was nothing but the run.

And nothing could have been better.

“Gotta keep up, gotta keep up.” She scaled a small hut and continued the race right away.

It felt so perfect. Perfect stamina. She knew she was good, but damn! The speed her body reached could have had her instructors’ jaws drop - and not a single sweat! Perfect level of breath, perfect motion of legs, perfect speed. She was perfect. It was a dream.

Rainbow Dash ran through the Spitfire lane and hoof-bumped each of them while running, and not even that slowed her down. Each Spitfire nodded in return. Not shock-stricken, no, that’d be too good, but with respect and appreciation. Perfect. It was a dream.

Nothing in her life could ever have been better. Nothing mattered but the run.

“Gotta keep up, gotta keep up!”

Sometimes, her mind would sway off and start doing something weird. It wanted a reason for the running, it wanted to tell her something, but Rainbow Dash did not want to listen. It was her dream.

Why was she running? Why wouldn’t she be running, that was a better question! It was a dream.

Was she running from something? Why would she ever run from anything, the whole idea was stupid! It was a dream.

If she would never run from anything, then why was she leaving her town behind? She wasn’t leaving anything behind, she was living her dream! It was a dream.

If she was living her dream, then why wasn’t she flying? What was keeping her down? What—

The dark, purple pall that pulsated around her head tightened the strain and Rainbow Dash continued to run.

Really, there was some reason why she started to run. Ever since she did, her mind simply got lost in the process. She knew it was satisfactory. It was appreciated.

“Gotta keep up, gotta keep up, gotta get away!”

Maybe there was something out there - and so what? The run mattered. Nothing else did. She was Rainbow Dash, and her run was perfect. It was a dream.

She was Rainbow Dash! She saved Equestria, multiple times! All by herself!

Okay, not by herself, but mostly!

Primarily!

Partly!

She slid under the legs of a huge, off-center arc, clearly put up specifically for her triumphant run. It shambled and moved slightly, as if the wind was making it twitch. It was a crappy arc. But, well, it was her dream, and nothing could ruin it.

But she was Rainbow Dash, and she could live with that. What mattered was that she was the best! Loyalty. That was what she was. The best element, period, ask anyone. Everyone loved her, anyway, so why would there ever be any disagreement? It was a dream.

There, she even found someone who could help her prove the point. She stopped gracefully in front of an orange filly with a purple mane (no inertia and no post-run exhaustion whatsoever for the mare herself). Dash knew that this filly, Scootaloo, was her biggest fan. Of course she would be honest when Dash asked her who was the best! It was a dream.

The cyan pegasus mare tapped the filly on the shoulder with a hoof. She could always make time for her little friend. If she was ever in trouble, she would definitely help her. What if she was? The filly looked so solemn, standing with her tail facing Dash, and staring into the distance. The run was good enough, but there were more important things, after all. It was her dream, but that did not mean that she couldn't make time for anyone else.

“Gotta keep up!” her mind sprung into the conversation, but Rainbow Dash knew better.

“Gotta keep up!”

“Gotta get away!”

“Run! RUN! RUN!” She had been running away from something, and the abstract terror fueled her resolve through all that time, Dash understood. That was still secondary.

“Gotta keep up! Gotta get away!” the only reason she continued to run was that her body told her to, and her mind simply slipped into denial, beginning to find joy in the hopeless process.

“RAINBOW. DASH. What are you doing?..” her conscious yelled right at her in a terrifying screeching voice, but Dash knew that something was wrong with Scootaloo, and her own problems could wait for just… one… minute.

She looked the filly in the face when there was no response.

One of her eyes was torn out, the jaw was hanging by little more than a few tendons, and the skin on the forehooves was almost completely missing. A needle pierced her neck. Multiple stab wounds, indicative of a unicorn foal's horn, were sprung all over her chest.

“Uuuurrrghhhh…” Scootaloo replied.

Rainbow Dash’s eyes widened, and not even the ghastly purple pall around her head could repress the Element of Loyalty’s self any longer.

It was a dream, yes. A Nightmare, to be exact.

“Scootaloo!” she yelled in stricken surprise, terrified with the thought of what must have happened, not a single remainder of the run left in her head, “What is going on? What happened to you?”

Scootaloo stared at her for a few moments. The sickening mist that circled even on the outskirts found its way into Dash’s lungs, and now she could hear her heartbeat so much better. Her slow, slow heartbeat.

The shadow of the arc closed in on her, falling over the filly and walking its crooked legs in a repulsive, rigid manner.

“Twilight… Sparkle…” a voice that Rainbow Dash’s psyche refused to try and describe to itself sounded off from far behind and above.

The pall was gone.

Rainbow Dash was alone. Alone with Scootaloo, whose terribly mangled frame stared right at her, gurgling idly.

How could she let herself never notice it before? How could she be so self-centered and let the drug of the nightmare take over her mind? How did she never notice the figures in the mist, never think that something was wrong? Why did she only react when she practically ran into her? How could she have done that?

The Nightmare was reality.

“Why…” Dash had begun to speak in defeat, her brain barely having caught up to what exactly happened. All she knew was that she had failed, and failed horribly. She did something so, so wrong. Scootaloo… What would Scootaloo think?

Dash looked at the filly again, and never got to realize what had happened.

“AAAAAAH—”

The upper teeth of the little pegasus were still more than fit to rip into her throat and weigh down the exhausted, unsuspecting, confused body.

The last thing Rainbow Dash ever saw was the dead, blank stare of something her dying mind refused to even try to identify.

“Twilight Sparkle,” she was ordered, and there was nothing else for Rainbow Dash, the Element of Loyalty, to do.

Princess Celestia was just walking out of the conference room, and fought with the desire to let her thoughts slip through the serene visage she wore day to day.

The pure white alicorn nearly puffed out of her nose with frustration. The conference with the griffon Queen and multiple Northern Equestrian landlords went… successfully, but with far too much strain and argument. A big letdown after the willing cooperation of the Crystal Empire, ruled by Princess Cadence and Celestia's faithful student Twilight Sparkle's elder brother, Shining Armor. Perhaps, it was all simply nepotism in that regard.

Celestia knew that it was a big ask to tell the other northern nations to send their armed forces to Canterlot for almost entirely supernatural reasons. Supernatural even by Equestria's standards. Discord, Nightmare Moon, and many others would have made themselves known prior to their terror - this one they were warned about in advance through means Celestia feared to deduce. Worse yet, she knew that if she was in their position, she would have been just as suspicious, and most likely have sent an emissary to clear things out first, wasting her time if the threat was ever proven to be true. The Princess, however, also knew for a fact she would never have been half as stubborn. Quite literally just a single jarl from the North agreed right away, and the amount of bartering it took with the Queen… Sometimes, the sudden strains of diplomacy caused Celestia to show just a bit of the pent up anger on the outside.

And then, with just a single crack, that anger was gone.

The Princess was walking, and then she stopped, replaying the sound she just heard over and over again in her head, wishing it was merely something misheard.

The two Princesses had access to the Elements of Harmony. They did, from the very creation of the devices. Their most powerful artifacts. Their defense against all that was evil and their weapon against all that wished to assail. Their tool of perseverance. The link they had with them was intricate and deep.

Right at that very moment, Celestia heard one of them crash into pieces.

Canterlot Towers shook under he impact of a royal’s voice yet again that day, and this time around, it was much worse than before.

Chapter 5: Cry

The creatures he used to exist among had this saying - “to be tearing one’s hair out”. Him, he had no hair. His corporeal body did not support that. That was an immense shame. At the moment, Bane was very much in this hair-tearing state.

Pondering on sayings of a world he never wished to return to acted as little more than feeble attempts at escapism.

“Nyaahahaaaaurgh!” his twisted purple body jerked in the air, letting out screeches of black, charred frustration. It was so maddening that even remaining in his own home plane, the dreamscape, was impossible - no concentration could be found in his raging mind. Bane was too busy figuratively tearing out his hair.

He had failed, and he had failed so miserably that not even his trickster mind could come up with a good excuse. As a matter of fact, a more telling piece of evidence was that he, the avatar of all nightmares, was concocting excuses for his dismal failure. Excuses that he would use before the comically brightly colored quadrupedal rulers of the plane that was doing so well before he decided that he knew better.

“They will all DIE now!” Bane gurgled to himself , tearing at his prolonged forehead with the weak, branchy arms springing from the tops of his shoulders, “What was I THINKING? Whaaaaaayyyyuuuaaargh!”

Her. It was all her. That stupid, stupid, stupid blue winged mare. His control, his tightly woven strings of puppetry over her uncomplicated mind, all broken through sheer stupidity. She was too dumb to live.

“No!” he choked on the ichor that flowed ever out of his body, “It was NOT that! Stupidity is DIFFERENT.”

No, no. He had spent long enough trying to come up with a way to blame it on her to know that it was simply untrue. Nothing could have been special about her - not even the lack of intelligence that was so clearly evident in these equines. What could a blue pony with a rainbow mane have that could pierce his mental pall? Nothing. It was never her.

It was him.

He could not hold that pall up.

“Yuuaaaeeeeeheeehaaaargh!” he let out another screech, gaping his maw open wider than where his stomach reached, casting peacefully dreadful shadows on the marble past the corner.

There was no getting away from this fact - Bane simply did not do a good enough job. He thought he was cut out for the task, that this bit of variety would be up to his level of mastery in this new world with its new magic, but he was wrong.

The point of the matter was, he had never had to cast truly complicated Nightmares that… were not truly Nightmares in the end. The way this energy worked, its recipients were partly transformed to realms of neverending terrors to remain there for much longer than they were truly away. In reality, their bodies would phase out, partly inaffectible, especially at the very start - and in that state, they could be moved by especially elaborate means. Not easy to do with creatures bigger in power, but definitely possible with lowly equines. That was Bane’s assumption.

He even considered the fact that their psyches were ever so much softer than any others he had encountered before. There was no other way they could taste so well - they were simply too fragile to be harmed. They would never be able to withstand even what he thought small, more than enough for a defensive use. No, they would have required precision. He, the embodiment of fear, would have to create an image where fear was to be pushed to the background. All to keep these intact. All to help preserve the land of infinite food for ages more.

He thought he could do that. No terrors. No sanity-rippling imagery that leaves one shaking for dear life. Just an easy path for their minds to follow his, and be moved along to somewhere safe so that this stupid, idiotic, brainless horde would never catch up.

And he had failed. The God of Nightmares, the Bane Elemental, could not handle a simple quiet dream.

It was either that, or these equines had some special ability, something to help them tear out of his tight webs, something so strong in its strive that not even he could repress it with all his focus - which was far beyond possibility. No, it was a complete failure.

Which made life so much more difficult for the floating purple nightmarish being as he waited till the rulers of this stupid, delicious world would visit their chambers. The one thing he wanted to have an upper hand in would have to be entrance. He would start. Not them. No, he would not give them the opportunity.

And yet, even that assuredness was sent into shambles, now that Bane had clearly heard an admirably frightening female voice yell out something that sounded alarmingly similar to his name from somewhere deep within the castle. He floated, but even without an anchor to the floors and halls of the Towers, the creature had no difficulty telling that the foundation was quite decidedly shaking from that voice alone.

“Sounds far too much like they already know...” he exhaled an echoing breath and spoke to himself, “May as well get comfortable.”

A grin erupted across the dark reaches of his conscious, having already been glued to his corporeal maw. What a wonderful sound. The anger and the rage within… Oh, if only it meant what he thought it did - he could actually start the unpleasant talk with an advantage! An advantage the poor overly emotional Princesses would give him gladly, even if it might possibly be just the slightest bit painful. It was so much more preferable to being humiliated in any more of a way than he had already concieved for this scenario.

Bane dragged a coffee table into the eerie, moonlit hallway, and floated low by it, crossing all four of his arms. They would not find him lacking a pose. That would have been simply disgraceful. This was one thing the half-equine nightmare creator knew, in a sick way, that they could never match.

They had no arms at all.

He trained his grin further.

The damp earth met her snout with an unwelcoming slurping sound and a rush of mild, cold, wet pain. Her body remained less than operating for a few minutes, even when her head had begun to pull itself back into bigger pieces. Or, perhaps, it was longer. Twilight Sparkle could barely tell.

She felt as if she had slept for days.

That alone was bad enough. Her forays into studies that far exceeded twenty four hours taught her that spending over ten hours asleep did bad, bad, bad things to your head and throat. This felt like that, but so much worse that there was no proper description. Unfortunately, that was not all.

Her memories of things past to such prolonged slumber were coming back. They were bad enough to make her stiff body get back up on its legs and gape its eyes around in abstract confusion.

Lost and horrified as she was, the first thing the unicorn did upon having come to complete conclusion was try to turn her head back and see if anyone needed help. Surely there would have been escapees, survivors, tens of her friends that she had become so accustomed to, fleeting the town…

Her attempts to turn her head back and yell out to be noticed ended up in a painful stumble and a prolonged vomit session during which copious amounts of purplish liquid poured out of her throat.

Perhaps to retain some control over the situation, Twilight had decided to visually examine it. That proved to be a monumentally wrong choice, as he findings were that it was floaty, steaming, and at least four times more of it had left her than could physically have fit in. This realization of the denial of basic laws of physics, biology, and anatomy, made her sick with actual vomit.

Having finished with oral excretions within ten minutes’ time, helped out immensely by her proper inner bile, Twilight was, by most means, a wet sock puppet that lacked a hoof to be mounted atop.

“Twilight Sparkle,” a voice the pony had not heard before and already sincerely wished she never would again sounded faintly in her head.

“Twilight Sparkle,” another voice repeated, higher pitched, but having the same broken patterns and disgusting, dead atmosphere about it.

“Twilight,” a voice spoke, the familiarity of which made those same similarities far more horrifying than they could have been expected to.

“Twilight…” another sounded out, and finally forced her to lock her vocal recognition off. It told her of matters beyond undesirability, but what she did was the only thing that her body physically could not do. Run.

As a haunting, titillating, rampaging melody sounded out in a voice and tone of purity that not even her wide vocabulary of Equestrian could describe, Twilight Sparkle did significantly better at running than anyone could have been expected to in her state.

When voices so much nearer, weak, panicked, frightened, and lost, sounded a “Twilight! Stop! Why are you running?” to her, she could not hear them.

It was only when she had once more collapsed under the body strain that Rarity and Applejack had added the unconscious unicorn to the group of incapable ponies they had to lead to safety. Canterlot Towers were so close, but so far away at the same time.

And the sight of the ravaged top of the Golden Oaks Library rising high up into the sky, supported now by meters of corroded metal and rotting wood, and emanating a ghastly green light out of its surviving windows only worked for the worse.

The hulking General sat on the ruins of a particularly sturdy building in the town that had, through his militia’s efforts, ceased to wrong the will of the Dead God. Its pink ornaments and decorations, turning it into a perverted mockery of a confection that the two worlds must have shared, had turned into piles of rubble covering the numerous corpses sprayed over the ground. Mysterious mists passed over the mumbling, trapped corpses. The Undying had little interest in freeing the likely mangled remains from the pink debris, and the nature of the zombifying mist was very much tertiary to him.

He sat atop the ruined store, and felt his thoughts gnaw hungrily on his decadent brain.

“My body… curdles…” His vocal chords vibrated without his intent, and his arm grabbed at the ground, bringing up a serving of pudgy blue flesh, sating the ever decomposing owner’s hunger in an automaton motion.

Such an unusual world. Such an unusual place to be in. Such a new position.

It was rare for the dead to experience major change. Death was the antithesis of change. Death was a perennial symphony of harmonic tones that no living could ever comprehend, death was the final unity that brought all within the Dead God, and him within them. Death had no time for measly change. Death was art. It was contemporary.

Life… Life was strife. Life existed in a perpetual disagreement with death. Odds in this battle seemed to, perhaps by virtue of a malicious random number engine, often favor life. It was its side that got to dictate what happened, and it was its side that was celebrated celestially.

It was life that brought him here, and forced his thoughts into this deep ponder. However unnatural it was, this was a new world, and this new world would require adaptation. A measly concept, the necessity of which only reminded of the incomplete status of the Undying’s task, but… He wondered to himself, as he sat, on how oddly exciting it all was to his lack of a soul.

Death was art, and he was a master of death. He was not an artist from the start, no, but having mastered an art, he drew a close affinity with them.

The plans and ideas that sprung into his mind as soon as it had begun to process all the little things that those sparkly, shiny souls told him, they were fresh. New. Unusual. Ink for the notes and colors for the pictures. And even now that the Dead God had been lost, his guidance no longer an option, this lack of control… it made the General so much more free in what he decided for his own symphony.

“Yes…” he gurgled, thinking the thought again. A symphony all of his own… His own Dirge.

Not to replace the Almighty Dirge, but to sound to its side. A spin-off project. A cross-over into new possibilities. He was free to create.

Now all he needed to do was get this old, rotting mind into new patterns, and this big, lush land would serve a perfect canvas for the imminent destruction. A perfect stage for a song of tombstones and walking dead.

If only he had Twilight Sparkle and the knowledge within her… That being, one of the horned kind, as the poor, unfortunately lacking souls of the former town denizens told him, knew it all. Easier to access than the rulers, which were a problem in its own right, and a part of something greater. Something, the fluttering keys of the colored equines in their dying spasms said, that could potentially evaporate the Undying himself. A subject of curiosity, yes…

He was almost disappointed to find out that he could never hear the music of that which would fail to destroy him. A seemingly random soul he had ripped not more than a few hours ago ended up being much more than that. It was passed down to dormant parts of his brain for analysis, but he knew for sure - it was close to Sparkle. It was unique, unusual, it was… a dash of inspiration. A measly little winged equine, but she was enough to get him into ponders. It was her slow digestion that called him to stop the command over the assault and simply sit down to think.

He had done something unusual with her. Something… unallowed. Indecent? Abnormal? Or simply never thought of before?

The Undying cast a dead glance to the gaping pit in front of what used to be the library he crashed through, familiar green winds emanating from the deep crack. His stale nerves were far from functional, but they almost felt giddiness and anxiety of awaited result. It could just be the start…

It could be so much more if he did, in the end, have Twilight Sparkle.

“Uuuugrh,” he and his stomach grumbled in unison, having circled round to the same thought yet another time.

“Guaaaaahhh,” a weak voice from below sounded out, as if rhythming with the sitting, pondering Undying.

“Grrrmmmm,” he scoffed at the insignificant corpse, and channeled himself back into his thoughts.

“Guuuurgh…” The front half of the grey pegasus mare continued to rub against his leg for approximately three hours until an undead manticore accidentally picked it up with its tail and carried it away.

Princess Luna was sitting distraught next to a communications officer, who shivered in pain and whose ears bled profusely. His eyeballs were almost extended out of their holes, and it was evident that he had suffered significant inner damage. It was much more likely than not that he was suffering from internal hemorrhaging, which made casting any sort of healing incantation a difficult option to choose - less so with how poorly she was handling the side-effects of her dream visits.

Nevertheless, that stallion had, perhaps, just saved Equestria.

He was standing right next to her as she cried out in the most horrific, earth-shattering, terrifyingly royal shriek ever recorded in Equestrian history. It was her that dealt him all those wounds, with just her voice.

If not for the care over her innocent subject whom he had, by accident, harmed, she would have stormed upstairs where Bane awaited, and done her damned best to bash that abomination’s brains out on the floor and then force it to eat them up so that she could rip them out of its stomach and set them on fire.

Seeing how the nightmarish creature was very much ethereal in base and could just have continued to operate without a functional corporeal body, that would have been a horrible mistake, and likely would have lost them not only his loyalty, but her life as well.

In this dire moment, Luna knew that she had no right to put herself in danger.

She tried to calm the officer, more mentally than not, and remained at his side. Not for too long - a medic crew arrived shortly to take him away. They attempted a check-up on her, but the snarl that came over Luna’s snout alone scared the already shaking doctors off. Even they heard the scream. It was that bad.

Luna simply had no way of restraining herself in such a way.

The situation their capital city was in. The imminent invasion of the walking dead. The visions this nightmarish creature that called itself their ally showed her. The existence of that nightmarish creature. The immense wrongness of it all. The hectic panic and fright of the reality of their choices’ narrowness. The feeling of watching a shallow grave being buried for your entire land.

The fact that in all of it, Rainbow Dash’s death was only so low in her list of troubles.

What has it come to? Luna had no verifiable answer. Luna was sick, confused, frightened, frightening, and angry. She hoped that her sister would have a way out. That there would be a moment of peace, a fleeting image of a resolution at the very least.

When she felt what could only have been Celestia unloading immense amounts of battle magic in a spot directly by her chambers, that hope choked on its own birth liquids and died.

Even though Luna teleported up as quickly and as precisely as she could, she was still too late. The communications room and teleport construction crews were most likely blown over by the winds caused by the spell, and herself, the Princess merely arrived to a disaster site faster than usual.

She watched with her jaw absently agape and her eyes glaring into space as the sickening purple body fixed its head back into place from the neck-snapped position it was in. Celestia was nearby, charred at the horn and steaming in more ways than one.

“I only wanthed to tahlk,” the insufferable entity half-cackled half-gurgled, picking up its guts and placing them back in the stomach, and grinned at the two Princesses.

Luna wondered if it was the permanent expression of this malicious outsider. If it was, it fit perfectly.

“Oh, we are going to talk,” her sister answered through magical distortion, and the three of them were taken away in a flash of blinding light.

These negotiations would not end well, Luna could tell from the start.

Chapter 6: Elegy

Author's Note

After ten years in development, hopefully it had been worth the weight. I can't deliver on promises, can I?

Chapter 6: Elegy

“Twilight Sparkle.”

It had been very long since they called to her. Persistent at first, eager to meander through her limp subconscious, they became less and less frequent with time. Passing her sleeping thoughts by and avoiding contact there where before they all but lead her breaths to escape the confines of the throat.

The few moments she could spare, the diseased unicorn spent trying to decode their mystery. They… They had a reason for being, she figured. Not just figments of madness as her mind and body fought whatever she had been injected with. If only because insanity would not normally be so easily recognized. It was all too simple. But the simple questions of who they were, w
hy they appeared, and why they would now leave her were all in obscurity.

Even in this pitiable state, Twilight Sparkle realized that the answer to the first question was, although double in nature, readily available. Perhaps, it wanted to be answered, that question. Such a coincidence in thought and matter would not surprise her fever-ridden mind.

Only convenient that they came back the moment it occurred to her that it was for too long that she only knew pain and constant swiveling as her limp body was carried along.

Even among the general pain that troubled her these long hours and days, the sight of who came to visit her made Twilight wince.

“Why… are you…”

“Why am I what?” Rainbow Dash shrugged, floating up in the air, easily phasing through the back of the tent with her wings.

Twilight could not finish her question, as another dose of inky purple matter had gathered in her lungs. Painfully, she coughed and coughed, cleaning her insides out. As per usual, solid chunks got stuck, clogging the throat up, causing the unicorn to start wheezing in pain.

“Like you don’t know,” Dash waved left and right nonchalantly, rolling her eyes at Twilight’s pain, rolling them until they went wide and blank, “You’re the smart one here, not me. Oh, come on, what’s the problem? Got something stuck? Fine, fine, whatever, I’ll help.”

The cyan pegasus emerged in front of Twilight as she lay wheezing on the makeshift bed that had been established for her, and punched her in the chest with a forehoof. A deeply unpleasant, spastic, wet feeling spread all over Twilight’s body, sending her to shake even further. She jerked, but not from the impact. Her breath struggled to come out still, blots of purple pouring out of her mouth and vaporizing before hitting the sheets.

“Stuff’s weird. Hard to get used to it. You know… being left to die and all. That’s what you did, isn’t it? I thought I could trust you. You, Rarity, AJ - I thought you were okay. Not gonna blame Pinkie or Fluttershy, it’s not like you’d let them stop you. But you? Yeah, not very nice.”

They would never touch her before.

“You know— Actually, nevermind. I’ll be going. You won’t be alone for long, don’t worry yourself, ” Dash mouthed, the movements of her lips barely matching up with the words, “I’d have stayed, just… got things to do, ya know? You’ll see soon enough. It’s a surprise. I’m gonna try to sort my issues out. Don’t want to be mad at you. We have better things to focus on.”

It felt all the more horrible now that she took one last look at Rainbow Dash, standing on back-bent legs, her oversized torso and gaping, asymmetrical maw swinging in the air as the terrible fleshy contraption backpedaled through the tent.

The very moment it went away, more shapes flooded her tent. Could it even hold so many?

Her friends barely set it up, she recalled. All they could find… wasted to protect her. Painful as it was to remember details, Twilight failed to ignore the fact that they put themselves under the elements, the materials only enough to cover her afflicted body. If only she could stand up, tell them to stop it… leave her behind, in the best of scenarios.

“Oh, dear heavens, she’s choking!”

“Get the civilians out of the way.

“Just hurry the hell up, or let me—”

An immoderate degree of noise sent Twilight’s train of thought careening into inky oblivion, her throat still struggling to clear itself. More shouting ensued, and large dark shapes all but tore the tent to pieces, the two figures that her eyes could recognize pushed out in frantic hurry.

They came in different forms, Twilight figured. Only the noise and quantity were special about this one. Just another visitation. Nothing out of the ordinary.

“Scheisse.”

Immense pain that came at a mercilessly crushing hit to her stomach disagreed radically. It felt as if a fist of bone struck her, piercing the weak, sweat-covered skin with sharp talons on the way back. A panicked cry of pain emerged from her ichor-ridden throat, spastic breaths following in short order. At least she breathed.

“We take her. You check at the quarantine station.”

“But we have more wounded! We all—”

“Orders are only for her.”

“Are you serious?! You can’t just leave us like this, we’ve come all the way from Ponyville form here! Officer, we are barely alive, this is not—”

It never hurt when they touched here, Twilight realized. Their touches were wriggling, wet, and slick. These filled her body with agony, them moving her off the sheets and bringing her to the light, burning the reddened, tearful eyes. These brought her severe nausea as they put her on something much more solid.

These did not speak Equestrian, either.

Twilight only managed to open her eyes once, and never got to draw a conclusion from the sight of many visibly non-equine, large, winged figures obscuring a mountainback set of spires and towers. Her consciousness left her again, and the confusing picture was washed over with the eyeless, distorted, grinning, purple maw of the one who allowed her visitors.

He stretched out his four arms, and welcomed her in gladly, smiling a crooked smile with his uneven teeth. And all around them was the room that Twilight had all but forgotten after the years spent with her friends.

“They’re all dead. Let’s make sure you won’t be, hmm?”

The Canterlot Towers, clandestine and calm a mere few days prior, were teeming with desperately shuffling ponies. Military and communications, publicity and news, service and diplomacy - equines of all kinds and trades, lost without guidance. A pair of Northern Patrol troopers were yelling down a guard who desperately tried to explain that the Princesses simply were nowhere to be found.

How easily things fell apart when the twin alicorns failed to be around to move their subjects around.

A mere few orders left them before both were nowhere to be found, for an excess of four hours, if not more. That alone was concerning for the pony population of Equestria’s political brain and heart, but the nature of the orders was even worse. Or better, depending on one’s allegiances.

“State your business,” a burly armor-clad stallion commanded, crossing a spear with his near-identical counterpart.

“None of yours,” a griffon officer of medium build scoffed in response, pulling out a badge and issuing out an obedient dissociation. She brushed her wings on both their flanks as she went regardless, flicking one of them with her tail.

A more than fair amount of her comrades in talons were seeping into the halls with every hour. Armed and armored, they quickly occupied more than a few sections of the administrative center, detained there for the time being, their official documents awaiting confirmation. Ponies complained, of course, but it was not for them to decide. Just a matter of time.

The first order, in terms of importance, was that the Griffon Empire was allowed control over an immense part of the Equestrian capital city. Canterlot, under Griffon jurisdiction. More than a few dozen guards and military officials all but found themselves floor-jawed when the order came through, but that was the reality of it.

“Hey, you two!” the officer, having passed a few corridors and reached a stairway to one of the outlook towers, screeched out to the guards on duty, “Out of here, now. We’re in control of this sector.”

Before they could even reply, a badge was flashed in front of their faces. With befuddled looks ridding their faces, they left their posts, a number of griffons filling the empty spots. It was safe to assume that the guards the officer passed through received similar treatment from them. With numbers greatly outweighing those of the old guards, and weaponry of more than suspicious nature, they made the watch tower feel like home in little time.

Slowly, bit by bit, Canterlot Towers gave up ground, and the pressure present in the pony population was palpable. It was about time, but Equestria accepted its inferiority in dealing with crises. Took them a half-mythical threat somewhere south - the officer, in all frankness, struggled to care less - but they finally did it. Gave the work up to those who knew what to do with it.

They aimed to outdo themselves.

“Alright! Freakin’ fabelhaft. Get this thing set up, the commanders are gonna wanna check.”

All in all, the situation over at Canterlot was a delight for Griffon Empire Special Service officer Guildenstern to witness. It was way about time that these pony pricks got what was coming to them, and if their Princess was so easy to lure into allowing them control over even part of her golden city… then it really was a joke that Equestria was ever considered a military threat. For Celestia to simply call the Queen over and effectively hand her the capital was hilarious to think of.

There was very little to be upset about, in frankness. One thing, perhaps, not much more.

The second order turned the Griffon-controlled city quarters into quarantines and refugee centers. Messy work. Assuming the threat existed (Guildenstern herself doubted that), it would be a touch unsavory, but nothing the Griffons would fail to handle. Maybe the higher ranking officers could curl their beaks at it, but even then, despite being high birds, their commanders were far from the delicate paper-pushers the stereotype painted them to be. Nothing to worry about, not for the new avian overwatch.

Especially not for Guildenstern. The scouting party had returned just an hour ago. She was getting guests, sooner rather than later. And just the thought of revisiting some old grudges made her talons scrape against the tiled floors.

Not even the floaty patches of inky matter seemingly floating by, somewhere by the royal tower, made for much of a distraction. Ponies and their stupid magic. Stupid princesses, too. All of them. Stupid and soft.

Decayed winds soared past the towering, ponderous corpse. All around, errie mists remained, having dealt their damage to the location’s previous inhabitants, and nestled into the rubble and mold-covered streets. Stray undead shambled here and there, their Undying master’s mind moved far enough away from them to leave them objects of little animation. They waddled and crawled towards the towers of rune and bone, created out of landmarks they lavished in life, so that they would reasonably persist. Their Dead God’s Herold was busy.

For hours and hours, he stood static, only a rampant wind or a deathly shake causing parts to contort. His maw wide open, his posture limp, he was considering the options.

So much to do. So much to consider, explore, decide. New decisions, things never before done, not for any of the lands conquered prior… Perhaps, it was for the better that the most ambitious part of his plan he undertook before entering pause. It was difficult to stray from the strategies of old. A whole new draft of options, it was tempting to attempt what has been done before, but that would be so highly suboptimal. Not too detrimental, of course. This realm, Equestria, as it was called, had a few months left in its repertoire at best.

It was the impact on his own state of affairs that the Undying was truly considerate of.

“Blight will spread,” the towering General’s rotten mouth moved on its own accord, gurgling out a statement of relative relevance, “More will join.”

The dilemmas that he faced were copious. The spreading of blight, as his barely controlled speech noted, was inevitable, but the structural presence of the heart of that blight was a different matter entirely. This rarely was a problem, as most lands lacked power enough to truly burrow deep into their own thick, and eliminate the primary production centers.

More often than not, he employed a moving camp of sorts, relocating the conduction monuments and soul rip winds as he went, a traveling orchestra of sorts. Not here. Too risky. It remained unknown what it was that the equines possessed - not even after hours of knowledge absorbtion did it become apparent what their world dominance secret truly was.

In this case, a much safer procedure would be to center production in a fit position. Even with that choice made, another dilemma arose - the lands his army had crossed offered not one, but two fit camps.

“Crumble,” he heard a word escape his own throat - a faint distraction.

True enough, the crumbling of the main structures would have been an issue. An invasion needed its headquarters, even if it was one of the undead, who rose from the ground wherever the Almighty Dirge extended. A center of conductor structures, supreme Tombstones, that would allow for manipulation of matter and magic to hasten the creation of smaller ones, to improve on the corpses of the once-living if they were never encountered before. An improvization center of sorts, a center of creativity - something to protect dearly, just as well. Through few mistakes, albeit costly ones, the Undying did learn that the destruction of his chosen structures meant an immense weakening of the horde. Rarely a factor in the quick skirmish war that he normally waged, but this was not one of them. Emergency Tombstones to raise weak undead would not do.

Not a war he would get to engage in directly, not this time. Too costly a mistake if he falters, however unlikely that was. Ideally, he needed a proper stronghold, a place hard to reach and dangerous to persist within. The Dead God’s will would have it that he knew a place with those exact qualities - the dead city he awoke within, surrounded by haunted forests, and now deadly plague, as well as numerous undead inhabitants. Everfree was the name of the forest, and each soul consumed knew to fear it - especially those found roaming within. No small diversion would persist through the undead, haunted, poisoned groves, only a stark assault. A safe haven.

There was, however, a polar choice.

“Grrrmhhh!” the upper half of a grey pegasus crawled out from behind a corner, gurgling as if to attract attention. None was given.

The preservation of the main structures was a concern, yes, but so was their productivity. It rarely factored in, their melodies more than enough to lull the living into a Dead God’s lullaby sleep, but sometimes… some places would be special. Places bursting with inspiration, raw magic, that which could enhance it all so much. New ideas, and never a hint of composer’s drought - they added flavor, they made an invasion memorable, they made it efficient. It would not be unwise to assume that this world would contain one of those, but it was truly a play of fortune that such a place was all around him.

Ponyville, the town was called. Despite its seemingly insignificant name and nature, it was one of the strongest bastions of sheer inspiration that the Undying had ever encountered. Even the weaker structures produced new, exciting things - even in comparison to those outside the town, those that already showed new abilities, they did. To establish main structures within this town… There would be no definitive end to what he could create with those raw energies.

It was this choice that kept the undead general standing in trance for hours on end. Hundreds of wandering corpses populated the town, sure to prevent any major distraction. The first tactic to consider, a proper step on the path to reunion with his deity.

The possibility of defeat, the sheer disappointment his Dead God would feel should he fail in this faraway land… They created things within the Undying’s mind that even its rotten, deeply deceased frame wished it could unthink. Such a failure he would be. Unique, in all regards, he was the first Undying, and he could not risk being the last.

At the same time… his Dead God had left him, for the time being. Or rather, the Undying left his Dead God. The benevolent overseer no longer watched. He was on his own, and however horrifying it was, subconsciously, the general had begun to realize that more and more of his creativity was becoming active. Dormant before, likely due to lack of necessity, it sprung up now, clearly aiming to help him persist. Ideas that he knew for a fact would have seemed sacrilegious before, so possible now. It would be foolish to deny - he had already done a number of things in ways his old self never would have thought of. Was there truly a need to stop? Was the risk of defeat not worth an endless stream of opportunities and creativity?

Was there a point in stopping, now that he had definitely composed something which no other undead ever heard or thought of?

“Grrmmhhm?” the same torso had continued to crawl towards him, straight forward. The Undying stood at the far edge of a large, gaping pit, once the town’s library, a pit that sung the Almighty Dirge in many an octave, and it was him that it wished to reach. Whichever reason drove the barely animated body, it was suboptimal for it to crawl any further, as the pit was what separated them. With the Undying too occupied to notice, it did just that, and fell right in.

“Rruh!” the hulking thinker roared abstractly, contorting in spasms, and swung his hands far into the air, one of them snapping at the shoulder. In a frantic movement, green winds lifted the torso out of the pit moments before impact. Tossing the inconsiderate thing back against a building, the Undying tried to return to his train of thought.

He no longer could. Too important a thing not to think of, what he had done, and even its near spoilage by one of his soldiers failed to convince him against the controversial idea. No, no, no, there was no option not to admit his intentions. Especially since they affected the decision he had been trying to make, and heavily.

The general bent forward, gazing into the deep pit. Deep, deep below, deeper than living eyes would see, a once simple body lay. The blue winged mare whose soul tasted so different. It was different, he knew. It was… special. Not the only one of the ones he had taken, but the most sparking one. A dash of inspiration, truly.

The choice was in the making for long enough, but, at long last, he no longer could draw the suspense.

In a puffing grumble, he clapped at his stomach, and bent even further forward, his mouth open to where the cheek flesh tore even further apart. Green bile streamed from his mouth, but, more importantly, so did a decisive bright spark. Regurgitated into the world, it flushed down the pit, caught by the winds, and impacted directly the body below. A soul ripped apart, a soul returned, fixed in proper.

He failed to tell how long it took, but soon enough, the process was over. One soul less, now returned to the flesh carrier it favored the years before. A soul he needed. A pit that sung.

“My stomach… rumbles,” his mouth moved, just barely, as he drew the grey torso into his hands, and lifted it off the ground. It looked at him with wide, perfectly lifeless eyes, for a moment - the Undying then used it to wipe the bile off himself, and threw it back against the same building.

The choice was made now. They remained in Ponyville.

His legacy was to be secured, and his inspiration was merely rising up. The first ethical block out of the way, he had more ideas to realize. This invasion was to be the most creative to date. However limp and broken his body was, his rotten soul sparked at the thought.

Patches of inky essence and mild flashes of lights had been emerging all over the Canterlot Towers vicinity for hours. Unnerving the denizens a fair bit, they were yet another thing to worry about, now that everything seemed to have gone insane. Ponies who went to sleep in relative peace the night before awoke to find little as it was. Confusion reigned in the political heart of Equestria.

Princess Celestia, slumping over a window in her secret chambers, felt so drained and exhausted that it simply was not an option to reveal herself after this sudden absence.

She left her ponies unattended at the worst time imaginable. She ordered a nation that she knew had little in ways of diplomatic agreement with them to all but take over the crown jewel of Canterlot. She issued orders to parts of her own realm that made her heart sink, and those sent to execute bring themselves ever closer to committing to their promises of separation. She effectively put an end to all and any hopes she had for the pony that was her light at the end of the night in the direst of times. She presumed, at the beginning of it all, that her sister was deluded, if only for a moment. She just had one of her most loyal subjects die, and bring with her death the effective disuse of the Elements of Harmony.

And yet, it was not any of that which plagued her drained body and mind. Not the terrible injustice that she herself put into action, not the strain she put the whole country under. It was not even the bleeding wounds covering her legs and chest, and not the terrible pain and exhaustion she could barely block out.

It was the fact that all of this was just the beginning. When she pulled that abomination away into a distant space, infuriated by that which it had done, not even her foresight could allow to consider what would transpire. None of these thoughts were very welcome in her mind, normally serene and with a will of stern iron.

“Celestia…” she spoke to herself, looking into a mirror, standing weakly on the massive sterling white legs that seemed before so firm, “...how could you let this happen?”

The Princess lowered her head, and took a step forward, looking herself in the eyes.

“When did you go so wrong? How could you let it live? What were you thinking?” she asked herself the questions that the only other beings informed of those actions would be too courteous to approach her with.

Her blood-shot, endlessly tired, leaking eyes stared back, and it was not a contest she could feasibly win.

“What makes you think this is for the better?” she tried to provoke her mind to give a proper answer, to little avail.

The starry, fittingly celestial mane, tainted with patches of sticky purple, came over her snout, obscuring visible tear tracks. Celestia could not even be bothered to shake it out of the way.

“This will only end in blood. This is not an alliance. And you know there’s another way.”

With her head twitching and her ears flicking sporadically, the Princess of the Sun struggled to breathe, her eyes fixated on a blood-covered blade that fell on the floor next to her when she, her sister, and that demented thing came to a conclusion. They talked, they did talk. If only she knew how it would end when she dragged it to a place where it seemed that no victory would ensue but her own.

“You know this isn’t what a true leader should do. You’re taking the easy way out. For you, Celestia. For…” Her own voice, hoarse, and whispering to itself, could no longer keep up the maddened babbling, and stopped for a gulp. “For you.”

The blade went up in the air, carried by the flickering yellow aura spread by Celestia’s unstable magic. It inched ever closer to her chest, hungry to add to the deep, although barely damaging cuts that covered it.

For almost a minute, she simply shook in place, her eyes bulging, and her breath strained, gazing hypnotized at the blade that had never before drawn blood, not once for the thousand years she had owned it. Her mind nearly crumbled, the sheer images of the pain her actions would inflict, and already were inflicting, displaying themselves vividly to her. Oh, how dear was the price for a safe recovery from something they never could even conceive.

“And this is not the first time. You’re talking to yourself again. It’s been over a thousand years. What makes you think you can decide for yourself?”

Finally, Celestia simply screamed, and threw the blade across the wall, knocking out chunks of solid stone and leaving a dent on the decorative handle. She could no longer hold it in. For the third time, the Towers shook under the scream of a royal, this time scaring many an intruding griffon, throwing them off their triumphant routine.

And not even with that sign of sorrow was there anyone who could hope to calm her fears. The only one who truly knew what she felt was occupied, and would be, for a prolonged period of time. It was a wretched alliance they brought upon themselves. Deep inside, Celestia almost wished that that… Bane would simply turn against them already. But no.

Her sister was busy working with that which Celestia herself could only describe as pure evil, that which played tricks on them for its own benefit. And noone else could hope to comfort her.

Chapter 7: Wright

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Chapter 8: Guildenstern

It had been close to an hour since she parted ways with the disgusting, ichorous, writhing freak of universal design that had found itself on their side of the proverbial barricades. The passing of time did remarkably little to avail her of the swelling, throbbing feelings of palpable wrongness and sheer repulsion, which coursed reliably through her much weighted mind.

The mere amount of levels on which the whole affair felt wrong made her dizzy. Then again, she had been up and continuously stressed for a duration that could have potential to start ailing even an alicorn. Debatably fortunate was that her work would continue still - despite the purplish haze taking her vision over with every errant blink and wobble in the knees.

Too much of it to do. Even simply looking out the windows of the deeper chamber of the Canterlot Library, it was visible that by sunrise, there would be chaos of all kinds in the Equestrian capital. There already was. Luna preferred not to think much on the matter, but the amount of time it took the avian forces to answer their call was suspiciously short. It took no genius to figure out that the exchange between the local population and the brought in help would be less than amicable. She sincerely hoped it would be, but, in the end, being a realist was necessary in times of struggle.

Being a realist also meant accepting the fact that crossing the distance between the library chamber and the quickly set up data center would be a struggle in and of itself - in her condition, at least. The knowledge of how that was merely the beginning of the grip that would most assuredly come over her once the dreamwalker queue shifted itself did little to console the Princess.

Luna took in a short few deep breaths, eventually sounding out to the building in the formerly spacious library yard with a voice signature enough to be heard in its glass-vibrating volume.

“Data analysis!”

The Princess leaned against the window, blocking out her celestial body’s entry of light into the gloomy corridor. Weakly, she got her body to relax and slump into a half-sit.

“Everything must be set up by 7 AM,” she ordered loudly, directing her voice to the staff within the crystal antennae-equipped building, which bursted with sparkles of recent construction still, “Am I understood?”

Whether there was any proper reply, Luna could not know, as both the loud echo of “stood-stood-stood” and the limp state of her physical faculties prevented her from being able to perceive much in terms of clear sound. It was no big loss, as she would know that there was a distinctly fleeting possibility that her order would have been ignored. She merely ensured its completion with a possible small bit of intimidation.

The absolute last thing she needed would have been for that newly equine abomination to find its new workplace in no condition to function. It had gloated enough for her to try and give it as little ground as possible in that regard.

At the exact moment, in the very first hints of morning, hoping that her sister would be in any condition to perform her namesake duties, Luna got her body to relax as much as possible.

And then shrieked briefly, with a faint gasp, as her extended alicorn immunity had been summoned to kick in, having her suffer a fair amount of discomfort for more than a short while. No falling asleep, not for the next forty-eight hours.

Her head would kill her once that time had ran out, but common sense told Luna that she had bigger problems than that. Even if they were either learning to walk on long stairways, or gathering to pick at the crown jewel of her country like vultures. Or… whatever the thing that had started the whole disaster was doing.

On the bright side, the data centers were established to figure out exactly that. A small comforting thought in a discouraging sea of issues. It was all starting to take a very major tall. By persistent realism, things were only getting worse from then on out.

According to plan, as she winced to think.

The vision of the formerly living, newly reformed and freshly rewritten additions executing their parts was a sight of tentative peculiarity. The Undying himself stood slumped sideways, his maw gaping absently, and passively transferring spare segments of greenish essence to the gaping pit in the center of the creative workshop - his attention was elsewhere. The undead headquarters were barely silent, seeping with music and song as well as other noises, but nothing alarmed the general yet. He watched the testing groups have their first tryouts.

Simple corpses of the fallen were normally enough for realms with a mere quirk or two to their defenses. Time was needed, but little more than that. This realm, though… This realm, as he had been many times reminded of, had opportunity to write a poetic end to itself. Something that a musical mind could appreciate. Tentativity permeated the thoughts - the inspiration-borne would first have to have a performance worthy of remembrance.

It was their performance what gave him the tentative feeling. For a batch of experiments produced by a large innovation, their success rate was alarmingly high.

The Wright, as for herself, was standing, twitching, mouth clenched shut, and motioning in front of a crowd of non-equine undead, as glimmering lights sparkled in the forest. She had proven to be responsible enough to take care of most of what could come from any direction. The undead general himself was using that time to analyze the additions to the army, varied at last. None of the living had seen her yet. As sensitive as they were to the sacred Song, it seemed far from likely that her new features would be well-received.

On the many small battlefields, elongated, thinned, curved undead hurled the viscous, noxious secret that their redesigned stomachs produced for lack of vital liquids in death. It burned through all but stone, set tender tissues ablaze, and cleansed the living of their burdens, the one they were born with and all that they carried. Perhaps, not the most productive to facilitate in large quantities, as there was little use of those who fell to them, but still, not a misfire. Fire, smoke, and melting remnants of an infectious life, these ones called for panic from the quadrupeds.

The crawling, leaping particulars put their reshaped physique to appropriate use - having lost what they had for front limbs, they had gained more than enough to send the living shrieking away with almost more volume than they themselves produced. A trend of uncontrollable self-mutilation had transpired, with some showing an aversion to light and attempting to avail themselves of eyes, but that much could easily be controlled or fixed - the effectiveness was barely under question. Even despite the relative bracing strength of the equines, which would naturally be put to better use by actual fighting squads, they were more than optimal to sow terror among the equines. They seemed to be almost amusingly prone to that, the Undying had noted.

Those that gained more muscle seemed virtually unstoppable by most means. Regular selections would occasionally be controlled by either a horned individual, or taken down by either alarming convenience or errant brute force - these had suffered little to no casualties. The physique seemed imbalanced to the Undying at first, but the near-simian restructuring had given them enough muscle control to execute destruction in a manner not too dissimilar to his own. If not for the nagging difficulty in sustaining control over the hulks, it would have been all too tempting to form an entire army of those… Then, again, if there was anything this venture into creativity had told the undead general, it was that there was a peculiarly high amount of workarounds for most issues in this particular world. Even now, the mere sight of these creatures sent some of the living into freezing shock - their handiwork left few to be traumatized by the imagery.

Several creations even more convenient in their use of existent physical parts showed yet more of the Wright’s inborn affinity with the equine body, and more evidence to prove that her creation was a step in the right direction. Those that were rebalanced to extend their fronts much taller than before, having their intestines repurposed to be effectively limb-like, had shown a high degree of ability to pick off various targets. The memories of many wars fought had given him enough of a reason to continue their particular type - while they took a fair amount of time to choke out the life out of their victims, they were what looked to be an effective counter-measure to the winged and horned individuals. The desperation panging within the survivors as they watched others choke and waste away were significant enough for the Undying to feel them from even where he stood, miles away.

It was a mere dozen battles he witnessed, and each of them was so strewn with plain panic. With the passing of ages, it had become so easy to dismiss the value of psychological damage of the living upon witnessing their former cohorts bettered. The rougher conditions of the old world had forced the general to prioritize blunt power and numbers, as the kingdoms that survived had little in ways of morale to tremble. Again and again, he had to remind himself that this was a clean slate.

Even if the many disjointed memories of those he had consumed told of many tales of terror, by his standards, it was a clean slate of a world. Some tales, even with exaggeration removed, made him wary to persist so confidently, as surely such creations of chaos and consumers of matter had to have been toppled somehow… But the thought of the new concepts nestling within the mana potential this world offered reinstated the assuredness. Where the corrupted celestial ruler fell prey to overpowering artifacts, where an agent of chaos built up his own demise, where a traitor fell to that of his own kind, where many tried to dismantle the reigning power and degraded into obscurity, he would prevail. The realm’s consumption was not merely a goal, it was art. An art he took seriously.

It was for that reason that the effects of these curious changes on the morale of the inhabitants had to be considered. The true power within the presumably dominant species was concealed still - but minds remained the same. Something to fear but death, and death pushed to extremes.

He watched the test groups pummel, rip, burn, choke, slice, gnaw, and ram through settlements of little consequence, only occasionally falling to the yet persisting local predators, and thought of ways to further the advantage.

Somewhat conveniently, and somewhat disappointingly, one appeared to have been trying to get his attention for the time that it took for the moon to appear in the sky.

The odd smell and the distant wails had been a feature of his surroundings for some time, but it took his Wright’s waking call and a grey torso’s blind ramming of his leg for him to finally arrive to the occasion.

“Silence… we have… adjourned!” the frantisyllabic voice of his sentient officer brought the Undying to a bone-cracking twist of the spine, his mind separating itself from village ravaging.

“WHAT. ARE YOU. DOING.”

The other voice was not one he recognized. It seemed as if he was woken for a reason. Little could compare to even his creations, he knew - so it was no invasion. Besides that… there was an air of eerie familiarity in even the first sound of that voice.

“By decree of… the mayoral assembly… the spring distribution of anti-weed…” the Wright hunched herself in an offensive posture, standing tall in front of the animalistic congregation, which had fallen into curiously static stances. A large, ghostly interpretation of a symbol had surrounded the square, a circle with two perpendicular lines supporting a curve right below. Faint crystal glimmers sparkled all around.

“THIS. IS. OUR. REALM.”

“The sleepless… wake,” the Undying’s own maw moved in freezing motions, his body crushing through the idleness. Before he even regained full vision, the familiarity of the presence had become apparent.

“YOU. INTRUDE. IMPOSTOR.”

It was the dead.

“Wither…” the general gargled, stretching out his arm to extend the reach, so as to feel the presence better. The ground all around had rotten even further than it was before. The presence was not perturbed.

“THIS IS OURS. ALL OURS.”

Once he had opened his eyes and mind, he saw in front of himself a curious spectacle. Again, a reminder of how difficult it was to keep track of novelties in information - even if he knew all, he could at times miscalculate. This looked to be another thing he had overlooked.

Circling around the former city plaza, the current lounge of spreading decay and towering, smoking Tombstones, were ghostly entities of vaguely equine shape. A hotness permeated in the air, and a sulfuric essence.

The restless, barely persisting spirits he had consumed in the haunted forest were far from the only local undead.

“You…” the Undying grabbed his own throat, forcing out words with purpose, “...announce… yourself.”

“YOU. DON’T. MAKE. DEMANDS. ALIEN.”

“Announce yourself,” his gargle repeated, and his blank eyes stared into the main entity that spoke.

“WE DO NOT OBEY. I DO NOT OBEY. NOT EVEN TO ONES WHO THINK TO RULE OUR SKY.”

“I… will… repeat… no more.”

“YOU WILL LEAVE.”

The voice roared in gravelly whispers, seeming distinctly equine in appearance, a jagged edge of a broken horn poking from out a poignant head. A distinct texture of crystal persisted throughout the ornamentation, even more so with the wailing strips that circled round. It wore distant remains of royal wear, albeit it felt clear enough that it was no former ruler of the realm. Former rulers the Undying knew well, being the Herald of the Dead and the destroyer of kingdoms simultaneously.

To amusing coincidence with the stream of thought he was having, this was very much a failed contender.

“Join in death. Else, clear,” the general spoke simple words to the ambassador - or escapee - of what the equine denizens referred to as Tartarus. That much he had gathered from the symbol and the sense of chase present in the spirits surrounding the one that spoke. They haunted along in rage.

No position to threaten him. No position to disrupt his observation with their hapless attempts.

“WAS I NOT MADE CLEAR?!” the spirit that barely reached the Undying’s waist grew himself with magic, and rose to stare his ghostly eyes into the ones long blank, “THIS IS MY REALM TO CONQUER. OURS. AS SOON AS I FIND AN OPTION OF RETURN, THESE TREACHEROUS PRINCESSES WILL KNOW KING SOMBRA’S WRATH.”

Not even with ghostly spit failing to land on the Undying’s face was enough to provide any phasing.

“We are Death,” he said.

“WE ARE MERELY INCONVENIENCED BY THE DASTARDLY PRINCESSES AND THEIR LAP DOG. YOU ARE ALIEN TO THIS WORLD. I WILL NOT CONCEDE IT.”

“We are all Death,” the Undying repeated.

“WHAT. EVEN. ARE. YOU.”

“I am Undying.”

“AND I AM KING. NOW, GET YOUR DESPICABLE CREATURES. OFF. OUR. LAND.”

No option for the hollering spirit of a fallen king to harm the dead. Not by definition. The Undying knew that for a fact, but could not tell whether the spirit was simply foolish to believe otherwise, or was attempting a bluff.

In any case, the thought of such proximity to that which this world, according to general equine knowledge, used to store the spirits of the unwanted dead… the powerful dead… with one of them having presented himself right away… that sparked a determined inspiration.

It was never a good idea to think less of the dead that had lost their physical form. Granted, true unity of death was in flesh devoid of life - but they were familiar nonetheless. He spoke the truth, they were all Death.

Whether they wanted to be that or not.

“ARE YOU LISTENING?”

Especially when even their leftover strength, and the visage that invoked distinct realization of fear in the shreds of souls assumed, was still enough to potentially perturb the equines very much. It was less the strength and more the symbol.

King Sombra. He was still remembered. In fact… he was not so old a spirit. A recent memory.

These creatures, they were prone to panic. They had distinct panic, distrust, proper trembling instilled from birth - it was that which came on the opposite side of other personality traits the Undying was yet to fully perceive due to their insignificance. They would fall, they would fall soon to his army, even the way it was now… But how much could a morale attack influence them?

He was getting ideas. This was new, this was something newer still… All he needed was the essence.

“I AM ASKING YOU. ANSWER.”

“Fresh soul,” the Undying’s maw opened much wider than the stray bits of sinew at the sides allowed for, and thick, green beams surrounded the former center of town.

“I. AM. THE. ONE. TRUE. KING.”

He had other plans at first, but for now, they could wait. It was all too enticing. Focus was needed, yes, there were other plans, yes, and his treasured creation at the bottom of the pit needed more sustenance, and that this burst of activity could attract whatever kept the equines intact… but the urge to experiment was too strong. He had seen from the performance of the one big untested idea that statistically, it was all too possible that this would have remarkable consequences.

Not much harm in taking the rancid, belligerent soul, and giving it new form. Something that spirit said gave him a particular idea… a resemblance of a story from the old world, where the Dead God laid in wait.

Whether he would approve, the Undying could not know, and that fact disturbed him less and less as the roaring scream died down.

Dying moonlight refused to give way to the unwilling dawn. That was the way of things. It was her responsibility to have day replace night. Day into day, century into century.

This time, it did not take her the loss of a sister to feel unwilling to perform her duties.

And that alone added to the stress of the situation, which was what caused the issue in the first place. A cruel joke of a self-ensuring problem.

“Not that difficult,” the Princess spoke to herself, looking at the fires far and chaos below, “Just a few minutes. Then…”

She took a glance behind, to the dormant body in her bed. What little of an optimist kept a voice in Celestia’s troubled mind said that at the very least, the poor thing was getting better. It would only take her a day or two of highly extensive therapy and constant siphoning of ichorous refuse from the dip she took in that which should never have had to provide her safety.

“...then what?”

The audible rest fittingly pointed out that the mere fact that she was in that condition was abhorrent, that the presence of her “savior” was a disaster in and of itself, that the reason she was put in Celestia’s chamber for safekeeping was disgusting. Eventually, the Princess had decided that her growing stress had had enough of a voice, and groaned loudly, starting onto the balcony to finally do her day job.

“Then you keep to the plan, don’t you? What a great plan. Hmf.”

It was a large relief that a lack of accuracy in magical direction of the Sun reliably resulted in major discomfort. Celestia was very sloppy. As such, she had, for a full, lengthy, fifteen-minute dawn sequence, little to worry about in her mind but the persistent pain and the minor chance of ruining the Sun itself. Minor pressures, compared to that which she would imminently return to.

A country under unannounced war. A country being ripped apart by she should rightfully have vaporized if not for the damning consequences. A country - a world - she had put her all into for millennia, only for it to now be taken away piece by piece as she sat watching, her glowing orb in the sky illuminating the nooks and crannies of that which she had allowed to go wrong.

Her responsibility through and through. To think that she had it all right within reach, but no longer could the pieces together to make it work. An errant thought made her wish she could consult herself from a past year. Herself from back when the endless years of having managed Equestria were yet to catch up. Herself from back when all was well, and she could manage it all even without her sister’s help. Herself from back when all the opportunities she had and missed resulted in Equestria being where it was.

She was always doing it all wrong, Celestia had to admit in the end.

Even that day’s sunrise was many minutes off schedule.

A loud, pained cough and gurgle called for her attention, blissfully emerging only after the sun had gone up. She could at least move.

“I’m… I’m coming,” Celestia mouthed, and went to help siphon out more of the disgusting liquid contained within her student.

Whatever kept her from coming back to the dangerous curve of the blade. Something told her that not even having locked the ceremonial artifact as far away as she could from herself was enough, should things ever get any worse.

“This won’t get worse,” she said out loud, as if talking to the mostly unconscious unicorn, “I promise that.”

In a better world - a week ago, perhaps, - she would have believed that. In the current world, she had reports of fallen cities and reality of refugee overflow to deal with. At least it felt as if little more could get worse.

Something was wrong, Rarity felt, when they were called away from the large line of incoming refugees addled with whatever they had managed to carry to the capital on such short notice. Most were simply accounted for and then let into the quarters that had evidently been reformed to house refugees, as opposed to the many vanity shops and luxury stores that, as the unicorn knew, this part of town used to mostly consist of. They were the first to be specifically called away, and virtually dragged to a building that once used to be Sparkler’s Seasonal Suits - now it bore the Griffon flag, and had walkways to the city walls set up. Prior, this would have felt like an annoyance that she would scoff at. After the time spent trying to get to Canterlot alive, it sparked up angst and paranoia.

Something was very much wrong at the very core, and she could not begin to list all the strain she had undergone while helping Applejack take care of their less functional friends. It would have felt terrifying to think that they were dealing with Rainbow Dash having evidently died, Fluttershy suffering from extreme nausea and barely eeping a sound, Twilight sick with what had taken a course through them all, and Pinkie having turned into a near vegetable - but the time spent fighting to get them alive to the one safe place made it all too much of a reality.

At the exact moment of being pushed into the dimly lit office, where multiple armed avians stood, Rarity could not spare much in terms of terror or distress. She was merely tired, tired beyond belief, tired of pushing off the many thoughts that rushed to get into her head, tired of walking, tired of blinking, and tired of standing upright. She had no strength left to complain. The things she had to complain about had all mixed into one continuous image of pain, struggle, loss, and rapidly dying hope.

Applejack, being more resilient, was more prone to speaking up, which she had been doing all the way while being directed to the office. Rarity tried to listen to her, but, perhaps humorously, not even in her current condition did she consider it pleasant to listen to exemplary cursing of the farmworker variety. AJ needed to vent. They all did. She herself knew for a fact that once they had settled down, there was a distinctly high possibility that she could spend up to a full day crying in depression. It was very much natural, and at that point, broad concepts and basic ideas like that were the most of her conscious.

Which was why the earth pony having silenced her rant so abruptly forced Rarity into a pained, defensive posture.

“So, here you fuckers are,” spoke a rough, distinctly female voice of the griffon that must have been the officer, judging by the armaments and clothing. She had her back turned to them, leaning against the map-filled table, and seemingly looking out the window at the inner line of refugees.

The assumption that something was wrong was, indeed, proven right, as the officer clicked her talons, and the other griffon soldiers gathered next to each of them. Before Rarity could offer herself a guess at what they had in mind, each of them was pushed down, held from then on in place by a pair of far stronger limbs than theirs. AJ’s hat flew off, Rarity winced at the impact of the cold floor of the former clothing store, and the other two barely made a sound.

“How the hell you made it here, I don’t know. Not like I care, though,” the officer spoke with barely suppressed strain in her voice. Her head twitched neurotically, and her talons scraped at the table.

“Hey, wha—” AJ attempted to speak up, but was quickly discouraged with a push against the floor. The soldiers holding them down each had helmets cover their heads whole, only an elongated respirator and two darkened lenses to show for facial features. They acted quietly and firmly, visibly trained to obey their commander. Something told Rarity that this was not a spontaneous outburst of a military official that should not have even been in the city to the best of her knowledge.

“I. Am. Fucking. Talking. You country hick piece of shit,” the officer growled, and turned around.

Rarity’s addled mind took some time to put the pieces together. She felt as if she had seen this particular griffon before, and the voice was familiar. Some things were off - the shorter upper plumage, the few scars around the auriculars and bill, and the visible dents on the beak, they all stood out as new, but it took her time to realize whose visage they were new to. In the end, it was Fluttershy who recognized her first. Her recognition was a frightened bout of hyperventilation, and a single whispered word that even the nearby unicorn barely heard.

Gilda.

“Okay… You morons clearly don’t understand your own language, do you? Do you?” The griffon stomped her feline back legs, heading towards the yellow pegasus. “I am talking here. You talk when I tell you to.”

“What the hell are you doing, you crazy—” another loud thump signified the earth pony having been silenced once more.

“DOES ANYONE UNDERSTAND EQUESTRIAN HERE?” the now-familiar griffon screeched at the top of her lungs, pushing the soldier holding Fluttershy off the pony, and grabbing her by the throat, lifting the limp girl up, “EQUESTRIAN,” she squawked right in the pegasus’ face, covering it in spit, “DO. YOU. UNDERSTAND. IT?”

“Mmmmhhhh…” Fluttershy winced in evident pain. Rarity was about to try to explain that the poor thing had become extremely sensitive to sound… but the course the conversation was taking made it seem like any action would be for the worse. Cowardly, she knew. But there was no helping it.

“Oh, you stupid cunt, you don’t even speak it anymore, do you?” Gilda - what little Rarity could muster of memory had indeed identified her as Dash’s… “friend” - nearly stabbed her beak into Fluttershy’s muzzle and roared, “Huh? Dumb yellow bitch.”

The griffon was choking the pony by that point, but that seemed to trouble her little. Rarity tried to utter something for the madness to stop, but somehow, the soldier holding her down had decided to give her a preventive budge before she even tried. Gilda dragged Fluttershy into the middle of the room, where the lighting was better in the sordid morning hours.

“Well, I shouldn’t be pretending like I don’t know you little shits. You’re tired, are you? Lost? Confused? Can’t fucking go anywhere you like, huh?” she spoke with raspy gusto, dragging the pegasus along the floor as she stepped side to side, “And look who’s here to save you.”

“What on earth is wrong with you?!” Applejack, having refused to learn the lesson of silence, yelled out at the officer. It was followed by a thump hard enough to leave the earth pony with a tiny stream of blood coming from her mouth.

“Me? Oh, I’m just watching how you dumb fucks get left to rot by your own Princess while we clean up for her. But... that’s beside the point I have with you four fucknuts,” Gilda spoke, fixing up the tri-goggled officer’s helmet hung off her head in a decidedly casual manner as the pony in her hand gasped for air, grimacing in pain, “See, my problem with you is that you dweebs are FOUR.”

She lifted Fluttershy up with little difficulty, and nonchalantly swiped her talons across the distressed face.

“I am giving you ten fucking seconds to tell me that Rainbow Dash just ran off from you idiots and is in a different camp. Cause then I’d be happy, and you’ll be free to rot in my quarantine.”

Things had been going badly, but it was that part which made Rarity realize that the depth of trouble they were in was far beyond her groggy comprehension. It was bad.

“One.”

“She’s—” AJ began to speak, and immediately braced for impact, but none followed.

“Yes?” Gilda said tensely, even loosening the grip on the pegasus’ throat. The soldier holding AJ down let her continue.

“She’s… ugh…” the earth pony winced with pain both physical and mental, “...she’s dead.”

At least, to her own credit, Rarity did not feel as if AJ was to blame for simply having done this to all of them. Somehow, it felt like making a lie would only have diverted the encounter.

“She’s dead,” the griffon repeated plainly.

“We… we barely got out. It was an accident. What do you want from us? The hell is going on? Why can’t we—”

“YOU are dead,” the same plainness of voice coursed through this statement as well, “Do you hear me? You’re dead. All four of you. And the fifth one, when your stupid Princess steps down. I am going to gut you. You are all fucking dead.”

That was better than she had expected. Fluttershy, for one, did not add in facial scarring. At least for the moment.

“Look—”

The griffon’s eyes twitched, having shrunk far. Her free hand jerked in place as she breathed, staring with pure despair and lurid hatred combined at the ponies laid on the floor in front of her. The soldiers keeping them in place made not a sound, as if inanimate in the unpleasant scene. For close to a minute, the heavy silence was interrupted by only the officer’s attempts at deep breath, and Fluttershy’s at breath period.

“No, actually… No. You’re not fucking dead. Scratch that.” Gilda finally went to remedy the small relief Rarity had felt, and slashed across the pegasus’ face once more.“That’s too good for you.”

“Wait, wh—” Applejack’s protests were silenced by the floor this time around.

“No, no. You fuckers are going to live. Here. I’m gonna keep an eye on you, that’s what I’m going to do. I mean, shit, that’s my job. I’m in charge of this quarter. And besides, we’re all friends, right?” she spoke in a voice that made the unicorn feel, in delirious remembrance, as if she was back a teenager in a dark alley, and the shady, bulky thugs surrounded her from all sides on her first night in the capital city all over again.

“I still remember all of you. You’re the white dumbshit, you’re the orange dumbshit, you’re the yellow dumbfuck that WON’T MOVE OUT OF THE FUCKING WAY,” the rampaging officer made a sudden start and rammed the pony’s body right against a wall, a crack of bone plainly audible, “And you’re the pink degenerate that I’m gonna talk to right now.”

Rarity talked her way out of that one. In the end, none were beyond approach. There was never a situation where you could only sit, watch, and suffer. She used to think so.

The nightmare of the past few days was making her reconsider that point of view.

Fluttershy was unceremoniously launched to the griffon that held her, and within a few seconds, she was being pushed down hard against the floor. The cold tiles in her section went more and more red as the pegasus failed to keep her head upwards, slumping it down, no longer bearing the strength to watch. Rarity looked at her, and her eyes simply stared in the distance.

There was little eye contact to speak of, but even that was broken when the other earth pony was ordered to be passed to the quarantine officer. The bulky griffon barely waited until her own soldier let his gloved talons off the limp pink pony, and wasted little time in dragging her into the light by the mess of a mane that Rarity remembered having given up on trying to straighten properly… it had begun to do that on its own, in any case.

“Now, you’re Pinkie fucking Pie. I know you. Oh, I know you,” Gilda growled, lifting the pony up by her mane. She wouldn’t even hold her. Instead of holding the pale, distant Pinkie properly, the griffon wrapped the long pink hairs around her wrist in several knots. That treatment threatened to scalp the pony she intended to “talk” to, but it seemed unlikely that Gilda viewed that as a bad thing.

“You’re awful quiet right now. Last I saw you, you weren’t like that. You wouldn’t shut up, actually. What happened, Pinkie?” she asked in mock concern, tilting her head at the pony who looked at her with a frightened stare, eyes darting back and forth, lips quivering. “Did someone give you a boo-boo? Did someone come and take all you ever FUCKING CARED ABOUT away? Oh, is that so? Your town’s got destroyed? All your friends had their guts ripped out? You had to cross fuck knows what to get here only to get STABBED IN YOUR BACK right as you arrived, huh? Well, what a fucking story.”

Either Gilda was shortening the details, or the exact means by which they had escaped the massacre were not yet common knowledge. Rarity had to suppress a desire to vomit and pass out simultaneously upon having thought back to that exact process.

“Such a shame. Yeah, you know, I think I’m gonna treat you fairly. I mean, all you morons did was let the only one of you who ever mattered SHIT get killed. All you did was make her stay with YOU when she could have been SAFE with me. Just, you know, borrowed the only pony that was ever worth twiddle-fuck, and then got her killed. It’s nothing! No big issue! We’re all very understanding, isn’t that right, guys? Habe ich recht, ech?”

The griffons holding them down did not change a motion. Whether that meant that they knew from experience not to get in their comander’s way when she had something to say, or that they didn’t much care for what was happening, Rarity could not tell. What she could tell was that everything was going to get significantly worse.

“I am going to be fair with you four! Deliver justice your way, eh? I am going—”

“Mmmmnnnhhh…”

“Oh sweet heavens…” Rarity could not stay silent, and whispered out the most coherent thing that came to her mind as tears refused to stay within.

She was twistedly grateful that Pinkie had been barely functional, as otherwise, she would definitely have screamed. The earth pony's whole left ear came off in one tear of Gilda’s metal-gloved talons.

“—to STAB—”

“Nnnh…”

“You fucking bitch,” AJ spoke out, eyes opened wide, the soldier above her choosing not to punish her. Gilda was far too occupied to notice. Her sharp talons entered right into Pinkie’s abdomen, and emerged reddened.

“—SLAP—”

“Mmmmnnnn…”

Fluttershy got it light. It turned out that Gilda could leave inch-long scars with just a single sweep.

“—PUNCH—”

“Kkkhhhh…”

“WHAT THE FUCK IS WRONG WITH YOU?!” AJ yelled as loud as she could, her muzzle contorted in a mixture of despair and rage not unlike that which Gilda bore when they confirmed to her Dash’s fate.

It seemed that what she was doing mattered to her a bit more than show-off sadistic “discipline”, as the griffon ignored the orange pony, instead dealing blow after blow after blow to Pinkie’s snout. Each came with cracking sounds and fleshy throbs. At least four dull thumps on the floor were the teeth that found their way out of the decimated muzzle.

“—BLIND—”

“Nnnneeeeehhhhh!..”

“STOP, FOR CRYING OUT LOUD, JUST STOP, YOU CRAZY BITCH, WHAT DID WE DO TO YOU?!” AJ had begun to try and wrestle away from the grip, tears swelling up in her own face.

Rarity could not quite see if there was any fruit to those labors. She had seen enough. She closed her eyes, and fought to restrain herself from vomiting. Pinkie’s eye… Gilda must have made it messy on purpose. Just the sounds signified that it took her a few more strikes to tear it out in full. Rarity stopped watching before the first beak strike even hit.

If only she was only a little bit stronger. The least she could do would have been get Gilda’s attention with magic. Even if she would have started mutilating her instead… it would have been worth never seeing her friend get torn apart, segment by segment. Like her sister must have been.

“—AND BURN.”

The unicorn winced at the memory of there being a quickly installed fireplace in the store. She doubted that Pinkie, if still conscious, or alive, would remain silent. She also doubted that Gilda would be as merciful as to simply feed the pony to the flames so as to watch her crisp - from what they were shown, she would at least go limb by limb.

Escapism, an art Rarity had been particularly good at, was offered in the idea that perhaps, this was all just the continuation of the nightmare that begun when that… thing appeared outside the library. It definitely fit together. All that had happened was too brutal, too drastic, to ever be real.

She could not just have lost Ponyville, she could not just have lost her little sister, she could not just have lost her unkempt pegasus friend, she could not have spent days struggling to stay awake in order to get everyone who survived safely to Canterlot, and she could not have succeeded so as to only end up in the claws of a sadist with a badge and a grudge.

The blissful reality in which their main problem was a hypnotic, ghastly mist and a nightmarish creature outside the window did not hold for long. A loud clang and a grunt from quite nearby signified a change in the events. A muffled, distorted, Low Griffon curse was spat out as rampant clopping distanced away from Rarity and several meters ahead.

“GILDA!!!” Applejack confirmed Rarity’s suspicion of having successfully wrestled away, roaring the officer’s name madly.

“Wait—” the unicorn tried to stop her, but, perhaps, it could have been more productive if the pony was not ramming herself into the officer.

This was only ever going downhill. The thud of a sideways dropping body and the disgusting sound of nearby ripping flesh confirmed that much. Rarity held on to the nightmare theory as hard as she equinely could.

“You stupid, inbred shit,” came the sound of the griffon’s voice, intercepted with yet more choking gurgles. These were AJ’s, expectedly.

“Whhkkhhh—”

“You don’t seem to get it. I was kind of showing it to you, but I guess you’re too dumb to understand.” Gilda must have strengthened her grip, as Applejack started to whine quietly. “I do whatever the fuck I want with you. You’re in Hell now, you got that? Or what do you have… Tartarus, right, you idiots have Tartarus. This is your Tartarus. And I am Sergeant Guildenstern. Also known as “your lord and fucking master from here on out”. Verstehst du?”

Rarity just looked as hard as she could into the darkness behind her eyelids, and tried to think of anything else. Eventually, it would all end.

“The Princesses don’t give a fuck about you anymore. I was specifically told that Twilight gets Celestia’s chambers, and you get whatever. It’s just that. None of your “friends” in high places give a fuck about you. Makes sense now. You idiots got the only one who was worth shit killed. Now whatever your jinglies were called, they don’t work anymore, so you’re not the savior of Equestria anymore. No, you’re just a dumb…” Applejack had begun to wheeze, much like Fluttershy did. “Inbred. Country. Hick. And I am?..”

Evidently, Gilda expected an answer from the pony she was choking.

“Who am I?”

“A.. fffuuuhhkhkhh…”

“Again?”

“A fuhkhingh bittsh. Ghilda.”

AJ had somehow managed to speak. Resilience, honesty. Her biggest mistake.

Rarity knew where it was headed, and could no longer act rationally. She opened her eyes, and tried to look at the power-mad quarantine control officer, to say anything to divert her attention…

...but instead, all she ended up accomplishing was gaining herself yet more trauma.

AJ was always strong. Even half choked, she tried to buck. And even half choked, she had managed to scream. She screamed loudly, she screamed worse than the things Rarity saw in the corner of her eye ever since leaving Ponyville under the faint purple pall. She screamed exactly like someone whose eye was being beaked out would.

The unicorn’s psyche and mind had decided to, at long last, exchange the nightmare of reality for a proper one, and her consciousness departed the body. The last thing she heard was Gilda ordering them to be taken away in Low Griffon.

“Hieraus,” the audibly delighted griffon said, having ascended from a friend’s old time mislead acquaintance into something Rarity preferred nightmarish abominations to.

There was a twisted sense of respect within Atropos’ mind as he realized that the Princess was using all her opportunities to put him in his place while she had control. Stairs. These endless, high, jagged stairs.

After a near eternity of effectively trouble-less existence, it was refreshing to have something to solidly hate. Atropos had announced his infinite hatred of the very concept many, many times during his long ascension. Efficiently so, it also allowed him to practice speech synchronization. Most mental actions came from his incorporeal body hidden within the thestral, but having to move the mouth was an important part of pony speech. Whenever his mouth healed back from the injuries it took from hard stone steps, he practiced, although primarily with expletives.

To little surprise, it took him an approximation of five hours to get into the library chamber proper. The regenerative factor took care of the many cuts and hits he took, so, for all intents and purposes, he was just another nightkin off-duty. He had a bit of a suspicious limp, but it was far better than no walking at all. The long ascension had definitely helped him flesh out the backstory for when he would reach his workplace.

Less so it helped with coming to terms with what exactly he was doing.

Somehow, it was not even the fact that his arrangement of powers would be concealed by supposed data analysis of all that was coming in about the invasion. Neither was it the fact that instead of feasting on the stressed rulers, he would instead be part of the solution to the impending problem. It was much more so the fact that he had drafted himself into the affair specifically to interact with the population.

Even the pony Princesses, when faced with that proposition from his side, took some time to fully process that. So did he. It was close to being the most awkward moment of their “talk” after his having encountered Celestia. Some other runner-ups were embarrassing enough for him not to wish to think of.

“Geeaahhh…” Atropos stifled a yelp when his mostly limp wing got caught in a brazier’s metal wiring, “...oh, if I could see myself right now, I’d feed me.”

The matter of fact was that the denizens of the land he had marked as his hunting and feasting grounds were much too fragile for him to treat them like any others.

Painful as it was, accepting mistakes was necessary. He was presumptuous to think that all previous knowledge instantly applied to a life form from a dimension parallel to the one he was altogether glad to depart. That they had no means of affecting his control over their subconscious, or that they would not just burn out after a few visits. More importantly, the fact that each was so delightfully… unique, that it would have been a crime to the still undoubted master of all nightmares to offer them simple frights.

The ability to control, manipulate, and eat at the minds of living beings was inborn, but back in the old world, it was a simple process. Almost mechanical. Most species were relatively similar, and hardened enough by the many curiosities they had encountered to not be particularly susceptible to different techniques. Show one torture, show the other daemons, offer the next their dead family, and play on a prideful fault here and there. If especially unoriginal at any point, just drag them to all the nightmares that their deity can think of musters, and it is very much a healthy meal.

These new ones… These had to be studied. Especially now, when war was at the gates, and soon, their psyches would be far too moved to be as pure as they once were. Waiting was not a pleasant option.

So he would thrust himself into their society. Become a functional - as much as he could - part. Interact, work, and learn. As mind-numbingly counter-intuitive as it sounded, it was the most optimal configuration for the situation he had found himself in. The Princesses wanted him to find a way to somehow devoid the world of the disaster he formerly worked with - he wanted a way to be a nightmare god that the world truly deserved. Two birds, one stone, and one very, very unpleasant night for Princess Luna when it was his turn of the bargain.

The funniest part of it was that haunting Luna to sustain himself, as opposed to feeding on those he now neighbored, was suggested by the Princess herself. Protective rulers. Sometimes they did the most entertaining things.

Him, he knew he would come up with a way to play around that when it was time. At the given moment, he limped to the antennaed building in the center of the library plaza, having stumbled, waved, wobbled, and cursed his way through the few rooms and floors of the forbidden wing.

Before he had even raised a hoof to motion, a sparkling field enveloped him, and an equine shadow sprung up at one of the windows. Unpleasantly, that left him with sun shining right in his eyes.

“Halt! Identify yourself,” said someone distinctly male, nearing his middle ages from the sound of the voice.

“Why’d I have to?” Atropos made honest effort in his attempt to sound casual.

“We will repeat only once. Identify yourself. This area is off-limits to non-staff.”

“I’m staff,” he answered, barely evading the tongue with his teeth.

“I don’t see a badge.”

If that was Luna’s idea of further tormenting him while he was like that, it was becoming very inefficient to their actual efforts. If so, he was starting to become a bit disappointed.

Another shadow came up close to the first, and spoke as well.

“Calm down, Sent. Could you move your wings? They’re blocking your mark, we have to check...” a female voice spoke.

Atropos tilted his head. He could not quite control his wings yet. That was embarrassing.

“How hard is it to go to the other window?” he answered back.

Thankfully, his motion revealed that Luna must have told them about him in detail. His cheeks were still crossed with the very first injury he got upon having been so roughly installed into the body. The large, grin-like scar refused to fade.

“...okay, that’s him. Field off, field off!”

“I must be handsome,” he spoke quietly to himself in a practice of verbal sarcasm, the closest to a personality he felt the ponies would readily accept.

“You must be Atropos,” the male pony said, removing himself from the window, and likely being the one to cause the sturdy crystalline door to open.

“Welcome to the team!” the female voice sounded out from further than before, as she was evidently crying out her farewell while moving deeper into the mildly sized two-story building.

Atropos stood in place as the sparkles faded, technically allowing him to pass through, and realized that already he had a dilemma.

He only hoped that experience would come quick, because the formerly dead body turned out to be capable of flushing with embarrassment. Very inconveniently. He did not know whose comment to be sarcastic to.

He did know, though, that he would get his own back when the tables had turned.

Author's Note

The end may soon be starting to begin.

Chapter 9: Despair

His body hung limply, emotionless gaping maw and empty eyes staring into the gaseous green abyss where the library once stood. Physical presence was unachieveable in all the tasks he was to undergo. So, for hours, he let his consciousness drift from runed monument to runed monument, directing the local mana manually. The stretched out, familiar vessel was left for placid observation of the most important task of all, and the least bothersome one. When the commotions had all been directed, something individually inspiring would be optimal to greet him into his persisting carcass.

For the time being, though, there were issues to handle that that carcass could not attend to in time.

There rarely was so much to do. He swung from one task to the other, following the lead of the rhythm. It was all so similar to the invasion routine back at the homeworld, but while that was routine, this was a fresh movement. Playing against the clock, strung between spots, directing, orchestrating.

The persisting issue to correct was the local undead representative. The fallen king felt like a good addition at the time, and strategically, he still did. With that assumed, however, the amount of dissonance his presence alone was causing in the conversion streams of the main production Tombstones went far over the accepted limits. That was his presence alone - his continuing attempts at struggle made it no easier.

“HOW” shrieked a chordless noise. It was left with no response. The mental agony of persevering life was a vital part of the process. At least, the Undying made it so. This was never done before.

A vessel to be controlled - not by the King, but by a directed, sound whole of the high command - was well underway, watched over by the Wright. The procedures underwent by the sentient spirit were simply an accumulation of its most needed properties. To increase the damage to the living, to enhance the impact of the performance, to sharpen the edge of impression. It would have been much easier to simply emulate what they required - certainly not a poor plan in itself - but that solution did not have the same… feel to it. No soul to it - in both the literal and the proverbial sense. Passable, but not acceptable.

If there would be a scaremonger to upset the quickly brightening heart of the realm, it would best perform its duties with the legitimate imprint. Not an emulation of something that he believed they would fear - but that soul itself, boosted in multiple ways, all while regaining the self. Same general idea, but better execution. The more usual invasion routine the general oversaw, the more frequent this direction was becoming. What they did before, they could now do better, and to pass the opportunity up was unacceptable as far as he was concerned. His concern stretched far.

Not quite far enough, however, to grasp the bigger cities looming out of visual reach, especially not with his consciousness contained within the area secured by Tombstones. He could see bands of his undead marching through the woods and down the roads, headed towards the nearby settlements, formed into collectives by his second in command. Normally, directing those assaults would require his proper involvement. With the changes made to the millennia-static rules, that issue was gone.

All that was required of him to keep the assault on the three big cities to the south, west, and east of the city was to leave a reminder of himself in the Wright’s consciousness. Perhaps, an inkling of pride would sting him to take personal control - but it was a new, untested feeling that he derived from watching her succeed. That she did, in every regard, with every task given to her, at least thus far.

It had barely been enough time for the cities to receive proper fortification. The nation had not taken part in any warfare for a long, long time, and what showed. Sent out were miniscule amounts of troops, but, upon fleeting investigation of the cities from the distance, he saw that they were a proper fit for the terrain.

One city to the south-west, past the formerly haunted forest, was inherently the most hard to breach location. The local living called it… Appleloosa. What made it special, aside from the complicated geographical location, was the trail of train tracks. Cargo traffic coming from the south, the other realms, would pass through there. Although this nation did not depend on transport of goods nearly as much as some others, cutting that line was vital. With the denser population, tough terrain, and high quantities of cargo to demolish, the Wright sent out the largest undead at the army’s disposal, as well as multiple bands of those bearing acid. Comparatively few, but specialized, and unlikely to be stopped.

Another, to the far west, was the sea port. Its name was, apparently, Baltimare. A much more built out settlement. Higher population, naval presence, and a train track to the rock that the recently shielded off capital city rested on. A long forest, a mountain range, and a lake distanced it from the army’s main camp - the issue was not in dealing with it, but in getting there. For that purpose alone, the bulk of the mostly intact undead were used, sent ahead in a rush, the winged ones exhibiting a natural speed higher than the rest. A few dozen of elongated, muscular, enclawed ones leaped ahead of them all, crossing major distances at more than acceptable speeds. They got to the relatively distant port in less than a day.

The last was a specific spot at the southeast. When he had noticed directed movement towards that particular location, the general was about to doubt his faith, but the intention soon became clear. What the locals dubbed Las Pegasus was a city located primarily in the clouds - held up by an innate magic that he was yet to fully comprehend, it only had several quarters on the ground. Cheap houses and other elements significant of a poor quarter of any attempt at community the living constructed. With a clear lack of undead capable of flight in his army - a matter that he knew was being seen to - it would have been suboptimal to divert resources only to harm the slums. It became clear, though, when only the most damaged and the least valuable were sent. In combination with how the racial majority of that city was the most militant among the dominant species, it made for an effective show of their enemies’ fighting prowess in a fight not utterly hopeless. Poor leftovers were sent to Las Pegasus to see how its denizens would retaliate, and have them spread the panicked word along to the other cities.

Management and planning were things the Wright was more than adept at, and that brought the Undying, the Wright’s direct creator, a sense of accomplishment.

That sense made observing the eventual goal, looming over the horizon atop a mountain, less of a bittersweet temptation. A much easier plan would have been to decapitate the government, and then ram through the rest of the realm. The recent influx of intense magic in all areas surrounding the capital, however, made that less than possible. They took in living still - for specific reasons unknown to him - but only in short lines, clearly observing the line. It was not one he or any of his could cross. Breaching it would require significant power, that which he did not yet have, albeit he tried still, sending shockwaves against the barrier that only with his consciousness disembodied he could see - but it was no major issue.

There were many other large cities and small settlements strewn all over. Should it come to it, he would simply devour them, and his already strengthened powers would turn for the more constructive. What other secrets lay dormant, waiting to be untapped… would definitely be seen. Unplucked souls and many other natural mana sources were strewn all over country, with objects ripe for runing and turning into Tombstones being more than duly present as well. The longer the march lasted, the louder his song would become.

His song was going to be something never before seen. New factors, new ideas, new spins on the old. A new downfall of a new regime of the living. If not by brute force, amplified by their own sterling magic, then by their own pressure, as they lock themselves in their capital city and watch all that is remained crash, burn, decay. As they are haunted by that which they so long feared, and as they realize the futility of their resistence against the Almighty Dirge. And his own Song.

So he saw to all that. Disembodied, he coursed through the runes on the Tombstones, he channeled through the green winds, he observed the growing army, he set up markings for more Tombstones, and watched the camp expand. Few issues remained, like the necessity to bring corpses back within range in order to gain new followers, or the debilitating mist having begun to circle around the haunted forest. None of them vital.

And none of them comparing to the barely explained emotions he felt on sight of what his eyes opened up to.

“The Undying…” The Undying grumbled, revisiting his body when all outside work was done, and greeting the shape at the bottom of the runed, vined, pulsating green pit.

Rarity leaned weakly against the railing, looking at nothing in particular. Below her was a dark street, once a crossing between Luxurious’ Lustrous Lamps and Polyester’s Divine Drapings, now a freshly rubbled and stained pathway from one cluttered patch of ponies to another. Quadrants M-3 and M-4 in the official register. She looked at them from the elevation of quadrant M-6.

Before, it was an elegant, artistically designed street. When on trips to Canterlot, she would pass by this elevated patch above the road and sit down on the benches by The Gem Cache, watching the shadows play off the high buildings, sipping a moderately priced drink.

She lived in The Gem Cache now.

At the given moment, though, she was hanging her front hooves and head limp off a railing, and staring at nothing in particular. For close to an hour, she just hung limp and felt late night change for early morning, heard the streets go from panicked and stressed to loud, panicked, and stressed, and was subjected to faint, dull sunlight. She held no worry that one of the numerous griffon guards would come up to her and take any sort of advantage of her limp state, or that someone at all may have been coming for her. Rarity held no worry at all.

And that, in a way, worried her the most.

She dangled a sweaty, patchy, botched up lock of hair with a forehoof, and watched it dangle in the air. Untreated, unappealing, most certainly unattractive by this point. Again, it was worrying how little that affected her. The longer it went on, the more likely became the probability of it being merely the prolonged effect of the suffocating pall that fell upon her and the others as Ponyville came to ruin. It was a… pleasant assumption, in all honesty.

All the ponies she had lived next to for years were dead, or worse. Her home was gone. Her career was gone, with the quarter she would have operated in being repurposed for refugee holding. Her whole body went through such stress that it no longer registered basic irritants properly, pain and exhaustion numbed to faint shades.

Her sister was dead. Rarity juggled that thought here and there a few times. It occurred to her back when her and AJ were pulling muscles trying to carry the rest to Canterlot and away from the horrifying wave. She cried back then, she roared, she did some other things - she could no longer recall. Now, all she knew was simply that her sister was dead. That was just a fact.

Rainbow Dash was dead. They never even saw her go. She just did. Pinkie Pie was dead, too. The officer in charge ripped her to shreds and forced them to watch. The officer in charge, in fact, could easily walk by and maul Rarity where she stood, and that would surprise noone, least of all her. Applejack tried to protest and got an eye torn out. Those were just facts. That was life now. In all of it, she struggled to find anything else to be emotional about aside from the fact that none of those things got her emotional any longer.

What point was there in continuing if what felt most probable was that this was all a nightmare that refused to stop? She could as well just stand in place until the end. Nothing much mattered any longer. Alternatively, she could just drop all the way over the railing, and hope to land head-first so that her neck would give.

Rarity leaned a little further forward and examined the drop. Far enough. Could be done. It was something - better than the nothing that she was starting to consider.

She took a deep breath. Then another. Then, another. Shut her eyes tight, rubbed them hard with her limp hooves.

Then, she hit her head against the railing repeatedly, gasping out with each strike.

“Enough of this, enough of this, enough of this!” the mare chanted to herself as her head met the metal time and time again, eyes opening wider and wider. She did it again, and again, and again, and finally, pain kicked in.

That was when her nervous system and basic senses triggered her to cry out loud, breathing sharply inbetween takes. Ponies and containment griffon soldiers scuffled all around, too busy to notice her. Good for her - she needed to get herself to think properly.

“What… No, no, no, this is not going to go,” the mare held a forehoof against her forehead, where blood was pouring out now. The degree of pain that settled within her head called with itself all the other senses that had been repressed until then. She was exhausted, hurting, hungry, thirsty…

Livid most of all.

“Enough,” Rarity said to herself. “Enough. Enough, enough, enough.”

She could not afford to just hang limp and watch everything she treasured get picked and broken apart. That was not happening. Granted, a lot of things that “were not happening” happened - that was beside the point.

In a choice between despair over what happened and denial of how meaningless she was when not part of the Bearers, Rarity would adamantly choose the second. The combination of stress, pain, shock, and exhaustion brought her to the edge, but when she nearly considered suicide, that crossed the line.

“I am not going out like this,” she spoke sternly, stammering for a moment, upper jaw caught on a lip bruise. “I’ll just…”

The mare shook in place, her weak legs giving out under the pain and pressure they suffered. She had not slept ever since her loss of consciousness at their “meeting” with “sergeant Guildenstern”. As a matter of fact, she had spent the whole remainder of the night against the railing, looking, but not watching, at how the quarter was being filled with pony refugees. In all of that, she had not once thought of what exactly she would do.

“...one thing at a time,” Rarity concluded, and set her path towards the building she was to live in, according to the guard.

There was no shortage of things to do, now that there was thought given to it. They were surrounded by refugees, ponies who had lost their belongings, who had to suddenly be packed into tight homes without much comfort - there was so much they could help them with! It baffled Rarity how she thought it hopeless.

No, all they needed to do was get themselves - Applejack, Fluttershy, and herself - together and in order, and then they would open a new page in their lives. After all, it had to have been for a reason that together, they had quite literally saved the world a number of times.

Yes. They had a goal to work towards now. Together, they would make it right. A weak smile crept up on her messed up, sweaty face. Her knees buckled down immediately afterwards, and sent her bleeding head-first into the stone.

Small setbacks. Any undertaking had them. If only she had it in her to get up, though… Or at least open her eyes.

With the pain she had invited into her head to clear it out, came realization of her bodily state. Now that that body was laid on the ground, uncomfortable and aching all over… It lulled her to sleep, in penance for the hours it had spent ignoring those duties as she stood in shock over the railing.

The last attempt at opening her eyes graced her with the visage of a disgusted orange mare staring right at her. They exchanged looks for a faint second, Rarity taking a while to notice a large bandage covering the right eye.

She failed to say anything about her inspiring plans, and dropped her head limp back on the ground. A cool, wet blob hit her on the chest, a loud “hrrrk”following along with it, and a set of heavy hoofsteps had the other mare distance herself.

In all this, Rarity was at least worried.

“Easy, now… Easy…” Princess Celestia whispered with effort, straining her hind legs. “Shhh.”

With a heavy puff of breath, she strengthened her telekinetic grip on the revolting purple mass protruding from out of Twilight’s mouth. Hunching and struggling as if the labor was physical did little to help her in productivity, but at least it made her feel as if something was being accomplished. It was psychological tricks that kept her going.

“Just… a bit now,” the weary alicorn assured the unconscious unicorn that the purple tendril sprung from. “Just a few more of these… and you should be clean.”

Celestia took in a sharp breath, squinted her eyes, and increased the pressure, adding in heat. The sound and smell of the procedure instantly cast reactionary tears from her eyes, and what little she ate more than twenty hours ago squalled for frontal release.

“This… is worse… than when Disc—” the Princess’ attempt at self-conversation had her inhale an amount of purplish smoke, which sent her head to a carousel ride around an extended spectre of putrid aromas. Her lungs revved with irritation, and a long, loud chain of coughs followed.

During recovery attempts at breath and emergency airing of the chamber where Twilight lay observed by herself hour after hour, Celestia considered what she said while making small talk with the unjustly afflicted unicorn. Naturally, her intent was to comment on the smell that the now bi-hourly growths of the abhorrent matter emitted whenever they had to be removed. The magic used on the ill mare forced the alien influence out much faster than her inborn immune system otherwise would, and, true enough to her word, a few more growths pulled out would solve this particular problem. It was just that the process of dealing with them was less than hygienic. A mild annoyance, in the end.

That brought Discord up in her mind. Firstly, that made her think back to the statue in the garden, now likely forgotten in the panic and chaos. A few thoughts crossed her mind, and were immediately blacked out, her forehoof stomping down on the chamber floor.

Secondly, there was one thing she realized about this particular onslaught of misfortune and terror that befell her and her realm.

“See… Should be a lot better now, shouldn’t it?” Celestia spoke to the limp unicorn on a bed of freshly changed sheets. The old ones were fully soaked with disturbingly purplish sweat, calling for a half-daily change.

What piqued her interest was that this disaster was… a catastrophe. She tried to search for a bright side, and found nothing.

A millennium and then some was spent guarding Equestria and the bordering nations, to more than average success, if she had to evaluate her own performance. The amount of crises that had to be fended off was in dozens if not more. It felt almost funny to think that, but this time… This time was vying for the first spot.

It had been less than a fraction of a single week, and so much had gone wrong. So much was lost. And her?

Celestia did not want to get started on her. Herself.

She did know one thing, however.There was never a situation utterly hopeless, never a disaster with no mode of aversion, never a spot so grim there was no bright side to it. That was not how things worked, plain and simple. An established fact. All that lead into one conclusion, one the Princess wished was not so plainly obvious.

Something was very, very deeply wrong with her.

“Really now,” she spoke silently, brushing a hoof against where the many cuts used to be before her inner vitality took care of them. “How didn’t I notice?”

She wanted… She wanted to be afraid. To panic, to bargain, to drop down. But instead, she simply realized. Something was wrong with her, and it was when by no means could she allow herself such a frivolity.

Even with how her task in their upcoming victory plan was significantly less stressing than that laid upon her sister, or that demented, perverted… creature they were graced with for an ally. Still, it was not one that felt right to be given to someone whose subconscious was slowly growing quills and setting her all ablaze.

There was enough evidence so that even Celestia’s own self, an inherently biased party, could see where it was going. She was considering options that her usual self would smack her hard enough to break even an alicorn jaw for.

"Can't afford that," the Princess mumbled to herself, staring out the window and into chaos as virtually automatic magic cleaned up residual stains from the growth. "I'll be talking to her within less than a day, won't I?"

Meandering around her thoughts, Celestia raised a weak eyebrow upon stumbling on a particular thought. The prospect of meeting what that thing was voluntarily turned into felt somewhat pleasant. Primarily the part where it was introduced to the proper meaning of pain.

“No, no, no…” she argued back at her own thoughts. “That will not end well.”

Her eyes drifted to the unicorn laid on the bed, shuffling in restless sleep, the last portions of the malevolent, despicable disease still boiling within. That was not what she intended for her all those years back. Not even at her most cynical, with acknowledgement of what, in technicality, she and her friends were for, did she ever want that. Now, though, this outcome seemed rather logical for the path that Twilight was put on. By her.

“And what will?” Celestia raised a counter-argument to Celestia’s statement.

“...”

“Delaying the inevitable? That’s a mark of desperation. Desperation is not a good thing, not at all, and you know that.”

“It’s necessary.”

“Necessary to whom? To all the ponies you’ve ordered to turn their lives into a living torment? To the Griffon Empire and their silver platter we’re so eager to fetch for them now? To whoever else you’re so ready to open up to? Maybe if only to further what you set in motion? Really then, if you could justify why this has to keep happening, then you could—”

The Princess stomped very loudly on the floor, forcing her own mouth shut.

In all of this, it seemed that it was only fair that she had a personal struggle of her own. This time, with someone truly deserving of the title of Princess Celestia's Own Adversary.

Herself.

"...Princess? Would you pardon us?" a pair of strained, confused voices sounded from the creaked open door into the "medical" part of her chamber.

Celestia's eyes widened, her ears dropped flat against the head, and her breath ran sharp. The guards she had assigned to message her with recent developments if she was ever not present. In the mess of having to take care of Twilight and, naturally, argue with herself out loud, they were plain forgotten about.

“I apologize,” she spoke out quietly, almost unassumingly. “What has happened? Is it urgent?”

Urgency would have been good. Something to let her leave her chambers and do something but stare at her failures and mistakes. Also to wash away the realization of how she was quite clearly caught arguing with herself by her ponies.

“It is… news,” one of the guards said, never advancing further than a peek’s length through the creak in the door. “Should we leave a written report and leave you to it?”

“No, no need. I… I am listening,” Celestia replied in a voice as serene as it has ever been to anyone who was not herself.

A heavy silence hung for just a few seconds. The other guard audibly gulped and relayed what had happened.

“The cities of Baltimare, Dodge Junction and Appleloosa have gone quiet. The data teams… The data teams say they have been massacred. We received the news less than an hour ago. Evac teams have been dispatched, but from what we are told, probability of success is low.”

“I see,” the Princess answered plainly.

“Las Pegasus is sending distress signals. The local police department had been entirely mobilized by the officials, but the acting government is requesting that the city be allowed to fly under our protective barrier.”

“I... “ Celestia pressed a hoof against her forehead. “I…”

“And, as you had requested… We remind you to remind us that your decision is not final, Princess Luna’s is.”

“Thank you,” she answered with a heavy breath. “Is that all? No progress in identifying anything specific in the invaders?”

“None, unfortunately.”

“Then that will be all. Notify me what Princess Luna’s decision ends up being.”

“Understood. The detailed reports will be on the writing desk,” the guards’ voices from behind the crack spoke one last time, and relative silence fell.

The Princess stood in the middle of the room, digesting what she had been told. That proved too dangerous a task, and she focused on repressing the knowledge of what had happened instead, and all the implications of it - if even financial and infrastructural ones alone. Twilight’s rising huffs and gasps of restless slumber helped survive through the trudge.

“Easy now, easy,” Celestia whispered, looking into the window. “It will all be fine.”

“No, it won’t.”

“I’ll need a detailed breakdown of what exactly these things are made with,” the dark blue alicorn stared intensely at an incorporeal image of a disgustingly stretched out equine with extreme burn marks at around the neck and mouth.

"Will be done ASAP," an analyst officer replied.

"Spread the order to stations One, Two, and..." she paused for a moment, closing her eyes. "...and Five. Get them on these, and Five in particular to try and trace where exactly the transformation process originates from. This can't be a casual mass enchantment, this is something that needs a focal location. Have them find it."

"Affirmative."

"Then that is all. Keep me in check."

Princess Luna left the main data station with a start, shoving the door open, and nearly knocking over the guard that stood in front of it. No time to readjust push strength, not in her position. There was no time for anything, and even with all the efficiency she was squeezing out of herself, there was not enough.

She was needed to settle issues with the griffon higher-ups, she was needed to relay orders to the analysts, she had to keep watch over the castle, she had to maintain the barrier they had finally established, and then more. Teleportation, a pair of wings, and approximately forty-three hours left until absolute physical collapse did alleviate some of the impossibility, but they by no means made it easy.

Still, Luna liked to think she was doing a fine enough job. Granted, just a bit less than a day of so doing already had her feeling like her own tail was teasing her from behind a corner, but the situation retained the ability to get worse. For as long as it kept the same level of intolerability, it was fine enough.

Running a checklist of things to do in her mind, top priority being the detailed lowdown of the situation over at Los Pegasus. She could already guess that it was bad, worse than bad - everything seemed to be heading in that direction. Chances are, whatever her choice ended up being, it would lead to disaster.

The worst thing one could possibly do in such a situation, however, was focus on that element. Luna offered herself a simple ultimatum - all she does is make the right decision and then deal with the consequences. No second-guessing, no overthinking. Not the time for it.

Her path went through a few blocks and up the headquarter stairs, not too far away from the main data analysis center. Too cramped up inside to be freely teleported into without causing potential damage to the equipment and staff. So walking it was. Her legs felt unnervingly stress-free, but that side effect of overclocking the internal alicorn mechanism was probably going to become familiar sooner than later.

“What is—” Luna froze for a second and shook her head after her eyes caught something behind a corner. “No, is he…”

She was quite convinced that she had just literally seen her own tail slip by. Trotting up hastily, she was wondering whether that thing had actually managed to break free of the control spells included in the ritual that was used to settle it among her ponies. She still beat herself up over that. To cope, a few thoughts of punishment for that fact, provided it was possible to dispense it on such a creature, emerged in her mind.

When Princess Luna had reached the corner her own tail slipped past, her eyes registered nothhing out of the ordinary, expectedly at that. A mild magical influence, enabling her to scan the area for recent magical manipulations of the subconscious sort, detected nothing just as well.

“Could still be masking it…” she muttered to herself, eyes squinted and head tilting left to right. “Who knows that thing.”

For a few seconds, Luna stood in place, awaiting the damned thing to creep up in her mind and spit some venom over her last remark. When nothing came, she could only sigh deeply, and condemn the ill practice she had gotten the several times her mind was already tampered with. Having learned to anticipate clearly villainous entities, she ended up expecting them to overperform there where they could not.

Atropos - Bane - was either planning something else, something she had not yet figured out, or plainly unable to break out of her control, remaining properly subservient until his time came. She doubted the latter intensely, if only from the knowledge of the creatures with mindsets such as his.

Regardless, what this concluded with was her wasting over half a minute staring at nothing, and being reminded that in roughly ten hours, it was, in fact, his time.

Part of their agreement was that he had to remain functional. He needed someone to feast upon. Luna offered herself, and he agreed all too happily.

“Well, at least sleep no longer seems like a good idea,” she said to herself with false pluck, and shook her head. There was still a lot of things to do, and important decisions to make, before they would meet again, face to face, in the home realm.

Things were not going to be very good, but, in the end, current struggles were all for the sake of eventual success.

Chapter 10: Applejack

Atropos moved his almost responsive eyes from panel to panel, from projection to projection, let into the work station after the misunderstanding had been quenched. At his disposal was more or less the most detailed mass of information about this world that there was - not that he needed it all so much, of course. He could see all he wanted as it was, but this just added a more numerical and more ocular angle to it. Faint strings of leftover magic signifying the form of the landscape at any given coordinates, the amount of entities within, their parameters… Nothing a regular equine could sensibly process so easily, even the ones working alongside him, those specifically trained, but definitely an open book to him.

Despite how indubitably irritating the situation was for the fear deity turned glorified zombie, that book was firmly seated in the genre of comedy.

“Oh, has… has anyone got a spare mug? I think I just got mine melted,” an analyst from a cubicle some blocks away inquired shakily in the midst of the thick hum and drum of their equipment.

“Penfold, we’re saving the world here. Your coffee can wait,” replied the armor-wearing pony that paced nervously at the front entrance.

“But I—” the awkward interrupter of silence disregarded continuation, sighed, and evidently returned to work, a deep, irregular cracking in his voice.

“Quarter-hour till break, keep it together,” the guard - Sentinel, as he was called - dismissed the issue, sounding little better than that himself.

It took Atropos some effort not to crack up with laughter at the situation - and even more not to do the same at what he clearly saw this “Equestria” to be. Something, though, pressed at his chest, and kept his jaw clenched shut, also sending occasional twitches to the still somewhat heavy fore and hindlegs. Among that, his mouth could not help but dry out frequently, causing sympathy, somewhat, for the poor mistake of nature with the crystal-molten mug.

The issue that was causing all those unwanted bodily shifts, as well as the genre denomination of Equestria’s hopes for the future, was just the absurd state the land was in.

When he drifted idly in the dreamscape, chewing mostly on a single mind, and making plans as to where to allocate his food for the next couple millennia, he presumed the little weirdnesses to be just the kinks of separate minds. That certain things were merely how these simpletons interpreted the natural order of Equestria to be. That they have not, in fact, dealt with a considerable amount of disasters both natural and magical through the so-called “magic of friendship”. Commoners did very often simplify things for their own belief. Surely there were at least some failsafes, some structures and institutions in place to keep a disaster - like this one - from going that far out of control. He may not have spoken highly of them when conversing, but that was a logical assumption, at least to him.

What caused the most stir within was the fact that he was right, somewhat. There were failsafes and institutions.

But, by the sweet ichor of Nyctasha, were they useless. He himself was allocated to one of them. What should have been just one of many things a reasonable ruler would install in order to thwart a world-devastating threat… was one of the last that they had at their disposal.

Because they truly, truly did solve all of their problems with friendship. Atropos honestly struggled to decide whether that was absurdly funny, or insanely depressing. At least he forced himself into comprehending it at all… with time.

“What’s with the readings in the southeast?” a voice inquired from behind him, close enough to be directed at the covertly undead thestral. He hoped for half a second that that was not the case, but the echo, as read by the nightkin ears, stated that something equine was turned towards him.

“I need a moment,” he blurted out, his voice skipping an octave or two, causing him to pretend to hiccup. It took about three to four seconds to acquaint himself with the data he paid no attention to previously, far more interested in what was still intact than what had already fallen. “It’s, uh… A massive energy formation, clearly directed, significant of… summoning, or resurrection, but it’s clear—”

Dismissing interloping thoughts of just how pointless it probably was, saving these things that is, Atropos was instead overcome by an intense desire to slap himself on the head. To his credit, he resisted having a sickly arm spring up from his shoulder and do that for him.

“How can you tell?” the mare that greeted him just six hours ago tilted her head, somewhat surprised. Sure enough, that was the reason the bodybound entity longed for self-imposed corporeal punishment. How could a weird batpony with a scar across half his face and not much else to show beyond that know such a fact?

Her eyes drilled into him, and the presence of the vanilla-coated, hornless, wingless equine made him oddly uneasy - upon arrival, Atropos was rather glad to shamble off to his workplace, earning a sigh from the mare and an approving grunt from the guard Sentinel. Now they had met again, inevitably so. And simply put, he did not like her. “We’ve been trying to figure what it means out for a while now, it’s got, like, a lot of interconnections with other uncommon signatures, but we kinda thought you wouldn’t be ready to really work yet, so we didn’t ask, and now if we know we can—”

The amount of air her lungs apparently held was not what the physical norm for such a creature should have been - and yet, that was not what made his new spine shudder in her presence. He took the forty seconds, in which the mare drew out all the possible outcomes of them using this little bit of knowledge, to quickly resolve a dilemma.

It was going to happen sooner or later, and putting it off was becoming childish. He had intended for this, after all. This was why he agreed - no, put forward - the idea to cage himself in a corporeal body. Interaction. Learning about them. Lack of knowledge already caused a large mishap, and he could not afford more.

And yet, when push came to shove, and he forced himself into a community, the first thing he did was shovel himself away into the corner and work alone - in retrospect, more interested in their defenses than the enemy’s offense, occasionally daydreaming of how they would be useless against him. Only that was not the point. Atropos - Bane - was letting himself go.

If he did that, then coming up with legitimate excuses to use in the talk with the disgusting Princess would be an issue. Moreover, a bigger issue would be that the pony race would most probably be lost.

“Halt… Halt, if you please. I know this signature. How about I—” he looked blankly at Sentinel, who had begun to approach them, irritation visible on his face. Atropos attempted an ensuring facial expression, and had to have had some manner of success, as the guard stared back, and returned to his post without a word. “—How about I just give all of you a little… low-down, when we are on break. We should… work together. Isn’t that right?” The thestral’s body attempted a smile, barely helped by the one already engraved in it.

“Yeah! Yeah, yeah. You should really have told us right away, we have been trying to get at it for hours. I knew Princess Luna didn’t make space for you just so you could sit here in the corner, you know! Though I was half afraid she thought we were going rogue, although why would we do that, but, perhaps, if—”

As the mare turned from speaking out loud to mumbling to herself, all while trotting jumpily back to her cubicle for the last few minutes of the shift, Atropos sighed to himself, and began to construct a detailed explanation of why he knows exactly how that freakish thing’s magic worked, why he knows what it appeared to be doing, why seventy-five percent of Equestria could wave itself goodbye, and why Canterlot itself was going to have a large problem, as it had only just began to move…

Applejack leaned against the starkly gleaming and polished wall of a considerably large room of the former store. Her limbs twitched, and her breath came in and out in infrequent puffs. The pony’s ears, neck, and head would all twitch erratically when a dull nerve remembered it had nothing but mauled remains to connect to. Deep claw marks crossed her left cheek and lower lip, each of the violent now-brown lines sending out a signal of pain into her system - only to be lost amidst what blew it far, far out of the water.

The earth pony’s mind had attuned itself to these hardships in the days before. Pain came second or third, never first. If it did, then that was it. Not a task of the body, but a task of the mind. So no, it was not the exhaustion, which the short break she allowed herself barely softened, and not the many injuries, which the volunteer doctor among the jewel store inhabitants said would last her the whole lifetime if not treated magically, that bothered her.

It was that she came upon an impasse, one her psyche refused to cross, but did so step by step regardless. Whether to congrtaulate herself on how she passed through the crisis despite adversity, or to panic in regards to what that entailed, AJ could not decide, despite having spent a number of hours in seclusion, left with nothing but physical pain and mental freedom.

Having looked out the window and seen nothing but a pair of masked and armored griffon guards grimly interfere in a fight between some still richly clothed ponies, screaming desperately both at each other and the guards themselves, the orange pony realized that little had changed outside. With a stuttered sigh, she sat down on her hunches, not far from a barely motioning white and dark purple shape atop a thick mattress.

Applejack had talked to it many times over the past hours, receiving nothing but errant twitches and occasional quiet moans of a pony that, unlike her, allowed her body to lose itself to the clutches of unconsciousness. AJ herself had no such luck. Hours spent laying on her back and side, without much perturbance by the others in the building even, all to no avail. She had no right to rest, but no way to challenge anything.

“This is all a big, giant, stinking travesty, I tell you,” the earth pony said hoarsely and monotonously, glaring at the white unicorn. “You know I don’t get it. You know that. But I still can’t get it out… Nah I can’t. It doesn’t fit. How?.. How can this?... Gah, whatever, don’t mind me.” AJ rubbed her eyes harshly, moaning in frustration. “You wouldn’t want to know, would you. And I mean, would any of us, really? It ain’t nice knowing that you’ve all done screwed it up, huh?” A downturned grin jerked its way onto her snout. “That it just blam, and went to all the hells it had.”

What caused the insides of her chest to twist the most was the faint suggestion of peace on the unicorn’s face. Somehow, for some reason, AJ despised the idea that after all that had happened, Rarity would not even have a single nightmare. If she did, it did not look it. She slept like she was just very, very tired.

Well, Applejack was not tired. Not just, anyway. Applejack, Applejack was slowly beginning to realize, was more dead than anything else. And those without a life to worry over… Their nightmares stretched beyond unconsciousness.

“Big words. They said we were important, yeah? All of us, making this world a better place. No, we weren’t special, you know, we just had that opportunity. They put us out there, and had us make an example of how to be a good freaking pony. And so we did. I am telling this to you right now, and I wanna kick my own teeth out because of how damn stupid this is.”

The pony turned on her back and laid on the cool, barely tarnished floor of the former office, fumbling with the white bandage covering where her eye used to be.

“We were important, Rares! Nothing unlike anyone else, but still important! Stuff happened, we got through it, everything was fine, nothing ever went wrong! If it did - well jokes on them, nothing was going to bring us down! Years,” she had giggled hoarsely, sending a pang of pain down her throat, “it went on for years…”

Nothing else surrounded her, the chaos was gone. The ponies that crammed the other rooms spoke and clanged their things, sure, but that was nothing her mind singled out. Not even the mare to her side murmured as AJ lay there for long minutes, mumbling to herself. It was like a vacationer’s hotel, on an early, early morning. Although it was the brink of darkness, the quiet and the casual noises made it all the more similar. That worked for all the worse.

“And now… What now, Rarity? What now? Huh? What now, can you tell me? WHAT. NOW.” Applejack startled herself a little with the harsh echo of her own voice, barely sounding like what it used to.

“We are still important,” came a quiet word from her side, surprising the earth pony further.

“Wha?.. You awake?” she twitched and fumbled in the unicorn’s direction, rashly and quickly, as if terrified at the prospect of having been listened to when talking to the unconscious mare.

The answer took a while to come, but Rarity’s now open eyes, staring right at her, replied more or less by themselves. Perhaps a bit too much, them widening and rushing left and right at AJ’s question. Brows furrowing at seeing the light scowl in the corner of her lips.

“I think I am,” came the measured response. “Are you okay?”

Applejack glared at the white unicorn for a good ten seconds or more.

A significant part of what her tirades to an unconscious pony entailed was another fact that caused the earth pony a good amount of distress. She was pretty certain that even looking at Rarity made her boil.

“What do you think?” AJ quipped coldly.

“You look tired,” Rarity stated plainly, almost aloof, almost as if it were a casual meeting after a full day of farmwork and they crossed each other on the street. The unicorn rubbed her face gently, getting up from the floor, not even considerate enough to shudder at the knees or look mournful.

“No shit I do.” It took her some effort not to grit teeth openly, but by the unicorn’s stare, she still looked steaming. “Yeah you can see, alright, you can see.”

The other mare was less than unaware to Applejack’s treatment of her, but visibly restrained herself, her grim scowl turning into an uneven curve, eyes growing large upon observing the orange pony. Rarity stopped, and gasped quietly at AJ’s appearance.

“AJ, you are not okay. You have to rest. You— No, no, you have to rest. There is no point talking like this. And do not misunderstand me, we—” The white mare raised a hoof to signal a yawn, quickly turning away and covering it up with that same hoof, as if it mattered. “—we have a lot to talk about indeed, but… No, you are absolutely not going to do in this condition. Did you just spend the day watching over me?” The unicorn’s eyebrows twinged, head tilting, the concern so saccharine AJ barely contained the urges swelling up in her forehooves. “Do you… Do you know how shortsighted that is? Oh dear, oh, Applejack, how can you…”

The earth pony sat where she sat, breathing audibly, gazing at the torn hat that hung off a rack in the far corner on the room. That at least caused the now absent nerve to add more pain to focus on. What she wanted to do was not good, or right.

“Have you even looked in the mirror? You haven’t, have you? Had you seen yourself, you would probably… Most probably, you would have followed exactly what the doctor had to have said after cleaning your wounds,” Rarity had switched to a nearly lecturing tone, eyes visibly going over the mess that was the orange earth pony’s head. “But no, you have to make sure I am safe, don’t you?..” A faint, misguided smile overtook the other mare’s mouth for a second - fortunately, it did not last, as it was giving the urges more ground.

“I have looked in the mirror, thank you very much,” Applejack mouthed, finding a distraction to talk about. “I’m messed up, but I’m alright.” She still stared at the hat in the corner - the clothing rack was just above where a huge pile of glass, some shards stained with red, lay disassembled. Her distant eyes clearly caused the unicorn to track that out.

“Oh dear. Oh… Oh dear.” Rarity put together the few cuts more red than others, and the remains of the reflective glass. “Applejack… I am going to be right back. You need rest. And when you are up, we will be making adjustions,” she said as she bit her lip, eyes looking over the former office, now fit with mattresses and such. “This is no starting point.”

“Where are you going,” the earth pony leaked through her teeth, frowning more and more vehemently with each word.

“You need sleep medicine, and since there was clearly a doctor to clean you up… I will try my luck. I’ll be right ba—”

Rarity could not finish, as Applejack had lunged at her, throwing them both on the ground, and topping the unicorn. They stared at each other for a few seconds, an eye of unconcealed bloody rage, and eyes of absolute confusion. Then, AJ’s forehoof came swiping against Rarity’s face, followed by her head, forehead smashing into muzzle.

Only just having turned woozy after a much required break, a complete blackout that left nothing but hazy, purplish, droopy remnants upon awakening, Rarity was now considering that perhaps the nightmare was simply delayed. Her being violently pinned down and beaten by her closest friend definitely qualified for a nightmare, and definitely did not qualify for something that should really have happened under any circumstance.

The pain, however, was real, much more real than her weak attempts to struggle away, eyes gaping desperately, mouth flinging open but unable to ask the questions needed, or give the answers demanded.

Her friend wailed on her for some more time, having begun to moan and groan grizzedly, contrasting the higher pitched responses Rarity herself was giving out. She was, in frankness, far too shocked to scream or do anything loud of the sort. Her eyes locked onto the one AJ had, but found nothing that wished to respond within the bloodshot orb. Weakly, she tried to kick and fight back, gaining minor success in pulling herself further back away, but even having recently slept, the unicorn was in no condition to wrestle the exhausted, clearly maddened earth pony.

Applejack mumbled something desperately, illegibly, and her groans eventually turned into sobs and whimpers. She had begun to miss punches, and even the ones that did hit now only felt like prods and swats, nothing compared to the first blows that lacerated Rarity’s snout. Only those sobs and whimpers were not of grief, or sadness.

They were nervous, desperate. AJ began to breathe quickly, opening and closing her mouth, gulping audibly. Eventually, her eye started to dart to and fro, locking then on to the hurting, confused Rarity. Two shaking, but firm forehooves stomped by the sides of her head, and the green eye stared right into her face.

“Rarity,” growled the pony, half-whispering, lower jaw shaking. “Where are we?”

“Applejack…” the unicorn whispered back, softly, keeping calm to the best of her ability. “You are not okay. You need—”

“Where are we?!” AJ spat at her, the words sounding primal, barely coherent. Their snouts pressed into each other’s as the earth pony lowered her head, staring menacingly. “Answer.”

“We are… in a quarantine zone…” Rarity whispered back, shaking and beginning to fear looking into Applejack’s eye. “Or… refugee camp, rather. We are in a refugee camp in Canterlot.”

“Right. Why are we here?”

“App—”

The unicorn moaned rather loudly, the earth pony’s forehead crashing right into her snout. If there was no exhaustion to soften the blow, she would have been dealing with a badly broken nose.

“ANSWER.” Applejack’s speech was only fringely coherent by that point.

“Because…” the white mare took in a deep breath, shuddering. “Because something terrible has happened. Equestria is… in peril. They want us to be safe, and so we are here.”

“Something terrible,” the orange pony repeated her words, leaving her eye to wander around for a short bit. “You know your fancy euphemisms, that you do.” Speaking somewhat more clearly, AJ spat the words nonetheless, barely letting them pass through the tensely shaking mouth. “So you’re not just cuckoo and in denial. Right. What are you then, Rares?”

“I… Applejack… I don’t quite understa—” Rarity braced for another splatter of spit to land on her face - or, perhaps, a blow - but received nothing. “—understand. What is supposed to be wrong with me?”

A lot of things, she knew. A good many that would not leave easily. They resided as far within her mind as she had the power to shove them away. They would no doubt resurface then on, but for the time, they were hidden. Not that AJ’s rabid inquisition was making it very easy.

“You act like nothing’s wrong, Rares,” AJ spoke, stuttering and gasping in speech, twitching and shaking, but keeping the menace in her stare. “Like this is all just another end of the world. Common stuff, ain’t it? For us, huh? We’re all high and mighty, the bunch of us, we’ve all been through the motions, came on top too. That’s how you act. Woulda gone and checked your hooficure if I hadn’t stopped you, I bet.”

“Applejack…” Rarity paused, working together a reply. “What… exactly… is wrong with that?”

What her friend, after having beaten her up and yelled at her, shot at her in a rather accusatory tone, was exactly what kept her from taking her own life hours ago. That was the whole point. How was it such a crime?

How—

A couple of gears ran quick in the unicorn’s head, adding together details, and a frightening fact clicked.

“You’re blind,” the orange pony stated plainly. “I’m the mare without an eye, but you’re the one who’s blind.” She nodded to herself, and finally took the stare away from Rarity, so as to look around - as if watching the other inhabitants of the building, judging them as she went. “And so are they. No different. You have no respect. For reality, that is. No respect at all. You’re all deluded.”

Their home town had been ravaged, their minds had been visited by something best left untold, all whom they had known were gone, they pulled all the muscles there were to get to this safe haven, only to be demeaned, humiliated, mutilated, and killed. Taken apart, one by one, the Element Bearers were peeled and peeled, until there was little left.

Rarity nearly ended it upon realization of just what was lost. Her life was her friends and her art. She was never extraordinarily strong-willed. It seemed logical to her what nearly caused her to snap.

Applejack… Applejack’s life was her friends, her family, and her work. And she was a very, very, very staunch pony. She would not do… that.

But by no means at all did that mean she would not be affected. To the contrary.

AJ had taken the worst of it, and what remained of her…

“You think it’s gonna be fine, huh? That Dash and Pinkie all gonna come back to life cause Twilight casts some shmancy spell, and we’re gonna pull a stunt so all this is solved, bam and done? Huh? That what you think?” the mare spoke, looking at the ceiling in place of Rarity. “It’s all gonna be fine. Don’t worry. All gonna be fine. They just went to Aunt Annurca’s farm down south, ‘s all gonna be fine. Right?” Her head twitched rapidly, back to pressing Rarity’s aching snout within a second. “Huh? You think it’s all gonna fix itself?”

Rarity was lost for words.

“When you were laying there, I went out. Snuck out, went to the walls they put up. Heard some noises, y’know, wanted to see what was up, wasn’t thinking all clear, nah,” AJ spoke harshly, monotonously, eye twitching in place, drilling through Rarity’s skull. “Got onto the wall. Luck and all. You know what I saw? For the half minute I was there till the griffs pulled me out and told me not to go there again?”

They stared at each other, the unicorn shutting her eyes and sighing in defeat.

“Been there for half a minute, again, I’m telling you. So what I saw? Cousin Braeburn, Cousin Beacon, and Cousin Beauty. You know what they looked like. Oh, and back when we broke our spines to get to here? I saw them in the woods, you know. Thought, nah, WISHED I was going crazy.”

“This is all so wrong,” Rarity said to nobody in particular, tears of nervousness and locked up grief showing on her eyes.

“So tell me, Rares, am I crazy? Did I just go loony and none of this ever happened? Huh? Cause if so, I’m a shit loon. I make too much sense, don’t you think? Don’t you think that you’re all blind for not seeing this for what it is? That they,” - she lifted a hoof to point in the direction of their presumed neighbors - “INSISTED that we take the good big room? That they were HAPPY to see us? That they said they were GLAD we survived? That the doc MADE me go ahead of the line to clean my wound? That nobody questions that we’ve got the entire birdbeak military up in here while I ain’t seen an armed pony around here at all? That we’re somehow in QUARANTINE, even though I’m not seeing a disease here at all? That, all that, that all ain’t crazy, Rares. That is stupid.”

It was an infernal tease. What AJ said, about the others… It lightened the chest, for her. To know that they were already a symbol of hope, even as shattered as they were. That there was such a stepping stone to helping all those ponies recover, to make sure that…

...that what happened to AJ would not happen to others. And yet, it was this exact fact that drew her poor, unfortunate, maddened friend up the wall. At least, perhaps, there was one good thing to this unpleasant conversation.

But that did not make an answer any more obvious.

“And so I thought about how stupid this all was. A while with nothing to do does that, it makes you think, ‘specially when you ain’t got your life no more. There’s something funny I realized. It’s never ever not been stupid. We’re all like this. We’ve been like this our entire lives, but it was fine!” Applejack grinned a grin that caused Rarity’s intestines to curl together and shiver in unison. “Fine! Everything WAS fine! Only, you know - NOT!”

The orange pony kept the grin for a while, simply looking at the unicorn. Then, her eye closed, and clicking, coughing sounds started to come out. Soon enough, AJ was sobbing and laughing at the same time, smiling, but with an infernal rage in her eye.

“So why’m I telling you this… And why I’m doing this to you. We’re why, Rares. We’re what’s wrong. They see us, and they think everything is fine. My eye’s torn out, you look like you’ve been ridden by a yak for a month, Fluttershy’s gone missing, Pinkie got thrown into the trash, Dash is dead, and Twilight is somewhere up there. But nope, just seeing us makes them happy and smiley. We made this. Us.”

The mare’s stance loosened, and the unicorn was given a slight extension of movement. She felt up her face, looking at the earth pony in a mix of panic and pained understanding. Rarity understood.

“But we ain’t the root. The root…” AJ stepped away from the beaten Rarity completely, and walked towards a wall, northeast, knocking her hat off the clothing rack unceremoniously, not bothering to pick it up. “...is in those towers. Older than us. The Princesses, Rarity. They made us be the heroes, they made us save Equestria, that’s what we do now, that’s all that’s left now.”

Applejack was unsalvageable, Rarity understood.

“And that’s exactly what I’m going to do,” the beat up, eyeless, exhausted farmer pony with a dirty, bloodstained blonde mash topping a cut-up face with an eye that burned of genuine murder, turned towards the dumbfounded white mare. “If I talked any sense into you, you are going to help me.”

“So… In conclusion, this signature, it…” Atropos stuttered, giving a vacant look at the dozen or so ponies sat down on a sofa and a mat, listening to him for the past ten or so minutes. “To round it up, it contains something with a lot of…” He stopped himself from using the word “mana”, having learned truly enough that the denomination was alien. “...magical energy in tow. Only a portion is native, the rest is induced. It is old, it is big, and it is… Oh, I could say angry, but then, I shouldn’t suppose that it has emotion. This cloud - if it is one at all, of course - it is moving, if slowly at that. As you—” his hoof lifted up for a short stopping motion, directed at himself. “—we have already found, prolonged observation causes this… equipment of ours to start misbehaving. Our vision is unreliable, so to say. And it would seem that it should take us a while before we find out for ourselves, as the course it had been keeping for as long as I could see it has it going around this city. It is already going through the… recent casualties.”

Several of the ponies visibly shook, eyes twitching, hooves tapping nervously on the floor. They grit their teeth, staring in directions for mere sections, and forcing themselves back into the meeting-lecture-public humiliation-unending exposure for a mightily unwilling entity-thing. One good job they definitely did was give Atropos himself incentive to hold off on having a “lunch break” of his own, showcasing textbook (if there ever was one) reactions of genuine, uncopable shock. It was quite filling. Would be, anyway…

“Therefore, as our unprotected, unshielded, unprepared cities are being taken down by an unrelenting horde of the undead, something even more unthinkable approaches from behind, to make sure that we are all fully undone.” He lost himself to a streak of likely unnecessary sarcasm, topping it with a somewhat disturbing smile - not that anything that his mouth formed would be anything else. Confused snickers that resembled sobs all too much not to be delicious were the answer, as well as a few stares. Could have been worse. “Lastly, something that I just cannot help but shake… My, uh, equipment is acting as if it had seen something of this before. I… suppose this could be something you… guys have looked at before. At some point. Or, perhaps, it is just an error. I am not all too sure. That is all.” He nodded, retroactively realizing how stupid that looked, and immediately caught himself wanting to leave for his cubicle. Forcing himself to stay, Atropos did his best to smile calmly and shrug, as if to compensate for how positively chewed-up his social skills were.

Either he was going to get good at them, or he was going to get good at excuses. Or, more likely, all of them would be dead, and he will be having to find a way off-world, because the grim recounting was, at most, a quarter of what he actually found out. Knowing too much about panic, he fed only the safest information in the safest way possible to his co-workers. And only half of them or so had begun to exhibit symptoms of hidden panic! A good result, at the speed they were all going.

Atropos was given a few nods and acknowledgements from the intellectual workers, and little more. They were less than excited to continue talking about the task in front of them on their period of rest - especially not after having had to listen to a creepy newcomer talk to them about things they wish they could say were unfounded. Although… many kept their eyes on him. In those eyes, and, more reliably, traces of thoughts, Atropos could see a touch more to their relationship with him. They were sorry.

Sorry that they did not immediately flock even closer to him and begin socializing voraciously, ripping into the new arrival like a pack of literal social animals, to bring him into the fold, and make him feel like one of theirs. At least eleven felt even more sorry for his disfigurement, and at least four of those found him to be attractive - three stallions and a mare. A dark, ugly, awkward, unnerving, scarred nobody just walked up and told them something they were working their backs off to figure out, all of which fit together at that - and damned he was if he could find any negativity.

Perhaps, had he managed to escape from Equestria when and if it fell, and then grown tired of his life as a near omnipotent embodiment of fear, this experience of settling into a body would allow him to settle down somewhere, and doubtlessly become rich off creating stories based on this nonsense world.

Atropos was just realizing that his own thoughts were definitely starting to turn to mush when things had begun to go wrong again.

“Hey, um… Atropos?” the mare that called him in, and caused all this to happen, walked up. After all the effort to forget that she exists, so as to lighten the mental load… “This does all check out. For good or for bad, mostly for bad though, I’ll be compiling a report soon enough to see if we can may— Ugh, I’m talking shop again.” She raised a hoof to vaporize any hope of talking about non-social matters. “You… did okay,” the earth pony mare lied spectacularly. “It’s good to have you here. Even if you won’t tell how you know all this.”

“I’m an agent,” Atropos repeated the trite excuse that seemed to work so far, even though the fact he had to use it about three times now spoke otherwise.

“Oh, but that’s not good enough, nah, I’m more, like, about how you know where to look in all this… These readings, they’re completely alien! I’ve seen maybe… maybe four or five similar streams in there. Doubling as a tech translator here, and everyone else, too! I wonder where the Princess sent you with that sort of knowledge.” The mare’s eyes were two open, hungry, dark orange voids that awaited background information that he was yet to remember. That very Princess did give him a very short background, but even that he already had filed away under “unnecessary” in his memory, out of reflex.

“I worked in the north,” he drew out a stumbling reply, shrugging to himself.

“Ooooh.” The mare pointed at a free spot on the mat, where some others used to sit during the impromptu lecture. “That must have been exciting. Is that where you?..” She crossed her mouth with a hoof, having sat down. The humor of seeing the extent of the ponies’ politeness somewhat countered the realization that he was meant to sit next to her. Before more thinking was done on the matter, the body of the thestral came down hard on the floor, reasonably far away from the mare, but doing the job regardless.

“No, it…” He stopped to quietly curse himself for having forgotten to lie and say yes. “It was… an accident. A very… silly accident. Hah-heh, nothing more.” He was meant to say that yes, it was, in fact, from his service, but, not being used to proper deceit… This seemed to suffice, at least to him.

“Why didn’t you have it fixed? I kinda get keeping a beauty scar, but, you know…” The trapped entity was, at the very least, not alone in being awkward.

“It’s recent,” he replied, drawing up the one explanation the void of his thoughts offered him. “Gotta wait a bit. That’s what the doctor said.” Hopefully, medicine worked the way he just assumed it did.

“Ah… Well, if that’s what the doctor said, then that’s what the doctor said. I’m not a medic,” — Atropos was rather glad to hear that much — “and, well… I’m not a medic, so I’m here, I guess. Not out there, in the quarantines. Actually… Actually, let’s not talk about those.” The mare shifted uncomfortably, having already given him something to look forward to when he had mental freedom from the body for the night. “Not exactly something we like to discuss much, you know. So let’s… um…”

Atropos kept quiet, smiling inadvertently, having forgotten to relax his muscles. Unfortunately, that called for a continuation, before he scampered off. He knew he would, even if he was not supposed to. This took a lot of getting used to, and this was the getting-used-to part.

“Oh, I am such a screw-up,” the mare sighed out, lightly tapping herself on the forehead, reminding Bane to learn to do that instead of borderline cracking his carcass each time. “Didn’t even tell you who I was. Like, I’m sitting here, asking you stuff, going on and off topic to topic, and you’re like, who’s that even supposed to be? Pfff.”

She held up her hooves and turned right to him, met with a persisting smile and two half-closed eyes that, thankfully, did not express the sea of frustration Atropos was bathing in internally.

“My name is Vision. Silly, silly, I know, but, well, I guess it makes sense I ended up running this little bunch. I’m in charge of our branch - I take reports, I send reports, and… I make reports. So if you think you aren’t doing enough paperwork, well, that’s because of me. I’m actually a linguist, but, well, talents go hand in hand, I guess… See, this is why I was so interested in how you knew what this was. Looks almost like a whole new language to me, maybe even something I once saw… So we may have some common ground here, if you know a bit more. This is, like, well… Completely natural!” She motioned with her hooves for a few seconds, smiling awkwardly, eye twitching just a bit, cheeks flushing red. They stared at each other for a while. Atropos was trying to figure out which exact emotion that was. There was even a little bit of fear.

“Okay,” he replied after a period of silence, and did not resolve absolutely anything.

“Come on, Vis, let go of the guy, he’s new on the team, no need to gobble him up,” the inadvertent savior of the situation spoke, approaching from behind, recognizable by the light clunk of the armor if nothing else.

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. Promise,” the thestral’s mouth grinned without will for it as he spoke, nodding uncomfortably at them both. “This is our first day, after all. We’ve got at least two weeks until we’re all dead, as I told you.” The dose of sarcasm may have been a bit on the heavier side, but Atropos felt it was fitting.

“Right... “ Vision scrunched her mouth up, giving the two stallions looks. “I’ll go… recreate some recreation. Got about ten minutes to go, and then back to work.”

“Just pretend they are all just dots on the screen,” Atropos spoke before forcing himself to reconsider ever opening his mouth again.

The mare just scowled, more sad than angry, and trotted off to a group of ponies that would look at them every now throughout the conversation. The one that was, gladly, over, with at least middle-of-the-road marks to be given. At last, Atropos had time to dream about—

“Yeah, you spec-ops guys are cold, you know that?” Sentinel spoke to him, not having departed at all.

“Well, I worked in the north,” the thestral answered unevenly, with a sigh, not even sure if that qualified for a logical response.

“Sure… Actually...” the guard began, with far too much enthusiasm for Atropos to be excited about continuing. “Actually, I’m kinda fascinated by you guys. Nothing weird, just… well, who hasn’t dreamt of being a super-spy or something? In your childhood I mean. I grew out of it.” Even the quite literally alien mind within the batpony could tell that was not the case, just from the motions and the tone of voice. “But I just, well, just wanna say that you guys are cool. I dunno what you were doing up there, but it’s never quiet there, so it’s got to be something hardcore. No wonder you’re not… well… You don’t look too phazed, yeah? Every one of us, when this all just happened, when they woke us up…”

The guard took a long pause, looking down grimly. Atropos imitated patient attention, more glad to not be expected to talk back than anything else.

“Let’s just say it was rough. I’m fine now, we’re all… fine now.” Sentinel was a terrible liar, though not for lack of a good reason. “But, what I mean is, you’re gonna be fine here, I think. We need someone like that. Things can get crazy… I think. Hope not.”

“Somehow I doubt that my aura of sanity spreads very far,” the nightkin grinned in response, admittedly amused at the idea.

“Maybe you underestimate yourself. You’re cool. You should be. And, uh…” The bulky guard stepped in place uncomfortably, visibly doubting what he was going to say. An entertaining enough picture, if nothing else. “Just want to ask before we’re back to work. Which team were you on? Back there? I know they assign agents to teams. Just gimme a name, I’m curious. I have, like, a journal, and… Well, might as well add a name. Want to be an expert on this, what little I can find.”

Atropos stared, dumbfounded, at the stallion. He moved his lips a little, as well as his eyes, not pretending to be thinking so much as thinking is proper.

His team. That was a funny question. He knew he should have had an answer, but he did not.

“Dire,” he said to himself, unsure as to what that could even mean. “The Dire.”

“Scourge,” his mouth blurted out a word, and left him to wonder what that meant, too.

“Oh, right, okay. Won’t keep you. Thanks for indulging me, and, uh… stuff. Good luck… have fun, I guess.” Sentinel departed, and left Atropos to wonder what he just tapped into in his errant thoughts. “You’re on our team now!”

“Right.”